Recently in Domestic Security Category

Capital Games and Gains' Andrew Samwick links to a Wall Street Journal story by Holman Jenkins examining what the recent foiled terrorist attack says about Al Qaeda and our nation's response:

Considering the ease with which a suicide bomber could stroll into a Starbucks in any American city and kill a dozen people, you have to wonder at al Qaeda's obsession with targeting commercial airliners.

If 19 terrorists (the number who carried out the 9/11 attacks) each blew himself up at one- or two-week intervals in a shopping mall or a movie theater, America likely would become a seething nation of paranoid shut-ins. That it hasn't happened tells you something: Al Qaeda doesn't have a ready supply of competent suicide bombers, domestic or imported, to carry off serious attacks. That it continues to pour what little resources it can command into lame airliner attacks, like shoe bomber Richard Reid's failed attempt to blow himself up in 2001 and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's failed attempt on Christmas Day, tells you something else:

Al Qaeda may be incapacitated, but its leaders aren't dumb. So what if their hapless messengers only embarrass themselves and burn their legs? Al Qaeda can still count on the sizeable damage we will inflict on ourselves through an airport security apparatus that specializes in expensive political displays of barn-door closing that seldom have any real security payoff.

The few people who actually remember the fear created by the anthrax attacks or the D.C.-area sniper cannot doubt the potential effectiveness of the strategy Holman outlines.

I think the conclusions Holman reaches about Al Qaeda, our national battle against it, and our domestic security situation, have significant merit. His article is worth reading.

Our friends the British have begun an investigation this week into their involvement into the Iraq War, one to which we should pay more close attention.

Glenn Greenwald, for example, reviews testimony yesterday that should remind us of how important the anthrax attacks which followed the September 11, 2001 attacks were to creating the climate of fear in the United States that fed into the Iraq invasion and so many other horrible policies. Yes, those same anthrax attacks so quickly deleted from our collective memory.

Yesterday, the former U.K. Ambassador to the U.S., Sir Christopher Meyer, testified as to the importance of the anthrax attacks, as Greenwald summarizes:

Meyer said attitudes towards Iraq were influenced to an extent not appreciated by him at the time by the anthrax scare in the US soon after 9/11. US senators and others were sent anthrax spores in the post, a crime that led to the death of five people, prompting policymakers to claim links to Saddam Hussein. . . .

On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in "no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation" . . . It seemed that Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, argued for retaliation to include Iraq, Meyer said. . . .

But the anthrax scare had "steamed up" policy makers in Bush's administration and helped swing attitudes against Saddam, who the administration believed had been the last person to use anthrax. (emphasis by Greenwald)

As Greenwald then reminds us, the anthrax attacks remain "unresolved and uninvestigated." How the hell is that acceptable given how important they were? He reviews, with links, all of the sources that have serious questions for about the FBI's conclusion to this case.

I simply do not understand how we have left the anthrax attacks unresolved and wiped from our collective memory. They directly impacted more people than the September 11 attacks. They created more fear. (To this day, how many of us get training on the proper way to open mail?)

Some things deserve more of our attention. That's why I encourage you to go read Greenwald's post and restart your memory by clicking on his post's links.

I agree with Digby, and thank Richard Clarke for pointing out that the trauma of September 11, 2001, is no excuse for bad decisions made by government leaders. As Clarke writes:

Yet listening to Cheney and Rice, it seems that they want to be excused for the measures they authorized after the attacks on the grounds that 9/11 was traumatic. "If you were there in a position of authority and watched Americans drop out of eighty-story buildings because these murderous tyrants went after innocent people," Rice said in her recent comments, "then you were determined to do anything that you could that was legal to prevent that from happening again."

I have little sympathy for this argument. Yes, we went for days with little sleep, and we all assumed that more attacks were coming. But the decisions that Bush officials made in the following months and years -- on Iraq, on detentions, on interrogations, on wiretapping -- were not appropriate. Careful analysis could have replaced the impulse to break all the rules, even more so because the Sept. 11 attacks, though horrifying, should not have surprised senior officials. Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.

Thus, when Bush's inner circle first really came to grips with the threat of terrorism, they did so in a state of shock -- a bad state in which to develop a coherent response. Fearful of new attacks, they authorized the most extreme measures available, without assessing whether they were really a good idea.

I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.

There should be no excusing this. Nor forgiving it. And as the evidence suggests, more investigations are in order.

We must come to terms with what happened if we hope to restore our national honor.

The power governors enjoy to appoint replacements to vacant U.S. Senate seats has come under fire in recent weeks thanks to the appointment spectacles in Illinois and New York (among others).

Rachel Maddow, Nate Silver, the Washington Post editorial page, and the great Senator Russ Feingold (among others) are arguing that now is the time to reform this 17th Amendment provision and mandate special elections.

I understand the view. What has happened the past month in New York and Illinois has been awful to watch. Silver has pointed out that appointed Senators have trouble winning re-election.

But I am thankful that our Constitution is hard to amend -- because in our rush to good government, I fear all of these special-election proponents are not placing enough consideration on one of the good elements of the appointment rule: the fact that in the event of a catastrophic event that were to kill most members of the United States Senate, that body could be reconstituted rather quickly.

One of the (many) failures of the Bush Administration lies in its refusal to ensure our government could continue to function after a catastrophic event.

After all of the talk in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks about what could have happened in Flight 93 had made it to Washington, D.C., and flown into the U.S. Capitol, our nation has done nothing to prepare for such remote, but important, possibilities.

After September 11, many people began to look at what could be done to recreate our government the event that many of our Senators and Representatives were killed -- like in a terrorist attack. The Brookings Institution even hosted a Continuity of Government Commission.

Alas, little has changed.

