For most people, former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is a national embarrassment, a pimple on the ass of American history. But to hear him tell it, the man George W. Bush called "Fredo" is a victim of partisan warfare. And the lesson he apparently learned in Washington is not that he politicized the Bush Justice Department, but that he didn't politicize it enough.

Those are among the head-shaking takeaways in a brief but revealing interview in Esquire titled, "Alberto Gonzales: What I've Learned." The man who repeatedly lied to Congress about the U.S. prosecutors purge, President Bush's illegal program of domestic surveillance and regime of detainee torture was just an innocent bystander caught in the political crossfire:

"I think 90 percent of what happened to me is politics, pure and simple. It's tough to knock out a president. But if you can get someone who is viewed as close to the president, then that may be a good thing."

As it turns out, this Gonzales declaration of victimization pales in comparison to his self-described martyrdom a year ago. In December 2008, the former AG complained to the Wall Street Journal that the scorn and derision heaped upon him was undeserved:

"What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong, that deserves this kind of response to my service?"

"For some reason, I am portrayed as the one who is evil in formulating policies that people disagree with. I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror."

Of course, perhaps the biggest casualty in Alberto Gonzales' own war on terror was the truth. In January 2007, the Attorney General delivered the Big Lie about the entire U.S. prosecutors purge scandal to the Senate Judiciary Committee:

"I would never ever make a change in a United States attorney position for political reasons or that in any way would jeopardize an ongoing investigation."

But as he acknowledged to Esquire this week, Gonzales' real lament about the U.S. attorneys firings is that the Bush White House wasn't political enough. After the Republican losses in the 2006 midterm elections, Gonzales suggested, the Bush administration's error was that it simply couldn't get away it:

"We should have abandoned the idea of removing the U. S. attorneys once the Democrats took the Senate. Because at that point we could really not count on Republicans to cut off investigations or help us at all with investigations. We didn't see that at the Department of Justice. Nor did the White House see that. Karl didn't see it. If we could do something over again, that would be it."

Now ensconced in the law school at Texas Tech, Alberto Gonzales claims "I'm proud of that record," while sighing that "I don't believe my life's work should be solely defined by four years in the White House and two years as attorney general." But in all likelihood, the poster child for Bush administration incompetence and corruption will be recalled for statements like this:

"Senator, that I don't recall remembering."

(This piece also appears at Perrspectives.)

Talking Points Memo notes that former SecState Condi Rice and former NSA Stephen Hadley are joining forces to create a" strategic consulting" firm. May I suggest that this is probably an even bigger farce than former FEMA Director Michael Brown's decision to start a consulting firm on disaster preparedness following his stellar performance during Katrina?

I really want to know what clients these two take on, so that I can relentlessly mock their stupidity for hiring the dynamic duo who brought us into the adventures of invading Iraq and Afghanistan without any idea of the resources required or any form of an exit strategy.

UPDATE: In the comments, jenne corrects me:

I think the Cheney "Keep America Safe" Institute is a bigger farce than both Brown and Condi's thingies put together.

OUCH. And touche'

If nothing else, Republican Senator John Cornyn is an irony producing machine. During the Terri Schiavo affair, the former Texas Supreme Court Justice was at the forefront of the GOP campaign to intimidate and threaten judges. Now after his fierce defense of President Bush's regime of illegal NSA domestic surveillance, Cornyn is comically warning that the Obama administration has launched a sinister "data collection program" to promote health care reform.

Back in December 2005, Cornyn dismissed the New York Times' revelations of the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program. Regurgitating the same "Give Me Death" defense offered by colleagues Pat Roberts (R-KS) and Jeff Session (R-AL), Cornyn sneered:

"None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."

Alas, that was then and this is now. Now, there's a Democrat in the White House, one who's trying to overcome Republican obstructionism on health care reform.

