More on the FBI's illegal phone record searches
Here's a Justice Department report on laws broken by the FBI, with the full cooperation of certain phone companies:
http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s1001r.pdf
(you'll need a PDF reader like Foxit Reader or Adobe Reader)
And here's a PC World article about it:
FBI broke law in phone record searches
From the Washington Post:
The FBI illegally collected more than 2,000 U.S. telephone call records between 2002 and 2006 by invoking terrorism emergencies that did not exist or simply persuading phone companies to provide records, according to internal bureau memos and interviews. FBI officials issued approvals after the fact to justify their actions.
FBI officials told The Post that their own review has found that about half of the 4,400 toll records collected in emergency situations or with after-the-fact approvals were done in technical violation of the law. The searches involved only records of calls and not the content of the calls. In some cases, agents broadened their searches to gather numbers two and three degrees of separation from the original request, documents show.
Bureau officials said agents were working quickly under the stress of trying to thwart the next terrorist attack and were not violating the law deliberately.
And the road to hell is paved with...
Alastair Campbell had Iraq dossier changed to fit US claims
Fresh evidence has emerged that Tony Blair's discredited Iraqi arms dossier was "sexed up" on the instructions of Alastair Campbell, his communications chief, to fit with claims from the US administration that were known to be false.
The pre-invasion dossier's worst-case estimate of how long it would take Iraq to acquire a nuclear weapon was shortened in response to a George Bush speech.
As Campbell prepares to appear before the Iraq inquiry on Tuesday, new evidence reveals the extent to which – on his instructions – those drafting the notorious dossier colluded with the US administration to make exaggerated claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
From the Guardian
US intelligence chief criticises spy failings in Afghanistan
It's bad enough that the Obama administration refused to publicly investigate and expose the mistakes of the previous administration. It now appears that they refuse to even learn from those mistakes.
According to Maj Gen Michael Flynn and two other intelligence advisers, the huge intelligence apparatus in Afghanistan is "only marginally relevant" to Nato's overall war plan because nearly all of its effort is spent finding Taliban fighters to kill rather than trying to understand the needs and grievances of ordinary Afghan civilians. Their support is now seen by military chiefs as key to beating the insurgency.
Bogged down producing detailed flow diagrams of rebel cells, intelligence officers are consequently "ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of co-operation among villagers", the report says.
It claims that some battalion-level officers looking for an overview of the political and economic situation in key areas "acquire more information that is helpful by reading US newspapers than through reviewing regional command intelligence summaries".
All other material Copyright © 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 by Nathan David Teegarden. All rights reserved.
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