An Obama National Security Council

Since 1947 amidst Harry S Truman's presidency, the National Security Council (NSC) was born out of the military and intelligence interagency disorganization post WWII. In 1949, the NSC became the sole province of the president. By law, the National Security Act, this creature exclusive to the White House the NSC remains unmonitored by Congress and operates as a president chooses in matters pertaining to national security and foreign policy with some mandated participation. A National Security Adviser (NSA) is appointed by the president. The role oversees portfolios of regional or specific interest depending on the president's choice and mitigates between major cabinet officers (principals) and ideas that may have jurisdictional overlap. The real power is the Deputies meetings or the surrogates sent by the main principals to get into the fine detail in the conference rooms allocated off the White House's semi-secret Sit Room.

A six foot five inch four star combat tested former marine commandant, Jim Jones, is the President Obama selection. The President-Elect has authorized Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, Greg Craig as Counsel to the president and Lawrence Summers in his capacity as Assistant to the President fon Economic Policy to participate in the 2009 United States National Security Council. In spite of being part of Bush's war council, Robert gates remains atop the military industrial complex as the SecDef and a top spot on the NSC battling Clinton among others for resources and policy supremacy. General Jones is the lead arbitrator before it gets to the president's desk.

Sometimes the president is forced to "redo" his NSC in the middle of a term. Why? Because they have usually committed a terrible wrong that leaves the nation and the world aghast. Not likely one might say in Obama world -snicker. In sixty years, NOT one president escaped unscathed from not watching the NSC more closely. The bet is when, not if, Obama gets into trouble with his. History beckons and Obama's name will either be in smaller font or writ large depending on what the issue is he wrangles with and gambles on the wrong person. That's when he's going to need all the political friends he made because he will build up a reservoir of Goodwill. He is smart like that.

In the White House there are 5,000 square feet of first rate technology including cell sensors in the cieling and the best military minds dedicated to crisis management and day to day intelligence activities. CNN's show The Situation Room is named after this collection of rooms inside the White House. The Sit Room is where the president discusses domestic emergencies, planning for pending military action or response to a global crisis. Those familiar with Aaron Sorkin's The West Wing TV show will immediately recognize the room. It was beautifully rehabbed during George W. Bush's 2nd term in 2007 with wainscoting lower on sliding padded walls to receive better transmission of secure communications than the prior mahogany covered walls did during the Clinton administration. Three secure conference rooms, plastic phone booths for calls and direct communication with Air Force One increase the Sit Room complex's functionality and capabilities. There are over 33 LCD monitors and 32 hookups that allow multiple simultaneous conference call capability. All that fancy hardware is needed to manage the threats and the fast growing cyber security incursions.

The NSC has a collection of people considered principals. Getting on the permanent principals list is at the sole discretion of the president. One ofthe layers below the principals is made up of their second in commands or in DC parlance, Deputy blah blah Undersecretary of the Molehill region.Usually, the presidents are the Main Man, Vice president, Secretary of Defense,Secretary of State, Director of National Intelligence or the CIA Director, and the National Security Adviser who chairs the meeting and directs traffic. Condoleeza Rice was George Bush's 1st term NSA and she was awful. Regan's second term guy who waded in and cleaned up the Iran Contra mess, was Colin Powell. Whoever gets that chair in an Obama Administration needs to be the consummate professional that cannot be pushed around by the big guns on the NSC.

Richard Clarke, the upstanding hard edged intel NSC guy sets the scene here:

On the ground level of the West Wing of the White House, a dozen men and women trickle into the wood-paneled Situation Room. They balance thick briefing books and cups of hot coffee from the White House Mess next door. The meeting's chairman, a member of the National Security Council staff, brings to order this gathering of the Counterterrorism Security Group, the committee that coordinates U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Behind and above his chair is the seal of the president of the United States.


"All right, let's get going," the NSC man intones. "President Obama wants a high-level game plan for counterterrorism efforts in 2009. First, we need the intelligence picture." The NSC staffer turns to the woman sitting to his left, who works in the National Counterterrorism Center.

