A Dangerous, Yet Useful Book: Bush's Law

Comments on Bush's Law: The Remaking of American Justice. 

2008. NY. Pantheon.

By Eric Lichtblau, NYTimes, LATimes

{my comments within quotes are in braces. #9}

This is an important and useful book from one of the NY Times duo, Lichtblau and Jim Risen, who broke the stories on the illegal National Security Agency (NSA) wire-tapping of phones, cell-phones, e-mail and Internet use by the Cheney/Bush administration, the illegal “mail cover” operation by 50 or so United States Postal Service employees, who “inspected” (meaning “opened and read”) mail from the US to the Middle East and probably more, the copying of 10 or so public library patron and Internet use databases in the D.C. area, and maybe more. There was that famous Connecticut Library case on the "National Security Letters" dodge to make another end-run around the Constitution.

But the book is also dangerous because the author accepts uncritically, without question, far, far more of the official Cheney/Bush Administration Conspiracy Theory about 9/11/2001 than I think is right and proper for a reporter at not one, but two major newspapers (Lichtblau was an LA Times-man before he became a NY Times-man). Because that just perpetuates the "official myth" or "official conspiracy theory" and that conspiracy theory is dead wrong--about 3,000 dead--wrong.

In the indexed references I set out below to the World Trade Center tale, Lichtblau, aping the Phil Zelikow novel (or whitewash, depending on how your ironic streak runs) entitled The 9/11 Commission Report, does not once mention the problematical and rather prosaic collapse of Building #7 (aka WTC #7, The Solomon Building, or The-47-story-skyscraper-that-collapsed-at-5:15-or-so-P.M.-on-9/11/01-that-hardly-a-soul-now-alive-remembers-that-fateful-controlled-demolition-implosion).

Lichtblau’s book certainly contains enough information to start impeachment hearings and investigations in Congress. However, no impeachment activities will gain traction to move forward, of course, because the 535 members of Congress have shown themselves unwilling to honor their oaths of office to “support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and Cheney/Bush, etc.” (1)

Herewith, the nine indexed references to the World Trade Center, in Lichtblau's work, to The World Trade Center. There is no entry for the Twin Towers, WTC Building 7. There are 3 to Total Information Awareness, 3. (I keep wondering if the "spinal taps" the NSA made to all the telephone companies in the US — except for what was US West at the time — are still in place. Anyone know for sure?). And as for TIA--not Thanks In Advance, but former felon John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness, I note the references merely to encourage you to look at the BBC video-drama on the topic, and to follow up on Johnny-boy's activities.

On page 3:

Even before the last legs had given out on the World Trade Center’s twin towers on that horrific day, the BFBI had begun the monumental task of piecing together what had happened. Who were the jihadists who had carried out the audacious attacks. How had they operated so invisibly, and with such impunity, on American soil? Who had helped them? And, most urgently, what other plots were already underway? There was no better law enforcement agency in the world than the FBI at solving a crime, and this investigation — code named Penttbom — would be the biggest in its history. {Of course, as we know now, there has been no proof that "jihadists" did the dirty deeds; many of the FBI-named suicide-hijackers have actually shown up alive. And Osama bin Laden, on the FBI most-wanted list for the 1998 American Embassy bombings in Africa, is not wanted for 9/11/01 "because there is no evidence linking him" to 9/11, saith the FBI. The website entry runs this way: "Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people." The 'bureau' has now added: "In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world."}

On page 4:

