John McCain and the Telecoms

It's been a while since I've addressed the issue of telecom immunity, as not much headway has been made in either direction, aside from the occasional wind-testing proposal tied to the starter's block. The contention, however, is beginning to bubble again, if only slightly, because of John McCain's public wavering on the issue.

Although previously on record as saying the President is not above the law, McCain and his advisers have backtracked in the past week.

A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance.

McCain, as with every other about face he's made in the process of this campaign, denies he's changed his stance. But McCain said this to Charlie Savage six months ago:

There are some areas where the statutes don’t apply, such as in the surveillance of overseas communications. Where they do apply, however, I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is.

It strains credulity to imagine what, if any, Constitutional power would grant the President the power to ignore written law. In saying so, McCain shows an increasing attraction into the orbit of President Bush's flawed legal justification of the NSA program, a justification a wide array of legal experts have declared "fails to offer a plausible legal defense of the NSA domestic spying program." Indeed, it appears an insurmountable task to find a lawyer of any import outside of the current administration who can find any legal backing for the program.

An examination of McCain's advisory team, however, leaves little want of an explanation for the waffling. The list of advisers reads like a telecom dream team, with more than a third of the 66 lobbyists on McCain's team having lobbied for the telecom industry in the past decade, with many, such as chief political adviser Charlie Black, fighting until very recently for ratroactive immunity. Three leading lobbyists for AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint listed in a September Newsweek article are now members of McCain's campaign. EFF continues to list and expand upon numerous other lobbyists involved with the Arizona Senator, eliminating any mystery surrounding the sudden shift in position.

[Note: The 66 lobbyists is a dated number from a March USA today article. As the number is inexact and fluctuates, the numbers above are meant as an anecdotal estimate giving a general perspective, not an exact statistic. At one point, McCainSource had listed as many as 134 lobbyists involved. Again, those numbers shouldn't be taken as precise.]

Whatever you think about John McCain, the only thing that has become exceedingly evident in the process of the campaign is that however principled he has been imagined throughout his career, he has ceased to be. He has changed course on nearly every significant issue except the Iraqi occupation, be it taxes, Roe v. Wade, or telecom immunity. Sure, he still throws in the occasional token environmental reference, but the only thing 'maverick' about John McCain these days is his staunch commitment to a thoroughly-reviled status quo.

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Phil Gramm and Undercutting the War on Terror

Given the predictable nature of American politics and its false sense of ideological diversity, it is guaranteed that a central theme of the coming general election will be that Barack Obama, and by extension all Democrats, are soft on national security and that only John McCain is capable of protecting the country. While a tired theme, consistently dispelled by all available evidence, it still has legs as conventional wisdom.

While any assessment of the last 8 eight years of the 'strong' foreign policy will see the strengthening of al Qaeda (in the FATA), Hamas (in Gaza), Hezbollah (in Lebanon), and Iran (by its proxies and in Iraq), the media narrative remains intact. In addition, the last 8 years have seen Iran continue its nuclear ambitions unabated--despite the furrowed brows and promises not to converse--and North Korea on the verge of achieving a working weapons program with nary a notice by the Bush administration.

In light of the obvious failure of the policy by any available criteria, John McCain will run on much the same platform. He often holds up his disagreement over the Iraq war as a significant divergence, but McCain's only complaint was that the US didn't send enough troops. Never did he question the wisdom of ignoring al Qaeda in favor of deposing an impotent white whale. Following that path to the nomination is fraught with potholes for McCain, however, as his team of lobbyists has a long history of shilling for brutal dictatorships--Myanmar, Zambia, Qaddafi to name but a few.

While those relationships may be in extremely bad taste, McCain's relationship with former Senator Phil Gramm illustrates a much more nefarious portent for US security and the War on Terror.

Gramm, as campaign co-chair, is "a valued voice on economic policy," according to McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker. Gramm's day job is vice president of US division of Swiss bank, UBS, a position which saw him lobby for the banking industry in the run-up to the sub-prime bubble burst as late as this past December. Now, UBS is under investigation for tax havens:

NEWSWEEK has learned that UBS is also currently the focus of congressional and Justice Department investigations into schemes that allegedly enabled wealthy Americans to evade income taxes by stashing their money in overseas havens.