When the Obama White House on Tuesday asked Americans to help fight the disinformation campaign ("If you get an email or see something on the web about health insurance reform that seems fishy, send it to flag@whitehouse.gov"), Cornyn was quick to suggest a dark plot was afoot. As The Hill reported:

"By requesting citizens send 'fishy' emails to the White House, it is inevitable that the names, email, addresses, IP addresses and private speech of U.S. citizens will be reported to the White House," Cornyn wrote in a letter to Obama. "You should not be surprised that these actions taken by your White House staff raise the specter of a data collection program."

Cornyn asked Obama to cease the program immediately, or at the very least explain what the White House would do with the information it collects.

"I am not aware of any precedent for a President asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure speech that is deemed 'fishy' or otherwise inimical to the White House's political interests," Cornyn said.

Of course, this is just the latest data collection myth spawned by the right-wing noise machine this week.

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I've been following this issue for a while and was pretty surprised to conclude that the government doesn't have much choice. The way data travels means the entire country's far too vulnerable to cyberattacks, and they don't really have many effective options that don't to some degree compromise our privacy. The question is, who can we trust with that kind of power? We need a robust public debate over that very issue, but since they dumped this on the last day before a three-day weekend, I'm guessing not so much:

The Obama administration will proceed with a Bush-era plan to use National Security Agency assistance in screening government computer traffic on private-sector networks, with AT&T as the likely test site, according to three current and former government officials.

President Obama said in May that government efforts to protect computer systems from attack would not involve "monitoring private sector networks or Internet traffic" and Department of Homeland Security officials say that the new program will only scrutinize data going to or from government systems.

But the program has provoked debate within DHS, the current and former officials said, because of uncertainty over whether private data can be shielded from unauthorized scrutiny, how much of a role NSA should play and whether the agency's involvement in warrantless wiretapping under the Bush administration would draw controversy.

[...] Under a classified pilot program approved during the Bush administration, NSA data and hardware would be used to protect the networks of some civilian government agencies. Part of an initiative known as Einstein 3, the pilot called for telecommunications companies to route the Internet traffic of civilian government agencies through a monitoring box that would search for and block malicious computer codes.

AT&T, the world's largest telecommunications firm, was the Bush administration's choice to participate in the test, which has been delayed for months as the Obama administration determines what elements of the Bush plan to preserve, former government officials said. The pilot was to have been launched in February.

"To be clear, Einstein 3 development is proceeding," DHS spokeswoman Amy Kudwa said. "We are moving forward in a way that protects privacy and civil liberties."

[...] The program is the most controversial element of the $17 billion cybersecurity initiative that the Bush administration launched in January 2008. Einstein 3 is crucial, advocates say, in an era in which hackers have compromised computer systems at the Commerce and State departments, and have siphoned off sensitive military jet data from a defense contractor.

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From Countdown, James Risen on the NSA's domestic surveillance program which has been found to have accessed the personal emails of former President Bill Clinton, along with millions of other Americans' mails and phone calls.

Keith asks just what Congressional oversight is in place to prevent this and whether the Obama administration has actually put some oversight in place to end the over-collection of data that occurred under the Bush administration. Risen notes Eric Holder's unwillingness to say the program is illegal during Congressional hearings, which means we aren't going to see anyone prosecuted for spying on every American illegally any time soon. Of course with so much of this being classified we're going to be lucky to ever find out just what the NSA has been doing. I'm inclined to assume the worst since these people have given me no reason not to.

When or how we ever get Big Brother out of our lives is a question yet to be answered. If spying on a former President and a former member of the House Intelligence Committee isn't enough to raise some concerns from our political elite and put a stop to some of this, I'm not sure what is.

For more on this you can read Risen's article at the New York Times: E-Mail Surveillance Renews Concerns in Congress. From the article:

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Democracy Now's headlines for June 18, 2009.

