These hearings will begin in June and will focus on the following important questions:

What surveillance activities has the President authorized under the NSA surveillance program disclosed in December 2005? What was the legal basis for these activities, and how did those activities change since the inception of the program? What activities are occurring today?

How does the current FISA system operate? Can this system be improved?

Are current legal authorities adequate for tracking terrorist communications, or are changes to the law required?

Whether current and proposed legal authorities adequately protect the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans.

The June hearings will include testimony from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, the newly minted freedom fighter and former AG John Ashcroft, former Deputy AG James Comey, secret court judges and outside experts.

"This is a landmark ruling that affirms the right of habeas corpus for all individuals in the United States, citizen or non-citizen, and rejects the administration's attempt to treat the entire world as a battlefield and to lock up people in this country, potentially for life, without charge, without evidence, and without a trial," said Hafetz.

New evidence unearthed by House Democrats establishes that White House political adviser Karl Rove and many of his colleagues used Republican National Committee e-mail accounts for official business -- even though White House policy is clear that doing so is a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

How did such casual lawbreaking come to be so widespread? And why was it tolerated? Those are among the questions the White House has yet to answer satisfactorily.

Palast: I know because I have Karl Rove’s emails. No kidding. He and his team aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer. They sent copies of their plans to GeorgeWBush.ORG instead of GeorgeWBush.COM addresses — and, heh heh, they ended up in my in-box. Who says this job ain’t fun?

Senators Kennedy and Whitehouse have sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales demanding a probe by the DoJ’s Office of the Inspector General and Office of Professional Responsibility into “allegations that the Republican National Committee engaged in ‘vote caging’ during the 2004 elections.”

The letter, sent today to Gonzales, also requests an investigation into “whether any Department officials were aware of allegations that Tim Griffin had engaged in caging when he was appointed United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas, and whether appropriate action was taken.”

The complete letter, and a press release sent along with it, is posted in full at the end of this article.

LORDKAHUNA: I just wanted to say that I think your vigilance with this is admirable, you are like the Jimminy Cricket of the interweb.

Vice President Cheney's office has refused to comply with an executive order governing the handling of classified information for the past four years and recently tried to abolish the office that sought to enforce those rules, according to documents released by a congressional committee yesterday.

Since 2003, the vice president's staff has not cooperated with an office at the National Archives and Records Administration charged with making sure the executive branch protects classified information. Cheney aides have not filed reports on their possession of classified data and at one point blocked an inspection of their office. After the Archives office pressed the matter, the documents say, Cheney's staff this year proposed eliminating it.

"Gordon Silverstein, a constitutional scholar at UC Berkeley, said Cheney's claims were all the more noteworthy given his repeated assertions of executive privilege, based on his senior position within the Bush administration, as a reason why he has not had to testify before Congress or provide lawmakers with information on such national security issues as torture, interrogation and CIA renditions of terrorists.

"'Here's a guy who raises 'executive privilege' to historic levels to exempt himself from all rules and oversight, and now he says he's not part of the executive branch?' said Silverstein. 'Here we have a subordinate part of the executive branch asserting independent constitutional authority even against its own superior. It is flabbergasting.'"

The committee chairmen told the White House to provide a signed letter from Bush asserting executive privilege, as well as a description of each withheld document, a list of who has seen the documents, and the legal basis for arguing that they may be shielded from public view.

That demand, with a July 9 deadline, is the beginning of several steps lawmakers are empowered to take to try to overcome the executive privilege claim. Those steps could culminate in Congress voting to find the president in criminal contempt and to refer the matter to a federal prosecutor with a recommendation to issue an indictment.

dragonstaff: It figures that they would indict him for contempt, rather than illegal wars, mass murder, and crimes against humanity ( which are both obvious if you agree to the Iraq Wars illegality).

Q: Would the U.S. attorney actually file charges?

A: That's uncertain. The U.S. attorney is an arm of the Justice Department, which has already indicated it thinks Bush does not have to turn over documents or testimony about the firings.

On the other hand, U.S. attorneys are supposed to be independent. (Ironically, that is what started the whole flap: Congress believed the eight fired prosecutors were dismissed because they acted too independently.)

If you complain about the Iraq war, we can take yer shit.

Bush saved for the classified files the rules laying out exactly what agency operatives can do to extract information from suspects. Administration officials cited the need to keep terror groups off-guard.