McCain's campaign is already distancing itself from some of Gramm's other work for UBS: his involvement in attempts to sell financial products known as "death bonds," which BusinessWeek described last summer as one of "the most macabre investment scheme[s] ever devised by Wall Street."

Again, perhaps in bad taste, but its Gramm's lack of commitment to national security that should have McCain running for cover.

A six-year struggle to uncover Osama bin Laden's financial network failed because American officials did not skillfully use the legal tools they had, did not realize they needed stronger weapons, and faced resistance at home and abroad, officials involved in the effort say.

Federal officials say they have not persuaded foreign banks to open their books to investigators and that in this country, a law that would have allowed the United States to penalize foreign banks that did not cooperate was blocked last year by a single United States senator.

That single senator was Phil Gramm, then a member of the Senate Banking Committee. Given that al Qaeda could not have launched an operation on the scale of the World Trade Center attacks deprived of finances, tracking down and putting a stop to money laundering by terrorist organizations should have been and should be today a priority in any national security effort. Efforts to put the screws on foreign banks prior to 2001 met with resistance in the Bush White House, but it quickly reversed course after the attacks. Phil Gramm, though single-handedly responsible for blocking the bill, felt no such inkling.

"I was right then and I am right now" in opposing the bill, Mr. Gramm said yesterday..."The way to deal with terrorists is to hunt them down and kill them."

That anyone still believes that is a reliable and practically-feasible method is incredible, but to suggest using force to the exclusion of all other tools is ludicrous.

"We could have starved the organization if we put our minds to it," said Richard Palmer, who gained experience in money laundering as the Central Intelligence Agency's station chief in Moscow during the 1990's. "The government has had the ability to track these accounts for some time."

Clearly there were many moving parts in the failure of American intelligence which led to the attacks, and any attempt to place that blame on Gramm is erroneous, but the fact remains that Gramm placed the financial interests of the banking industry above that of national security. He was willing to sacrifice the ability to track dirty money before and (somehow) after the WTC attacks, yet has teamed with John McCain as the latter tours the country proclaiming to be strong on national security.

It is the reigning narrative that Democrats are weak on national security and Republicans strong, but the facts simply don't bear that out. There is no tangible evidence of an improvement of American or Israeli security over the past 8 years, though there is ample proof of al Qaeda's reconstitution, Hamas' control of Gaza, and Iran's new-found playground handed to them on a silver platter.

Now, on top of that, McCain employs the economic advice of a man who fought to keep American law enforcement from tracking and freezing money laundering by terrorist organizations. This contradiction may be of little concern, however, as the media is loathe to make any adjustments to its reigning narratives, lest they have to do some mental leg work.

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This Time We Mean It. Really.

As a parent counts to three using a series of inane fractions, so has the United States government dealt with the Iraqi exile and charlatan, Ahmed Chalabi. McClatchy reports that the US has again cut ties with one of the men most responsible for war in Iraq and the concomitant faulty intelligence.

The U.S. decision...is the fourth time that the U.S. has ended an alliance with Chalabi, whom officials in the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney's office once touted as a successor to Saddam Hussein. The State Department and U.S. intelligence agencies, however, have long regarded Chalabi as untrustworthy and a "charlatan."

Ahmed Chalabi began working with the US in the late 80s in fits and starts, but rose to prominence following the first Gulf War. At that time, he was being paid by the CIA, but that agency cut him off in 1995 after it became clear to them that he was selling fraudulent goods. Despite being known by US Intelligence as a source of false information, Chalabi used his friends in Congress to convince the State Department to pick up his tab, and he continued to fight to depose Saddam Hussein.

Perhaps no single person is more responsible for building the case for invasion than Chalabi. And certainly no one intentionally provided more false information to the government and journalists, most famously Judith Miller. This false information ranged from WMD caches to phantom ties to al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Chalabi wanted Hussein gone, and wasn't the slightest bit concerned with the means, so long as he got the end he wanted.

