Ridge pressured to raise terror level

After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

The provocative allegation provides fresh ammunition for critics who have accused the Bush administration of politicizing national security. Mr. Bush and his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, were locked in a tight race heading into that final weekend, and some analysts concluded that even without a higher threat level, the bin Laden tape helped the president win re-election by reminding voters of the danger of Al Qaeda.

Keith M. Urbahn, a spokesman for Mr. Rumsfeld, said the defense secretary supported letting the public know if intelligence agencies believed there was a greater threat, and pointed to a variety of chilling Qaeda warnings in those days, including one tape vowing that “the streets of America will run red with blood.”

“Given those facts,” Mr. Urbahn said, “it would seem reasonable for senior administration officials to discuss the threat level. Indeed, it would have been irresponsible had that discussion not taken place.”

Mr. Urbahn said “the storyline advanced by his publisher seemingly to sell copies of the book is nonsense.”

Mr. Ashcroft could not be reached for comment. But Mark Corallo, who was his spokesman at the Justice Department, dismissed Mr. Ridge’s account. “Didn’t happen,” he said. “Now would be a good time for Mr. Ridge to use his emergency duct tape.”

Frances Fragos Townsend, who was Mr. Bush’s homeland security adviser, said that “there was a fulsome debate” about the threat level but that “the politics of it were not ever a factor.”

Mr. Ridge’s book, called “The Test of Our Times” and due out Sept. 1 from Thomas Dunne Books, is the latest by a Bush adviser to disclose internal disagreements and establish distance from an unpopular administration. Mr. Ridge complains that he was never invited to National Security Council meetings, that Mr. Rumsfeld would rarely meet with him and that the White House pressured him to include a justification for the Iraq war in a speech.

He also writes that he lobbied unsuccessfully before Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to replace Michael D. Brown as head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and that the White House killed his proposal to open a homeland security regional office in New Orleans.

The most sensational assertion was the pre-election debate in 2004 about the threat level, first reported by U.S. News & World Report. Mr. Ridge writes that the bin Laden tape alone did not justify a change in the nation’s security posture but describes “a vigorous, some might say dramatic, discussion” on Oct. 30 to do so.

“There was absolutely no support for that position within our department. None,” he writes. “I wondered, ‘Is this about security or politics?’ Post-election analysis demonstrated a significant increase in the president’s approval rating in the days after the raising of the threat level.”

Mr. Ridge provides no evidence that politics motivated the discussion. Until now, he has denied politics played a role in threat levels. Asked by Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times if politics ever influenced decisions on threat warnings, he volunteered to take a lie-detector test. “Wire me up,” Mr. Ridge said, according to Mr. Lichtblau’s book, “Bush’s Law.” “Not a chance. Politics played no part.”

Papers Show Bush Aides’ Role in Firings of Prosecutors

August 12, 2009

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON — Thousands of pages of once-secret congressional testimony and e-mail messages released on Tuesday showed that Karl Rove and other senior aides in the Bush White House played an earlier and more active role than previously known in the 2006 firings of a number of federal prosecutors.

Early discussions at the White House in the spring of 2005 were focused on unhappiness with David C. Iglesias, a United States attorney in New Mexico who was later among eight prosecutors who were fired in a purge that created a political firestorm for the White House. A top aide to Mr. Rove wrote in an internal e-mail message in June 2005, a year and a half before Mr. Iglesias was fired, that Republicans in New Mexico were “really angry” over what they saw as the prosecutor’s inaction in pursuing voter fraud charges against Democrats in the state in tight elections.”

“Iglesias has done nothing,” the Rove aide, Scott Jennings, wrote to another White House staff member. ”We are getting killed out there,” he added, urging that the White House “move forward with getting rid of the NM USATTY.”

White House aides to former President George W. Bush have long maintained that the White House played only a limited role in the firings of Mr. Iglesias and the seven other United States attorneys and that the Justice Department took the lead in the review that led to their dismissals. Mr. Rove and Harriet E. Miers, the former White House counsel, played down their roles in congressional testimony last month as part of an agreement to resolve a years-long dispute with Congressional Democrats.

Transcripts of their testimony — including many instances in which the two aides said they could not remember important details of the debate over the United States attorneys — were among the materials released Tuesday by the House Judiciary Committee.

A lawyer for Mr. Rove could not be reached immediately for comment.

The e-mail messages, in particular, raise questions about the Bush White House’s assertion that it played only a limited role in the firings. A federal prosecutor is continuing to investigate accusations that officials may have acted criminally in the firings or in their testimony to Congress about the incident, which led to the resignation of former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and many of his top aides at the Justice Department.

Representative John Conyers Jr., the Michigan Democrat who leads the Judiciary Committee and has led the push to examine the Bush White House’s role in the firings, said the e-mail messages and testimony contradicted major claims by Bush aides.

“This basic truth can no longer be denied: Karl Rove and his cohorts at the Bush White House were the driving force behind several of these firings, which were done for improper reasons,” Mr. Conyers said. “Under the Bush regime, honest and well-performing U.S. attorneys were fired for petty patronage, political horse trading and, in the most egregious case of political abuse of the U.S. attorney corps — that of U.S. Attorney Iglesias — because he refused to use his office to help Republicans win elections.”

Spreading Freedom across the globe...one prison at a time

May 17, 2008

U.S. Planning Big New Prison in Afghanistan

By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Until now, the Bush administration had signaled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan. It had planned to transfer a large majority of the prisoners to Afghan custody, in an American-financed, high-security prison outside Kabul to be guarded by Afghan soldiers.

But American officials now concede that the new Afghan-run prison cannot absorb all the Afghans now detained by the United States, much less the waves of new prisoners from the escalating fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

The proposal for a new American prison at Bagram underscores the daunting scope and persistence of the United States military’s detention problem, at a time when Bush administration officials continue to say they want to close down the facility at Guantánamo Bay.

Military officials have long been aware of serious problems with the existing detention center in Afghanistan, the Bagram Theater Internment Facility. After the prison was set up in early 2002, it became a primary site for screening prisoners captured in the fighting. Harsh interrogation methods and sleep deprivation were used widely, and two Afghan detainees died there in December 2002, after being repeatedly struck by American soldiers.

Conditions and treatment have improved markedly since then, but hundreds of Afghans and other men are still held in wire-mesh pens surrounded by coils of razor wire. There are only minimal areas for the prisoners to exercise, and kitchen, shower and bathroom space is also inadequate.

Faced with that, American officials said they wanted to replace the Bagram prison, a converted aircraft hangar that still holds some of the decrepit aircraft-repair machinery left by the Soviet troops who occupied the country in the 1980s. In its place the United States will build what officials described as a more modern and humane detention center that would usually accommodate about 600 detainees — or as many as 1,100 in a surge — and cost more than $60 million.

“Our existing theater internment facility is deteriorating,” said Sandra L. Hodgkinson, the senior Pentagon official for detention policy, in a telephone interview. “It was renovated to do a temporary mission. There is a sense that this is the right time to build a new facility.”

American officials also acknowledged that there are serious health risks to detainees and American military personnel who work at the Bagram prison, because of their exposure to heavy metals from the aircraft-repair machinery and asbestos.

“It’s just not suitable,” another Pentagon official said. “At some point, you have to say, ‘That’s it. This place was not made to keep people there indefinitely.’ ”

That point came about six months ago. It became clear to Pentagon officials that the original plan of releasing some Afghan prisoners outright and transferring other detainees to Afghan custody would not come close to emptying the existing detention center.

