Via Spencer Ackerman, this is just rich:

CIA Director Michael Hayden is going after the agency's independent watchdog, Inspector General John Helgerson. Hayden wonders if Helgerson -- who is not appointed by the CIA director -- hasn't gone too far in investigating how the agency conducts detentions and interrogations. . . . Helgerson has for years been perceived as overly aggressive in reviewing CIA techniques in the war on terrorism.

. . . [T]he investigation, headed by Hayden confidante Robert L. Deitz, is now a full-fledged exploration of how Helgerson conducts his work. It comes as Helgerson is "nearing completion" on several reports into interrogations, renditions, and detentions, reports The New York Times.

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Looks like it's time for a trip to the courthouse tomorrow. The Judge in the insider trading trial of former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio has unsealed documents related to his classified information defense which he was not allowed to present at trial. This is coming up now because yesterday Joe Nacchio filed his appeal brief and one of the grounds alleges the Judge erred in refusing him to raise his classfied secrets defense.

The Rocky Mountain News reports:

The National Security Agency and other government agencies retaliated against Qwest because the Denver telco refused to go along with a phone spying program, documents released Wednesday suggest.

The documents indicate that likely would have been at the heart of former CEO Joe Nacchio's so-called "classified information" defense at his insider trading trial, had he been allowed to present it.

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Speaking of torture, Justice Anton Scalia Joins the Cast of 24 in the role of Jack Bauer....very funny. From Slate V . (It's slow to load, here's the direct link.)

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, is speaking at Columbia today. Many in NYC and the United States find this appalling. I don't.

It gives the public an opportunity to hear him and, if Columbia is doing its job, ask him questions that enables him to attempt to explain his nation's supporting terror in Iraq and maybe elsewhere and why he denies the Holocaust. Indeed, if he attempts to answer questions, he will harm his own cause because he can't rationally answer some questions.

Instapundit has a podcast up of an interview with Jack Goldsmith, formerly of the Office of Legal Counsel and one of those who balked at Dick Cheney, David Addington and Alberto Gonzales' attempt to stretch the NSA wiretapping program past what he and James Comey and others believed to be the legal limits.

It was Goldsmith who was responsible for withdrawing John Yoo's torture memo.

Goldsmith's new book discusses, among other things, what went on behind the scenes with Ashcroft, Gonzales and the NSA wiretapping program.

Book details are available here.

Bump and Update: ABC News has an explanation for the black beard in the Osama photo accompanying his upcoming video:

The "phony beard" may be an important clue as to where bin Laden is hiding, according to Clarke. "One place where a beard would stand out would be southeast Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia," Clarke told ABC News. "No one's thought he was there, but that is an environment where most men, Muslim men don't have beards."

ABC also reports U.S. authorities have obtained a transcript of the tape, which will be directed to suicide bombers.

Original Post 9/6/07
A New Osama bin Laden Video is Imminent

An Islamic website reports that Osama bin Laden will be releasing his first video since 2004 in time for the 6th anniversary of 9/11.

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Say goodbye to Operation Advise, which cost $42 million. The DHS announced today it was scrapping the program, probably for good.

Known as ADVISE and begun in 2003, the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program was developed by the department and the Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest national laboratories for use by many DHS components, including immigration, customs, border protection, biological defense and its intelligence office.

Reason for abandonment: It didn't comply with privacy rules.

[T]wo internal Homeland Security reports found that tests had used live data about real people rather than made-up data for one to two years without meeting privacy requirements...

Check out next Sunday's New York Times' magazine article by Jeffrey Rosen on Jack Goldsmith's book that discusses, among other things, what went on behind the scenes with Ashcroft, Gonzales and the NSA wiretapping program. Goldmsith is the former head of the DOJ's Office of Legal Counsel

The article contains a number of new disclosures. But first, some background. Goldsmith is a conservative. He supports the war on terror. Here's where he's coming from:

Goldsmith notes, everywhere the president looks, critics — as well as his own lawyers — are telling him that pre-emptive actions may violate international law as well as U.S. criminal law. What, exactly, are the legal limits of executive power in the post-9/11 world? How should administration lawyers negotiate the conflict between the fear of attacks and the fear of lawsuits?

