Balloon Juice: "Despite a zero-tolerance policy on tampering with voters, the Republican Party has quietly paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to provide private defense lawyers for a former Bush campaign official charged with conspiring to keep Democrats from voting in New Hampshire.

James Tobin, the president’s 2004 campaign chairman for New England, is charged in New Hampshire federal court with four felonies accusing him of conspiring with a state GOP official and a GOP consultant in Virginia to jam Democratic and labor union get-out-the-vote phone banks in November 2002."

(Via John Cole's Balloon Juice.)

Salon.com - War Room: "The economy is looking marginally better -- at least until the housing bubble fizzles or pops or otherwise does what it does when it leaves folks upside down in their homes -- but the Bush administration doesn't seem to be getting any credit with the well-polled public. Democratic pollster Mark Mellman tells the Washington Post that Iraq is the cause. Americans don't approve of the way George W. Bush is handling the war, and that disappproval spills over on to everything else. Mellman calls it 'reverse halo effect.'

There's another word for it: albatross. Check out these numbers from the latest USA Today/CNN/Gallup Poll. An 'unprecedented' 57 percent of the public thinks that, the president's pronouncements notwithstanding, the Iraq war has made the United States more vulnerable to terrorism, not less. Almost as many, 56 percent, say the war is going 'badly.' Fifty-four percent say that going to war was a mistake in the first place, and the same number says that the war hasn't been worth the cost."

(Via Salon.)

Salon.com Wire Story: "Sept. 11 ringleader Mohammed Atta and three other hijackers were identified by defense intelligence officials more than a year before the attacks but information about their possible connections to al-Qaida never were forwarded to law enforcement, Rep. Curt Weldon said Tuesday.

Weldon, a Pennsylvania Republican and vice chairman of the House Armed Services and Homeland Security committees, said the hijackers were identified in September of 2000 by a classified military intelligence unit known as 'Able Danger,' which determined they could be members of an al-Qaida cell.

At the time, Weldon said, the unit recommended that its information on the hijackers be given to the FBI 'so they could bring that cell in and take out the terrorists,' Weldon said in an interview.

However, Weldon said Pentagon lawyers rejected the recommendation because they said Atta and the others were in the country legally."

Yeah, clearly we needed the Patriot Act. It's not a cover for incompetence at all...

(Via Salon.)

Burns must uphold higher ethical standards - billingsgazette.com: "S. Sen. Conrad Burns has been on the defensive recently, explaining his involvement with a Michigan Indian tribe's school funding and his connections to a Washington, D.C., lobbyist who is being investigated by Congress and the FBI.

The Saginaw Chippewa Tribe of Michigan owns a ritzy casino resort that boasts 4,700 slots - the most gambling machines between Las Vegas and Michigan, according to the tribe's Web site. The resort business has allowed the tribe to make $70,000 annual payments to each of its members and to hire Jack Abramoff as its lobbyist.

Earmarking funds for Michigan

Abramoff and the Michigan tribe and other Abramoff tribal casino clients contributed more than $130,000 to a political action committee formed by U.S. Sen. Conrad Burns, R-Mont., according to news reports in the Washington Post and Rollcall Report.

One thing the tribe wanted was millions of federal tax dollars to build a new school. Despite lobbying by Michigan's two U.S. senators, the U.S. Department of the Interior said the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe's proposal didn't meet requirements for federal funding. That program apparently was for tribes that didn't have lavish casinos or $70,000 per capita payments.

But after Burns became chairman of the Senate appropriations committee that controls federal spending on Indian affairs, the tribe got a $3 million school appropriation. The Washington Post reported that Burns pressured the Interior Department to put the Saginaw Chippewa project in the school program, even though it didn't meet requirements. That effort was unsuccessful; Burns earmarked $3 million for the Saginaw Chippewa school anyway."

