Ex-Calif Rep. Cunningham gets 8-year sentence - Yahoo! News: "Former U.S. Rep. Randy 'Duke' Cunningham, who pleaded guilty last year to taking $2.4 million in bribes, was sentenced to eight years and four months in prison by a federal judge on Friday.

...

The 64-year-old California Republican who tearfully resigned from Congress in November after pleading guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion, faced a maximum of 10 years in prison under a deal with prosecutors."

(Via Martini Republic.)

The I-word goes public | Salon.com News: "Late last year, the idea of impeaching President Bush, once taboo even among most liberals, started gaining real currency. Following revelations of Bush's domestic spying program -- and the president's unrepentant insistence on continuing it -- former Nixon White House counsel John Dean called Bush 'the first president to admit to an impeachable offense.' Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called for the creation of a select committee to investigate 'those offenses which appear to rise to the level of impeachment.' Twenty-six House Democrats have joined him."

(Via Salon.)

NATIONAL JOURNAL: What Bush Was Told About Iraq (03/02/2006): "Two highly classified intelligence reports delivered directly to President Bush before the Iraq war cast doubt on key public assertions made by the president, Vice President Cheney, and other administration officials as justifications for invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein, according to records and knowledgeable sources.

...

The disclosure that Bush was informed of the DOE and State dissents is the first evidence that the president himself knew of the sharp debate within the government over the aluminum tubes during the time that he, Cheney, and other members of the Cabinet were citing the tubes as clear evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. Neither the president nor the vice president told the public about the disagreement among the agencies.

When U.S. inspectors entered Iraq after the fall of Saddam's regime, they determined that Iraq's nuclear program had been dormant for more than a decade and that the aluminum tubes had been used only for artillery shells.

The second classified report, delivered to Bush in early January 2003, was also a summary of a National Intelligence Estimate, this one focusing on whether Saddam would launch an unprovoked attack on the United States, either directly, or indirectly by working with terrorists.

The report stated that U.S. intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that it was unlikely that Saddam would try to attack the United States"

(Via AlterNet.)

Annual Threat Assessment of the Director of National Intelligence for the Senate Armed Services Committee: "Each of the major intelligence challenges I have discussed today is affected by the accelerating change and transnational interplay that are the hallmarks of 21st century globalization. As a direct result, collecting, analyzing, and acting on solid intelligence have become increasingly difficult. To meet these new and reconfigured challenges, we need to work hand-in-hand with other responsible nations. Fortunately, the vast majority of governments in the world are responsible and responsive, but those that are not are neither few in numbers nor lacking in material resources and geopolitical influence.

The powerful critiques of the 9/11 Commission and the WMD Commission, framed by statute in the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 and taken to heart by the dedicated professionals of our Intelligence Community, have helped make us better prepared and more vigilant than we were on that terrible day in September 2001. But from an intelligence perspective, we cannot rest. We must transform our intelligence capabilities and cultures by fully integrating them from local law enforcement through national authorities in Washington to combatant commanders overseas. The more thoroughly we do that, the more clearly we will be able to see the threats lurking in the shadow of the future and ward them off."

(Via GlobalSecurity.org.)

Update 16: Senate Approves Patriot Act Renewal - Forbes.com: "The Senate on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to renew the USA Patriot Act, after months of pitched debate over legislation that supporters said struck a better balance between privacy rights and the government's power to hunt down terrorists."

(Via Google News.)

Who is the real Hamas? | Salon.com News: "So which is the 'real' Hamas? Is it a party of apparent pragmatists like Ramahi, who seem prepared to accept Israel's de facto presence and perhaps also its de jure legitimacy -- provided that Israel gives up the territories it occupied in 1967? Or is it a party of true believers, still dedicated to the furtherance of regionwide Islamist goals and concealing a dedication to Israel's destruction behind media-savvy spin?"

(Via Salon.)

Schneier on Security: More on Greek Wiretapping:

"Unknowns tapped the mobile phones of about 100 Greek politicians and offices, including the U.S. embassy in Athens and the Greek prime minister.

...

More details are emerging. It turns out that the 'malicious code' was actually code designed into the system. It's eavesdropping code put into the system for the police.

The attackers managed to bypass the authorization mechanisms of the eavesdropping system, and activate the 'lawful interception' module in the mobile network. They then redirected about 100 numbers to 14 shadow numbers they controlled. (Here are translations of some of the press conferences with technical details. And here are details of the system used.)"

(Via Schneier on Security.)

Patriot Act E-Mail Searches Apply to Non-Terrorists, Judges Say - February 28, 2006 - The New York Sun - NY News: "Two federal judges in Florida have upheld the authority of individual courts to use the Patriot Act to order searches anywhere in the country for e-mails and computer data in all types of criminal investigations, overruling a magistrate who found that Congress limited such expanded jurisdiction to cases involving terrorism."

(Via cypherpunks.)

Consortiumnews.com: "In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 28, Gonzales recanted testimony he gave on Feb. 6 when he declared that Bush had only authorized a narrowly constructed warrantless wiretapping program by the National Security Agency against Americans in touch with foreign terror suspects.

Referring to a part of his testimony in which he said Bush had approved the NSA program ‘and that is all that he has authorized,’ Gonzales withdrew that language, saying ‘I did not and could not address … any other classified intelligence activities.’ [Washington Post, March 1, 2006]

The strained wording of Gonzales’s letter – and the fact that he deemed it necessary to correct his testimony – suggest that other warrantless surveillance programs exist outside the framework of the NSA program, which began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and was exposed by the New York Times in December 2005."

Emphasis mine.

(Via cypherpunks.)

AlterNet: War on Iraq: The Overwhelming Costs of the Iraq War: "Judging by the lessons of Vietnam, public opinion has already tipped against the war on Iraq. All that remains is to hold the neocons accountable.

In the center of the CostOfWar.com home page, an upward-racing ticker, presented in a large, red font, keeps a steady tally of the money spent for the U.S. war in Iraq. Every time I visit, it takes a moment to sort through the counter's decimal places and make sense of it. The hundreds of dollars fly by too quickly to track. The thousands change a little faster than once a second. As I write, the ticker reads $239,302,273,144."

(Via AlterNet.)

Baghdad Burning: "It does not feel like civil war because Sunnis and Shia have been showing solidarity these last few days in a big way. I don’t mean the clerics or the religious zealots or the politicians- but the average person. Our neighborhood is mixed and Sunnis and Shia alike have been outraged with the attacks on mosques and shrines. The telephones have been down, but we’ve agreed upon a very primitive communication arrangement. Should any house in the area come under siege, someone would fire in the air three times. If firing in the air isn’t an option, then someone inside the house would have to try to communicate trouble from the rooftop."

(Via Baghdad Burning.)