• Supporters of Mousavi Hold Mourning Rally in Tehran
  
• Iran Accuses US of Meddling in its Internal Affairs
  
• US State Dept Asks Twitter to Delay Shutdown Due to Iran Protests
  
• Obama Extends Some Benefits to Same-Sex Partners of Federal Workers
  
• Holder Refuses to Say Bush’s Warrantless Wiretapping Program Was Illegal
  
• NSA Database Collects Millions of Intercepted Emails
  
• Obama Proposes New Regulations of Financial Industry
  
• EPA Declares Public Health Emergency in Libby, Montana
  
• U.S. Drone Strike Kills Nine in Pakistan
  
• Suicide Bombing Kills Somalia’s National Security Minister
  
• GOP Aide in Tennessee Distributes Racist Image of Obama
  
• GOP Operative in SC Compares First Lady To A Gorilla

Who ever could have guessed that an NSA analyst would look at someone's personal emails for their own purposes? (And of course, how certain are we that they weren't working for someone else?) I guess we should assume that there's an audience for anything we say or do!

A secret NSA surveillance database containing millions of intercepted foreign and domestic e-mails includes the personal correspondence of former President Bill Clinton, according to the New York Times.

An NSA intelligence analyst was apparently investigated after accessing Clinton’s personal correspondence in the database, the paper reports, though it didn’t say how many of Clinton’s e-mails were captured or when the interception occurred.

The database, codenamed Pinwale, allows NSA analysts to search through and read large volumes of e-mail messages, including correspondence to and from Americans. Pinwale is likely the end point for data sucked from internet backbones into NSA-run surveillance rooms at AT&T facilities around the country.

Those rooms were set up by the Bush administration following 9/11, and were finally legalized last year when Congress passed the FISA Amendments Act. The law gives the telecoms immunity for cooperating with the administration; it also opens the way for the NSA to lawfully spy on large groups of phone numbers and e-mail addresses in bulk, instead of having to obtain a warrant for each target.

The NSA can collect the correspondence of Americans with a court order, or without one if the interception occurs incidentally while the agency is targeting people “reasonably believed” to be overseas. But in 2005, the agency “routinely examined large volumes of Americans’ e-mail messages without court warrants,” according to the Times, through this loophole. The paper reports today that the NSA is continuing to over-collect e-mail because of difficulties in filtering and distinguishing between foreign and domestic correspondence.

If an American’s correspondence pops up in search results when analysts sift through the database, the analyst is allowed to read it, provided such messages account for no more than 30 percent of a search result, the paper reported.

The NSA has claimed that the over-collection was inadvertent and corrected it each time the problem was discovered. But Rep. Rush Holt (D-New Jersey), chairman of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, disputed this. “Some actions are so flagrant that they can’t be accidental,” he told the Times.

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From the Situation Room April 21, 2009. Jane Harman is upset that her civil liberties may have been violated and wants to see those transcripts of the NSA wiretaps unredacted. So how's the support of the NSA's wiretapping working out for you now Representative?

I like Glenn Greenwald's take on this:

So if I understand this correctly -- and I'm pretty sure I do -- when the U.S. Government eavesdropped for years on American citizens with no warrants and in violation of the law, that was "both legal and necessary" as well as "essential to U.S. national security," and it was the "despicable" whistle-blowers (such as Thomas Tamm) who disclosed that crime and the newspapers which reported it who should have been criminally investigated, but not the lawbreaking government officials. But when the U.S. Government legally and with warrants eavesdrops on Jane Harman, that is an outrageous invasion of privacy and a violent assault on her rights as an American citizen, and full-scale investigations must be commenced immediately to get to the bottom of this abuse of power. Behold Jane Harman's overnight transformation from Very Serious Champion of the Lawless Surveillance State to shrill civil liberties extremist.

I don't know about you, but I always thought they were spying on Congress members, so this doesn't come as a complete shock. (Oh, and Spencer Ackerman does the legwork to narrow the field.)

The big story of the day will be this one in The New York Times reporting that the National Security Agency intercepted private emails and calls of Americans beyond the limits set by Congress.