 Sub rosa, however, investigators were already employing unorthodox, push-the-limits tactics in those early days that would not become publicly known, even in the exhaustive, 567-page report {"exhaustive" is definitely NOT a word I would use to characterize Zelikow's work of fiction} of the 9/11 Commission three years later. The National Security Agency, in what amounted to a pilot project for a much bigger and more controversial exercise, would be gin intercepting American calls and e-mails to and from Afghanistan, home of the Taliban, in an effort to identify al Qaeda’s communications. Some 50 postal inspectors would begin the “enormous task” of “sorting through the outbound international mail” to look for possible clues to terrorist activity, according to an internal FBI report in Maryland prepared two weeks after the September 11 attacks but never made public. The FBI, through the grudging cooperation of library managers, would “mirror” ten computers in suburban Washington believed to have been used by two of the hijackers. And then there was this: “All fugitives of Arab descent,” the FBI advised, “have been made a priority for capture, federally and locally.” {my emphasis. #9}
These were the kinds of over-the-top tactics that troubled James Ziglar, the commissioner of the Immigration and naturalization Service, as he sat at SIOC on 9/11 just hours after the attacks. {picking up 5, ...With the government caught flat-footed....}

5 With the government caught flat-footed by the attacks on the world trade center and the pentagon, no one doubted the need to mobilize at breakneck speed against the next terrorist attack.

7 They saw it in the fateful last steps of John O’Neill, a top terrorism official at the FBI who became head of security at the world trade center, only to die on his second day on the job racing back into the building to try to rescue survivors. They heard it in the hate-filled rhetoric of Osama bin Laden.

11 I was covering the justice department for the Los Angeles Times when the towers fell, and as I stood with a gaggle of other reporters outside the FBI headquarters in Washington on 9/11 in the hours after the attack, waiting all day for any scrap of information from the officials huddled inside the building at SIOC, black humor took hold. We knew the Pentagon had already been hit, a bomb was rumored to have gone off at the State Department, and United Flight 93 had crashed in a Pennsylvania field en route to either the White House or the Capitol.

11 ...I was able to get a phone number of a young wall street stockbroker I’d met in Southern California, He had escaped an upper floor of one of the Twin Towers just hours before. With his voice still quivering as we spoke, he described what he had seen. “People were screaming and things were flying everywhere,” he told me. “There’s blood, there’s glass, there’s everything. You get to the point that you’re so scared you’re not even scared. This is as close as I’ve ever gotten to a war.” The quote, which ran the next day on the front page of the Los Angeles times, summed up;the trauma for me about as well as anything I’d heard..

12 It was an internal FBI report that recounted the frantic last few minutes of flight 11’s descent into the world trade center, told in the harrowing words of an American Airlines flight attendant named Amy Sweeney. Snippets of fateful final phone calls had come out publicly in the days since the September 11 attacks, but nothing like this.

16 The same mosque had already become suspect a decade earlier because of its brief association with the so-called Blind Sheikh, who helped orchestrate the 2003 bombing at the World Trade Center, and the latest allegations were sure to reignite those suspicions. (should have read 1993. OOOOPS!)

56 Ashcroft placed the call, and his ruddy face turned ashen. He began scribbling notes on the back of the remarks he was supposed to deliver that day. Tower has been hit ... Second tower has been hit. he ordered the pilot to turn the plane around, as he gold the handful of his aides aboard the plan what had happened. “Our world has changed forever,” he told them. ¶ Whatever apathy Ashcroft may have displayed toward terrorism issues before 9/11, the attacks on the world trade center changed him forever too.

99 That attitude, he suspected, was one reason why the World Trade Center was hit not once, but twice. “You’d think after the first bombing [in 1993]* we would have solved the problem rather than waaiting for the second one. The problem right now, we have peoople that done’t know what they’re supposed to be doing.” *Lichtblau’s insert.

145-6 As they watched the South Tower of the World Trade Center crumble to {turn to p. 146} nothing, the aides beside him groaned in collective horror. From Cheney, there came only silence, as he closed his eyes for but a brief moment. Within minutes, after a phone conversation with the president that no other government witnesses were able to corroborate, Cheney would be ordering U.S. warplanes to shoot down any threatening airliners from the sky. This was a day Cheney could not have imagined when Bush talked him into becoming his White House running mate fourteen months earlier. {How do we know that Cheney "could not have imagined"?It wouldn't surprise me if he actually planned it all. As to VP, as I get the story, Cheney set up the whole "I'm the best candidate for vice-president I have on my list" scenario. So I doubt there was any "Bush talked him into" going on, unless as a charade.}

216 Was their theory true? It was plausible enough. the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, after all, had ripped through an underground garage in Manhattan. I called an official at the FBI, who agreed to research the history of the teenager’s case for me. After a few days, word came back from the FBI: no, this hadn’t come from the NSA program. {Generally, a theory is not "true" or "false." It is "verifiable"or "confirmable" or not.}

{232 “Swift-Boated (Round Two)” chapter 8 title: a play on SWIFT, the Belgian international bank clearinghouse (what does acronym stand for? Eric does not say. It’s an adscititious, irrelevant pun, and has nothing to do with “boating” or Vietnam, etc. “Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications”}

233 In reality, American officials saw the company as eager to turn over everything it could — even more than the Americans had sought, in fact — to help follow the money that brought down the World Trade Center. This, in the eyes of grateful American officials, was an act of true patriotism. {Patriotism from an international financial outfit, or on the part of the American citizen who ran it in Brussels?}

271 And somewhere in New England, one man was so outraged by Gorelick’s alleged complicity in the September 11 attacks that he phoned her home in suburban Washington. “You tell that bitch I’m going to blow up her and her family,” the caller told the housekeeper who looked after Gorelick’s two young children. The FBI sent in bomb-sniffing dogs to the home and traced the call to a pay phone in Boston before the trail went dead. {"Alleged complicity" seems inappropriate; more like "contribution." Unless directly quoting Ashcroft using the word "complicity".}

But like Senator McCarthy’s thunderous accusations a half-century earlier, {from the look of Lichtblau’s photo, I suspect he wasn’t around in the 1950s for the “decline and fall” of Joe The McCarthy} the changes rang hollow. Ashcroft’s accusation — that Gorelick’s 1995 memo was somehow to blame fro erecting the “wall” that contributed to 9/11 — was belied by the record. To blame Goreleick for erecting the infamous “wall” was a bit like blaming the ship steward for the sinking of the Titanic; she had laid, at most, one brick in the wall, and perhaps not even that. Gorelick’s directive dealt with the sharing of intelligence information in a narrow and unprecendented situation--suspicions that defendants alreadhy indicted in the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Cdnter might be involved in plotting attacks on withtnesses and others. {a better simile: “a bit like blaming the gal who spray-painted the casing of the so-called smart-bomb that blew up 300 or so civilians in a Baghdad bomb shelter”} {“belied by the record” — “belied” is a transitive verb--takes a direct object. Better would be “but the record belied Ashcroft’s accusation.” Or “the record contradicted Ashcroft’s accusation.” Or even, "But Ashcroft was lying."}

{ATTACK s plural? I thought there was only bomb-filled truck. Where is this lad going??}

One can make many criticisms of the writing style, grammatical lapses, an early mental or typographical lapse (On page 16, saying that the first bombing of the World Trade Center took place in 2003 — which would be two years after the second bombing, on 9/11/2001, of the three WTC buildings, skyscrapers #7, #2 and #1, when it took place in 1993, ten years earlier — but I’m sure this will be fixed in the paperback edition.)

And some may find it difficult to stomach the self-congratulatory tone about “scoops” and “stories on the front page” unless one considers that print journalists may be said to almost “live for” these front-page bylines and “exclusives” and “firsts.” Some reporters rise above this pride (particularly when, like at the NY Times, the stories of many reporters are so rewritten by the copy desks that hardly a word of what was submitted remains unchanged — at least, that was the case before Judith Miller and Jayson Blair; maybe it all started to go downhill faster when Allan M. “Al” Siegal retired in May of 2006 — he once told me the that Times “is an editors’ paper,” which I took to mean that, to an extent not imagined, certainly by this reader, it was the writing/rewriting of the editors that appeared under NYTimes’ reporters’ bylines.)

