The Washington Post reports:

Vice President Cheney's office acknowledged for the first time yesterday that it has dozens of documents related to the administration's warrantless surveillance program, but it signaled that it will resist efforts by congressional Democrats to obtain them.

Among the docuemnts Cheney acknowledges having in his possession:

They include 43 separate authorizations from President Bush for the program, which had to be renewed approximately every 45 days beginning on Oct. 4, 2001.

The letter also lists dates, from October 2001 through February 2005, for 10 legal memoranda from the Justice Department. Although Cheney's office has copies of the memos, none of them "was rendered to the Office of the Vice President," Coffin wrote.

As to 2004, the year of the Ashcroft hospital visit,

Coffin's letter indicates that Bush signed memos amending the program on March 19 and April 2 of that year. The details of the dispute have never been revealed publicly.

Th March 19 and April 2 memos amending the plan, signed by Bush, would seem to be key in understanding the objections of those in the Justice Department. I hope the Senate Judiciary Committee sticks with their plan to seek to hold the White House in contempt for not turning them over.

Update: Marty Lederman at Balkanization parses the letter from Cheney's office.

Walter Pincus in the Washington Post reports the Defense Intelligence Agency wants to spend $1 billion on contractors outside the U.S. to do its dirty work.

What work? Collecting and analyzing intelligence information. Can you say data-mining? That's my interpretation.

Via Instapundit, a case of the federal government using "sneak and peek" search warrants in a Tennessee cockfighting case with no connection to terrorism.

The Patriot Act expanded the government's ability to use sneak and peek (delayed notice) warrants.

“This is one of the few provisions of the Patriot Act that was sneaked into the Patriot Act in the middle of the night so that no one knew it was there,” said Michelle Richardson, a legislative consultant for the ACLU’s Washington, D.C., Legislative Office. “It was passed without everyone knowing about it.”

Prior to the Patriot Act, she said, federal courts had held that agents could conduct secret searches and defer notifying the targets for short periods of time in very limited circumstances, such as when someone’s life might be in danger.

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The report by the Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar has been released (pdf.)

This was one of the more telling disclosures:

In October 2002, (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) officials knew that the United States might have sent Mr. Arar to a country where he could be questioned in a "firm manner." In a report to his superiors dated October 11, 2002, the CSIS security liaison officer (SLO) in Washington spoke of a trend they had noticed lately that when the CIA or FBI cannot legally hold a terrorist suspect, or wish a target questioned in a firm manner, they have them rendered to countries willing to fullfull that role. He said Mr. Arar was a case in point.

Spencer Ackerman at TPMMuckraker has more. Some background is here. While Canada awarded Mr. Arar $9 million in damages and issued a public apology, the U.S. has kept him on the terror watch list.

All of TalkLeft's Maher Arar coverage is accessible here.

I'm angry but not surprised that the Democrats propelled the FISA Amendment to passage this past weekend. Matt Stoller today has the response from the ACLU to his post yesterday accusing it of dropping the ball. They didn't of course. It was the Democratic leadership who not only dropped the ball, but picked it up and ran with it. The ACLU writes to Matt:

We met with Pelosi and with Reid -- we spoke with the staff from every leadership office. They did not listen to us. It was dem leadership who scheduled the vote on these particular bills. Why be mad at us and not at them? We met with them. They rebuffed our arguments.

We weren't notified that the bill was moving until 6 days before when Rep. Harman let it slip on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. We gave it the full court press: with action alerts, meetings with Members of Congress and Senators and their staff.

Pelosi and friends spent the entire week negotiating with the DNI and cut out ALL the civil liberties groups - not just the ACLU.

The Democrats have pulled this before, including the last-minute wrangling right before the August recess. Their reason then, like now, was that they were afraid of appearing soft of crime and terrorism.

Let's take a walk back to 1996.

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Glenn Reynolds links to Victor Hanson writing:

Apart from the notion that it would be as hard to distinguish civilians in a Waziristan from terrorists as it is in Iraq, which the senator has written off, other questions arise. As a US Senator why not now introduce an October 11, 2002-type resolution, authorizing such an invasion? Or why hasn't he in the past? . . .

It is funny how the Right will defend the notion that the September 18, 2001 AUMF activated Article II in such a way that the Commander in Chief can engage in torture, spy on American persons and do just about anything BUT actually attack Al Qaida. For the record, the President has ample authority to attack Al Qaida in Waziristan based on the September 18, 2001 AUMF:

[T]he President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

As we suspected, the Bush leak to the NYTimes on Attorney General Gonzales' trouble with the truth was all a setup for this:

[F]rom the letter: It states, “One particular aspect of these activities and nothing more, was publicly acknowledged by the President and described in December 2005.” . . . That is what Gonzales says was the Terrorist Surveillance Program. . . .

We will repeat this again - that is NOT what the President confirmed:

. . . This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies. Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. . . .

The news report in question revealed that:

In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it. . . . A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials.

