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Jihadis and Wiretaps and Moonbats! Oh, My! -- Part 5
(Click here for some earlier related posts.)
Michelle Malkin:
How [al-NYT] is ringing in 2006
Yes, it's New Year's Eve. And since there's no rest for the NYTimes, I'm not taking it easy tonight either.
You see, NYTimes' reporter James Risen has been a busy bee over the holidays. The co-author of the infamous Chicken Little opus exposing the NSA special collection program to monitor international communications between suspected al Qaeda operatives and their contacts will be launching his new book, State of War, on January 3.
Turns out the publisher of Risen's new book, which includes a discussion of NSA eavesdropping, has moved up the publication date to this coming Tuesday. (It was originally scheduled for release in mid-January.)
NYT ombudsman Byron Calame lets us all know that he's having trouble getting any information out of his bosses and colleagues:
[Read the whole thing.]
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Thanks go to MacRanger for the link to this al-WaPo article:
The NSA's Overt Problem
So Many Conversations, So Few Clues to the Terrorists' Chatter
In any war, surveillance of the enemy is critical. Today, in the eyes of at least some Americans, surveillance itself has become the enemy.
It was not always so. As any intelligence maven knows, some of the heroes of World War II were eavesdroppers, not soldiers. They were quiet, wonkish men, like those who monitored and deciphered Nazi communications about German battle plans at Bletchley Park, an estate 50 miles northwest of London. Their super-secret operation employed thousands of people who listened to 226 radio frequencies for dot-and-dash messages and passed them to ingenious code-breakers. The results were kept on 5-by-7 inch cards in shoe box-shaped containers.
Who are our masters of surveillance today? Most are located at the National Security Agency, the giant "Crypto City" complex located off Interstate 95 between Washington and Baltimore. The agency vacuums up 650 million intercepts a day -- called signals intelligence, or sigint -- from satellites, ground stations, aircraft, ships and submarines around the world. And it hunts for patterns that might lend seemingly ordinary words significance in the war on terrorism.
[Read on here.]
I'm not as upset by that one as MacRanger is; I don't see anything in the article that the jihadis aren't pretty sure to already know, but on the other hand I don't see any reason for making sure they do, either.
CIA prisoner 'rendition' program began under Clinton: ex-agent
The CIA's controversial "rendition" program to have terror suspects captured and questioned on foreign soil was launched under US president Bill Clinton, a former US counterterrorism agent told a German newspaper. Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in 2004, told Thursday's issue of the newsweekly Die Zeit that the US administration had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system.
"President Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy Al-Qaeda," Scheuer said, in comments published in German.
"We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture. Clinton said 'That's up to you'."
Scheuer, who headed the CIA unit that tracked Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, said that he developed and led the "renditions" program, which he said included moving prisoners without due legal process to countries without strict human rights protections.
[Read on here. Hat tip: Captain's Quarters. See Captain Ed's comments here.]
On a related note, don't miss Dafydd's The LA Times Needs a "Special Journalist" More Than We Need a Special Counsel post.
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