"Well, as we said in the recent National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism, we had a break for a while after we smashed the al-Qaida sanctuary in Afghanistan after 9/11," she begins. "But now al-Qaida has reconstituted itself in the Pakistani tribal areas, right along the border with Afghanistan. The Pakistani army tries every once in a while to rein them in, but essentially, they're just too weak to gain control of the Wild West border areas. Al-Qaida is busy training terrorists up there, including Europeans and Asians, people who could slip into the United States without arousing suspicion. And al-Qaida is also developing another sanctuary in Somalia, where their local allies have been taking over Somali cities. It's not a soothing picture. We could see al-Qaida attacks in 2009 on the Arabian Peninsula, in Europe, even here at home. But of course, we have no actionable intelligence pointing to a specific plot."

Back to the trouble president's get in. Nobody likes telling a president no. Harry Truman Korea, Dwight Eisenhower is the best to date that pulled together an NSC that was stellar, but a certain pilot was shot down while spying over Russia and trainers were parachuted into Indochina in a former French colony. There was the NSC's fingerprints all over the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Kissinger & Pol Pot among others, China, Iran Contra, WHIG or Bush's White House Iraq Group an off shoot of the NSC that set up to market the war. Time will tell whether the error will be a combination of haste and sloppiness or a personal hubris on the part of his team or horrible circumstance that will bring the NSC to the public's attention in an Obama administration.

The only expert to write a book with scholarly dimensions but wickedly funny asides on the NSA came in a truly fascinating 2006 book from David Rothkopf. Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power traces the NSA from gestation to now with a look at the internecine connections amongst those who serve the public good (usually) inside the NSA.

This part of The Transition Series to the presidency of Barack Obama. (please not the posts at the link above are stored by date)

Barack Obama In America's Story - Part 1

This past week was really hard for me to write about Barack Hussein Obama, Junior. As a student of history it hurts and heals to write about the events as they rolled down like Justice from all the Good and Evil that came before. The Obama Family will stride into the pages of world history forevermore, with possibilities as the American First Family. Their pictures will be so different than all those on the walls of the White House, on official Holiday cards, or upon entering any federal building and seeing Barack Obama's likeness there. Context requires a stinging trip down memory lane's gutters reviewing some of the racial practices and policies describing how it began. It is a small attempt to put context in understanding the truly historical significance of what happened since Jamestown.

One place to begin is with a map made by two ambitious brothers to the New World for travel by sea, rather than overland to acquire bulk Asian goods more easily after the 1453 fall of the Ottoman Empire. Christopher Columbus received the 1492 patronage of Spain's King Ferdinand II of Aragon and Castilian warrior Queen, Isabella, to go forth and conquer as it were with the Santa Maria, La Niña & La Pinta. The Spanish treasury was depleted from the latest round of European Wars. Imperial Empire. Fateful decisions. Columbus forcibly imported Haitian people specimens to show off in Seville upon his 1493 return. His second trip was brutal with killing and the practice of bringing back human chattel for Europeans to purchase for their own amusements.

America's First People called Indians or Native Americans endured many attempts by Europeans to establish a foothold on their land and to convert them to Christianity. The 1607 attempt that made America, started in founding Jamestown. Thanksgiving sprouted as a concept. As a tobacco farm prospered, Matoaka - renamed Pocahontas, was made to marry John Rolfe who issued her the new name, Lady Rebecca. Battles continued between the developers/plantation owners and the Powhatan, ending with the murder of Pocahontas's brother, the Chief, while in custody. No one truly knows her interpretation of events, though many Europeans mythologized her, especially after she died in England.

Slaves became fashionable and necessary to farm huge plantations, especially as indigenous peoples died from disease and famine brought by the usurpers. The Europeans also brought the idea of commerce, representative governments for the aristocratic white men and the horrors of the Middle Passage. America embraced the land grab and purchased a Louisiana package, ratcheting up the need for people and those that would be made to serve the richest of many of them. Slavery, America's original sin and permanent stain.

Our Constitution was written without a resolution to slavery, with the sweat, blood and tears of each slave and slaveholder mixed in all that follows. Thomas Jefferson wrote, he trembled to fear that God was Just. Yet, economic politics held sway. Incorporated by the Founding Fathers, each black man was counted for census purposes as

3/5ths of a person

A potato famine saw an influx of Irish immigrants to the eastern shores of the United States. The only saving grace for them integrating into the American fold was that they were white. Those of Chinese descent working on the American railroads and mining for gold in California suffered other indignities. Mexico suffered a grievous defeat at the hands of Americans in 1848. The loss of land crystallized on this content a harsher vision of eminent domain. Texas considered itself a nation in its own right until the US annexed it in 1845. Harriet Tubman suffered a horrible head injury from an enraged slave master, yet still managed to use the legal system and found the Underground Railroad. White abolitionists took to visceral arguments stirring strong resentment in southern states.

