ACLU challenges government's no-fly list -- 10 years late

News that the American Civil Liberties Union had filed suit to challenge the federal government's "no-fly list" should be regarded as both good news and bad news for U.S. residents concerned about Washington's growing authority over their lives. That it has taken so many years to assemble a credible constitutional challenge to what assuredly was an immense power grab by federal authorities speaks quite loudly about the passivity of most Americans and their lack of involvement in governing their country. To be sure, the circumstances that led the feds to closely monitor airplane travel after the Sept. 11 attacks were unprecedented and outrageous. But the emergency that arguably justified the imposition of such a draconian regulatory regime -- barring U.S. citizens from traveling on airplanes based on possibly incorrect but still secret information -- has surely passed. And that it took a citizens group to mount that challenge, and not any of the array of federal agencies whose taxpayer-funded mission is to defend the U.S. Constitution, is nothing short of disgraceful. Even the lawsuit filed Wednesday tacitly accepts the legality of the restrictions, since it argues on behalf of 10 residents that the rules are unconstitutional because they do not permit people on the list to challenge their inclusion, according to the Reuters international news service. An ACLU lawyer told Reuters that the lawsuit was the first filed on behalf of legal U.S. residents challenging the no-fly list system. A lawsuit by a non-citizen seeking to get removed from the list is still pending, Reuters said. "The Constitution does not permit such a fundamental deprivation of rights to be carried out under a veil of secrecy and in the absence of even rudimentary process," the suit filed Wednesday says. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Portland, Ore., and names Attorney General Eric Holder, FBI Director Robert Mueller and Timothy Healy, director of the FBI's Terrorist Screening Center, Reuters said.

FBI pins blame for anthrax attacks on Army microbiologist

News that the FBI had wrapped up its long-running investigation into the anthrax mailings that terrorized the United States in the weeks following the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 is, apparently, not reassuring to anybody. Friday's announcement set off a storm of criticism because some government experts were still studying the evidence collected in what have called the largest investigation in FBI history. U.S. Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-New Jersey), a physician, said the closure of the case was premature and laid out only "barely a circumstantial case" against a U.S. Army scientist, according to the New York Times. "Arbitrarily closing the case on a Friday afternoon should not mean the end of this investigation,” Holt said, since the National Academy of Sciences was still studying the FBI's scientific work, and since the bureau had accused the wrong man earlier in the probe. The case catapulted into the national spotlight just a week after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington when anthrax-contaminated letters began arriving at the offices of news organizations and two senators. Five people were killed and 22 more, including five postal workers, were exposed to the contamination, and offices on Capitol Hill and the U.S. Supreme Court had to be evacuated. The U.S. Postal Service spent hundreds of millions of dollars to decontaminate its offices, the Times said. But the FBI concluded in a 92-page report that Dr. Bruce Ivins, who even helped work on the investigation at the Army’s biodefense laboratory in Fort Detrick, Md., was solely responsible for the contaminated mailings, based on coded DNA messages discovered in them. Ivins killed himself in 2008 after months of being followed and questioned by agents. But Ivins' colleagues at the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fredrick, Md., said the scientist was not capable of such an act, and doubted whether he had the capability of producing the powder in his lab, the Times said. The report also revived memories of the FBI's earlier incorrect pursuit of Dr. Steven Hatfill, a former Army scientist who was kept under 24-hour surveillance in 2002 and 2003. Hatfill eventually sued the government for violating his privacy and settled for $4.6 million, the Times said.

How does diplomacy make sense when dealing with Taliban?

News that Turkey plans to bring Afghanistan's often warring neighbors together at an international conference raises some interesting questions, but not all of them are good ones. While it seems like things can only get better in the region if the governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan talk, their reported plans to invite Taliban leaders to join them is a sad miscalculation. Who can forget the Taliban's misogynistic misrule of Afghanistan from 1996-2001, their destruction of ancient statues of Buddha and their decision to protect Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader blamed by the United States for planning the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.? Who in their right mind would expect them to bring anything positive to negotiations? Well, Turkey, for starters. NATO's only Islamic nation has been actively engaged in behind-the-scenes talks to get Afghanistan, Pakistan and Taliban insurgents together in the week before a planned international conference on the future of Afghanistan in London, according to the Reuters international news service. "The Turks are playing a behind-the-scenes role patching up relations between Pakistan and Afghanistan," an unnamed official told Reuters. "The Turks are among those working on negotiations with the Taliban. There's a lot happening behind the scenes that people don't know about." Turkey has unique ties to both countries since the days of the Ottoman Empire, Reuters said. Afghanistan's discredited president, U.S.-backed Hamid Karzai, is said to be a major source behind trying to open negotiations with the Taliban. But the military defeat of the Taliban's ruthless government in 2001 is the very reason Karzai was elected in Afghanistan, and the reason why Western nations still support him despite a questionable re-election in November. And fighting a resurgent Taliban is why U.S. President Barack Obama announced in December that 30,000 additional troops would be sent there. Moves toward negotiations with the Taliban under these conditions do not make any sense.

