Legislative Update XX

The House of Representatives to protect wild horses from slaughter and give them millions of more acres to roam.

The Senate confirmed retired astronaut Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden to be the next head of NASA. The Senate also added a hate crimes provision for sexual orientation and genders as part of the defense appropriations bill to be completed next week. The House had already passed a bill, but the defense bill this is attached to is under a veto threat for F-22 spending that the White House and Pentagon don't want. And it looks like the infamous "card check" provision will be dropped from the Employee Free Choice Act to win over enough support from conservative Dems.

The Senate Judiciary Committee conducted hearings for Sonia Sotomayor and her nomination to be an associate justice on the Supreme Court. Most observers think Sotomayor was cool and collected and impressed even her GOP questioners. Her confirmation by the August recess seems assured, as even some Republicans are going to vote for her.

The House Intelligence Committee will investigate whether the CIA broke the law by not telling Congress earlier about a secret program for terrorist assassination teams.

The House Ways and Means Committee and the Education and Labor Committee have approved a sweeping health care reform bill (which has been endorsed by the AMA), but it still needs to be approved by the Energy and Commerce Committee before going to the full House.

More on the Secret CIA Program

Yesterday I was wondering why former VP Cheney would order the CIA to hide a program of targeted assassination from Congress. Via Scott Horton, there's some indication that the nature of the program wasn't one of assassination, but of intelligence-gathering...on American citizens:

The details and specific target of the program have yet to be made public. The New York Times, citing unnamed officials, says that the CIA had plotted since 2001 to find and kill al-Qaeda leaders abroad. Two former CIA officials tell TIME there's another, somewhat less dramatic, possibility: a plan to conduct domestic surveillance. Spying on Americans is outside the CIA's purview and would be highly controversial — good enough reason for Cheney to want it kept under wraps.

Less dramatic perhaps, but far more troubling as such a program is more than "outside the CIA's purveiw"; it's blatantly illegal. And it would explain why Cheney would want so badly to keep it a secret from Congress.

Intelligence Revelations

Over the last week we've learned a few interesting things about intelligence programs being run by the NSA and the CIA, and the participation of Bush administration officials in those programs. Last Wednesday it was revealed that the CIA concealed a top secret program from Congress for eight years. Congress became aware of the program only after they were of informed of it by current CIA director Leon Panetta, who himsefl learned of the program only last month. Over the weekend we learned that the CIA withheld information from Congress on the direct orders of Vice President Cheney, according to testimony before Congress by Leon Panetta. Panetta also indicated that the program had been canceled. And yesterday we learned that the program was an effort to assassinate Al Qaeda terrorists wherever they might be found, including in friendly countries. Now officials say that no assassination was ever carried out and due to legal and logistical problems, the program never left the planning stages. Of course, that leads one to wonder just why there was an effort to keep the program away from Congress completely, especially given that we have been assassinating Al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan (a "friendly" country) for years now. If anything, one would think that Congress and the public in general would approve of targeted killings, which have the benefit of at least not killing dozens of civilians along with the terrorist you're trying to get. I'm almost willing to bet there's still more about the program we don't know yet, but we'll see.

Also, last Friday saw the release of a report compiled by the various agencies Inspectors General regarding the warrantless wiretapping program whose existence was revealed by the New York Times in late 2005. The report doesn't offer an opinion on the program's legality, but it does discuss the program's effectiveness, finding that most leads generated by the program were dead ends and that this was due in part to the extensive secrecy that surrounded the program.

The report also touches on the other intelligence-gathering program maintained by the Bush administration, the "unprecedented" data mining operation that we learned in December was the cause of a now infamous showdown between the Department of Justice and senior Bush administration officials. The report provides little detail about the program though, so though we are well aware that it existed at one time and was canceled when the DOJ officials threatened to resign over it, we still don't know exactly what it did or where all the data it collected has gone off to.

So, an interesting weekend to say the least.

UPDATE: Via Tim F, Philip Giraldi with an informative post on why the CIA assassination program would be so problematic and thus why it likely never came to fruition.

Legislative Update XV

The House of Representatives passed the Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act which would provide four weeks of paid leave for federal workers following the birth or adoption of a child (currently federal employees must use annual or sick leave to be with their new children). The House also passed bills recognizing seven Native American tribes and a resolution honoring those that died in the Tiananmen Square protests twenty years ago that also calls on China to free remaining prisoners and launch a UN-backed probe of its crackdown.

GOP opposition to IMF funding delayed a vote on funding the wars in Aghanistan and Iraq. Why would this matter, you ask? Well, the combined votes of Republicans and those Democrats who don't vote for war funding on principle would have been enough to defeat the legislation, but this will likely be worked out next week. What I want to know is: Can we start running ads that say House Republicans denied funding for our troops? Hell, these days they are even revealing secret information on intelligence briefings. Traitors, all!

The Senate overwhelmingly voted to consider legislation that would allow the FDA to regulate tobacco, which the House has passed already. Republicans are dragging out a vote until next week though.

"Ghost Network"

Suspected Chinese hackers have upped the ante in cyberspace, hacking into almost 1,300 foreign machines around the world for unknown reasons, stealing sensitive documents and logging the activities of the users. So far this is the most sophisticated cyber spying operation uncovered. Actual cyberwar remains crude in comparison, though you can be assured that the Chinese government and other governments around the world are working on that too.

The NSA And Your Credit Card

Does the NSA have your credit card and other financial information? Kim Zetter, looking back on interviews with NSA whistleblower Russell Tice, thinks it's entirely possible.

Did the NSA Spy on American Journalists?

Would you be surprised?

UPDATE: More here:

Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst, spoke on Wednesday to MSNBC host Keith Olbermann. Tice has acknowledged in the past being one of the anonymous sources that spoke with The New York Times for its 2005 story on the government's warrantless wiretapping program.

After that story was published, President Bush said in a statement that only people in the United States who were talking with terrorists overseas would have been targeted for surveillance.

But Tice says, in truth, the spying involved a dragnet of all communications, confirming what critics have long assumed.

"The National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications," he said. "Faxes, phone calls and their computer communications. ... They monitored all communications."

Tice said the NSA analyzed metadata to determine which communication would be collected. Offering a hypothetical example, he said if the agency determined that terrorists communicate in brief, two-minute phone calls, the NSA might program its systems to record all such calls, invading the privacy of anyone prone to telephonic succinctness.

All of this is of course, illegal.

More on Panetta and Blair

Scott Horton, on why the fact that the Panetta/Blair picks irritate Senators Rockefeller and Feinstein only means that they are the right picks.