Speaking of liars

Senator Leahy pursued Attorney General Mukasey's recent misleading (if not totally fabricated) remarks in San Francisco. Mukasey allowed that he might have gotten the country wrong, blah, blah, blah.

Glenn Greenwald, who--thank you, Jesus--will not let go of this, comments in an update to his post today:

UPDATE: The commenter selise, one of the most reliable sources around, has posted a transcript of the Leahy-Mukasey exchange that is somewhat different (and even more damning) than the source quoted above. Mukasey claims that his only point was that no warrant should be required for foreign-to-foreign calls, but virtually nobody contests that. Indeed, that has always been the law under FISA -- certainly it was the law as of 9/11 -- and there was absolutely nothing preventing them from having intercepted and investigated that call (more details on that here, from Kevin Fenton).

Moreover, virtually everyone in Congress -- including even Russ Feingold and Rush Holt -- were willing to amend FISA to clarify further that no warrants are required to eavesdrop on such calls, but the President threatened to veto any such amendment unless it was accompanied by telecom amnesty. So it's hard to believe -- to put it mildly -- that Mukasey's only point was that foreign-to-foreign calls shouldn't require warrants, since (a) nobody contests that and (b) no warrants were required for such calls as of 9/11. His point was that FISA's warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attack ("We've got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn't come home to show for that") and that claim is every bit as false as Mukasey's description of the call itself.

[Emphasis mine]

From selise's transcript:

Mukasey: The one thing I got wrong was the geography. It did not come from Afghanistan. I got the country wrong, but other than that it was spot on, and I will be happy to provide you with the page. And the point to be made there was not that we could not have monitored it under FISA, but rather that no FISA application should have been necessary to monitor a foreign target in a foreign country. I was speaking generally to the desirability of getting a bill passed, as you know we've been having a lot of trouble with that, but I'd be happy to get you the reference. You're right it's not in the 9/11...

Leahy: Then we don't need FISA to monitor a foreign source.

Mukasey: We shouldn't need it.

Leahy: We didn’t need it then. And we don't today.

There is no end to their obfuscation.

--the BB

Mukasey utterance redux

Just five days ago I posted about Attorney General Michael Mukasey's astonishing assertion when speaking before the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco.

Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went." [Emphasis mine]

The director of the 9/11 Commission has no memory of any such call coming to the attention of the Commission (as I posted then).

Not sure of course what the AG had in mind, although the most important signals intelligence leads related to our report -- that related to the Hazmi-Mihdhar issues of January 2000 or to al Qaeda activities or transits connected to Iran -- was not of this character. If, as he says, the USG didn't know where the call went in the US, neither did we.

Neither do the co-chairs or anyone in Congress. As Rep. Lee Hamilton finally responded to Glenn Greenwald:

I am unfamiliar with the telephone call that Attorney General Mukasey cited in his appearance in San Francisco on March 27. The 9/11 Commission did not receive any information pertaining to its occurrence.

Gleen Greenwald comments today:

(1) The Bush administration concealed this obviously vital episode from the 9/11 Commission and from everyone else, until Mukasey tearfully trotted it out last week; or,

(2) Mukasey, the nation's highest law enforcement officer, made this story up in order to scare and manipulate Americans into believing that FISA and other surveillance safeguards caused the 9/11 attacks and therefore the Government should be given more unchecked spying powers.

Either way, isn't it rather self-evidently a huge story?

Rep. John Conyers wrote Mukasey asking for clarification. I have not noticed word of any response.

I agree with Greenwald's obvious implication. This IS self-evidently a huge story.

Did the maladministration make a horrendous error in not acting when it could and should have?

Or is the current Attorney General, like the previous one, a liar?

Anyone have other interpretations of this (and some reason to deem them plausible)?

--the BB

Catapulting the propaganda - updated

Attorney General Michael Mukasey gave a speech to the Commonwealth Club this past weekend.

Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went."

The press played up how, at his following comments, the AG got all choked up. Let's skip the emotion, real of faked for effect, and focus on what he said.

If there was a call from an al Qaeda safe house in Afghanistan into the US prior to 9/11/2001, then the government did not need a warrant to listen in, according to then current law. So if they knew about such a call and did not act on it, the level of malfeasance is staggering.

If there was such a call, why was it not mentioned at any point in the 9/11 Commission's investigation? It such a call was not mentioned because it never really happened, this would be the worst sort of public lying to achieve a political goal.

Either of these options should be alarming.

And in any case, it hardly touches upon the issues that are actually relevant to FISA law.

But it clearly constitutes highly emotional fearmongering. And is highly misleading.

Again, did anyone in their right mind really believe he would not be a Bush toady once appointed as Attorney General?

To reiterate the issue, in Maddow's words:

MADDOW: The implication of Mukasey‘s story here is that these pesky, restrictive FISA laws kept us from tapping that call from Afghanistan and blocked us stopping 9/11. That‘s complete bull pucky. The laws then, the laws now, the laws since the FISA court has been in existence; the laws have said that you can tap without a warrant that kind of communication from outside the United States into the U.S., particularly if you knew it was an al Qaeda safe house and it had a link in terrorism.