Although a special Afghan court has been established to prosecute detainees formerly held at Bagram and Guantánamo, American officials have been hesitant to turn over those prisoners they consider most dangerous. In late February the head of detainee operations in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone, traveled to Bagram to assess conditions there.

In Iraq, General Stone has encouraged prison officials to build ties to tribal leaders, families and communities, said a Congressional official who has been briefed on the general’s work. As a result, American officials are giving Iraqi detainees job training and engaging them in religious discussions to help prepare them to re-enter Iraqi society.

About 8,000 detainees have been released in Iraq since last September. Fewer than 1 percent of them have been returned to the prison, said Lt. Cmdr. K. C. Marshall, General Stone’s spokesman.

The new detention center at Bagram will incorporate some of the lessons learned by the United States in Iraq. Classrooms will be built for vocational training and religious discussion, and there will be more space for recreation and family visits, officials said. After years of entreaties by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the United States recently began to allow relatives to speak with prisoners at Bagram through video hookups.

“The driving factor behind this is to ensure that in all instances we are giving the highest standards of treatment and care,” said Ms. Hodgkinson, who has briefed Senate and House officials on the construction plans.

The Pentagon is planning to use $60 million in emergency construction funds this fiscal year to build a complex of 6 to 10 semi-permanent structures resembling Quonset huts, each the size of a football field, a Defense Department official said. The structures will have more natural light, and each will have its own recreation area. There will be a half-dozen other buildings for administration, medical care and other purposes, the official said.

The new Bagram compound is expected to be built away from the existing center of operations on the base, on the other side of a long airfield from the headquarters building that now sits almost directly adjacent to the detention center, one military official said.

It will have its own perimeter security wall, and its own perimeter security guards, a change that will increase the number of soldiers required to operate the detention center.

The military plans to request $24 million in fiscal year 2009 and $7.4 million in fiscal year 2010 to pay for educational programs, job training and other parts of what American officials call a reintegration plan. After that, the Pentagon plans to pay about $7 million a year in training and operational costs.

There has been mixed support for the project on Capitol Hill. Two prominent Senate Democrats, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and Tim Johnson of South Dakota, have been briefed on the new American-run prison, and have praised the decision to make conditions there more humane.

But the senators, in a May 15 letter to the deputy defense secretary, Gordon England, demanded that the Pentagon explain its long-term plans for detention in Afghanistan and consult the Afghan government on the project.

The population at Bagram began to swell after administration officials halted the flow of prisoners to Guantánamo in September 2004, a cutoff that largely remains in effect. At the same time, the population of detainees at Bagram also began to rise with the resurgence of the Taliban.

Military personnel who know both Bagram and Guantánamo describe the Afghan site, 40 miles north of Kabul, as far more spartan. Bagram prisoners have fewer privileges, less ability to contest their detention and no access to lawyers.

Some detainees have been held without charge for more than five years, officials said. As of April, about 10 juveniles were being held at Bagram, according to a recent American report to a United Nations committee.

Bush’s Veto of Bill on C.I.A. Tactics Affirms His Legacy

War criminal!


March 9, 2008

By STEVEN LEE MYERS

WASHINGTON — President Bush on Saturday further cemented his legacy of fighting for strong executive powers, using his veto to shut down a Congressional effort to limit the Central Intelligence Agency’s latitude to subject terrorism suspects to harsh interrogation techniques.

Mr. Bush vetoed a bill that would have explicitly prohibited the agency from using interrogation methods like waterboarding, a technique in which restrained prisoners are threatened with drowning and that has been the subject of intense criticism at home and abroad. Many such techniques are prohibited by the military and law enforcement agencies.

The veto deepens his battle with increasingly assertive Democrats in Congress over issues at the heart of his legacy. As his presidency winds down, he has made it clear he does not intend to bend in this or other confrontations on issues from the war in Iraq to contempt charges against his chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, and former counsel, Harriet E. Miers.

Mr. Bush announced the veto in the usual format of his weekly radio address, which is distributed to stations across the country each Saturday. He unflinchingly defended an interrogation program that has prompted critics to accuse him not only of authorizing torture previously but also of refusing to ban it in the future. “Because the danger remains, we need to ensure our intelligence officials have all the tools they need to stop the terrorists,” he said.

Mr. Bush’s veto — the ninth of his presidency, but the eighth in the past 10 months with Democrats in control of Congress — underscored his determination to preserve many of the executive prerogatives his administration has claimed in the name of fighting terrorism, and to enshrine them into law.

Mr. Bush is fighting with Congress over the expansion of powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and over the depth of the American security commitments to Iraq once the United Nations mandate for international forces there expires at the end of the year.

The administration has also moved ahead with the first military tribunals of those detained at Guantánamo Bay, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, despite calls to try them in civilian courts.

All are issues that turn on presidential powers. And as he has through most of his presidency, he built his case on the threat of terrorism.

“The fact that we have not been attacked over the past six and a half years is not a matter of chance,” Mr. Bush said in his radio remarks, echoing comments he made Thursday at a ceremony marking the fifth anniversary of the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. “We have no higher responsibility than stopping terrorist attacks,” he added. “And this is no time for Congress to abandon practices that have a proven track record of keeping America safe.”

The bill Mr. Bush vetoed would have limited all American interrogators to techniques allowed in the Army field manual on interrogation, which prohibits physical force against prisoners.

The debate has left the C.I.A. at odds with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies, whose officials have testified that harsh interrogation methods are either unnecessary or counterproductive. The agency’s director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, issued a statement to employees after Mr. Bush’s veto defending the program as legal, saying that the Army field manual did not “exhaust the universe of lawful interrogation techniques.”

Democrats, who supported the legislation as part of a larger bill that authorized a vast array of intelligence programs, criticized the veto sharply, but they do not have the votes to override it.

“This president had the chance to end the torture debate for good,” one of its sponsors, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, said in a statement on Friday when it became clear that Mr. Bush intended to carry out his veto threat. “Yet, he chose instead to leave the door open to use torture in the future. The United States is not well served by this.”

The Senate’s majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said Mr. Bush disregarded the advice of military commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, who argued that the military’s interrogation techniques were effective and that the use of any others could create risks for any future American prisoners of war.

“He has rejected the Army field manual’s recognition that such horrific tactics elicit unreliable information, put U.S. troops at risk and undermine our counterinsurgency efforts,” Mr. Reid said in a statement. Democrats vowed to raise the matter again.

Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has been an outspoken opponent of torture, often referring to his own experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. In this case he supported the administration’s position, arguing as Mr. Bush did Saturday that the legislation would have limited the C.I.A.’s ability to gather intelligence.

Mr. Bush said the agency should not be bound by rules written for soldiers in combat, as opposed to highly trained experts dealing with hardened terrorists. The bill’s supporters countered that it would have banned only a handful of techniques whose effectiveness was in dispute in any case.

The administration has also said that waterboarding is no longer in use, though officials acknowledged last month that it had been used in three instances before the middle of 2003, including against Mr. Mohammed. Officials have left vague the question of whether it could be authorized again.

Mr. Bush said, as he had previously, that information from the C.I.A.’s interrogations had averted terrorist attacks, including plots to attack a Marine camp in Djibouti; the American Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan; Library Tower in Los Angeles; and passenger planes from Britain. He maintained that the techniques involved — the exact nature of which remained classified — were “safe and lawful.”

