intelligence agencies

Last night the New York Times published a late night bombshell:

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has warned in a secret three-page memorandum to top White House officials that the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability, according to government officials familiar with the document.

Several officials said the highly classified analysis, written in January to President Obama’s national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, came in the midst of an intensifying effort inside the Pentagon, the White House and the intelligence agencies to develop new options for Mr. Obama. They include a set of military alternatives, still under development, to be considered should diplomacy and sanctions fail to force Iran to change course.

Officials familiar with the memo’s contents would describe only portions dealing with strategy and policy, and not sections that apparently dealt with secret operations against Iran, or how to deal with Persian Gulf allies.

I’m sure we will hear a lot of right wingers saying this is a failure of the Obama administration and his policies towards Iran, but let’s think a little further into history. Iran revved up their nuclear ambitions in 2003. A majority of President Bush’s tenure was having to figure out how to deal with a nuclear Iran, yet they never came up with a plan either. If so, then we would have a plan. So all this started before President Obama was even Senator Obama.

And 2003 is an important year to remember, since that’s the year that we invaded Iraq and changed the political landscape of that part of the Middle East. Any plans that existed at the time were pretty much nullified with the changes that were happening by the tip of our sword.

By having his agencies screw up the terrorist watch list:

A new Justice Department audit shows that for nearly three years the FBI gave outdated, incomplete and error-riddled data about terror suspects to be added to the government's watchlist.

Overall, the audit by the department's inspector general gives the FBI a mixed review for its process of nominating names and submitting other information to be included in the terrorist watchlist that is maintained by U.S. intelligence agencies

Think of the people who missed vacations because of the no-fly list. They did nothing wrong, but were punished because of this governments inability to do their jobs. Yeah I know how the right wing loves to lie about there not being a terrorist attack since 9/11 (ignoring things like anthrax), but that was purely by luck. This administration has done nothing to stop terrorism - it's just a political tool for them.

Rudy is making up excuses for his failures on 9/11. First up is the radio system:

But there's one key detail he won't clearly explain: Why firefighters on 9/11 had the same faulty radios that failed them in 1993, when the World Trade Center was first attacked.

When asked about the issue Thursday at an Associated Press appearance, Giuliani suggested it was an insurmountable technological hurdle that couldn't be cleared in his eight years in office that began Jan. 1, 1994, and ended just after 9/11.

A technology hurdle? I was on a fire department in a city of 24,000 people. We had the upgraded radio systems in 1988 and a lower frequency back up. That was 13 years before 9/11. It wasn't technology - that was there.

But that's not the only excuse Rudy is making. I really like this one:

The firefighter union and Riches also take Giuliani to task for insisting on placing an emergency response headquarters in the World Trade Center, even though he had been warned not to do so because it was a terrorism target.

The NSA thing is getting bigger than anyone could every imagine:

A little-known spy agency that analyzes imagery taken from the skies has been spending significantly more time watching U.S. soil.

In an era when other intelligence agencies try to hide those operations, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is proud of that domestic mission.

He said the work the agency did after hurricanes Rita and Katrina was the best he'd seen an intelligence agency do in his 42 years in the spy business.

"This was kind of a direct payback to the taxpayers for the investment made in this agency over the years, even though in its original design it was intended for foreign intelligence purposes," Clapper said in a Thursday interview with The Associated Press.

All of the sudden that movie "Enemy of the State" seems to be coming to life.

Meanwhile Verizon is now being sued for possible violations of their privacy policy:

Two New Jersey public interest lawyers sued Verizon Communications Inc. for $5 billion Friday, claiming the phone carrier violated privacy laws by turning over phone records to the National Security Agency for a secret government surveillance program.

Attorneys Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer filed the lawsuit Friday afternoon in federal district court in Manhattan, where Verizon is headquartered.

The lawsuit asks the court to stop Verizon from turning over any more records to the NSA without a warrant or consent of the subscriber.

One of the arguments that we keep hearing about the warrantless wiretaps is
that it could of helped prevented 9/11 if the "tool" was available prior to the
attacks. That is another point that is totally false. The FBI actually wanted to
tap Moussaoui prior to the attacks but didn't do so because their lawyers had a
"misunderstanding" of how FISA actually worked.

This is proven in an article from September 25, 2002 in the Washington Post:

The frantic efforts of Minnesota FBI agents to search the computer and
belongings of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 were
thwarted by lawyers at FBI headquarters who misunderstood the law on foreign
intelligence surveillance warrants, a congressional committee was told
yesterday. Had the agents succeeded in obtaining a special intelligence
warrant in the weeks leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, they would have
found materials that could have led them to al Qaeda members -- including
hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi -- who had gathered for a key
meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), a member of
the panel, said yesterday.

In the third of a series of critical reports, staff members of the
House-Senate committee probing the performance of intelligence agencies
reported that Minneapolis FBI agents spent three weeks trying to meet a
legal standard that was not required. The agents, fearful that Moussaoui was
somehow part of a U.S. plot, desperately tried to prove that Chechen rebels
to whom Moussaoui was linked were in turn agents of Osama bin Laden's terror
network.

Bush has sure taken on a different tone this week. He has been more
forthcoming in his speeches and started agreeing with Senate on controversial
legislation (the torture ban). He even accepted responsibility for faulty
intelligence this week which lead to the Iraq war. The question is - why?

Perhaps you have to look no further than a new report by the Congressional
Research Services, a non-partisan agency that conducts investigations for
Congress. The report states that Congress did not have access to the same
intelligence as President Bush when it came to voting on the Iraq war.

Just two weeks ago, the President was out making attacks against Democrats
questioning the war. He asserted that all members of Congress had access to the
same intelligence leading up to the war. This report proves that claim as
fictional as the one of Iraq being tied to 9/11 -

The Congressional Research Service, by contrast, said: "The president,
and a small number of presidentially designated Cabinet-level officials,
including the vice president ... have access to a far greater overall volume
of intelligence and to more sensitive intelligence information, including
information regarding intelligence sources and methods."

Unlike members of Congress, the president and his top officials also have
the authority to ask U.S. intelligence agencies more extensively for
follow-up information, the report said. "As a result, the president and his
most senior advisers arguably are better positioned to assess the quality of
the ... intelligence more accurately than is Congress."

Bush tried to rewrite history yesterday by

saying:

Today in the

Washington Post, we find out he stretched the truth on that line.

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of
the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw
the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that
independent commissions have determined that the administration did not
misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies
overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction,
and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this
belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties
were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence
information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to
provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though
concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to
change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the
administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions