Meet Mary Walker. General counsel to the Air Force. Bush appointee to the select working group on interrogations. Plagued by controversy, and for good reason. First, the past:

Last year a blue-ribbon panel headed by former congresswoman Tillie Fowler practically accused Walker of a cover-up after the GC issued a report absolving Air Force brass of responsibility in sexual abuse scandals at the Air Force Academy.

Fast forward to the present:

Now Walker, a former Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison lawyer appointed by President George Bush, is back on the hot seat. At issue this time is her role heading a U.S. Department of Defense group that issued a controversial report in March 2003 giving the administration enormous latitude in interrogating alleged terrorists....Walker's report is one of a series of government memos uncovered in recent months that seem to rationalize the use of torture on detainees.

Who's the first Bush lawyer in the cross-hairs on the torture topic?

Unbelievable. The New York Times is reporting that the information that al Qaeda may attack specific buildings in New York and Washington is three to four years old.

Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terror plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.

Was the terror threat issued to prevent Kerry from leaping ahead in the polls? Yesterday I didn't think so. Now, like many other people, I'm not sure. Especially after reading a comment like this:

"You could say that the bulk of this information is old, but we know that Al Qaeda collects, collects, collects until they're comfortable,'' said one senior government official. "Only then do they carry out an operation. And there are signs that some of this may have been updated or may be more recent.'' (our emphasis.)

Parse that sentence for a minute:

"signs" as in indications, not proof or evidence
"may have been updated," not "has been updated"
"may be more recent," not "is more recent" or "is very recent."

If this is all the Administration had to issue the alert, it's gone beyond "the little boy who cried wolf" to disingenous (at best) or outright deceitful.

[link via Just a Bump in the Beltway.]

Update: Agonist details the discrepancies between the accounts crediting a July 13 arrrest of an al Qaeda operative and seizure of his computer, with accounts dating the information 3-4 years ago, before 9/11.

Update: Jeff at Protein Wisdom disagrees with us.

FBI Whistleblower Sibel Edmonds has written this letter to Thomas Kean, Chair of the 9/11 Commission. Take a minute to read it. Here's just one excerpt:

Translation units are the frontline in gathering, translating, and disseminating intelligence. A warning in advance of the next terrorist attack may, and probably will, come in the form of a message or document in foreign language that will have to be translated.

That message may be given to the translation unit headed and supervised by someone like Mike Feghali, who slows down, even stops, translations for the purpose of receiving budget increases for his department, who has participated in certain criminal activities and security breaches, and who has been engaged in covering up failures and criminal conducts within the department, so it may never be translated in time if ever. That message may go to Kevin Taskesen, or another unqualified translator; so it may never be translated correctly and be acted upon. That message may go to a sympathizer within the language department; so it may never be translated fully, if at all. That message may come to the attention of an agent of a foreign organization who works as a translator in the FBI translation department, who may choose to block it; so it may never get translated.

If then an attack occurs, which could have been prevented by acting on information in that message, who will tell family members of the new terrorist attack victims that nothing more could have been done? There will be no excuse that we did not know, because we do know.

President Bush announced today he will follow the recommendations of the 9/11 report--with some modifications-- and appoint an Intelligence czar.

The bipartisan panel's most overarching recommendations in a 567-page report were for creation of a counterterrorism center, which the commission envisions as a joint operational planning and intelligence center staffed by personnel from all the spy agencies, and a national intelligence czar.

What are the modifications? Here's one:

However, officials say Bush differs from the commission on one point. He thinks the director and a new counter-terrorism center should be outside the White House hierarchy. One official said placing them inside the Executive Office of the President could undermine the intelligence community's traditional autonomy.`

New York City is convinced the terror alert threat is real. It is closing the Holland Tunnel tomorrow to commercial traffic:

The Holland Tunnel is expected to close to commercial traffic heading to New York at 12:01 a.m. Monday, officials said Sunday evening. The ban was "correlated to the warning about the downtown financial districts," said Tony Ciavolella, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. He said commercial vehicles should use the Lincoln Tunnel and George Washington Bridge as alternative routes.

[link via Drudge.]

Update: To make it clear, as a reader has pointed out, passenger vehicles are not affected. I've changed the headline to this post accordingly.]

SK Bubba thinks the terror threats are a ploy.

These alleged terrorist threats to U.S. financial institutions today are a transparent, cynical ploy to make the stock markets tank tomorrow. Then next month the GOP and their talking wobbly bobble-heads can be all serious and somber about how the markets reacted to the Democratic convention and Kerry's plan for America.

Oliver Willis is willing to credit the threats.

I don't know but my instincts tell me, mostly due to their specificity, that the threats are real and not a ploy. Better a false alarm than no notice.

I also wonder whether we are getting the whole story. For example, Secretary Ridge said in his remarks (text available here), “We’re concerned about targets beyond these and are working to get more information.” He also referred to security measures being taken “in our public places and cyber space; on air, land, and sea.”

The "beyond these" and the "in cyberspace" caught my attention. Is the threat broader than the New York area? Does it involve electronic sabotage of our financial markets? Is there an "electronic Jihad" on the way? Is it just a coincidence that American Airlines and U.S. Air were grounded today by "computer glitches?" Or are conspiracy theorists at work again?

Secretary Ridge also mentioned that “thousands of radiological pagers” would be distributed to law enforcement to enable the detection of radiological disbursement. Is there a real concern that conventional explosives will be mixed with radiological ones, which, if it's the case, would increase the damage that would be inflicted?