“Were it not for this program, our intelligence community believes that Al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland,” he said.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, disputed that assertion on Saturday. “As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I have heard nothing to suggest that information obtained from enhanced interrogation techniques has prevented an imminent terrorist attack,” he said in a statement.

The handling of detainees since 2001 has dogged the administration politically, but Mr. Bush and his aides have barely conceded any ground to critics, even in the face of legal challenges, as happened with the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay or with federal wiretapping conducted without warrants.

At the core of the administration’s position is a conviction that the executive branch must have unfettered freedom when it comes to prosecuting war.

Stephen Hess, a presidential scholar at the Brookings Institution, said Mr. Bush’s actions were consistent with his efforts to expand executive power and to protect the results of those efforts. Some, he said, could easily be undone — with a Democratic president signing a bill like the one he vetoed Saturday, for example — but the more Mr. Bush accomplished now, the more difficult that would be. “Every administration is concerned with protecting the power of the presidency,” he said. “This president has done that with a lot more vigor.”

Representative Bill Delahunt, a Democrat from Massachusetts, has been holding hearings on the administration’s negotiations with Iraq over the legal status of American troops in Iraq beyond Mr. Bush’s presidency. He said the administration had rebuffed demands to bring any agreement to Congress for approval, and had largely succeeded.

“They’re excellent at manipulating the arguments so that if Congress should assert itself, members expose themselves to charges of being soft, not tough enough on terrorism,” he said. “My view is history is going to judge us all.”

Mark Mazzetti contributed reporting.

Fiscal Conservative? an oxymoron

A LOOK AT SPENDING DURING THE BUSH PRESIDENCY

This shows the amount of spending and the size of the deficit during President Bush's two terms in office, how the president proposes to allocate the federal budget in his last year in office and the administration's track record in estimating the federal deficit from fiscal year 2002 through fiscal year 2007. The president's spending request to Congress is the first step in a lengthy budget process. Fiscal year 2009 begins Oct. 1, 2008. Bush's proposed 2009 spending: Total $3.1 trillion Discretionary spending $1.2 trillion Defense and Homeland Security: $730 billion Discretionary domestic programs: $482 billion Mandatory spending $1.6 trillion Social Security: $644 billion Medicare $408 billion Medicaid and SCHIP $224 billion Other $360 billion Net interest: $260 billion Federal budgets, deficits during the Bush years 2002 Spending: $2.01 trillion Deficit: $157.8 billion 2003 Spending: $2.16T Deficit: $377.6B 2004 Spending: $2.29T Deficit: $412.7B 2005 Spending: $2.47T Deficit: $318.3B 2006 Spending: $2.66T Deficit: $248.2B 2007 Spending: $2.73T Deficit: $162B 2008 (estimated) Spending: $2.93T Deficit: $410B 2009 (estimated) Spending: $3.11T Deficit: $407.4B Comparing deficit estimates Estimated deficits in Bush's original budget, compared with what the actual deficits turned out to be: (in billions) 2002 Estimated deficit or surplus: $231.2 Actual deficit: -$157.8 2003 Estimated deficit or surplus: -$80.2 Actual deficit: -$377.6 2004 Estimated deficit or surplus: -$307.4 Actual deficit: -$412.7 2005 Estimated deficit or surplus: -$363.6 Actual deficit: -$318.3 2006 Estimated deficit or surplus: -$390.1 Actual deficit: -$248.2 2007 Estimated deficit or surplus: -$354.2 Actual deficit: -$162.0

8 Years of Bush Deficits

$400 billion deficit to greet Bush's successor

By Richard Wolf, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — President Bush's proposed $3.1 trillion budget may be dead on arrival in Congress, but the impact of that political deadlock will make life difficult for the man or woman who succeeds him.

The next president will inherit a deficit of about $400 billion, and maybe more. Unless the economy rebounds and revenue pours in, deficits will push the cumulative federal debt past $12 trillion in the next five years.

DEFENSE: Bush seeks $515B to spend on military

AT A GLANCE: Proposals for education, taxes, health, security and more

VIDEO: Bush releases $3.1 trillion budget

He or she will need to spend far more in Iraq and Afghanistan than Bush proposed, because he included only $70 billion — designed to last until Jan. 20, when he leaves office. White House budget director Jim Nussle said Monday that even the cost of drawing down forces is "surprisingly high."

He or she will face the expiration of Bush's tax cuts, passed in 2001 and 2003. While the leading candidates opposed them, allowing any to expire after 2010 will feel like a tax increase and has all its political risks.

He or she will be closer to the projected fiscal crises facing Medicare and Social Security, which lack the tax flow to pay for benefits promised to baby boomers. Bush's call for $208 billion in entitlement savings over five years has no chance in this election-year Congress.

"Congress needs to know that every year they delay, the problem gets harder," Nussle said. "Every year they delay, it becomes closer to the time when this unfunded obligation is actually going to collapse on the country."

CONGRESS: Dems ready for a fight

But delay they will, as they have done every year since 1997, the last time a president and Congress came together to slash the deficit. Helped by a surging economy, the balanced budget measure led to surpluses from 1998 through 2001. Then came a recession, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and hurricanes that devastated the Gulf Coast.

The $407 billion deficit that Bush predicts will greet his successor could be even larger. "Once again, the president has tried to conceal the true fiscal impact of his budget by leaving out large costs," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D.

The president's budget:

• Counts on a freeze in most domestic spending — an unrealistic proposal for a Democratic-led Congress facing re-election. Proposals such as eliminating the popular COPS street-patrol program or trimming energy assistance for low-income families have little chance of passage.

• Cuts nearly $20 billion in grants to state and local governments for programs other than Medicaid, according to the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Members of Congress always come to the defense of their states, particularly when about half of them are projecting budget gaps.

• Counts on imposing the alternative minimum tax on millions of additional taxpayers in future years — something Congress is sure to avoid, at considerable cost. The AMT increases taxes on people with large deductions but has been adjusted every year to prevent being imposed on the middle class. "That is as certain as anything can be in politics," said Stan Collender, a budget expert at Qorvis Communications.

• Relies on a $178 billion reduction in Medicare's projected growth over the next five years, nearly three times the size of his rejected proposal last year. Congress won't go along — yet. Budget experts agree the day of reckoning will come.

"In the long run, the most important part of the budget is the president's challenge to Congress to finally address the unsustainable long-term costs of entitlements," said Brian Riedl of the conservative Heritage Foundation. "The longer lawmakers wait to enact the necessary reforms, the more painful those reforms will be."

All of those policies allow the president to claim that the budget will reach surplus in 2012, lawmakers said. "To think that anyone has the audacity to suggest that the deficit will be gone in five years under the president's plan is almost laughable," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., chairman of the House Budget Committee, said a more likely scenario is a deficit that remains in the $200 billion range in 2012. "Far from proposing a plan to fix the budget, the Bush administration proposes policies that worsen it and, with little compunction, leaves the consequences for the next administration and future generations to correct," he said.

Iran threat was phony....duh.

Last Monday, Pentagon officials issued disturbing information to journalists in Washington about a provocative Iranian threat against U.S. ships in the Gulf. The information made big news, reported by all the major U.S. and international newspapers and television networks. The story was front-page headlines just as President Bush was departing for a 10-day tour of the Middle East, where one of his top priorities would be convincing Arab states to help the Bush administration confront Iran.

According to U.S. officials, who initially provided some of the information off-the-record and not for attribution to an identifiable spokesperson, five Iranian speedboats approached three U.S. navy vessels in the Strait of Hormuz and acted aggressively. Senior U.S. military officials as well as Bush himself variously called Iran's behavior reckless, provocative and dangerous. But the detail that spiced up the story and really grabbed the headlines was at first provided off-the-record to reporters. Officials said that as the speedboats maneuvered, a warning was issued by ship-to-ship radio that the U.S. ships would explode momentarily. "I am coming at you, and you will explode in a few minutes," is the quote the NY Times used, provided by an anonymous American official. A similar version made it into the first paragraph of the Washington Post's account. Soon afterwards, the Pentagon released a video of the incident along with the verbal threat. The Pentagon was effectively accusing Iran of planning, carrying out or at least feigning suicide attacks on U.S. ships, reminiscent of the Al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. The Post's Robin Wright wrote that "the Pentagon had consistently given the impression that the [radio] threat was linked to the Iranian boats."

Now, the Navy Times newspaper is casting serious doubt on the claim that it was the Iranians who issued the kamikaze warning. It seems that the threat might have been uttered by a local heckler known in Gulf shipping lanes as "Filipino Monkey," who's been famous in the region for 25 years for interrupting Gulf radio communications with insults and epithets. The Navy Times article, by Andrew Scutro and David Brown, quoted several current and former Navy seamen saying the verbal threat may well have been a prank. "It's been a joke out there for years," said a civilian seaman quoted by paper.

Along with other news media over the last few days, Navy Times quotes Navy brass effectively back peddling from the version put out by the Pentagon last week. "We don’t know for sure where they came from,” said Commander Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for 5th Fleet in Bahrain, according to Navy Times. "It could have been a shore station." Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead told the paper: "Based on my experience operating in that part of the world, where there is a lot of maritime activity, trying to discern [who is speaking on the radio channel] is very hard to do."

There may be a serious problem here. Has the Bush administration's demonization of Iran so pervaded the U.S. government that the judgement of vital decision-makers is becoming dangerously clouded? So when a possible practical joker issues a threat to a warship, you have a Strangelovian military chain of command from Bahrain to Washington racing to insist that the crazy, murderous mullahs in Tehran are at it again. By the Pentagon's own account, one of the warships very nearly took out at least one of the Iranian vessels but the order to fire was prevented at the last minute when the speedboats turned away. It goes without saying that an armed clash like that between two long-time adversaries could have ignited a much larger confrontation. Bush recently warned that Iran's nuclear ambitions have raised the specter of World War III and he has not ruled out a U.S. military strike on Iran to degrade its uranium-enrichment facility.

In due course, I hope that we establish who issued the verbal threat to blow up the U.S. ships. Was it "Filipino Monkey"? An imitator? If the Pentagon had better proof that it was an Iranian, we would have seen it by now. Incidentally, the Iranians always denied making the threat, and accused the U.S. of hyping a routine ship-to-ship interaction in international waters into a fabricated confrontation. “This is an ordinary occurrence, which happens every now and then for both sides,” Iranian Foreign Minister spokesman Mohammed Ali Hosseini said immediately afterwards.

But I'm more interested in knowing if there was any monkey business involved in how the Pentagon originally spun the sensational kamikaze angle to the press and the global public. How seriously did the officers on the three ships take the suicide-attack threat? Were they certain that it had been issued by the Iranians? Did they consider or believe that it could have come from a prankster? How carefully did the Pentagon analyze the verbal threat once it was relayed back to Washington? Were officials there completely convinced that the threat came from Iran? Or did they have doubts yet went ahead anyway and indicated to reporters that Iran did it? Were officers on the scene and Pentagon officials in Washington aware that pranksters are prevalent on the Gulf radio networks? Did they factor that into their risk assessment and into their decision to point a quick finger at Iran?

If "Filipino Monkey" or somebody of that ilk turns out to be the culprit, it means that the Pentagon either can't tell the difference between a prank and a threat, or that it's too busy confronting Iran to bother trying to do so. Either way, it's another reason to worry.

FEMA Aide Loses New Job Over Fake News Conference

By ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Oct. 29 — A fake news conference at the Federal Emergency Management Agency has produced, along with outrage and ridicule, its first personnel casualty.

John P. Philbin, until last week the agency’s public relations chief, was supposed to start work Monday as the new director of public affairs for the nation’s top intelligence official, Mike McConnell.

But he learned instead that he would not.

“We do not normally comment on personnel matters,” said a statement issued for Mr. McConnell, the director of national intelligence. “However, we can confirm that Mr. Philbin is not, nor is he scheduled to be, the director of public affairs.”

Last Tuesday, two days before Mr. Philbin left the FEMA job, the agency’s deputy administrator held a televised news conference about the California fires where members of the agency’s staff, pretending to be reporters, asked him a series of easy questions.

No one has suggested that anybody at the agency set out to create a bogus event. But officials gave reporters only 15 minutes’ notice to show up at agency headquarters and then set up a telephone line that allowed them to listen in, but not ask questions.

With no reporters in the room — only television camera crews — FEMA’s public affairs department decided to go ahead with the event anyway. The agency’s own staff played the role of the press corps, posing unusually respectful questions for the deputy administrator, Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson Jr., retired. “Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?” one asked.

In an interview Monday, Mr. Philbin said there had been no intention to deceive the public, just a desire to get information out quickly.

In retrospect, he said, when he realized that no reporters were in the room and it was the agency’s staff that was asking questions, he should have called off the news conference.

“I should have jumped up regardless of how awkward it would had been and said, ‘Wait a minute, time out,’” he said. “My mistake.”

The agency’s administrator, R. David Paulison, who was in California at the time, has come to the defense of Admiral Johnson, a retired Coast Guard officer, saying he was “put in a position” by mistakes of the public affairs staff that have unfairly raised questions about his credibility.

In a memo to FEMA employees Monday, Mr. Paulison said of M. Philbin, “The failure to properly schedule, or to cancel a press conference that had no press in attendance, or capability to ask questions telephonically, represented egregious decision making by the director of external affairs and his staff.”

From now on, Mr. Paulison said, reporters will always get adequate advance notice of news conferences.

“Finally, under no circumstances will anyone other than media be allowed to ask questions at press events,” Mr. Paulison’s statement said.

So far, it looks as if no others will lose their jobs over the incident, but the public affairs office is being reshuffled. As of Monday, Russ Knocke, the press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA’s parent, has been temporarily transferred to the agency to supervise the press operation.

The development has been enormously embarrassing for the agency, which is still struggling to rebuild its reputation after its universally criticized response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Collecting of Details on Travelers Documented

U.S. Effort More Extensive Than Previously Known

By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 22, 2007; A01

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security's effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department's Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

But new details about the information being retained suggest that the government is monitoring the personal habits of travelers more closely than it has previously acknowledged. The details were learned when a group of activists requested copies of official records on their own travel. Those records included a description of a book on marijuana that one of them carried and small flashlights bearing the symbol of a marijuana leaf.

The Automated Targeting System has been used to screen passengers since the mid-1990s, but the collection of data for it has been greatly expanded and automated since 2002, according to former DHS officials.

