My query letters are in the mail, and it's back to business as usual for me. I thank my dear husband for his help.

Given the amount of information presented in the last three posts, you may feel overwhelmed. But here it is for your perusal.

Item 1: From the NYTimes.

Could this be part of the reason Ashcroft was replaced by Gonzales?

(You may need to be registered at the NYTimes to read this story. Registration is free - only needs a made up ID and password, email addr is so they know where to send the confirmation and (if you chose it) the daily headline summary.)

Justice Deputy Resisted Parts of Spy Program
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/politics/01spy.html?th&emc=th&oref=login

quote:
A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.

The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.
Additional comment by the Times:

quote:
It is unclear whether the White House ultimately persuaded Mr. Ashcroft to give his approval to the program after the meeting or moved ahead without it.
(In another article, below, it is stated that Ashcroft did not give the okay. His deputy - acting as Attorney General in Ashcroft's absence - did after a private meeting with Bush/Cheney.)

And:

quote:
Several senior government officials have said that when the special operation first began, there were few controls on it. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with it, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, officials have said.
Could it be that Ashcroft wasn't "quite" the puppet many thought him to be and actually had some redeeming qualities (other than a fair singing voice)?

The following story from Newsweek through MSNBC lends more insight (they said that Ashcroft did not okay the program) It is an excellent article raising a number of good points - too many to quote. It's 4 pages long, and definitely worth reading!

Full Speed Ahead
After 9/11, Bush and Cheney pressed for more power and got it. Now, predictably, the questions begin. Behind the NSA spying furor.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10663996/site/newsweek/site/newsweek/


And here's a little tidbit on what's being done (at least to a degree) with the gleaned spy data. Read it to the end to see how this processing of "innocent" data has been used in the past. Almost makes you wonder who's the terrorist.


NSA gave other agencies surveillance data
Information from wiretapping was processed, cross-checked
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10667276/

A point of concern:

quote:
Since the revelation last month that President Bush had authorized the NSA to intercept communications inside the United States, public concern has focused primarily on the legality of the NSA eavesdropping. Less attention has been paid to, and little is known about, how the NSA's information may have been used by other government agencies to investigate American citizens or to cross-check with other databases. In the 1960s and 1970s, the military used NSA intercepts to maintain files on U.S. peace activists, revelations of which prompted Congress to restrict the NSA from intercepting communications of Americans.

Looking for patterns
Today's NSA intercepts yield two broad categories of information, said a former administration official familiar with the program: "content," which would include transcripts of a phone call or e-mail, and "non-content," which would be records showing, for example, who in the United States was called by, or was calling, a number in another country thought to have a connection to a terrorist group. At the same time, NSA tries to limit identifying the names of Americans involved.
BTW, all emails you send contains your email address in the header, as well as the route the email took to get from your computer to the destination. With an email address, it's easy for an authority to find out who you are. In fact, all Internet activity, include page requests when browsing a site, contain the originating ID - how else would it know where to return the data to, and how else would all the website hosting companies be able to supply reports on who visited a given site, when the visit was made and from where? No matter where you go, your computer leaves behind its fingerprint. For the most part, this process is benign, but it can be used for the wrong purposes by untrustworthy people.


And back to the point of concern, the article further states:

quote:
Talon is a system that civilian and military personnel use to report suspicious activities around military installations. Information from these reports is fed into a database known as the Joint Protection Enterprise Network, which is managed, as is the Talon system, by the Counterintelligence Field Activity, the newest Defense Department intelligence agency to focus primarily on counterterrorism. The database is shared with intelligence and law enforcement agencies and was found last month to have contained information about peace activists and others protesting the Iraq war that appeared to have no bearing on terrorism.

Military officials acknowledged that such information should have been purged after 90 days and that the Talon system was being reviewed.
------


Item 2: From the AP through Yahoo.com

Bush Defends Domestic Spying Program
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060101/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush

The article starts with statements made today. It appears that Bush is again changing his wording to play down his actions and improve his image. Interesting that last week he admitted it was only two-way communications, to and from terrorists outside the country, that were being tapped, and later it was revealed that data mining was also taking place on internal US calls and emails. I wonder how many blind followers he'll dupe this time?


quote:
SAN ANTONIO - President Bush on Sunday strongly defended his domestic spying program, saying it's a limited initiative that tracks only incoming calls to the United States.
At the end of the article, he finds it necessary to further qualify another statement he'd previously made - now he finds he must segregate issues, statements that when originally made were blanket statements (or were they simply meant to be misleading CYAs (Cover Your A$$?):

quote:
The president was asked whether he misled the American people in 2004 when, during an event promoting the Patriot Act, he said that any wiretapping required a court order and that nothing had changed. He made the statement more than two years after he approved the NSA program.

"I was talking about roving wiretaps, I believe, involving the Patriot Act," Bush said. "This is different from the NSA program."
And another example of how he continually changes his story can be found here: The Bush Legacy: 2006 Is So Yesterday http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/weekinreview/01sanger.html?pagewanted=all where he now says:


quote:
"He insists that his real motive in conducting the war in Iraq is to democratize one of the least democratic corners of the earth."
What ever happened to WMDs?


And here is yet another article (from MSNBC) on the president defending his spying program. This one, however, seems to be slanted with definite right wing bias - they don't appear to be much concerned with rebuttals and concerns raised, except for a reiteration that Ashcroft resisted the program. They even quote from a FOXNews interview. Also, the arguments they quote are the typical administration type of quotes meant to frighten us into submission.

Bush says spying leak causes great harm
President calls domestic surveillance program limited
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10673060/


That's it for today - an eclectic
smattering of interesting reading.

My husband and I wish all of you a wonderfully Happy New Year.

[ January 01, 2006, 10:11 PM: Message edited by: Vi ]