Aram Roston, author of "The Man Who Pushed America to War," spoke to Amy Goodman in March and detailed how Chalabi got his false information into America's stream of consciousness:

No, exactly. It was—it’s all a slew of journals and a slew of television programs, but each one typically would get a piece of the pie that he was producing, a piece of the product of what ended up being phony propaganda that the Iraqi National Congress was coming up with. And they had a very elaborate system set in place to get these stories in the press and into the intelligence stream.

They weren’t very successful getting these stories into the intelligence stream. And what I found was they were most successful after the attacks of 9/11. People were very—they wanted stories about terror and about Saddam Hussein, about weapons of mass destruction. So Chalabi’s group became very successful at planting these stories. They weren’t that successful, it seems, in getting it into the CIA, because the CIA at that point didn’t trust a word that Chalabi’s group said. But they were much more successful in impacting public opinion. And that had an immense impact, obviously, on America.

Essentially, Chalabi was very good at running a propaganda campaign utilizing a cabal of journalist dupes and a credulous American public. The Bush administration, for its part, was all too happy to stoke the fire. But that the CIA didn't want any part of the intelligence speaks volumes about the run-up to the war. When the central agency for gathering foreign intelligence knows it's being sold rotten fruit, the policy makers and opinion shapers should have looked twice before biting down.

From a March, 2004, McClatchy article:

Feeding the information to the news media, as well as to selected administration officials and members of Congress, helped foster an impression that there were multiple sources of intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons programs and links to bin Laden.

In fact, many of the allegations came from the same half-dozen defectors, weren't confirmed by other intelligence and were hotly disputed by intelligence professionals at the CIA, the Defense Department and the State Department.

Nevertheless, U.S. officials and others who supported a pre-emptive invasion quoted the allegations in statements and interviews without running afoul of restrictions on classified information or doubts about the defectors' reliability.

Aside from the now-obviously lack of truth to his intelligence, Chalabi has a long history of fraud and embezzlement.

Chalabi, who lives in London, fled Jordan in 1989 after his Petra Bank collapsed and was convicted in absentia three years later for embezzlement. [...]

Earlier this year, the State Department threatened to cut off the INC's funding for information programs and other nonmilitary activities after an audit turned up expenditures that were deemed questionable or were unaccounted for.

The inspector general's audit of $4.3 million in grants mostly criticized the group's accounting and payroll procedures. But it also found questionable expenses, including $2,070 for a gym membership, $5,541 for legal fees related to a rental dispute and other money used for first-class plane tickets.

The audit also suggests the INC may have used taxpayers' money to lobby in Washington, which is illegal.

The funding continued, however, illustrating a recurring theme. Chalibi, having been convicted of embezzlement and cut-off by the CIA for providing faulty intelligence, continued to misuse tax dollars with relative impunity. He would receive several threats, always to have his funding restored in the end. He would be similarly 'cut-off' in 2004, this week [which, of course, is unresolved,] and intermittently in between.

So, given that it is now indisputable that Chalabi was selling faulty goods, the only question remaining is whether the administration was simply mislead in good faith, or bought into intelligence they should have knownn was bad from the start. The former is a favorite line of defense for supporters of the invasion, but the theory doesn't hold water.

As far back as the mid-90s, the CIA knew Chalabi's story. When the Central Intelligence Agency doesn't trust the intelligence, you might want to get a second opinion before spouting it out in knee-jerk fashion.

Also, in October 2002, it was clear to many that there was plenty of dispute over the veracity of Chalabi's claims.

The Pentagon and the CIA are waging a bitter feud over secret intelligence that is being used to shape U.S. policy toward Iraq, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The dispute has been fueled by the creation within the Pentagon of a special unit that provides senior policymakers with alternate assessments of Iraq intelligence.

[...]

A major source of contention is the Pentagon's heavy reliance on data supplied by the Iraqi National Congress. The INC, the largest group within the divided Iraqi opposition, has a mixed reputation in Washington and a huge stake in whether President Bush makes good on his threat to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam by force. Its leader, Ahmed Chalabi, sees himself as a potential successor.

[...]

It is not clear whether the Pentagon solicits the views of the U.S. intelligence community on the material it collects directly from the Iraqi opposition.

A senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed grave fears that civilian officials in the Pentagon may be blindly accepting assertions by Chalabi and his aides that a U.S. invasion would trigger mass defections of Iraqi troops and a quick collapse of Iraqi resistance.

"Our guys working this area for a living all believe Chalabi and all those guys in their Bond Street suits are charlatans. To take them for a source of anything except a fantasy trip would be a real stretch," one official said.

The special unit within the Pentagon was Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans, now known as a farcical cherry-picking operation based, not on gathering intelligence, but on manufacturing a case for war.

To claim that there was insufficient evidence as to the shaky foundation upon which the case for war was built prior to invasion is to ignore the facts. Chalabi was long known as a snake-oil salesman, and it was his un-verified intelligence that provided the crux of the case. Lifelong intelligence officers were pleading with the administration to take his information lightly, but the suits who wanted war were hearing none of it.

All of this information was available before the war. Feith and his cohorts can revise history all they want, but the evidence is there.

If Chalabi had two strikes for misusing funds and selling false information, then strike three comes from his dealings with Iran.

Roston:

Well, the Iranian group that is charged by Iran with exporting...the Islamic revolution is called the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guards. And...the man who runs their operations in Iraq now, and did before the war, is a general named Ahmed Foruzandeh. And Ahmed Foruzandeh is considered a very talented intelligence officer, and he’s very good at covert operations for the Iranians, and he’s very committed, he’s very sophisticated, and he’s no joke. And it’s certainly true that Chalabi had met with him before the war, before the US invasion.

What concerned American intelligence officers was when they found out—they believed he was meeting—he had met with him after the invasion, while the DIA was still funding the Iraqi National Congress’s intelligence operations in Iraq. It would have been in the spring of 2004. And they had serious concerns about that.

Now, more recently, Ahmed Foruzandeh, this man I mention in the book, he’s been named by the US government itself publicly as supporting terror, supporting insurgency. He’s been designated by the Treasury Department under an executive order as a real threat to efforts in Iraq.

Passing US intelligence to Iran:

The U.S. government has launched an investigation to determine how Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmad Chalabi obtained highly classified American intelligence that was then passed to Iran, Bush administration officials said Friday.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity, said the compromised intelligence was "highly classified and damaging."

Chalabi's most recent ouster comes as "U.S. military and intelligence officials said Chalabi is close to Brig. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, the commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' elite Quds Force." Suleimani, you may recall, brokered the cease-fire in Basra in March, and is also a proud member of the US terrorist watch list.

It is hard to imagine any single person who has done more harm to the United States as an outsider. Chalabi has pilfered money from tax payers to provide incredible, false intelligence claims that led the nation into a drawn-out, destructive occupation. Concurrently, he is negotiating and dealing intelligence secrets to Iran, our next target and current replacement for the USSR. Not only should Chalabi not be receiving US funds, he should be in a prison somewhere. Maybe he can be extradited to Jordan for his prior conviction, I hear they treat their prisoners real nice.

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While You Were Out, April 15

Drug Makers Near Old Goal: A Legal Shield

In keeping with the theme of 'if we say it's okay, it is,' the Bush administration is pushing for a policy known as 'pre-emption' which would declare that pharmaceutical companies could not be sued over drugs that had been approved by the FDA.

The Bush administration has argued strongly in favor of the doctrine, which holds that the F.D.A. is the only agency with enough expertise to regulate drug makers and that its decisions should not be second-guessed by courts. The Supreme Court is to rule on a case next term that could make pre-emption a legal standard for drug cases. The court already ruled in February that many suits against the makers of medical devices like pacemakers are pre-empted.

This theory, or course, works off the assumption that if the FDA has investigated a drug and approved it and its label, the courts are in no position to rule in opposition to the medical experts of the federal agency. But that relies on the FDA being provided with all of the facts and studies of the pill, something that drug companies are demonstrably opposed to complying with.

Consider Ortho Evra, the birth control patch made by Johnson & Johnson, around which this article is centered:

Documents and e-mail messages from Johnson & Johnson, made public as part of the lawsuits against the company, show that even before the drug agency approved the product in 2001, the company’s own researchers found that the patch delivered far more estrogen each day than low-dose pills. When it reported the results publicly, the company reduced the numbers by 40 percent.