What Mukasey said is either a terrible lie about the law or it‘s terrible admission about the Bush administration leaving us unprotected on 9/11.

Glenn Greenwald encapsulates it this way:

Mukasey's new claim that FISA's warrant requirements prevented discovery of the 9/11 attacks and caused the deaths of 3,000 Americans is disgusting and reckless, because it's all based on the lie that FISA required a warrant for targeting the "Afghan safe house." It just didn't. Nor does the House FISA bill require individual warrants when targeting a non-U.S. person outside the U.S.

Danger durden has a great post on this up at Daily Kos, including commentary on this issue by Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. There is also information provided (including a very good form letter) for contacting the House Judiciary Committee, urging them to call AG Mukasey in to testify under oath on what he's talking about here.

Did the government have all the tools it needed and still do nothing?
Is the government making shit up to scare us?

The answer may well be "both of the above" but I think it is reasonable to demand answers.

UPDATE:
Glenn Greenwald follows up on this issue. Lee Hamilton, c0-chair of the 9/11 Commission would not comment but Philip Zelikow, the executive director of the commission, responded with this:

Not sure of course what the AG had in mind, although the most important signals intelligence leads related to our report -- that related to the Hazmi-Mihdhar issues of January 2000 or to al Qaeda activities or transits connected to Iran -- was not of this character. If, as he says, the USG didn't know where the call went in the US, neither did we. So unless we had some reason to link this information to the 9/11 story ....

In general, as with several covert action issues for instance, the Commission sought (and succeeded) in publishing details about sensitive intelligence matters where the details were material to the investigative mandate in our law.

Glenn comments:

That's polite Beltway talk for saying that nothing like what Mukasey described actually happened. Does anyone on TV other than Keith Olbermann care that the Attorney General of the United States just invented a critical episode about 9/11 that never actually happened -- tearing up as he did it -- in order to scare Americans into supporting the administration's desired elimination of spying restrictions and blame FISA supporters for the 9/11 attacks? We still ought to hear from Hamilton and/or Kean.

[Emphasis mine]

--the BB

Remember the rule of law? Pretty vague memory, isn't it? - Updated

Smintheus at Daily Kos discusses Attorney General Mukasey's testimony:

The answer that waterboarding him personally would constitute torture puts Mukasey in line with DNI McConnell.

Funny though that in his answer to Kennedy, Mukasey doesn't need to know any further circumstances to make that decision. He's been claiming that torture is situational; certain circumstances make waterboarding legal. But with regard to himself, he doesn't hesitate to issue an opinion without even the slightest quibbling about possible circumstances.

That seems to imply that waterboarding Michael Mukasey would be torture under any conceivable circumstances - because he's innocent of wrongdoing. And yet none of the people who've been tortured by the CIA under George Bush's orders had been convicted of anything. The presumption of innocence is the very foundation of our law. Neither George Bush nor Michael Mukasey is in any position to rule that none of the prisoners might conceivably be innocent. They haven't attempted to assert that power. These and other prisoners of course remain innocent before the law until found guilty of some crime.

Essentially Michael Mukasey is declaring: No, you may torture other innocent people but never me. He is what passes these days for America's lawyer.

SSJOAS!

It would have been nice if the Senate of the United States of America had told the Sociopath-in-Chief that they would NEVER confirm anyone as Attorney General who would not unequivocally acknowledge that waterboarding is torture and therefore illegal. Of course, Bush could not do that, because we know we've waterboarded and if we admit that it's torture then it would follow, as the night the day, that the maladministration is guilty of violating the law. Which, my friends, the whole world already knows. We have a lawless thug in the Oval Office who has been turning the United States into a rogue nation.

Oh look! Britney got 52-50ed. [No, I am not going to provide a link; y'all have better things to think about.]

UPDATE:
Scott Horton has a great article up at Harper's about Mukasey's appearance. It really captures a lot of the issues and makes them quite clear. I recommend reading the whole thing.

Horton cites "Yale Law Professor Jack Balkin’s summation of the Mukasey testimony:"

You’re crazy if you think I’m going to admit that any of the interrogation practices previously performed by the Administration that just hired me are illegal. Saying that would suggest that people in the Administration violated the law and are subject to criminal prosecution, and that previous OLC opinions have condoned war crimes. The only thing I will tell you is that I sure hope we don’t continue one of these practices in the future (lucky for me you haven’t pressed me about the others!). But don’t ask me to say that the President can’t do any of them later on if he wants to. I mean, come on, guys, I just got here, you know? I just put new drapes in my office. I really don’t want to have to get fired only three months after I started. Oh, and by the way, the President, my boss, never violates the law. Got that?

There you have it: our American democracy gone down the tubes. Drawing toward his conclusion, Horton writes:

Mukasey promised a new rapport with Congress and with the American public, and he promised to restore the integrity for which the Justice Department was once famous. At this point he’s made a few positive personnel moves and given a few encouraging speeches, but when we come back to a focus on the major issues that he was forced to confront in the second day of his confirmation hearing, there is precious little to separate his opinions and conduct from his tarnished predecessor, Alberto Gonzales.

h/t to Smintheus at Daily Kos for the Horton tip.

--the BB