In Goldsmith’s view, the Bush administration went about answering these questions in the wrong way. Instead of reaching out to Congress and the courts for support, which would have strengthened its legal hand, the administration asserted what Goldsmith considers an unnecessarily broad, “go-it-alone” view of executive power. As Goldsmith sees it, this strategy has backfired. “They embraced this vision,” he says, “because they wanted to leave the presidency stronger than when they assumed office, but the approach they took achieved exactly the opposite effect. The central irony is that people whose explicit goal was to expand presidential power have diminished it.”

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Perhaps predictably, but news nonetheless, the Bush Administration Friday filed its opposition to the ACLU's request that the FISA court release the rulings it issued since January, 2007 concerning Bush's warrantless NSA electronic surveillance program.

The opposition motion, filed in the secret FISA court, is available here (pdf)at the ACLU's website.

The ACLU responds to the Government's filing here.

Newsweek's Evan Thomas writes a 15 page online article on why we haven't found Osama bin Laden. A few snippets:

Rather than send the snake eaters to poke around mountain caves and mud-walled compounds, the U.S. military wanted to fight on a grander stage, where it could show off its mobility and firepower. To the civilian bosses at the Pentagon and the eager-to-please top brass, Iraq was a much better target.

By invading Iraq, the United States would give the Islamists—and the wider world—an unforgettable lesson in American power. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich was on Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board and, at the time, a close confidant of the SecDef. In November 2001, Gingrich told a NEWSWEEK reporter, "There's a feeling we've got to do something that counts—and bombing caves is not something that counts."

Others say intelligence dried up long ago and the U.S. is just searching for a needle in a haystack, and the chance of success is "zero." Yet, without any intelligence on the whereabouts of Osama or what he's up to, experts quoted in the article maintain:

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The New York Times today reports that the Albany terror trial of Yassin M. Aref may have the best chance of challenging the NSA warrantless wiretapping program.

TalkLeft has been writing about Mr. Aref's case since its inception in 2004 (see here) and about its NSA wiretapping connection since Aref's lawyer, Terry Kindlon, filed his first challenge to the program. Aref's case was the Ashcroft-initiated prosecution of the pizza man and the Iman.

From Terry's initial motion:

"The government engaged in illegal electronic surveillance of thousands of U.S. persons, including Yassin Aref, then instigated a sting operation to attempt to entrap Mr. Aref into supporting a nonexistent terrorist plot, then dared to claim that the illegal NSA operation was justified because it was the only way to catch Mr. Aref," Kindlon's motion said.

The Judge denied the motion in a secret ruling. Terry then went to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals asking it to compel the District Court to direct the government to come clean about the role warrantless wiretaps played in its case. He got no relief.

The Government used the "Doogie Howser" of terrorism experts at trial and Aref and his codefendant were convicted. Even though Aref's sentencing guidelines were 30 years to life, the Judge sentenced him to 15 years. Even the Judge didn't believe Aref was motivated by a desire to help terrorists.

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Marty Lederman points out the problem with this statement of National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell to the El Paso Times:

There's a claim of reverse targeting. Now what that means is we would target somebody in a foreign country who is calling into the United States and our intent is to not go after the bad guy, but to listen to somebody in the United States. That's not legal, it's, it would be a breach of the Fourth Amendment. You can go to jail for that sort of thing. And If a foreign bad guy is calling into the United States, if there's a need to have a warrant, for the person in the United States, you just get a warrant. And so if a terrorist calls in and it's another terrorist, I think the American public would want us to do surveillance of that U.S. person in this case. So we would just get a warrant and do that. It's a manageable thing. On the U.S. persons side it's 100 or less. And then the foreign side, it's in the thousands. Now there's a sense that we're doing massive data mining. In fact, what we're doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that's, we've got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we're doing things we're not doing. (my emphasis)

Marty correctly, in my view, points out: More...