Officials yesterday defended the retention of highly personal data on travelers not involved in or linked to any violations of the law. But civil liberties advocates have alleged that the type of information preserved by the department raises alarms about the government's ability to intrude into the lives of ordinary people. The millions of travelers whose records are kept by the government are generally unaware of what their records say, and the government has not created an effective mechanism for reviewing the data and correcting any errors, activists said.

The activists alleged that the data collection effort, as carried out now, violates the Privacy Act, which bars the gathering of data related to Americans' exercise of their First Amendment rights, such as their choice of reading material or persons with whom to associate. They also expressed concern that such personal data could one day be used to impede their right to travel.

"The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society," said John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in San Francisco whose records were requested by the Identity Project, an ad-hoc group of privacy advocates in California and Alaska. The government, he said, "may be doing it with the best or worst of intentions. . . . But the job of building a surveillance database and populating it with information about us is happening largely without our awareness and without our consent."

Gilmore's file, which he provided to The Washington Post, included a note from a Customs and Border Patrol officer that he carried the marijuana-related book "Drugs and Your Rights." "My first reaction was I kind of expected it," Gilmore said. "My second reaction was, that's illegal."

DHS officials said this week that the government is not interested in passengers' reading habits, that the program is transparent, and that it affords redress for travelers who are inappropriately stymied. "I flatly reject the premise that the department is interested in what travelers are reading," DHS spokesman Russ Knocke said. "We are completely uninterested in the latest Tom Clancy novel that the traveler may be reading."

But, Knocke said, "if there is some indication based upon the behavior or an item in the traveler's possession that leads the inspection officer to conclude there could be a possible violation of the law, it is the front-line officer's duty to further scrutinize the traveler." Once that happens, Knocke said, "it is not uncommon for the officer to document interactions with a traveler that merited additional scrutiny."

He said that he is not familiar with the file that mentions Gilmore's book about drug rights, but that generally "front-line officers have a duty to enforce all laws within our authority, for example, the counter-narcotics mission." Officers making a decision to admit someone at a port of entry have a duty to apply extra scrutiny if there is some indication of a violation of the law, he said.

The retention of information about Gilmore's book was first disclosed this week in Wired News. Details of how the ATS works were disclosed in a Federal Register notice last November. Although the screening has been in effect for more than a decade, data for the system in recent years have been collected by the government from more border points, and also provided by airlines -- under U.S. government mandates -- through direct electronic links that did not previously exist.

The DHS database generally includes "passenger name record" (PNR) information, as well as notes taken during secondary screenings of travelers. PNR data -- often provided to airlines and other companies when reservations are made -- routinely include names, addresses and credit-card information, as well as telephone and e-mail contact details, itineraries, hotel and rental car reservations, and even the type of bed requested in a hotel.

The records the Identity Project obtained confirmed that the government is receiving data directly from commercial reservation systems, such as Galileo and Sabre, but also showed that the data, in some cases, are more detailed than the information to which the airlines have access.

Ann Harrison, the communications director for a technology firm in Silicon Valley who was among those who obtained their personal files and provided them to The Post, said she was taken aback to see that her dossier contained data on her race and on a European flight that did not begin or end in the United States or connect to a U.S.-bound flight.

"It was surprising that they were gathering so much information without my knowledge on my travel activities, and it was distressing to me that this information was being gathered in violation of the law," she said.

James P. Harrison, director of the Identity Project and Ann Harrison's brother, obtained government records that contained another sister's phone number in Tokyo as an emergency contact. "So my sister's phone number ends up being in a government database," he said. "This is a lot more than just saying who you are, your date of birth."

Edward Hasbrouck, a civil liberties activist who was a travel agent for more than 15 years, said that his file contained coding that reflected his plan to fly with another individual. In fact, Hasbrouck wound up not flying with that person, but the record, which can be linked to the other passenger's name, remained in the system. "The Automated Targeting System," Hasbrouck alleged, "is the largest system of government dossiers of individual Americans' personal activities that the government has ever created."

He said that travel records are among the most potentially invasive of records because they can suggest links: They show who a traveler sat next to, where they stayed, when they left. "It's that lifetime log of everywhere you go that can be correlated with other people's movements that's most dangerous," he said. "If you sat next to someone once, that's a coincidence. If you sat next to them twice, that's a relationship."

Stewart Verdery, former first assistant secretary for policy and planning at DHS, said the data collected for ATS should be considered "an investigative tool, just the way we do with law enforcement, who take records of things for future purposes when they need to figure out where people came from, what they were carrying and who they are associated with. That type of information is extremely valuable when you're trying to thread together a plot or you're trying to clean up after an attack."

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff in August 2006 said that "if we learned anything from Sept. 11, 2001, it is that we need to be better at connecting the dots of terrorist-related information. After Sept. 11, we used credit-card and telephone records to identify those linked with the hijackers. But wouldn't it be better to identify such connections before a hijacker boards a plane?" Chertoff said that comparing PNR data with intelligence on terrorists lets the government "identify unknown threats for additional screening" and helps avoid "inconvenient screening of low-risk travelers."

Knocke, the DHS spokesman, added that the program is not used to determine "guilt by association." He said the DHS has created a program called DHS Trip to provide redress for travelers who faced screening problems at ports of entry.

But DHS Trip does not allow a traveler to challenge an agency decision in court, said David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued the DHS over information concerning the policy underlying the ATS. Because the system is exempted from certain Privacy Act requirements, including the right to "contest the content of the record," a traveler has no ability to correct erroneous information, Sobel said.

Zakariya Reed, a Toledo firefighter, said in an interview that he has been detained at least seven times at the Michigan border since fall 2006. Twice, he said, he was questioned by border officials about "politically charged" opinion pieces he had published in his local newspaper. The essays were critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East, he said. Once, during a secondary interview, he said, "they had them printed out on the table in front of me."

Democrats Scrambling to Expand Eavesdropping

August 1, 2007

By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON, July 31 — Under pressure from President Bush, Democratic leaders in Congress are scrambling to pass legislation this week to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers.

Democratic leaders have expressed a new willingness to work with the White House to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it easier for the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on some purely foreign telephone calls and e-mail. Such a step now requires court approval.

It would be the first change in the law since the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants became public in December 2005.

In the past few days, Mr. Bush and Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, have publicly called on Congress to make the change before its August recess, which could begin this weekend. Democrats appear to be worried that if they block such legislation, the White House will depict them as being weak on terrorism.

“We hope our Republican counterparts will work together with us to fix the problem, rather than try again to gain partisan political advantage at the expense of our national security,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said in a statement Monday night.

Some civil liberties groups oppose the proposed changes, expressing concern that there might be far-reaching consequences.

“Congress needs to take its time before it implements another piece of antiterrorism legislation it will regret, like the Patriot Act,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “The Bush administration clearly has abused the FISA powers it already has and clearly wants to go back to the good old days of warrantless wiretapping and domestic spying. Congress must stop this bill in its tracks.”

The administration says that digital technology and the globalization of the telecommunications industry have created a legal quandary for the intelligence community. Some purely international telephone calls are now routed through telephone switches inside the United States, which means such “transit traffic” can be subject to federal surveillance laws requiring search warrants for any government eavesdropping.

Under the program of wiretapping without warrants, which began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, the N.S.A. eavesdropped on the transit traffic without seeking court approval. But in January, the administration placed the program back under the FISA law, which meant warrants were required for surveillance of the transit traffic.

In the Senate, talks were under way on Tuesday on proposed legislation among members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as Mr. Reid and the Senate leadership, Congressional aides said. Similar talks are under way in the House.

