warrantless surveillance

Writing about the role Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan played in the Bush counterterror surveillance program, Marcy Wheeler, blogging for Glenn Greenwald at Salon today, argues that as NSA adviser, rather than CIA director (a position Brennan was nominated for, but Glenn helped torpedo the nomination by highlighting his previous role in the Bush [...]

Somehow it took former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden over two weeks to respond to the report from five government inspectors general on warrantless surveillance, and this, in The New York Times, is what he’s got:
The reflexive judgments to the contrary seem hasty at best. Although the inspectors general report notes that the compartmented [...]

This is your horrible, dystopian future: John Yoo, the former Office of Legal Counsel official who had a hand in crafting the Bush administration’s detentions, interrogations and warrantless surveillance abuses, writes endless and endlessly misleading defenses of himself. Some people die because of Yoo’s cavalier relationship with the law — about 100, actually — and [...]

For quick reference, you can find all of my posts on the just-released inspectors general report on warrantless surveillance programs here.

One warrantless surveillance mystery solved. My friend Marcy Wheeler beat me to this: George W. Bush personally ordered White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and Chief of Staff Andy Card to visit an ailing Attorney General John Ashcroft in the hospital in March 2004 after Ashcroft’s deputy Jim Comey refused to certify the warrantless surveillance program. [...]

The militant triviality of Washington personalities is enough to make me break character and go outside of my national-security lane. Andy Card, chief of staff to George W. Bush, is whining that Barack Obama doesn’t wear a jacket in the Oval Office.