But even some members of Congress seemed confused.
Three Republican senators who were instrumental in drafting legislation on detainee rights — Sens. John McCain of Arizona, John Warner of Virginia and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina — said they had been briefed, but still had questions. "We are awaiting a response," they said in a statement.

acheron: Watch the judiciary hearing from yesterday. Mr. Gonzalez was...pathetic.

In the age of the Internet, a significant number of those conversations, even between foreigners in the same country, now come through switches in the United States. So the Administration wants the right to build spy bases inside the nation's domestic communication infrastructure and be able to listen in on any email conversation or phone call that it suspects is overseas to overseas, regardless if any American is involved.

For another, the Administration's proposed bill would let the government order the nation's telecoms and internet providers to open their networks so that the government can build out spying complexes on their networks. The law would only require that foreign intelligence gathering be a "significant purpose" of the installation. So in essence the government could order the nation's backbone providers to let the government turn the internet into one giant monitoring device and examine internet traffic for signs of copyright infringement, domestic political dissent, pornography and parking ticket violators, so long as the NSA's computer algorithms also scan packets for the term "Al Qaeda."

The introduction of extensive wiretapping should be seen in relation to Bush adminstration measures which are geared towards the suspension of civil liberties and the crminalisation of dissent including Bush`s July 17 executive order, which criminalizes the antiwar movement. The objective of this most recent piece of legislation is clear: establish a Police State in America.

The fact that the wiretapping under the legislation applies to foreigners is cosmetic. The measure is intended legitimise an extensive system of surveillance

The Democratic chairman of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, has threatened to hold members of the Bush administration in contempt for withholding documents subpoenaed by his panel. The administration did not meet a Monday deadline for handing over information about the legal justification for its wiretapping program...

A federal court in San Francisco has decided that AT&T's wireless contract is "unconscionable".
...
"The Ninth Circuit is saying that AT&T - or companies like AT&T - are not allowed to force consumers to waive what it regards as a fundamental constitutional right," Jeffery Glassman, a lawyer with the California firm Moldo, Davidson, Fraioli, Seror & Sestanovich, told The Reg.

acheron: What is with all this Vietnam crap? Does anyone else think that this is a terrible parallel for him to be making?

David Gergen, a former adviser to four US presidents, told CNN: "By invoking Vietnam he raised the question, 'If you learned so much from history, how did you ever get us involved in another quagmire?"

It’s been two years. And America’s media is about to have another tear-gasm over New Orleans. Maybe Anderson Cooper will weep again...

This is what an inside source told me. And it makes me sick: “By midnight on Monday, the White House knew. Monday night I was at the state Emergency Operations Center and nobody was aware that the levees had breeched. Nobody.”

The charge is devastating: That, on August 29, 2005, the White House withheld from the state police the information that New Orleans was about to flood. From almost any other source, I would not have believed it. But this was not just any source. The whistle-blower is Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, the chief technician advising the state on saving lives during Katrina.

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

He and his co-plaintiff, William Baldwin, a former employee fired by the firm, doggedly pursued the suit for two years, gathering evidence on their own and flying overseas to obtain more information from witnesses. Eventually, a federal jury agreed with them and awarded a $10 million judgment against the now-defunct firm, which had denied all wrongdoing.

It was the first civil verdict for Iraq reconstruction fraud.

But in 2006, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III overturned the jury award. He said Isakson and Baldwin failed to prove that the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-backed occupier of Iraq for 14 months, was part of the U.S. government.

Not a single Iraq whistleblower suit has gone to trial since.

The law allowed the F.B.I. to force communications companies, including telephone and Internet providers, to turn over their customers’ records without court authorization and permanently to forbid the companies from discussing what they had done. Under the law, enacted last year, the ability of the courts to review challenges to the ban on disclosures was quite limited.

The judge, Victor Marrero of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, ruled that the law violated the First Amendment and the separation of powers guaranteed by the Constitution.

Judge Marrero wrote that he feared the law could be the first step in a series of intrusions into the role of the judiciary that would be “the legislative equivalent of breaking and entering, with an ominous free pass to the hijacking of constitutional values.”

Here's what you need to know that NPR won't tell you.
1. Sheik Abu Risha wasn't a sheik.
2. He wasn't killed by Al Qaeda.
3. The new alliance with former insurgents in Anbar is as fake as the sheik - and a murderous deceit.

...
Just in case you think I’ve lost my mind and put my butt in insane danger to get this footage, don’t worry. I was safe and dry in Budapest. It was my brilliant new cameraman, Rick Rowley, who went to Iraq to get the story on his own.