The 16th president, ambivalent, sometimes hostile to the cause of Negroes, issued the sweeping Executive Order to free slaves during the Civil War in one fell swoop pertaining to statuses resulting from war. Abraham Lincoln had no power to free all in every state as the Emancipation Proclamation makes clear. Lincoln sustained a reputation for hard nosed pragmatism, bucked up by his friend Frederick Douglass, The Lion of Anacostia, a free bi-racial ex-slave, inspiring millions of modern Americans with his bicentennial looming as a celebration in 2009. How many will know that Victoria Woodhull was the presidential candidate with Frederick Douglass, her running mate on the Equal Rights Party Ticket?

Huddled masses yearning to be free greeted millions of immigrants as they processed through Ellis Island, overlooked by France's gift of The Statue of Liberty, having their names anglicized, but moving into culturally similar neighborhoods. years prior, ethnic groups of Dutch, Irish, Polish, German and Scandinavians among indentured servants and others, moved en mass to take advantage of the Homestead Act which displaced many Native Americans from lands they farmed or held for buffalo for centuries. Indians were placed on supposedly sovereign reservations. Immigration became a hot button after the 14th Amendment was interpreted by an 1898 Supreme Court decision to conclude people born on American soil were citizens. At the turn of the century, restrictive laws targeting Asians escalated with the Geary Act. Not repealed until after segregating Japanese in the 48 states in internment camps during the middle of World War II. Japanese immigration to Hawaii

Jim Crow laws took effect following the abysmal reconstruction era presidency of Andrew Johnson. The Ku Klux Klan tried to impose the will of a white superiority mimicked by Europe's Hitler with for an Aryan world. Americans tried to turn inward and isolate itself from the world. The assassination of an Archduke by a Bosnian Serb triggered a terrible war that ended with the 1918 Treaty of Versailles orchestrated by one of the most racist presidents ever, Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat, who previewed the racist tripe of Birth of a Nation in the White House. Hitler garnered power seeking to impose his white, exclude any one of semitic origin, will on the world, even after Jesse Owens won a gold medal in Germany.

Japanese imperialism made their presence known by bombing the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, a base placed on a multi-cultural US territory after the US triggered the overthrow of Hawaii's Queen. Millions of Americans of all colors and creeds joined to fight for the cause of freedom because the day that lived in infamy inspired all to sacrifice for the war effort. Barack Obama's grandmother riveted and his grandfather marched. They were not alone. Japanese surrender came after Harry S Truman ordered the Enola Gay to drop The Thin Man and Fat Man atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In the Negro community, culture prospered while injustices propagated wantonly. Quality of life issues stayed separate and supposedly equal as outlined in the Dredd Scott case before the Civil War. After WWII, the US military was integrated by presidential action. A young civil rights lawyer took civilian cases for the NAACP involving education. In 1953, Brown versus the Board of Education became the law of the land per the Warren Court. A picture of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall hangs in Senator Obama's office on capital Hill.

A young seamstress and Alabama NAACP secretary was tired when she got on a bus and sat where there was an open seat. The white driver told her to get up. She refused. Rosa parks emboldened a 27 year old preacher to lead a year long boycott of a bus company that went darn near broke trying to keep black folks in their place at the back of bus. Separate drinking fountains, lunch counters infuriated young people both black and white and they embarked on Freedom Rides as part of the Children's Crusade. The unifying factor was the call for nonviolence no matter the provocation of fire hoses, snarling German Shepard dogs and the beatings, oh the beatings. Firebombs and Molotov cocktails were launched, Edgar Medgars was shot in his driveway in Mississippi, yet the Civil Rights movement would not stop.

A bundle of joy arrived in Hawai'i. His parents were of Kenyan and Irish American stock. Their baby was born in the the brand new state of Hawaii in 1961. His name was Barack Obama. Two years later, while he was learning to walk and run, that young preacher gave a seminal speech on the steps Of the Lincoln Memorial on while a young President looked on with his brother Bobby. Some how many of the threads in this nation's history wind into an American flag made from the trials and tribulations of so many.