Mr. McConnell sent Congressional leaders a new legislative plan last Friday, one that was more limited than an earlier administration plan.

The White House has told Democratic lawmakers that it will accept a narrow bill now but will come back later for broader changes, including legal immunity for telecommunications companies involved in the wiretapping program.

Mr. McConnell met with Congressional leaders of both parties on Tuesday to try to reach a compromise, a spokesman for him said.

Representative Heather Wilson, Republican of New Mexico and a member of the House Intelligence Committee, said, “Admiral McConnell has made the case that this change is needed and that it is a serious problem. This is too serious for political games.”

One obstacle to a deal this week is a disagreement between Democrats and the White House over how to audit the wiretapping of the foreign-to-foreign calls going through switches in the United States.

The Democrats have proposed that the eavesdropping be reviewed by the secret FISA court to make sure that it has not ensnared any Americans.

The administration has proposed that the attorney general perform the review, but Democrats are unwilling to give that kind of authority to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, who is under fire for what some lawmakers describe as his misleading testimony about the dismissals of federal prosecutors and the wiretapping program.

Mr. Gonzalez has insisted that a 2004 dispute between the White House and Justice Department officials that erupted in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft related to other intelligence activities. On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the dispute centered on the data mining elements of the N.S.A.’s program, rather than on the eavesdropping, leaving open the possibility that Mr. Gonzalez had been legalistic in his testimony, but had technically not lied.

In a letter Tuesday to Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who is the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. McConnell seemed to confirm the Times account though the letter did not mention Mr. Gonzalez or his testimony.

The letter said that “shortly after 9/11, the president authorized the National Security Agency to undertake various intelligence activities designed to protect the United States from further terrorist attack. A number of these intelligence activities were authorized in one order.”

The letter adds that “one particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more, was publicly acknowledged by the president and described in December 2005, following an unauthorized disclosure.”

Mueller v Gonzales

WASHINGTON: The White House labored to explain Friday how apparently contradictory testimony from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller was not at odds.

Appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Gonzales repeatedly and emphatically said President George W. Bush's secret warrantless domestic spying program was not the subject of internal disagreement in 2004 within the Bush administration. Mueller, appearing Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee, said it was.

The apparent contradiction only compounded problems for Gonzales, who is losing support among members of both parties even as he retains Bush's.

The Justice Department chief has been on the political defensive, mostly over doubts about his credibility, since Congress began investigating seven months ago the dismissals of U.S. attorneys. In the process, questions have arisen about Gonzales' involvement in the surveillance program, designed to monitor the international communications of people in the United States with suspected ties to terrorists.

White House press secretary Tony Snow said Gonzales testified accurately that there was no internal dispute over the spying activities the administration launched in 2001 that have since been called the "terrorist surveillance program," or TSP.

"There has never been at any juncture along the line any disagreement about the propriety or legality of that program," he said.

Snow stressed that the program's "legal basis" was not at issue and repeatedly emphasized that his statements only applied to a program as "defined very narrowly and carefully."

Otherwise, he did little to dispel the mystery.

He acknowledged that other matters were a subject of controversy. Since they are classified, however, he said he could not speak about what they were or even whether they were in any way connected to the eavesdropping program. The eavesdropping was conducted without public knowledge until it was disclosed in the media in December 2005 and without any court approval until last January, when the program was put under the authority of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

"This is where you get into the fact that there is a possibility that there were broader discussions, and I'm not going to get into any of the context of those," Snow said. "There are many different things that involve the gathering or use of intelligence. Some of those may, in fact, have themselves been subjects of controversy."

The issue arose because former Deputy Attorney General James Comey told Congress that he, Mueller and former Attorney General John Ashcroft were among top Justice Department officials who believed the program was illegal and were prepared to resign over it.

Comey described a dramatic hospital bedside visit in March 2004 by then-White House Counsel Gonzales to Ashcroft that involved the dispute. Mueller also said this week that the hospital room confrontation concerned the terrorist surveillance program. Gonzales said it was not, as did Snow.

"I don't want to stand here as the judge to try to interpret for you what everybody means when they use that term, when they use 'terrorist surveillance program,' because it may have different significations to different people," Snow said. "I've told you the narrow construction that the attorney general has used."

When asked if both Mueller and Gonzales were telling the truth, Snow said, "Yes, I think so. ... I'm sure that both men were up there telling the truth and the whole truth as they understood it."

Gonzales testified previously that the dispute was over "operational capabilities" that remain classified.

During a secure briefing July 19 at the Capitol, Gonzales discussed the reasons behind the bedside visit, lawmakers told reporters immediately afterward. Democratic Rep. Sylvestre Reyes, who as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee is privy to classified details, said Gonzales explained the visit "very well in terms of why they had gone there."

But Reyes told The Associated Press on Friday that he found Gonzales' explanation "curious." Asked if he sees the distinction Gonzales made this week between the TSP and other unnamed activities, Reyes responded: "I don't see it."

Earlier Friday, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino accused Senate Democrats of waging a campaign of "constant attacks" aimed at bringing down Gonzales.

Democrats Urge Perjury Probe of Gonzales

Thursday July 26, 2007 5:46 PM

By LAURIE KELLMAN

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Senate Democrats called for a perjury investigation against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Thursday and subpoenaed top presidential aide Karl Rove in a deepening political and legal clash with the Bush administration.

``It has become apparent that the attorney general has provided at a minimum half-truths and misleading statements,'' four Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote in a letter to Solicitor General Paul Clement.

They dispatched the letter shortly before Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., announced the subpoena of Rove, the president's top political strategist, in remarks on the Senate floor.

``We have now reached a point where the accumulated evidence shows that political considerations factored into the unprecedented firing of at least nine United States Attorneys last year,'' said Leahy, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In response, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said, ``Every day congressional Democrats prove that they're more interested in headlines than doing the business Americans want them to do. And Americans are now taking notice that this Congress, under Democratic leadership, is failing to tackle important issues,'' he said.

Gonzales is at the center of the U.S. attorney controversy, but the call for a perjury probe involved alleged conflicts between testimony he gave the Judiciary Committee in two appearances, one last year and the other this week. The issue revolves around whether there was internal administration dissent over the president's warrantless wiretapping program.

As for the firing of the prosecutors, e-mails released by the Justice Department show Gonzales' aides conferred with Rove on the matter.

Leahy also said he was issuing a subpoena for J. Scott Jennings, a White House political aide.

``For over four months, I have exhausted every avenue seeking the voluntary cooperation of Karl Rove and J. Scott Jennings, but to no avail,'' the Vermont lawmaker said. ``They and the White House have stonewalled every request. Indeed, the White House is choosing to withhold documents and is instructing witnesses who are former officials to refuse to answer questions and provide relevant information and documents.''

CENSURE

Feingold to Introduce Resolutions Censuring President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Other Administration Officials

July 22, 2007

Washington, D.C. – U.S. Senator Russ Feingold announced today that he will introduce two censure resolutions condemning the President, Vice President and other administration officials for misconduct relating to the war in Iraq and for their repeated assaults on the rule of law. Feingold called the resolutions appropriate and necessary steps for Congress to rebuke an administration that is responsible for some of the worst misconduct and the worst abuses of the law in American history.

