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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: geode00 who wrote (178148)	12/18/2005 2:01:05 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Powell 'never told' of doubts From correspondents in London The Herald Sun 18dec05 THE US administration was never told of doubts about the secret intelligence used to justify war with Iraq, former secretary of state Colin Powell told the BBC in an interview to be broadcast on Sunday night. Mr Powell, who argued the case for military action against Saddam Hussein in the UN in 2003, told BBC News 24 television he was "deeply disappointed in what the intelligence community had presented to me and to the rest of us." "What really upset me more than anything else was that there were people in the intelligence community that had doubts about some of this sourcing, but those doubts never surfaced to us," he said. Mr Powell's comments follow US President George W. Bush's acceptance earlier this week of responsibility for going to war on intelligence, much of which "turned out to be wrong". US involvement in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion has led to the loss of 2,140 of its troops and badly hit the Republican president's popularity. The opposition Democrats have increased calls for a timetable for a military withdrawal. But ahead of this week's parliamentary elections in Iraq, President Bush insisted he was still right to order the invasion and argued a hurried withdrawal would be "a recipe for disaster". The British government, Washington's key allies in the invasion, has similarly refused to give a withdrawal date for its 8,000 or so troops in Iraq's four southern states, although has said it could happen next year. For his part, Mr Powell considered the US military could not be deployed in Iraq at its current strength for years to come, raising the possibility of withdrawal from next year. But he told the BBC that "essentially just to walk away, to say that we're taking all of our troops out as fast as we can, would be a tragic mistake". A US presence would be required in Iraq for "years", he added. "We've invested a great deal in this country, and the Iraqi people deserve democracy and the freedom that they were promised when we got rid of Saddam Hussein and we have to stay with them... until they decide that they can get it now on their own, they don't need us any longer," he added. "And even then, I suspect, there will be a continuing relationship and presence of some significance for some years to come." In the interview, Mr Powell confirmed that White House "hawks" US Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had bypassed him and other colleagues on occasions. Mr Powell's former chief-of-staff Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson made the damning allegations last month, accusing Cheney and Rumsfeld of running a "cabal" and hijacking US military and foreign policy. Discussions with Rumsfeld about dealing with the aftermath of the Iraq invasion were "not pleasant", Mr Powell admitted in the interview.

To: geode00 who wrote (178148)	12/18/2005 2:26:28 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Washington Post editorial: Spying on Americans Sunday, December 18, 2005 IN THE WAKE of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the New York Times reported last week, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance of hundreds of U.S. citizens and residents suspected of contact with al Qaeda figures -- without warrants and outside the strictures of the law that governs national security searches and wiretaps. The rules here are not ambiguous. Generally speaking, the NSA has not been permitted to operate domestically. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requires that national security wiretaps be authorized by the secretive FISA court. "A person is guilty of an offense," the law reads, "if he intentionally . . . engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute" -- which appears, at least on its face, to be precisely what the president has authorized. Mr. Bush, in his weekly radio address yesterday, defended his action, chastised the media for revealing it, and suggested both that Congress had justified this step by authorizing force against al Qaeda and that such spying was consistent with the "constitutional authority vested in me as commander in chief." But there is a reason the CIA and the NSA are not supposed to operate domestically: The tools of foreign intelligence are not consistent with a democratic society. Americans interact with their own government through the enforcement of law. And in those limited instances in which Americans become intelligence targets, FISA exists to make sure that the agencies are not targeting people for improper reasons but have sufficient evidence that Americans are actually operating as foreign agents. Warrantless intelligence surveillance by an executive branch unaccountable to any judicial officer -- and apparently on a large scale -- is gravely dangerous. Why the administration even deems it necessary remains opaque. Mr. Bush said yesterday said that the program helped address the problem of "terrorists inside the United States . . . communicating with terrorists abroad." Intelligence officials, the Times reported, grew concerned that going to the FISA court was too cumbersome for the volume of cases cropping up all at once as major al Qaeda figures -- and their computers and files -- were captured. But FISA has a number of emergency procedures for exigent circumstances. If these were somehow inadequate, why did the administration not go to Congress and seek adjustments to the law, rather than contriving to defy it? And why in any event should the NSA -- rather than the FBI, the intelligence component responsible for domestic matters -- be doing whatever domestic surveillance needs be done? As with its infamous torture memorandum, the administration appears to have taken the position that the president is entitled to ignore a clearly worded criminal law when it proves inconvenient in the war on terrorism. That argument is not as outlandish in the case of FISA as it is with respect to the torture laws, since administrations of both parties have always insisted on the executive's inherent power to conduct national security surveillance. Still, FISA has been the law of the land for 2 1/2 decades. To disrupt it so fundamentally, in total secret and without seeking legislative authorization, shows a profound disregard for Congress and the laws it passes. What's more, Mr. Bush's general assurances that the program is legal offer no indication of what legal authority, if any, permits this surveillance of what he described as "the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations." In the torture context, the administration abandoned the argument that the president could simply disregard laws prohibiting brutal interrogations and moved on to other legal theories. There is reason to think something similar has happened here. Does the administration now claim that warrantless surveillance of hundreds of people by an agency generally barred from domestic spying is consistent with FISA? Does it claim that the congressional authorization to use military force against al Qaeda somehow unties the president's hands? Other than claiming it has done nothing illegal, the administration is not saying. Congress must make the administration explain itself. In the aftermath of the revelations, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said hearings on the matter would be a high priority in the coming year. That's good. It should be unthinkable for Congress to acquiesce to such a fundamental change in the law of domestic surveillance, particularly without a substantive account of what the administration is doing and why.