Out of all this, peoples' Hopes, no matter how thin the string, held to believe that the next day would be better than the last in America. Part II coming.

Narrative of the Life of a Slave from Frederick Douglass retains its power. Now in Paperback for less than $5 US.

Weather Apocalypse In North America?

Canada & the lower 48 plus Alaska are in for some eXtreme epic weather that makes tourism attractions and chambers of commerce shudder in horror. Parched earth will get drier, floods will wet up 1,000 year records and storms shall become scarier Mother Nature thunderbolts and twisters legends. Earth has gas and exhaling will become weather tales of woe and withering. Crop failures and fresh water impurities would be likely results as populations continue to climb, use more power and throw carbon emissions into the air making for weather miseries. (Photo lightning NASA)

Seven Bush famine years has shown a moribund focus on maintaining critical infrastructure in the US as the current flooding shows a surfeit of levee failures, bridge & road erosion and overdevelopment in sensitive ecological areas that afforded protection once upon a time. Levees are a topic Bush & crew ignored prior to Katrina, after California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger sought federal assistance and now after the 1993 floods where a 1994 report detailed the looming disaster with shorter annual durations between cyclical downpours. Three billion bucks a week goes just to fuel the Iraq debacle where another ecological disaster is unfolding courtesy of Worst. president.ever & his neocon minions of menace. US Climate Change Science Program released the gloomy 162 page study showing North America will reap the whirlwind of wild weather as a potential result of climate change and global warming.

The economic and physical ramifications of the extreme weather events forecast in the report can already be grasped by the flooding in the Midwest, said Richard Moss, vice president for climate change at the World Wildlife Fund.

Moss, who previously headed the CCSP coordination office, said, "the longer we delay on cutting emissions, the higher the bill will be from these impacts."

The report said higher temperatures from global warming will also increase the likelihood of severe droughts in the U.S. Southwest, parts of Mexico, and the Caribbean. Heat waves are more likely "over most land areas, most pronounced over the northwestern two thirds of North America," it said.

Another government report issued on Friday and led by the Environmental Protection Agency, said some of the effects of climate change could be mitigated by methods like restoring vegetation along streams, increasing the resilience of ecosystems. (Reuters photo Marine One touring Iowa City 2008)

It is going to get hot, Hades hot and humid. For those with sensitive respiratory systems, the young and the elderly, will suffer the most, especially if they are poor and without resources or cooling stations. Southwestern US, already suffering a shortage of water, has a good possibility of imitating a blazing desert filled with parched plants and people that need but one lightening strike to flame away all in its path while elsewhere flooding being experienced now will return like a bad nightmare destroying prized farmland and washing away more homes. It was 15 years since the Mississippi flood plain experience flood stage records and this year the records are being beaten by several feet or meters, not mere inches. Funding was denied by a republican controlled congress to implement the plans to build catch basins that would have mitigated the current disaster. Doomed to repeat it again seems to be the consistent Bush mantra, especially after a 2004 prior scenario planning event for New Orleans predicted what would happen and it did in 2005.

But the committee chairman, Gerald E. Galloway Jr., a former brigadier general with the Corps of Engineers, said in an interview that few broad changes were made once the floodwaters of 1993 receded and were forgotten.

“We told them there were going to be more floods like this,” said Dr. Galloway, now an engineering professor at the University of Maryland. “Everybody likes to go out and shake hands on the levee now and offer sandbags, but that’s not helpful. This shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

While the committee’s recommendations certainly would not have prevented the Mississippi and its tributaries from rising to catastrophic levels, Dr. Galloway said they could have lessened the sense of helplessness and limited some of the damage.

Among the committee suggestions that Dr. Galloway said were largely overlooked: a more systematic approach to what the 1994 report described as “a loose aggregation of federal, local and individual levees and reservoirs” on these Midwestern rivers in which, that report said, “many levees are poorly sited and will fail again in the future.”