“Censure is about holding the administration accountable,” Feingold said. “Congress needs to formally condemn the President and members of the administration for misconduct before and during the Iraq war, and for undermining the rule of law at home. Censure is not a cure for the devastating toll this administration’s actions have taken on this country. But when future generations look back at the terrible misconduct of this administration, they need to see that a co-equal branch of government stood up and held to account those who violated the principles on which this nation was founded.”

Feingold will work with his colleagues, as well as seek input from his constituents and the American people, as he crafts the final language of the resolutions. The first resolution will condemn the President and others for misconduct relating to the war in Iraq including:

• Overstating the case that Saddam Hussein had WMD, particularly nuclear weapons, and falsely implying a relationship with al Qaeda and links to 9/11.
  


• Failing to plan for the civil conflict and humanitarian problems that the intelligence community predicted.
  


• Over-stretching the Army, Marine Corps and Guard with prolonged deployments.
  


• Justifying our military involvement in Iraq by repeatedly distorting the situation on the ground there.

The second resolution will focus on the administration’s attack on the rule of law with respect to, among other things:

• The illegal NSA warrantless wiretapping program.
  


• Extreme policies on torture, the Geneva Conventions, and detainees at Guantanamo.
  


• The refusal to recognize legitimate congressional oversight into the improper firings of U.S. Attorneys.

In March 2006, Feingold introduced a resolution censuring the President for authorizing and misleading Congress and the public about the illegal NSA warrantless wiretapping program. In January 2007, the administration finally brought its wiretapping program within the FISA statute.

“At my town hall meetings, online, and everywhere I go, I hear the American people demanding that the President and his administration be held accountable for their misconduct, both with regard to the disastrous war in Iraq and their flagrant abuse of the rule of law. Censure is a relatively modest response, but one that puts Congress on record condemning their actions, both for the American people today and for future generations,” Feingold said.

Feingold is encouraging people to email suggestions of what to include in the censure resolution. People can email Senator Feingold at Russell_Feingold@feingold.senate.gov or visit his webpage at http://feingold.senate.gov.

Bush to Congress...Get Bent

WASHINGTON, July 11 — President Bush has told his former White House counsel, Harriet E. Miers, not to even appear on Thursday before the House Judiciary Committee investigating the firings of United States attorneys, the committee chairman said today.

Susan Etheridge for The New York Times

Sara Taylor, President Bush's former political director, testifying in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today.

Representative John D. Conyers, the Michigan Democrat who heads the panel, said he was told in a letter dated Tuesday from Ms. Miers’s lawyer that she would not appear. Mr. Conyers said the lawyer was reacting to a letter from Fred F. Fielding, the current White House counsel, asserting that “Ms. Miers has absolute immunity from compelled Congressional testimony as to matters occurring while she was a senior adviser to the president.”

Mr. Conyers said he was “extremely disappointed” at the White House’s stance, and he hoped that Ms. Miers might appear despite Mr. Bush’s assertion of executive privilege to keep her away from the hearing. It had been expected that Ms. Miers would appear and would decline to answer certain questions.

The White House’s defiance of a subpoena from Mr. Conyers’s panel intensified a showdown between the executive and legislative branches and could portend a court battle, unless a political compromise can be reached.

The disclosure that the White House wants to keep Ms. Miers from appearing came hours after the former White House political director declined to answer senators’ questions about the firings of the United States attorneys last year and expressed personal remorse about one dismissal.

The former political director, Sara M. Taylor, honored President Bush’s invocation of executive privilege, as she had been expected to do, in a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

“Who decided which U.S. attorneys to fire, and why were they fired?” Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, asked in an exchange with Ms. Taylor that was typical of the questioning.

When Ms. Taylor offered a somewhat rambling reply, saying she was doing her best to follow the president’s assertion of privilege and “determine what is a deliberation and what is a fact-based question,” Ms. Feinstein cut her off.

“You decline to answer,” the senator said.

“Yeah,” the witness replied.

United States attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president. But the dismissals of the eight federal prosecutors last year ignited a controversy because of accusations that at least some of them may have been let go because, in the eyes of some Bush administration loyalists, they were too aggressive in going after Republicans or not aggressive enough in pursuing Democrats.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the committee, said at the outset that the White House had declined to answer questions about the dismissals because it was “contemptuous of the Congress.”

Ms. Taylor, 32, expressed contrition when Ms. Feinstein brought up an e-mail message that Ms. Taylor sent in February to D. Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, in which Ms. Taylor said H. E. Cummins III was being removed as United States attorney in Arkansas because he was “lazy.”

“What led you to conclude that Mr. Cummins was lazy?” Ms. Feinstein asked.

“That was an unnecessary comment,” Ms. Taylor replied, “and I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Mr. Cummins. It was unkind, and it was unnecessary.” She added that she had heard that Mr. Cummins was lazy. “That may not be fair,” she went on, apologizing again for any embarrassment she had caused.

The dismissal of Mr. Cummins has been of considerable interest to senators, since he was replaced by J. Timothy Griffin, a former aide to Karl Rove, President Bush’s top political adviser. Ms. Taylor described Mr. Griffin as a lawyer of impeccable credentials and integrity.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the panel’s ranking Republican, pressed Ms. Taylor on whether, in fact, Mr. Cummins was forced out to make room for Mr. Griffin. The witness said she was not certain.

In any event, she said, the dismissal of Mr. Cummins was particularly unfortunate, she said, because he had been planning to leave his post anyhow. “Obviously, we’re sitting here today because this whole situation has been awkwardly handled,” she said.

Ms. Taylor said she had never discussed the firings with President Bush himself. “I know the president to be a good and decent man,” she said in her opening remarks. “I am privileged to have had the opportunity to serve him, and I admire his unflinching devotion to always do what he believes is right for the country.”

When Mr. Specter asked her if Mr. Rove or Ms. Miers had personally intervened in the replacement of Mr. Cummins, Ms. Taylor said, “I don’t specifically know. I don’t, I don’t know for sure if one or both or either did.”

Despite their occasional annoyance over questions that went unanswered, the senators seemed to sympathize with Ms. Taylor on a personal level. Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said he thought that “Karl Rove should be sitting at this table, not Sara Taylor.”

Committee members were exasperated, but not surprised, as Ms. Taylor honored Mr. Bush’s invocation of executive privilege. She pledged in a written statement to be silent about “White House consideration, deliberations, or communications, whether internal or external, relating to the possible dismissal or appointment of United States attorneys.” Those parameters were set forth in a letter to Ms. Taylor’s lawyer, W. Neil Eggleston, from the White House counsel, Mr. Fielding.

Ms. Taylor acknowledged in the statement that differences may emerge about what falls under Mr. Fielding’s parameters and that “this may be frustrating to you and me.”

In her statement, Ms. Taylor portrays herself as caught in the middle of a Constitutional clash between Congressional committees seeking answers in the attorney firings and the president, who is accusing them of interfering with his right to private counsel.

In her written testimony, Ms. Taylor said she would not take it upon herself to disobey the president’s request during today’s hearing but said she would defer to the courts if it came to that in the future.

“While I may be unable to answer certain questions today,” Ms. Taylor’s opening statement read, “I will answer those questions if the courts rule that this committee’s need for the information outweighs the president’s assertion of executive privilege.”

Bush Directs Ex-Aides Not to Testify About Firings

By James Rowley and Roger Runningen

July 9 (Bloomberg) -- President George W. Bush ordered two former aides not to answer questions from Congress about the firings of eight U.S. attorneys.