Allowing for the FDA to be the final voice on all things pharmaceutical is based on the presumption that there is no pertinent information withheld. Clearly that isn't the case. Johnson & Johnson is not the first drug maker to be outed as having held back information, and they won't be the last. The makers of OxyContin actually marketed their drug (an opiate) as non-addictive, a laughable proposition for a drug of its sort, but approved as such by the FDA nonetheless.

If we expect the FDA to act as the only oversight arm of the entire drug business, we have to be assured that its acting well-informed and as an operative of the public. That isn't happening, and if lawsuits are a vehicle toward achieving an end better suited to the needs and expectations of American citizens then pre-emption is a disastrous precedent to set.

But pharmaceuticals aren't the only area where the protective arm of pre-emption is being extended, as this AP story details.

If you think the prescription drug you took for headaches caused your heart attack, the Food and Drug Administration says you can't sue the maker for injury if it met agency standards.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission says you can't sue a mattress maker if your mattress bursts into flame despite meeting commission standards. Companies making sport utility vehicles would get similar protection from suits brought by people injured or the families of those killed in rollovers under National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposals for stronger roofs.

Plaintiffs' attorneys call it "silent tort reform."

Tort reform has been a platform for the Republican Party in recent years, and certainly supported by Bush. But for all its clamoring about judicial activism and laws made by fiat instead of legislation, the Party seems to be quietly utilizing that very same method to achieve its own ends. Obviously, its not activist judges they're worried about, its judges who aren't activist in their direction.

Surely frivolous lawsuits abound in the United States, but eliminating them altogether removes just one more bullet in the arsenal of consumer protection in the midst of a continual volley by the Bush administration.


Supplier Under Scrutiny on Arms for Afghans

Sure, fighting terrorism costs a lot of money, but what's the price of freedom, smart guy?

If you're a 22-year old arms dealer with a massuer for VP, about $300 million.

But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging [sic]. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

The ends of eliminating terrorism (however much a fantasy that may be) has always been held to justify the means of its incredible expense in the eyes of those that would have the United States police the world. Whether or not that is the case, shouldn't that expenditure come attached to a bit of research?

If it's not granting no-bid contracts to former employers of the Vice President, the Defense Department is shelling out money to a man just old enough to have finished college for worn-out arms made in China between 1962 and 1974.

The Soviet Union, which designed the ammunition that AEY bought, developed similar tests, which are still in use. But when the Army wrote its Afghan contract, it did not enforce either NATO or Russian standards. It told bidders only that the munitions must be “serviceable and issuable to all units without qualification.”

What this meant was not defined. An official at the Army Sustainment Command said that because the ammunition was for foreign weapons, and considered “nonstandard,” it only had to fit in weapons it was intended for.

“There is no specific testing request, and there is no age limit,” said Michael Hutchison, the command’s deputy director for acquisition.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Bang-up job, fellas. Another case that screams out for the elimination of anyone watching how the government conducts its business.


Judge dismisses challenge to lobbying disclosure law

The National Association of Manufacturers suffered a major blow Friday in its legal battle against the new ethics and lobbying law.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court dismissed the group’s challenge to a key provision of the law. The group took issue with the clause that would require disclosure of the member companies of “stealth lobbying” coalitions.

Part of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act, the measure would require public disclosure of members of such coalitions who gave at least $5,000 every quarter to the group and participated actively in lobbying campaigns.

On what grounds would lobbyists oppose transparency of this sort? Why, free speech protection, of course.

The NAM argued the provision was constitutionally vague, hindering protections for free association and speech, and could lead to harassment of its member companies.

Yet again we are faced with an argument centered on free speech centered not on the ability to express yourself, but rather on the ability of others to respond to that expression. The First Amendment doesn't say anything about no one being able to react to free speech, but that's essentially the position the NAM has taken here.

In regards to free association, the new law--effective April 21--again says nothing about lobbyists not being able to associate or give money. It just says people have the right to know to whom and by whom.

That there is opposition to that premise illustrates the need for it by virtue of its very existence.

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