Floods are a witches brew of raw sewage, animal waste, chemicals with a variety of items floating about including carcasses. Underneath all that water now is a goodly portion of the nation's food supply. Imagine the cost of food and fuel when the coming floods tops this latest disaster the heartland is living through. This week, there are at least 20 breached levees so far inundating Iowa, Illinois and Missouri farmland and urban areas alike. The report is preparing people to expect more of the same conditions not less. That puts a real premium on investigating US presidential candidate plans for infrastructure and how they expect to pay for the necessary 2008 repairs while shoring up for the coming deluges and droughts. Too much water in one region and nowhere near enough elsewhere is going to exacerbate intrastate squabbling over water, with get rich developers screaming to continue at the same pace with more ecosystems losing. Something has to give. The coming legal battles will need a SCOTUS that understands the prevailing conditions. Our super nice Canadian neighbors have a stake in the Great Lakes and will not tolerate US domination.


Completely frightening book filled with humankind's self absorption on climate change BEFORE the NOAA study appeared in the news. Field Notes From A Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change is now available in paperback from Elizabeth Kolbert and it had a sense of urgency more than a year ago.

Intel Liars Club Gets More Bad Credit

Here it is years after much mud wrestling and partisan parsing is a US Senate Intelligence Committee report baldly stating President Bush & Co-president Cheney oversold, over hyped and overused intelligence to maneuver the USA to invade and occupy Iraq in 2003. Only people with nonworking logic faculties believe Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. And thanks to Scotty McClellan for memorializing in book form the truth of What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception as he left an 1812-style scorched executive mansion in his revelatory wake. It's only because republicans lost control of the US Senate in 2006 that all these years ater is the report being duted off and presented to the public. Most of what's contained in the new credenzaware was held by frightened republicans so as not to taint saint Bush's re-election chances in 2004. This exacerbates the simmering division between the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence chairman, John Rockefeller of West Virginia and the vice chairman, Kit Bond of Missouri of the committee at venal verbal odds.

“The president and his advisers undertook a relentless public campaign in the aftermath of the attacks to use the war against Al Qaeda as a justification for overthrowing Saddam Hussein,” Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, the committee’s Democratic chairman, said in a statement accompanying the 171-page report.

The committee’s report cited some instances in which public statements by senior administration officials were not supported by the intelligence available at the time, such as suggestions that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda were operating in a kind of partnership, that the Baghdad regime had provided the terrorist network with weapons training, and that one of the Sept. 11 hijackers had met an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague in 2001.

A second committee report, also made public on Thursday, detailed a series of clandestine meetings between Pentagon officials and Iranian dissidents in Rome and Paris in 2001 and 2003. It accused Steven Hadley, now the national security advisor, and Paul Wolfowitz, the former deputy defense secretary, of failing to properly inform the intelligence agencies and the State Department about the meetings.

The biggest underpinning for national security is intelligence. Intelligence should be an depoliticized commodity for the president and national security apparatus's consumption. The biggest users of intelligence is the military. Except in fuzzy bushworld, they distorted the truth to fit the fiction they served up to the world to facilitate a neocon's fantasy of gunboat democracy in Mesopotamia. To further aggravate those lies, the intentional outing of a covert spy was done partially to intimidate others who dared to say they were making the crap up just like an ad agency on 5th Avenue in New York. It went alongside other misuses of intelligence gathering and public distortion of a few facts by the Bush misadministration's strong arming of the big telco companies to turn over information based on their illegal warrantless wiretapping abuses that allow them t collect information on the innocent to use as they saw fit with out benefit of FISA court approved warrants later while running around saying the al qaeda bogeyman was the principal target of the intel gathering. More lies.

Democrats have not been proud models of leadership in the congress by autorizing Bush's ill begotten actions in Iraq based on intel lies and then not holding anyone accountable for the resulting Iraq debacle. It needs presidential leadership not hobbled by someone who's approval ratings proudly dwell in and dark dank basement. Intelligence was at the core of the dark arts portfolio that Bush beknighted Darth Cheney with to use as he wished and look how it all turned out. The CIA is in charge of HUMINT or human intelligence agents that bring information to the agency. The Agency remained the last bastion not under Cheney's incompetent control. Cheney was heart attack desperate that the yellow cake Niger stories from the Italian forgeries saying what he needed them to say so as not to be proved part of the superglue web of lies as written about in the jaw dropping book, The Italian Letter.