But this detail buried in the article is particularly interesting. Seems a member of Congress was under surveillance:

And in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

Really? Note that there was an active attempt by the NSA to wiretap a member of Congress. Who was it? Seems worth finding out.

Glenn Greenwald, who's a former constitutional attorney, is very unhappy with this move from the Justice Department:

[...] Late Friday afternoon, the Obama DOJ filed the government's first response to EFF's lawsuit (.pdf), the first of its kind to seek damages against government officials under FISA, the Wiretap Act and other statutes, arising out of Bush's NSA program. But the Obama DOJ demanded dismissal of the entire lawsuit based on (1) its Bush-mimicking claim that the "state secrets" privilege bars any lawsuits against the Bush administration for illegal spying, and (2) a brand new "sovereign immunity" claim of breathtaking scope -- never before advanced even by the Bush administration -- that the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government surveillance unless there is "willful disclosure" of the illegally intercepted communications.

In other words, beyond even the outrageously broad "state secrets" privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S. Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls, emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned.

There are several notable aspects to what happened here with this new court filing from Obama:

(1) Unlike in the prior cases where the Obama DOJ embraced the Bush theory of state secrets -- in which the Obama DOJ was simply maintaining already-asserted arguments in those lawsuits by the Bush DOJ -- the motion filed on Friday was the first response of any kind to this lawsuit by the Government. Indeed, EFF filed the lawsuit in October but purposely agreed with Bush lawyers to an extension of the time to respond until April, in the hope that by making this Obama's case, and giving his DOJ officials months to consider what to do when first responding, they would receive a different response than the one they would have gotten from the Bush DOJ.

That didn't happen. This brief and this case are exclusively the Obama DOJ's, and the ample time that elapsed -- almost three full months -- makes clear that it was fully considered by Obama officials. Yet they responded exactly as the Bush DOJ would have. This demonstrates that the Obama DOJ plans to invoke the exact radical doctrines of executive secrecy which Bush used -- not only when the Obama DOJ is taking over a case from the Bush DOJ, but even when they are deciding what response should be made in the first instance. Everything for which Bush critics excoriated the Bush DOJ -- using an absurdly broad rendition of "state secrets" to block entire lawsuits from proceeding even where they allege radical lawbreaking by the President and inventing new claims of absolute legal immunity -- are now things the Obama DOJ has left no doubt it intends to embrace itself.

(2) It is hard to overstate how extremist is the "sovereign immunity" argument which the Obama DOJ invented here in order to get rid of this lawsuit. I confirmed with both ACLU and EFF lawyers involved in numerous prior surveillance cases with the Bush administration that the Bush DOJ had never previously argued in any context that the Patriot Act bars all causes of action for any illegal surveillance in the absence of "willful disclosure." This is a brand new, extraordinarily broad claim of government immunity made for the first time ever by the Obama DOJ -- all in service of blocking EFF's lawsuit against Bush officials for illegal spying.

As EFF's Kevin Bankston puts it:

This is the first time [the DOJ] claimed sovereign immunity against Wiretap Act and Stored Communications Act claims. In other words, the administration is arguing that the U.S. can never be sued for spying that violates federal surveillance statutes, whether FISA, the Wiretap Act or the SCA.

h/t Ted

From NOVAonline:

In The Spy Factory, an eye-opening documentary on the National Security Agency (NSA) by best-selling author James Bamford and Emmy Award-winning producer Scott Willis, NOVA exposes the ultra-secret intelligence agency's role in the failure to stop the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent eavesdropping program that listens in without warrant on millions of American citizens. The Spy Factory premieres Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 8 pm ET/PT on PBS (check local listings).

Please check us out online at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/spyfactory/

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Keith Olbermann talks to James Risen about the statements made by Russell Tice and whether he was the subject of NSA wiretapping.

Keith talks to NSA whistleblower Russell Tice who reveals the NSA was spying on every American without warrants and targeting journalists and collecting "everything", all of their phone calls, emails and communications.

