The White House sent a letter to the House and Senate intelligence committees.  This was just the other day.  In it, the administration took the position that the war resolution passed by congress after 911 
" .. didn't limit the president to going after al-Qaida only in Afghanistan."

The president, defending his NSA (National Security Agency) approval of surveillance of international phone calls, took the position that he is not being inconsistent with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. For criminal investigation searches to be reasonable under law, a warrant is needed, the White House said.  However there are exceptions to this premise in established law. There are times when warrants are not needed because the reasonablness of a given search in some cases is determined by  "the totality of the circumstances."

This language was not invented by the White House.  It was handed down to other presidents by, among others,  the U.S. Supreme Court

In common parlance, if you are spying on foreigners during an armed conflict, particularly when the enemy has already committed a recognized act of war, like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, or the 911 destruction of the World Trade Center towers in New York City, some legal requirements disappear beneath extraordinary conditions.  Lincoln, is it said, deported a state governor to the Confederacy for seditious speech during the Civil War.  President Davis didn't want the man, either, and sent him to Canada.

Here's a direct quote from this White House letter:   "Intercepting communications into and out of the United States of persons linked to al-Qaida in order to  detect and prevent a catastrophic attack is clearly reasonable." 
 

January, 2006 -- In fact, has Bush ever listened to one of your phone conversations?  Unless you have spoken to a terrorist, the answer is no.  Do you speak to terrorists?  If you do, the answer is yes.  Here is how it works.

Every president for decades has had the ability to do it.  The technology has changed with the advent of cell phones and the advances in computers, but the point is the same.  It used to be done with people doing the listening.  Then, a clever geek came up with voice recognition software.  After that, a computer could do the listening.

The software program listens for words like dynamite, bomb, hijack and nuke, plus related words like C-4 (a type of explosive), detonator, cockpit and radioactive.  It listens for these and many other words in lots of languages.  It pays attention to foreign area codes, even specific foreign phone numbers. When our spy guys have recordings of the voices of known terrorists, the computers probably look for those, too.  There's a whole list of things like these that the computers look for.  Even certain names can cause the ears of the computer to perk up.  The central point here is that machines now do much of the spying people used to do.  They are faster and don't demand holidays off. 

Another point of interest here is that all but a microscopic number of these phone calls are discarded by the computers.  What is that number?  I have to guess, here.  Based on the impression I have received from my legion of  un-named sources who work for the New York Times (and would be fired if discovered leaking the truth), I'll say 99.99% are rejected by the software. No human ever hears them, and no copy of the contents is saved.  A few are selected by the computers and held for human inspection, but the rest of the calls are heard only by the people who made them.

The Pentagon and Able Danger

Much of this computer ability seems to have sprung out of  (it has been said) a Pentagon effort during the Nineties.  The group created there was called Able Danger for some reason unknown to me.  Perhaps the "able" was an acronym. 

Presidents since and including Carter claimed the right (and used it) to monitor communications to look for troublemakers, and Able Danger was an effort during the Clinton era by the Pentagon to use leading edge technology to sniff out bad guys who intended to harm America.  Able Danger is a big potential scandal waiting in the wings -- not because it listened to telephone conversations, but because the people in that group claim they got wind of the 911 plotters prior to the event, and couldn't get through to anybody from  the Clinton or Bush Administrations who had the power to and would do something about it. (Places like the FBI and the CIA don't flush out and refill  with the departure of one president and the arrival of another.)

Yes, a Fox was put on the chicken coop safety committee

Able Danger, it seems, connected the dots, but it didn't matter.  Didn't do us any good.  Part of the reason is that Jamie Gorelick, one of the members of the 911 Investigation Committee you saw on your television, was, in the Nineties, an assistant to Janet Reno, Clinton's Attorney General.  Now, at that time, Reno, one assumes at the instruction of Clinton, ordered Gorelick to write a rule that kept the FBI from talking to the CIA.  God only knows why Clinton would not want the top investigative bureaus in the national and international realms to talk to each other.  My guess is that it had to do with large, illegal donations to American political campaigns by foreigners.  Such illegal acts take place in the assigned arenas of both of these two biggies.  Offshore for the CIA and onshore for the FBI.

I am a Clinton-hater, so my natural reaction in this case is to suspect that Clinton's ample behind needed both off and onshore protection.  There is no doubt that the woman who wrote the rule that made the wall between the FBI and the CIA is the same woman we all saw sitting to one side of flaming left wing partisan, Richard Ben-Venista, during the 911 Committee hearings.  That cannot be debated.  It is a matter of public record and may be compared to putting a judge who is a member of the KKK in charge of the trial of a black man who has been indicted for raping a white woman.  (Or putting the fox in charge of henhouse security, as the subhead above points out.)