How serious is the new threat to U.S. assets? What other cities might be involved? Chicago has the Chicago Board of Exchange. Miami, Seattle and Houston could also be targets according to intelligence alert services to which we subscribe.

Oliver asks, if it is a real alert, what can we do? I always tell the TL kid who lives in New York to keep lots of bottled water on hand. Obviously, in a real emergency, that won't be enough. According to the Northeast Security Network, here are the instructions to follow for emergency preparedness--a Major Disaster Survival Kit. You might want to print them and keep them handy. Just in case. And one other thought. If the internet and television go down, you might want to have a short-wave radio on hand.

The past few months, the media has been abuzz with the story of FBI translator Sybil Edmunds. Now, there's a second FBI agent who has come forward alleging that the FBI ignored his warnings.

... in early 2002, when [FBI agent Michael] German got word that a group of Americans might be plotting support for an overseas Islamic terrorist group, he proposed to his bosses what he thought was an obvious plan: go undercover and infiltrate the group.

But Mr. German says F.B.I. officials sat on his request, botched the investigation, falsified documents to discredit their own sources, then froze him out and made him a "pariah." He left the bureau in mid-June after 16 years and is now going public for the first time - the latest in a string of F.B.I. whistle-blowers who claim they were retaliated against after voicing concerns about how management problems had impeded terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Just in by e-mail, here is part of John Kerry's response to today's announcement by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge that New York is facing a new terror threat from Al Qaeda:

“The Department of Homeland Security called to notify our staff in advance of Secretary Ridge’s news conference. They offered Senator Kerry a briefing on this new information. It is being scheduled now. We have a message today for al Qaeda or any terrorist who may be thinking of attacking our country: John Kerry and John Edwards will bring all aspects of our nation’s power to crush al Qaeda and destroy terrorist networks. No matter what threats we may face, the terrorists will not divide us. Our nation is united in its determination to defeat terrorism.”

The official Kerry-Edwards blog is here and it takes comments.

We get a lot of calls from reporters asking whether we can point to instances of Attorney General Ashcroft using the Patriot Act to charge non-terror crimes. Here's an example from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

The U.S. attorney in Seattle has used a Patriot Act provision to charge 15 people with smuggling marijuana money out of this country as part of a multimillion-dollar drug operation based in Canada. It is the first time the provision has been used in a major case in this district, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Greenberg. The indictments say an undercover agent spent nearly a year working with the alleged smugglers, accused of helping to deliver $3.4 million illegally into Canada in 2003. The money came from the sale of marijuana in the states, Greenberg said.

The 15 each were charged under the Patriot Act with one count of bulk-cash smuggling. Nine others were charged earlier with international money laundering and marijuana trafficking under a separate law. It has long been illegal to take more than $10,000 out of the country without reporting it. But the Patriot Act strengthened that law and "took it out of just being a reporting violation to be a smuggling, trafficking type of offense," Greenberg said. The crime carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison and the forfeiture of the illegally transported money.

The U.S. Attorney conceded these defendants have no connection to terrorism.

John Emerson (Zizka) at Seeing the Forest analyzes the 9/11 report and says while it stops short of saying that Bush and his Administration were at fault, a review of Chapter 8 leads to no other possible conclusion.

The ACLU provides its take on the 9/11 report released today. The good news: The report is critical of the Adminstration's excessive secrecy and of the USA Patriot Act. It does not recommend that any of the provisions scheduled to sunset be made permanent.

The bad news:

Unfortunately, there are some recommendations that raise civil liberties concerns; two of the most salient are calls for the backdoor creation of national ID cards in the form of a standardized drivers licenses and a cabinet-level intelligence czar. "A Senate-confirmed intelligence director sitting in the White House would be in the hip pocket of the president," Romero added.

The ACLU questioned whether pitting the FBI’s culture of case-oriented law enforcement against the CIA’s culture of covert, subversive operations, under one chief, would result in a further weakening of civil liberties protections in the FBI’s intelligence work. Similarly, if the new director were to have operational control over both domestic and foreign intelligence work - that is, real authority over both the FBI and the CIA - he or she could blur the lines between the agencies’ two very different missions.

The powers accorded intelligence gathering and law enforcment agencies are different for good reason. It prevents the Government from making an end run around the Fourth Amendment. The ACLU has an excellent explanation of the issue here. Additional arguments are available in The Gilmore Report (pdf) which was prepared in 2003 by a federal advisory panel (the Gilmore Commission), chaired by Jim Gilmore, a former Republican Party chairman and Governor of Virginia.

by TChris

The latest version of Homeland Security's attempt to use computers to assess the security risk of airline passengers (CAPPS II) is dead. CAPPS III might still be on the way.

A department spokeswoman Thursday said she couldn't elaborate on technology issues that hindered CAPPS II, but she did say that the project would be redirected to take into account data privacy concerns. "Homeland Security is still highly committed to replacing the antiquated passenger pre-screening program already in place [known as CAPPS], which Transportation Security Administration inherited," she said. There is no yet timetable for the new project.

The original CAPPS was administered by the airlines. CAPPS II raised concerns about privacy and due process. TalkLeft's coverage of the issue is collected here.

CAPPS II set a dangerous precedent by promising to give the government the power to fight terrorism by sifting Americans into trustworthy and not so trustworthy designations, says Jay Stanley, communications director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty Project. "The way to stop terrorism is through good physical security and reliable intelligence," he says. "It's not effective to sort through hundreds of millions of Americans using computer algorithms."