In a Newsweek exclusive three week ago, former Justice Department official Thomas Tamm revealed his role in helping the New York Times make public President Bush's program of illegal domestic surveillance. Now Salon's Glenn Greenwald has details on the DOJ's efforts to punish the whistleblower. And as it turns out (and as I suggested back in 2007), the Bush administration's ultimate target may be the New York Times itself.

As Greenwald spells out today, the Justice Department investigation is not pursuing the White House cabal behind the violation of FISA's prohibitions on warrantless eavesdropping of American citizens, but instead those who revealed it. Tamm, whose life has been turned upside-down since the FBI raided his home in August 2007, will likely be subpoenaed to testify what he knows about James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, the Times reporters who broke the story in December 2005.

That's the message in a letter sent to Tamm's attorney Paul Kemp by Steve Tyrrell of the DOJ's fraud section. As Greenwald described it:

The letter begins by announcing that the DOJ and FBI are "presently investigating the unauthorized disclosure of classified information regarding the Presidentially-authorized NSA program…(hereinafter, 'The Terrorist Surveillance Program')." It then references the Newsweek article and "ask[s] whether [Tamm] is willing to reconsider his prior refusal to speak with agents of the FBI and/or to testify before the Grand Jury regarding his knowledge of and/or participation in the disclosure of TSP-related information to [James] Risen, Mr. Lichtblau and others." It demands an answer from Tamm by January 9 -- 11 days before Obama is to be inaugurated -- and then threateningly warns: "if I do not hear from you by that date, I will assume that Mr. Tamm is not interested in submitting to a voluntary interview or testifying before the Grand Jury": an obvious threat that he may be subpoenaed and compelled to do so.

The implication - that Lichtblau and Risen are in the Justice Department's crosshairs - would represent a conservative dream come true. Many in the Bush administration and its amen corner have been clamoring for the prosecution of the New York Times ever since the President's lawbreaking came to light. (For more background, Perrspectives has the details.)

Three years after the New York Times first revealed the Bush administration's program of illegal domestic surveillance by the NSA, whistleblower Thomas Tamm has acknowledged his role in making public the President's lawbreaking. In its expose Sunday, Newsweek details how the former Justice Department official came to discover the White House's violations of the FISA law and reluctantly decided to turn to the Times. Whether or not Tamm is ultimately arrested for his revelations, the same voices in President Bush's amen corner that rallied to the defense of Scooter Libby will renew their call for the prosecution of both Tamm and the New York Times.

Tamm's public admission comes 18 months after the FBI first raided his home, confiscating personal files and computers. At the very moment the Democratic Congress in August 2007 was voting to codify President Bush's years-long criminal surveillance of American citizens, the net was closing around the man who helped bring it to the nation's attention.

While at the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR), Tamm stumbled upon the existence of Bush's program of warrantless eavesdropping on the international phone calls and emails of Americans which began just after the 9/11 attacks. The administration was not merely circumventing the legal requirement for approval by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts, but subsequently laundering the intelligence gathered to "get legitimate FISA warrants - giving the cases a judicial stamp of approval."

In the spring of 2004, a frustrated Tamm finally took action:

When Tamm started asking questions, his supervisors told him to drop the subject. He says one volunteered that "the program" (as it was commonly called within the office) was "probably illegal."

Tamm agonized over what to do. He tried to raise the issue with a former colleague working for the Senate Judiciary Committee. But the friend, wary of discussing what sounded like government secrets, shut down their conversation. For weeks, Tamm couldn't sleep. The idea of lawlessness at the Justice Department angered him. Finally, one day during his lunch hour, Tamm ducked into a subway station near the U.S. District Courthouse on Pennsylvania Avenue. He headed for a pair of adjoining pay phones partially concealed by large, illuminated Metro maps. Tamm had been eyeing the phone booths on his way to work in the morning. Now, as he slipped through the parade of midday subway riders, his heart was pounding, his body trembling. Tamm felt like a spy. After looking around to make sure nobody was watching, he picked up a phone and called The New York Times.

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