The White House conveyed the directive in letters to lawyers for former Counsel Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor, the ex-White House political director. Taylor is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee in two days. White House Counsel Fred Fielding, Miers's successor, also sent letters to House and Senate lawmakers leading the congressional inquiry informing them of Bush's decision.

``The president feels compelled to assert executive privilege with respect to the testimony sought,'' said Fielding's letter to the lawmakers. He said he was informing attorneys for the two former aides ``of his direction to Ms. Taylor and Mrs. Miers not to provide this testimony.''

Lawmakers in the Senate and the House of Representatives are trying to determine whether the Bush administration's firing of eight U.S. attorneys last year was carried out for improper political motives, such as to stymie probes of Republicans or prompt investigations of Democrats.

The letters were sent to Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate panel, and Michigan Democrat John Conyers, who heads the House Judiciary Committee, White House spokesman Tony Snow said.

Conyers said in a statement today he is ``extremely disappointed'' by Bush's decision. ``Contrary to what the White House may believe, it is the Congress and the courts that will decide whether an invocation of executive privilege is valid, not the White House unilaterally,'' he said.

Contempt Citations

Leahy has previously threatened to seek a congressional vote on contempt citations if the White House refused to comply with the requests for documents.

Should lawmakers seek to hold the Bush administration in contempt, it could move the dispute to the courts and spur a constitutional showdown between Bush and the Democratic-led Congress.

``I haven't heard anything from Mr. Fielding or anybody else at the White House that would justify a claim of executive privilege,'' Leahy said yesterday on CNN. He said Taylor ``sent something like 60,000 e-mails on the Republican National Committee account, not e-mails to the president, but political e- mails while she was there.''

In a July 7 letter to Leahy and Fielding, Taylor's lawyer, W. Neil Eggleston, said his client was caught in an ``unseemly tug of war'' between Congress and the president.

`Without Hesitation'

``Absent direction from the White House,'' Taylor, 32, would testify ``without hesitation'' about the firings, her lawyer wrote.

She faces ``two untenable choices,'' Eggleston wrote. ``She can follow the president's direction and face the possibility of a contempt sanction by the Senate'' or put herself ``at odds with the president'' by cooperating with the congressional inquiry, her lawyer wrote.

He urged the Senate to ``direct its sanction'' for any refusal to testify ``against the White House, not against a former staffer.''

George Manning, a partner in the Atlanta office of the Jones Day law firm who represents Miers, didn't immediately return a call seeking comment.

Fielding also informed the lawmakers of Bush's refusal to provide a detailed list of documents the president considers covered by his assertion of executive privilege. The two lawmakers had demanded the log of documents by today.

``This demand is unreasonable because it represents a substantial incursion into presidential prerogatives'' and ``would impose a burden of very significant proportions,'' Fielding wrote.

Bush has offered to let his aides be questioned behind closed doors without a transcript and with a promise that lawmakers wouldn't issue a subpoena for a follow-up. The congressional panels have rejected those conditions.

Ashcroft and the Night Visitors

By Dana MilbankWednesday, May 16, 2007;

As if Attorney General Alberto Gonzales didn't have enough trouble, now comes word that, before coming to the Justice Department, Gonzales preyed on the infirm.
In hair-raising testimony before a Senate committee yesterday, Jim Comey, the former No. 2 official at the Justice Department, described what might be called the Wednesday Night Massacre of March 10, 2004. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card staged a bedside ambush of Attorney General John Ashcroft while he lay in intensive care. Comey, serving as acting attorney general during Ashcroft's incapacitation, testified about how, on a tip from Ashcroft's wife, he intercepted the pair in Ashcroft's hospital room.
"The door opened and in walked Mr. Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Mr. Card," Comey told the spellbound senators. "They came over and stood by the bed." They wanted Ashcroft to sign off on an eavesdropping plan that Comey and others at the Justice Department had already called legally indefensible.
Ashcroft "lifted his head off the pillow and in very strong terms expressed his view of the matter" -- that Comey was right. "And as he laid back down, he said, 'But that doesn't matter, because I'm not the attorney general. There is the attorney general.' And he pointed to me."
Gonzales and Card "did not acknowledge me," Comey testified. "They turned and walked from the room."
The Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee stared. The lone Republican in attendance, Arlen Specter (Pa.), looked down. The 6-foot-8 Comey, slightly hunched in the witness chair, swallowed frequently and kept his hands in his lap as he spun a narrative worthy of Dashiell Hammett.
"I thought I just witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man," Comey told the quiet chamber. His voice grew thick and he cleared his throat as he explained how he prepared to resign. "I couldn't stay, if the administration was going to engage in conduct that the Department of Justice had said had no legal basis."
Comey had come before the committee to discuss Gonzales's botched firing of U.S. attorneys. Instead, under questioning from Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), he gave his account of Gonzales's dark-of-night attempt to emasculate the department he would soon lead. The testimony had all the more impact because it came the morning after Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty became the fourth senior official to resign in the prosecutor mess.
If Comey's testimony had the grip of mystery yesterday, Gonzales's defense had the feel of farce, as he heaped blame on McNulty for the mishandled firings. "The deputy attorney general is the direct supervisor of the United States attorneys," Gonzales volunteered at a National Press Club breakfast. He added: "I went back to the deputy attorney general and I asked Paul, 'Do you still stand by the recommendations?' And he said, 'Yes.' "
At the hearing, Specter offered a different view of McNulty's departure. "It's embarrassing for a professional to work for the Department of Justice today," he said, calling the resignation "evidence that the department really cannot function with the continued leadership or lack of leadership of Attorney General Gonzales."
Despite public pleas from a "lonely" Specter, the other Republicans on the committee didn't risk an appearance. Even the White House declined to counter Comey, who has a reputation for honesty. "You've got somebody who has splashy testimony on Capitol Hill -- good for him," presidential press secretary Tony Snow dodged.
In truth, nothing Snow could have said would have matched Comey's testimony. Comey recounted how, while driving home at 8 p.m. on that day in 2004, he got word that Mrs. Ashcroft had received a call -- possibly from President Bush himself -- to say Gonzales and Card were coming.
"I told my security detail that I needed to get to George Washington Hospital immediately. They turned on the emergency equipment and drove very quickly," Comey testified. "I got out of the car and ran up -- literally ran up the stairs with my security detail. . . . I raced to the hospital room, entered." The room was dark, and Ashcroft was "pretty bad off."
In Comey's account, he got FBI Director Robert Mueller to tell his agents guarding Ashcroft not to let Card and Gonzales evict Comey from the room. A few minutes after the bedside confrontation, Card called the hospital. He "demanded that I come to the White House immediately," Comey testified. "I responded that, after the conduct I had just witnessed, I would not meet with him without a witness present."
"He replied, 'What conduct? We were just there to wish him well.' " After Card demanded to know if Comey was "refusing to come to the White House," Comey, with the solicitor general, finally arrived at the West Wing at 11 p.m. His narrative covered the next two days, ending when Bush intervened and avoided a spate of resignations.
The senators had some trouble finding words for what they had heard. "This story makes me gulp," Schumer said.
Specter invoked the firing of the Watergate prosecutor. "It has some characteristics of the Saturday Night Massacre," he said. And the senator left little doubt about whom he blamed.
"Can you give us an example of an exercise of good judgment by Alberto Gonzales?" he asked.
This time, Comey had no narrative. "Let the record show a very long pause," Specter said.