None was more important than SIOC, the emergency command center at the FBI’s headquarters. {still doesn’t say that the initials stand for.} Sat AT SIOC; then sat IN SIOC. The Orwellian name of Internal Security. {"Internal Security" is not “Orwellian,” by my measure. Something along the lines of "Accuracy Management" might be more like it.} pg 8

“…a dense, 342-page package of sweeping counterterrorism measures known as the USA Patriot Act" {should be all caps, because it’s an acronym for “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001."(2)},  a smorgasbord of a bill pushed so urgently by Ashcroft and the administration that few lawmakers who voted for it had time to read its fundamental reworking of the law, much less understand it.

“Ashcroft had a “jagged rejoinder: ‘we need honest, reasoned debate, and not fear-mongering,” “to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies and pause to America’s friends. They encourage people of goodwill to remain silent in the face of evil. Our efforts have been crafted carefully to avoid infringing on constitutional rights while saving American lives.”

“Jagged” refers to sharp, many-pointed objects (mass-produced, stamped metal caltrops come to mind), physical things, or the result of being stabbed, stuck, pierced by such an object-- “She jagged herself in the mouth,” suggests my Apple-licensed version of the New Oxford American Dictionary.

p 10: The “administration’s clench-fisted grab for executive power.” (“Clench-fisted”: Tautology, pleonasm, redundant, and all-round bad compound adjective: a fist is made by clenching the fingers. How would you grab something if your hands were already clenched into a fist? clenched hands, made a fist, clench-fisted? don’t’ think so. This is the kind of writing that tries to hype drama with attention-getting verbiage, or “arresting” lingo. The only thing that’s arrested or stopped is communication with the reader. One stops and the reptilian brain generates the question, “Whaaaa? Wassup widis writer?”)

237: “A senior Treasury Department official in charge of coordinating terror-financing matters across the administration had this dour assessment of the progress in finding al Qaeda’s money in an internal e-mail he sent: ...”

“Dour” is an adjective describing a person’s demeanor, look, appearance, not that of an inanimate object or opinion. My English teachers/writing profs would have written “usage” in the margin of any student’s paper misusing the word in this way.

--------------------

NOTE:

(1) What apparently has happened is that almost all of these 535 men and women described as Members of Congress have held office for so long that they have evolved into invertebrates or, if they have not completely lost their spines, they exist in their bodies, like the appendix, only as a vestigial artifact of human evolution. 

That this evolution has taken place over such an incredibly short period of time — hardly more than a decade — should cause Congress to launch a massive emergency biological study, particularly because there are hardly enough prosthetic devices in the world to fit every one of its inhabitants with spinal replacements, braces, walkers, wheelchairs and such right now as the Afghan and Iraq occupations continue.

And if the invertebrate Member of Congress phenomenon goes pandemic on us, there would be no humans left who could stand up at a machine to make more prosthetics. We would all be reduced to slithering along the ground like snails, not a pretty prospect. However, we’re snagged by Catch-22: The very men and women in a position, as members of Congress, to launch such a study into Acellerated Congressional Onset Spinelessness are prevented from doing so because of that very spinelessness. They're now invertebrates. It’s a sad, sad state of affairs. I’m certain Darwin would be turning in his grave had he not moldered into dust long ere this.

(2) In fact, the bill itself has the reference wrong, as “ACT” should be only capitalized, “Act,” not all-caps, "ACT," as if ACT were itself a TLA, or three-letter acronym.(3)

(3) TLAs began to really pollute the acronymic atmosphere after the introduction of the crude UNIX knock-off DOS 1.0, purchased by Microsoft and licensed to IBM for its PC/1 and subsequent personal computers, and then virtually all non-Apple PCs. One of the dumbest features of this knock-off was that it swapped the essential virgule character (“/” — the unshift position of the question mark on every typewriter and computer terminal keyboard) for the “back-slash” character, “\” , which is in a different position on virtually every keyboard that actually had the character, and, for programmers and all other MS DOS users, was akin to putting the letter “e” on the numeral “1” key.

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