This is the program President Bush confirmed. The one with internal disputes. The very disputes Gonzales denies existed. More.

I'm as perplexed as everyone else in trying to decipher the White House's latest explanation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' seemingly inconsistent statements in his sworn testimony on what was at issue regarding the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program when he and Andy Card went to visit former Attorney General John Ashcroft in the hospital in March, 2004.

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

....Mr. Gonzales insisted before the Senate this week that the 2004 dispute did not involve the Terrorist Surveillance Program “confirmed” by President Bush, who has acknowledged eavesdropping without warrants but has never acknowledged the data mining. If the dispute chiefly involved data mining, rather than eavesdropping, Mr. Gonzales’ defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers, while legalistic, were technically correct.

Big Tent Democrat argues that the TSP program and the data-mining program were one and the same -- data mining was part of the TSP program. While there are many data-mining programs run by a host of different agencies, that seems right in this context.

I'd like to examine it from a different angle: Was John Ashcroft ever opposed to data-mining? If not, how could that be the basis of the need to go to the hospital and twist his arm in reauthorizing the NSA's TSP program?

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Gleen Greenwald reports on President Bush's radio address today on, get this, amending FISA. What the President said:

[M]y Administration has proposed a bill that would modernize the FISA statute. . . [I]t seeks to restore FISA to its original focus on protecting the privacy interests of people inside the United States, so we don't have to obtain court orders to effectively collect foreign intelligence about foreign targets located in foreign locations.

Did you get that? Bush will protect the privacy interests of people inside the United States by removing the requirement of a court issued warrant. Thank you very much Big Brother. More.

The Bush Administration has leaked the following story to the NYTimes as an explanation for Attorney General Gonzales' seemingly incorrect testimony:

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program. . . . The N.S.A.’s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.

The confrontation in 2004 led to a showdown in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, where Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, tried to get the ailing Mr. Ashcroft to reauthorize the N.S.A. program.

Mr. Gonzales insisted before the Senate this week that the 2004 dispute did not involve the Terrorist Surveillance Program “confirmed” by President Bush, who has acknowledged eavesdropping without warrants but has never acknowledged the data mining. If the dispute chiefly involved data mining, rather than eavesdropping, Mr. Gonzales’ defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers, while legalistic, were technically correct.

Personally, I am at a loss at how this exonerates Alberto Gonzales. He flatly stated there was no dispute over the TSP. Later, he stated it was about the program President Bush confirmed. Data mining is a search without a warrant. The data mining is part of the same program. The speculation, indeed JUSTIFICATION, from many conservative legal scholars was that President Bush was discussing data mining. In fact, this NYTimes reporting is flat wrong, since in his discussion of the TSP, President Bush expressly referenced "the program" described in news reports, news reports that expressly discussed a data mining program. More.

I know this is a law blog but this rather understated headline could be extremely important:

Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf held secret talks with opposition leader and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto about a possible power sharing deal, media reported Saturday. The meeting, held Friday in the Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi, lasted about one hour and ended without an agreement, Pakistani newspapers and television networks reported.

Reports of the meeting come amid intense speculation that Musharraf would seek Bhutto as an ally in his plans to seek reappointment from legislators for another term. The plans face constitutional hurdles, weakening the hand of Musharraf, an army general who seized power in 1999 and who is a key U.S. ally in the fight against terrorism.

Musharraf has recently been politically weakened by his failed attempt to oust Supreme Court Justice Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry and also faces an alarming upsurge in Islamic militancy. . . . Musharraf has kept a low profile since the Supreme Court ended his bid to fire its chief judge, seen as a major setback to his plans to win a new five-year presidential term from lawmakers this fall.

The downturn in political fortunes comes as attacks have surged in Pakistan since an army assault on the pro-Taliban Red Mosque in Islamabad killed at least 102 people two weeks ago. A controversial security deal with tribal leaders on the Afghan border to contain Taliban and al-Qaida forces has also collapsed.

Read the whole article. This significance to me is the clear sign of Musharraf's growing weakness in Pakistan and the need for an alliance against Musharraf's erstwhile allies, the militant Islamists. Al Qaida IS in Pakistan's Waziristan region and a Pakistan willing to cooperate in fighting Al Qaida is important to US national security interests. This is a story that bears very close watching.

In a move that is sure to upset some, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has pardoned a teenage suicide bomber and sent him home to Pakistan.

The extraordinary case involved Rafiqullah, 14, a would-be suicide bomber, who was captured in May by Afghan police in the province of Khost, which borders Pakistan. He was wearing a suicide vest and riding a motorbike. His target was Arsala Jamal, the governor of the province.

He had crossed the border from South Waziristan, a troubled tribal belt in Pakistan, where he lived and had been attending a religious school. “Today we are facing a hard fact, that is, a Muslim child was sent to madrassa [religious school] to learn Islamic subjects, but the enemies of Afghanistan misled him towards suicide and prepared him to die and kill,” Mr Karzai told reporters.

Karzai issued the pardon at a formal ceremony:

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