White House report on failed airline bombing reveals glaring mistakes

We're all happy that the attempted bombing of a Northwest Airlines plane failed on Christmas Day when the alleged terrorist was overpowered and subdued by alert passengers. But a lot of people, including U.S. President Barack Obama, were not happy to find out that federal authorities knew the suspect, Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab of Nigeria, posed a threat but hadn't yet placed him on a no-fly list. "The intelligence fell through the cracks," Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan told reporters Thursday, according to Cable News Network (CNN). "This happened in more than one organization." That could well be what happened, but it's far from reassuring. Nine years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington exposed major weaknesses in U.S. intelligence and led to the creation of a multibillion-dollar domestic security operation, the new apparatus failed a basic test. "Though all of the information was available to all-source analysts at the CIA and the NCTC [National Counter Terrorism Center] prior to the attempted attack, the dots were never connected," said the report, written by a Brennan-led panel. The dots were never connected? There are terrorists trying to kill us and the government is looking for dots? Maybe that's the problem, right there! It's sounds a little like all of the excuses we heard after the 9-11 attacks about how three hijacked airliners could have flown undisturbed for hours until they had crashed into buildings and killed thousands of people in New York and Washington in 2001, doesn't it? Isn't a little late for the country to rely on luck to prevent terrorist attacks? Or, if we were going to rely on luck, why did we spend those untold billions of dollars on security upgrades?

Coast Guard admits Sept. 11 training exercise was a bad idea

For anyone who still thinks it impossible that the U.S. military was caught napping on the fateful day that terrorists crashed jumbo jets into the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001 comes news of an internal U.S. Coast Guard investigation that found that scheduling a training exercise on the Potomac River on the anniversary of that attack was a mistake. Gee, you think? False reports of gunfire near the Pentagon, where President Barack Obama was attending a memorial ceremony, prompted FBI agents to rush the scene and caused the grounding of 17 flights at nearby Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, the New York Times said, citing a report yesterday by the Associated Press. CNN and Fox News reported the shots on television after hearing about them on a police radio, even though no shots were actually fired, the Times said. Instead, the exercise raised unnecessary fears that Washington had again come under attack on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, the report found. The Coast Guard said it did not know that Obama was in the vicinity and would not have conducted the drill if it had known, and promised to use more-secure communications in the future. Of course, the biggest question has to be why the Coast Guard didn't figure any of this out before. Like the incident in April when an airplane painted to look like Air Force One caused panic in New York City when it flew dangerously close to skyscrapers in a publicity exercise without notifying local authorities, federal authorities display stupidity at best or contempt for the citizenry at worst when they pull such stunts. If it's only stupidity, it certainly seems a likely explanation for what happened, or failed to happen, on the real Sept. 11.

Bush-era wiretapping goes on trial in San Francisco

Today's start of a court hearing on the federal government's post-9/11 wiretapping could herald a major step in undoing the years of constitutional mayhem of the Bush administration. A federal judge in San Francisco could decide that a now-defunct Islamic charity declared a terrorist organization in 2004 can proceed with its damage suit against the government for listening in on phone conversations with its attorneys without a warrant, according to the San Francisco Chronicle newspaper. The Bush and Obama administrations have tried, and failed, to get the case dismissed on national security grounds. U.S. Judge Vaughn Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has already ruled in the case that public statements by the government indicated that the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation had probably been wiretapped, the Chronicle said. The case is only the second in the country to challenge the Bush-era wiretapping program, instituted in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. In the first case, a federal judge declared the program unconstitutional but was overruled on appeal because the plaintiffs could not prove they had personally been wiretapped. But the Al-Haramain case is different in that the government already released documents apparently showing the charity had been wiretapped. The Bush administration said the documents had been improperly released, requested their return and declared them confidential. The foundation's attorney, Jon Eisenberg, argued before Walker that the president did not have the power to override a 1978 law requiring a special national security court to approve wiretapping of suspected terrorists, the Chronicle said. "May the president of the United States break the law in the name of national security? ... We're asking this court to say, 'no,'" Eisenberg argued at the hearing. Eisenberg also quoted now-President Barack Obama's statement while a candidate in 2007 that "warrantless surveillance of American citizens in defiance of (the 1978 law) is unlawful and unconstitutional." Walker told a government lawyer that the foundation had presented strong evidence that it had been wiretapped, the Chronicle said. The New York Times revealed the existence of the program in 2005 and Bush confirmed it. But Justice Department attorney Anthony Coppolino contended Al-Haramain's case had to be dismissed because the program, and everything connected to it, were protected secrets. Any ruling to the contrary would be "simply inappropriate," he argued, because it could reveal confidential information about "intelligence sources and methods," the Chronicle said.