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

Salon.com News | Sticker shock over shell shock: "LaBranche, however, may have to prove to Veterans Affairs a second time what the war has done to his mind. In a recent move that has set off a firestorm among veterans, the Department of Veterans Affairs has decided to go back and review more than 70,000 individual cases of vets who in the past five years are considered disabled and unemployable because of mental trauma. Veterans like LaBranche now stand to lose some or all of their monthly payments.

To outraged veterans groups, the review smacks of a convenient way to cut costs during an increasingly expensive war and reflects a reluctance by the department to take PTSD seriously. 'The V.A. hopes to trim costs for existing war veterans and recently returning war veterans by targeting PTSD,' says Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, a veterans advocacy organization in Silver Spring, Md. 'This is a desperate and despicable move by an administration caught without a plan, the money, or the staff to care for our nation's wounded warriors.'"

(Via Salon.)

Schneier on Security: Orlando Airport's CLEAR Program:

"And even worse, the system lets terrorists test the system beforehand. Imagine you're in a terrorist cell. Twelve of you apply for the card, but only four of you get it. Those four not only have a card that lets them go through the easy line at security checkpoints; they also know that they're not on any terrorist watch lists. Which four do you think will be going on the mission? By 'pre-approving' trust, you're building a system that is easier to exploit.

Nothing in this program is different from what I wrote about last year. According to their website:

Your Membership will be continuously reviewed by TSA's ongoing Security Threat Assessment Process. If your security status changes, your Membership will be immediately deactivated and you will receive a notification email of your status change as well as a refund of the unused portion of your annual enrollment fee.

Think about it. For $80 a year, any potential terrorist can be automatically notified if the Department of Homeland Security is on to him. Such a deal."

(Via Schneier on Security.)

RED HERRING | The Pentagon’s Chatter Box: "With the aim of tackling one of the biggest obstacles in its fight against terrorists, the Pentagon’s weird science department has selected three teams to develop a decoding machine that can monitor chatter in many languages and translate any information relevant to U.S. spies into English.

The U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will award IBM, SRI, and BBN an estimated sum of nearly $50 million over two years to develop the equipment for use on the battlefield and elsewhere."

(Via Red Herring.)

CNN.com - Peter Jennings dies of lung cancer - Aug 8, 2005: "Nearly four months to the day since he announced in a hoarse voice on his evening newscast that he had been diagnosed with lung cancer, longtime ABC 'World News Tonight' anchor Peter Jennings died Sunday, according to the ABC News network. He was 67."

(Via CNN.)

Salon.com - War Room: "When we last mentioned our old friend from Talon News, we were noting that a piece Gannon wrote back in the summer of 2004 -- a piece on which Bob Novak seemed to rely in a column involving the Valerie Plame case this week -- wasn't exactly supported by what you'd call reporting. Gannon wrote in July 2004 that the Kerry campaign had dumped Joseph Wilson over concerns about his supposed mendacity. On what did Gannon base his report? His own supposition, as far as we can tell. Gannon checked out Kerry's Web site, saw that prior references to Wilson weren't there anymore, and concluded on his own that the campaign had 'apparently ... jettisoned' Wilson.

We checked in with two staffers from Kerry's campaign, and they said it simply wasn't so -- that the Wilson references were removed from the campaign Web site as part of a larger redesign effort, and that Wilson did, in fact, continue to campaign for Kerry through the fall. And we checked the World Wide Web and found evidence that Wilson was still appearing on Kerry's behalf just weeks before the November election, long after Gannon's piece said he had been dumped. Gannon had claimed that his report was 'rock solid.' We showed that it wasn't."

In case you forget who Jeff Gannon was...

(Via Salon.)

The Poor Man Cafe » The one that got away: "During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled about whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Bush, Kerry charged, ‘didn’t choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill’ the leader of Al Qaeda. The president called his opponent’s allegation ‘the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking.’ Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.

But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency’s Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught."

(Via The Poor Man Cafe.)