A program to employ spy satellites for certain domestic uses is on hold indefinitely because of privacy concerns.
...
But some lawmakers demanded more information about its legal basis and what protections are in place to ensure the government is not peering into Americans' homes.
...
Rep. Bennie Thompson — a strong opponent of the program — commended the department on Monday for what he called a moratorium, and for its decision to "go back to the drawing board and get it right."

As head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, Jack Goldsmith led the team of lawyers that advises the presidency on the limits of executive power. During his tenure, he battled the Bush White House on the now-infamous "torture memos," as well as on issues of surveillance and the detention and trial of suspected terrorists. Goldsmith resigned his post after nine months.

He's speaking publicly for the first time about why he resigned in a new memoir, The Terror Presidency — which also recounts what he witnessed in Attorney General John Ashcroft's hospital room, when Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, demanded that an ailing Ashcroft approve a secret program that was about to expire. Goldsmith was among those who objected to the program.

Professor Goldsmith told the Judiciary Committee that chances to create a legally justified program were undercut by senior White House officials who were averse to any restraint on presidential power and devoted to extreme secrecy.

“It was the biggest legal mess I had ever encountered,” said Professor Goldsmith, who raised his objections to the program run by the National Security Agency while head of the Office of Legal Counsel.

When the Justice Department publicly declared torture “abhorrent” in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.

But soon after Alberto R. Gonzales’s arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.

The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.

Mr. Gonzales approved the legal memorandum on “combined effects” over the objections of James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general, who was leaving his job after bruising clashes with the White House. Disagreeing with what he viewed as the opinion’s overreaching legal reasoning, Mr. Comey told colleagues at the department that they would all be “ashamed” when the world eventually learned of it.

In a narrowly crafted ruling, U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly invalidated part of President Bush's 2001 executive order, which allowed former presidents and vice presidents to review executive records before they are released under the Freedom of Information Act.

By law, the National Archives has the final say over the release of presidential records and Kollar-Kotelly ruled that Bush's executive order "effectively eliminates" that discretion.

It allows former presidents to delay the release of records "presumably indefinitely," she said.

The judge on Monday ordered the National Archives not to withhold any more documents based on that section of the executive order.

The Bush Administration clearly wants to help its partners in crime; it also wants to avoid accountability for what it has done and is still doing. If the civil litigation proceeds -- and one judge already ruled that the "state secrets" privilege does not prevent the plaintiffs from going forward -- the Bush Administration faces the risk of a federal court's forcing it to disclose its unsavory surveillance activities.

Dodd, who has aggressively courted the liberal blogosphere as part of his Presidential run, was being loudly appealed to by top liberal bloggers today to put a hold on the bill. Dodd has for some time now spoken out against the immunity provision but had stopped short of saying that he would exert his power as a Senator to hold up the legislation.

So here's how a hold works: If you want to hold a bill, you tell your party leader that if anyone asks for unanimous consent to bring that bill to the floor, you intend to object and withhold your consent. That would force whoever wants to bring the bill up to use the actual rules -- typically making a "motion to proceed" -- which is a bit of a pain in the ass, and requires getting an actual vote on whether or not to start debate on this bill.

If you're really insistent, you'll show up and filibuster the motion to proceed. Then we're back in the familiar and annoying territory of needing 60 votes to do anything. And that's always dicey, especially in an atmosphere in which Senators will automatically get each others' backs even if they're doing something stupid, like filibustering a motion to proceed on a perfectly good and popular bill. You get another Senator's back on something stupid, because one day you'll need him to get yours on something equally stupid.

The article claimed that "on its face," the measure "asked lawmakers to declare where they stood on stopping Osama bin Laden from attacking the United States again." In fact, the measure would have exempted the president from requirements of the bill as long as he claimed to be acting to protect the country from attack.

Testifying about the Alabama case, former Siegelman lawyer Doug Jones disputed the Justice Department's claim that career prosecutors initiated and handled the prosecution.

Jones, a former U.S. attorney under President Clinton, said he was given strong hints by local prosecutors in 2004 that the case might be fading after several years of investigation. But in late 2004, Jones said, local prosecutor Steve Feaga told him that officials in Washington had ordered a "top to bottom" review.

Shortly after that, he said, Washington seemed to take over.

"All of this was absolutely stunning and a complete reversal of what we had been told only a few months before," Jones said. "It was as if the case started all over again."