Bestselling national security author Richard Clarke, brings the truth on intelligence matters into stark relief for the interested reader in Your Government Failed You: Breaking The Cycle of National Security Disasters. Later this year, the film made from his excellent nonfiction historical account in 2004 book will be in movie theatres from no less a personage directing it than Robert Redford. It is Against All Enemies which aptly describes the beginning of oath a president takes to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies - foreign and domestic.

Bush & Phone Companies DEMAND Immunity

In a political reality game show of Big Brother Survivor, Teleco's or phone companies, AT&T, Verizon et al, are pleading with President Bush to find the immunity trinket for them buried somewhere inside the Bernini bedecked halls of Congress. It was part of the government branch troika Bush kept bamboozled until about a month or so ago, despite the 2006 elections. Behemoth telecoms and phone companies were blindly dispensing your information to the US government on demand without a FISA court warrant. The House marked up its own wiretap bill, without the Bush immunity clause that has telecoms terrified, um vomit inducing worried, about their dastardly gained cha-ching billions lost from lawsuits brought on by class action suits from their American customers/hostages who want their rights and expectations to privacy back.

A whiny president trilled and trolled that national security is at stake and al Qaeda has an advantage without his law - they do. Bush gave it to them by invading Iraq and failing to read his super secret presidential newspaper published by the CIA on August 6, 2001, that told him exactly what was happening with Osama bin Laden - except al Qaeda was annoyingly interrupting his Crawford, Texas vacation at the former pig farm again. Bush tried to kick sand on the Joint Forces Command findings from the Pentagon report outlining al Qaeda not in Iraq when Saddam was in power because it reinforces the era of incompetence under Bush.

President Bush vowed to veto the House Democrats' version of the terrorist surveillance bill, saying it would undermine the nation's security.

House leaders said they would vote on the bill Friday, just before taking a two-week recess. The bill would then have to be approved by the Senate.

Bush opposes it in part because it doesn't provide full, retroactive legal protection to telecommunications companies that helped the government eavesdrop on their customers without court permission after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

FISA oversight, sorry - lack of oversight, must be legislated his way no matter what and you had better listen Congress because then he's going to stomp his Stride-rites and hold his breath or something. Congress has two basic legal questions for the president - why circumvent the judicial system granting an industry blanket immunity and what are they immunizing with out knowing? To quell the incessant executive branch tantrum, and Congress' detractors, like me, for their repeated bowing and scraping to the imperial president in capitulation after but kissing on this issue, the House of Representatives is invoking the closed door session rule for the first time in 25 years to discuss whether they should give away retroactive immunity to telecom corporations. This time there is something new. Over 60 lame senators, wingnut Republicans and a fair few wussy Democrats voted to give Bush what he wanted down to the hearts on the i in FISA, eviscerating the rule of law and America's best hopes for preservation of civil liberties.

While the House bill would not grant immunity, it would allow phone companies to present their defense in a closed-door U.S. district court, with the judge given access to confidential documents about the surveillance program.

"I think that is the proper way to decide whether they should have immunity or not -- not members of Congress' voting on it," Pelosi said.

Republican leaders "believe they have information relevant to the debate on FISA that cannot be publicly discussed," said House Democratic Leader Steny Hoyer.

The House bill would revamp the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which requires the government receive secret-court approval to conduct electronic surveillance on foreign targets in the United States.

The House and Madame Speaker did not immediately go along, shocking the Bush White House. Immediately, the al Qaeda bogeyman was duly trotted out in two Bush radio addresses and a press briefing by the lame duck that nobody remembers.

For real details on how much was missed by the 9/11 Commissions, read the book from the reporter who spent years covering the commission and got eleven members and more staffers to speak on the record. The book goes to show how much information of everyones down to the keystroke is picked up by Carnivore and other programs run by the stealthy techno-spy-gadget NSA. The 9/11 Commission received an unprecedented historic opportunity to go through the massive data at the NSA that holds a treasure trove of intelligence. Guess what happened. Read Philip Shenon's jaw dropping The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation.