Never has the evidence of mainstream media liberal bias been more evident.  Jamie Gorelick ,who for Clinton wrote the rule that made it impossible to connect the dots was on the committee which blamed Bush's FBI and CIA for failure to do so. And, the big media boys and girls said nothing about the hypocrisy. Your big national press is a decaying corpse of corruption, folks. 

As an aside, there is undeniable evidence, actual public testimony by this same Jamie Gorelick, which defended Clinton's presidential right to do what Democrats now want to impeach Bush for doing.  But on the main point, here, Miss Gorelick's wall, the information blockage was at least  part of the reason the people the Pentagon's Able Danger employed could not get their new high-tech spy info about the impending act of terrorism to the attention of President Bush or his top associates. 

Machines with many ears

I'll now expand a bit on the technology, here.  The developments of which the Able Danger group was a part, have to do with both the software programs described above, and (I may be wrong, here) perhaps even the electronic circuitry necessary to (1) record a zillion phone calls at the same time, (2) turn them into audio data files, (3) filter them through the language recognition memory banks, (4) select from the quadrizillions of words in all those calls the words or word groups which have been pre-selected as suggesting potential hazardous behavior and (5) save, archive and flag them for later review by the spy techs.

I have not done the numbers here, but suggest that if one adds up all the phone calls which happen each day between America and the rest of the world, multiplies that figure by the number of words in each call and then multiplies that by the time it would take humans to listen to each one, the period it would take ten thousand people to finish this job for this one day would match the length in years of the Jurassic period on Earth -- and possibly even last psychologically longer than the last three weeks in elementary school before summer vacation. 

This is a job for Supercomputerman. Only machines can mine those volumes of data at any functional speed.

So, now you know

The liberal press is trying to smash Bush for using a process used by James Earl Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and for all I know, G.W.'s father.  All of those presidents who used the process defended their usage as being constitutonally permissable.  None of the senators and representatives today trying to hang Bush for doing it complained when Carter or Clinton did it.  (I do not know if they griped at Reagan, and don't even know if Bush I used the process. Writing from memory, here, I don't recall a fuss about it.)

Jamie Gorelick, an assistant Attorney General in the Reno/Clinton Justice Dept., who publicly defended Clintonn's use of warrantless communications monitoring, wrote the rule which made it a felony for the FBI to tell the CIA, or vice versa, about information garnered during these and other types of investigation. What is obvious is that where it mattered to obstructing national security efforts, Gorelick's Rule worked beautifully.  If one of the two agencies had listened to the Able Danger group's information, it could not have legally passed it to the other one.

Just in case you haven't been a regular reader of the magazine, and so are not able to smoke out these schemes, what you've just read in this piece is the truth about the latest shot fired in a long war.  This long war is the result of  the decline of the Democrat party in America, which has been taken over by the radical left, and is no longer the party of JFK and Truman. 

It's all for show

Every week, you see a new attack, sometimes in the form of an actual indictment, of an important Republican conservative.  This will continue.  The conservative media shoots these charges down, one by one, because the charges, like the one discussed here, are ridiculous.  I doubt if the Left expects any of them to stick.  Charges against Bill Clinton and members of his administration -- dozens of them -- did stick.  People who didn't leave the country quite often went to jail.  Some of them died in jail.  Clinton himself was convicted of perjury (the offense the Democrats in the Senate failed to uphold) by a federal judge, fined a hundred grand (if memory serves) and at present no longer can practice law in his home state, Arkansas.

But, nothing has stuck to George Bush the younger, or members of his administration, because they aren't like Clinton people.  They are honest, which is why when he speaks on the subject his poll numbers go back up..   But, one doesn't need any real evidence to make a charge, and that is all the Left has left.  They have lost every major American political institution they once controlled because they have no way to win large scale elections.  They are living proof that totally negative campaigns often don't work on the national level.  Having no rational agenda (set of ideas) to offer as far as anyone can tell, their entire message is "the other guy is always wrong." 

The charges of theirs which caused the fuss that provided the reason for this specific essay -- Bush's alleged illegal attacks on American privacy rights -- are bogus for the reasons given above.  The Dems do not care.  Their point is not the defense of your rights, or even the defense of your nation.  These charges are all the ammunition they have left.  Every charge is a bullet or an RPG aimed at keeping the appearance of impropriety by conservatives in the spotlight.  They figure -- and they might be right -- that if the American public hears years of smoke, the American public may one day decide that there's a fire where one in fact does not exist.. 

It's all about 2006.  The mid-term elections. The libs have been staggared by recent elections.  They believe they have a royal, blood right to power in America, but since power in this land is given out by way of the ballot box, in the end if they can't stuff the boxes and steal the power, this whole thing is about you.  Will enough of you equate charges with convictions to give the nation's major political institutions back to the liberal-controlled Democrat party?  My impression of America, which contains sixty-four years of various levels of observation, says that there aren't that many stupid American voters.

We'll see.

(LL)

© 2006 Oregon Magazine