The Dark Arts of Professional Waterboarding

Under oath and with intense questions, the Giant Head of US's spy central, uniformed 4 star General Michael C. Hayden, comes clean with an admission that Bush the Lesser approved express lane waterboarding for three, courtesy of the Geneva Convention signing United Sadists States of America. What a stain on America as the US decried waterboarding US POW's under the Japanese in WWII leading to a treaty, a global accord, an international pact among civilized nations and dictatorships, not to engage in torture. But the Bush Administration and the US Attorney General still cannot define the "special techniques" of torture under Oath to Congress. So, in capturing terrorist tormentors, the US acted like barbarians, but wants to be thought of as the good folks wearing ten gallon white cowboy hats while saving people and puppies.

Our whole goal was not to be like terrorists - but Bush and his farm of cronies mightily begs to differ with that stratagem. He went to the evil dark place by confirming that the US reserves the right to use the drowning practice in the future - during the final year of his cesspool presidency. Gitmo has many prisoners who may shed light on US techniques that the Bush humanoids would rather not discuss since many have never had the right or writ of habeas corpus to tell their side.

The practice, a staple of brutal interrogations from the Spanish Inquistion to Cambodia's Khmer Rouge regime, usually consists of strapping down a captive, covering their face with a cloth, and pouring water onto the cloth.

Fratto underlined that the tactic -- which experts liken to controlled drowning -- is not currently permitted, but left the door wide open to resuming its use.

"The president will listen to the considered judgment of the professionals in the intelligence community and the judgment of the attorney general in terms of the legal consequences of employing a particular technique," he said.

His comments came one day after CIA director Michael Hayden for the first time admitted publicly that the agency had used waterboarding, to question three top Al-Qaeda detainees after the September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes.

An admission of torture comes amidst Congress's laborious dithering and OCD hand wringing on how to manhandle the issue with a stubborn and petulant Bush White House. Hayden's civilian boss, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) or Head Spook Mike McConnell, was giving Congress his gussied up version of the National Threat Assessment. Let's see, the 3 Guests who tested out the new waterboard features are all well known Al Qaeda operatives from the same kingdom, Saudi Arabia, who Bush just pitifully begged King Abdullah for more oil to feed America's energy habit. Th UN, Human Rights groups stage protests but that is to high minded to sway the hardened. Hayden was busy for years at the NSA serving the Pentagon with all the spy techno stuff floating in Orbit that listens to our calls and logs keystrokes before heading from Fort Meade to Langley to clean up the human side of the US spyworld - cough, still wearing military garb.



California scholar and author, Mark Danner, participates in full measure in debates about torture in a terrifying mesmerizing fashion both verbally and in the written word. His book, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Gharib and the War on Terror with the arresting and defining image of torture from Iraq grabs your attention from the cover to the index.

Barack Obama Gets Keys to 21st Century Camelot

Lifting spirits with poignant prose and shedding white light on the elegant daughter of the King and Queen of Camelot's decision to graciously support and generously endorse Barack Obama for president, appeared for the entire world to see Sunday in the New York Times. Caroline Kennedy, like the rest of us in America, wants to Believe again by voting for an inspirational president like her father. Let Her Words Go Forth, The Torch has been Passed.

Senator Obama is running a dignified and honest campaign. He has spoken eloquently about the role of faith in his life, and opened a window into his character in two compelling books. And when it comes to judgment, Barack Obama made the right call on the most important issue of our time by opposing the war in Iraq from the beginning.

I want a president who understands that his responsibility is to articulate a vision and encourage others to achieve it; who holds himself, and those around him, to the highest ethical standards; who appeals to the hopes of those who still believe in the American Dream, and those around the world who still believe in the American ideal; and who can lift our spirits, and make us believe again that our country needs every one of us to get involved.

I have never had a president who inspired me the way people tell me that my father inspired them. But for the first time, I believe I have found the man who could be that president — not just for me, but for a new generation of Americans.

Her endorsement will reverberate around the world. Tirelessly and without public fanfare, she works in her communtity and thinks long and hard before she bestows the Profiles in Courage Awards on recipients that showed political valor under great duress. On the heels of her eloquence comes one of the great senatorial orators, Ted Kennedy, to make his choice known in this historic Age of American political renaissance. Now, the last living brother of John F. Kennedy, the poetic silver maned liberal Lion of the US Senate is coming out to make one of the greatest endorsements for president in his lifetime. (EPA Photo)

Caroline Kennedy is an attorney and accomplished author/scholar in her own right on the right to Privacy and other constitutional matters. She has her mother's love of words and gifts for composition. Her latest release is A Family of Poems.