If Flight 93 had reached Washignton, D.C., at a time when Congress was in session, the results of that day would have been even more catastrophic. Would we still have a functioning government? How long would it have taken for the House of Representatives, which requires special elections for replacements, to constitute a quorum?

If we are going to reopen the question about the appointment of replacement Senators, we should only do so as part of a larger conversation about what can be done to ensure our government is able to return as quickly as possible under a worst-case scenario. Matthew Yglesias has an interesting idea that special elections are required unless a threshold number of Senators are killed in a terrorist attack or other disaster.

It should be an outrage that our nation has failed to deal with this issue more than seven years after the vulnerability was exposed. If we were to do something now, the Senate appointment dramas we have just witnessed would have some benefit to our Republic.

Andrew Sullivan asks a vital question of the main-stream media:

A simple question: now that the chief Gitmo prosecutor has said that Qahtani was tortured, will the New York Times, the AP, Newsweek and the Washington Post stop using words and euphemisms that are not true? Or do we have to endure more linguistic cowardice from the MSM?

Alas, I'm going to bet on cowardice.

Steve Benen highlights a Washington Post story explaining why many of us are worried about the government having the ability to order surveillance of people with little oversight. Abuse of the tactic is almost assured.

The Maryland State Police surveillance of advocacy groups was far more extensive than previously acknowledged, with records showing that troopers monitored -- and labeled as terrorists -- activists devoted to such wide-ranging causes as promoting human rights and establishing bike lanes.

Intelligence officers created a voluminous file on Norfolk-based People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, calling the group a "security threat" because of concerns that members would disrupt the circus. Angry consumers fighting a 72 percent electricity rate increase in 2006 were targeted. The DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq war, was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation.

One of the possible "crimes" in the file police opened on Amnesty International, a world-renowned human rights group: "civil rights."

This is an intolerable act. We should not accept it. The Founding Generation would be shocked to learn we are submitting to these actions with little complaint.

Despite the oft-repeated Republican lieclaim that the United States has not faced a terrorist attack since September 11, 2001, people in the reality-based community remember the anthrax attacks which followed in the weeks after.

The New York Times' Scott Shane has a story about Dr. Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in July just before the FBI was to file formal charges against him in the anthrax case, and the sorry state of the investigation into the anthrax attacks.

Shane opens his story with a helpful anecdote to remind us of the huge impact the anthrax attacks had on our nation:

Outside, on that morning of Nov. 14, 2001, five people were dead or dying, a dozen more were sick and fearful thousands were flooding emergency rooms. The postal system was crippled; senators and Supreme Court justices had fled contaminated offices. And the Federal Bureau of Investigation was struggling with a microbe for a murder weapon and a crime scene that stretched from New York to Florida.

Before we get back to the troubled investigation, remember that paragraph the next time someone tells you that President Bush kept us safe because there were no terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001 (even if you were willing to overlook the fact that they happened nearly 19 percent into Bush's first term of office).

Grave doubts remain about the FBI's handling of the case. While Ivins is suspected now, more than seven years later this case is not solved. And all of this is happening after the mistakes made with the focus on Dr. Steven Hatfill, who won a financial settlement from the government.

So, the stakes, as Shane explains, are high.

Still, doubts persist. The case will be reviewed this year by the National Academy of Sciences and by Congress. If the F.B.I. is wrong, then a troubled man was hounded to death and the anthrax perpetrator is still at large, as many of Dr. Ivins's colleagues at Fort Detrick believe. When institute scientists began their own review of the evidence, nervous Army officials ordered the inquiry dropped.

One of the major doubts, discussed here earlier, is that it seems implausible that Ivins could have mailed the anthrax letters from Princeton, N.J. As Shane writes:

The agents were building what they thought was a prosecutable case against Dr. Ivins, but gaping holes remained. No evidence placed him in Princeton, N.J., where the letters were mailed. No receipt showed that he had bought the same type of envelopes. No security camera had caught him photocopying the notes.

Nor, in his e-mail messages and conversations with confidants, could agents find any hint of a confession. One colleague who knew Dr. Ivins well told them, "If Bruce had done this, he never would have been able to keep quiet about it."

See this post to learn more about why people are seriously questioning the FBI's current case.

I am glad the National Academy of Sciences is going to review the case. In August, I called for an independent inquiry into the FBI's handling of the Anthrax investigation. As much as I like the NAS, I think a stronger inquiry is still needed.

James Fallows rightly vents about the post-September 11 security regime that does little to make us actually safer:

As Jeff Goldberg is the latest (and most amusing) to demonstrate, security routines like those of the TSA gum up travel and cost countless billions in salary, wasted time, and general hassle (not to mention the thrown-away bottled water and cigarette lighters!) without adding much that would thwart a serious terrorist.

My heart sank when I read recently about a truly idiotic last-minute Bush Administration step to lock in security theater. This is converting the "Air Defense Identification Zone," which had been "temporarily" in effect in the skies of the Mid-Atlantic since soon after 9/11, to a permanent federal regulation. (Splenetic background from me, here and here. News of the conversion to permanent status here.) Sigh. And commercial airports in the U.S. still ring with the ignored-by-all announcements warning that the "threat level" is "elevated."

If you haven't spent much time out of the country recently, it may be hard to convey how fraidy-cat all this ritual makes the US seem. Yes, the 9/11 attacks were a disaster of historic proportions. Yes, some group, somewhere, will probably manage to attack the United States again. But many, many societies around the world face an ongoing risk of attack. Life is dangerous. Over the long run, we judge societies by how they bear up under such threats (and, of course, what they do to contain them.) Compared with the Brits, the Indians, not to mention the Israelis and I bet also the Iraqis, our security theater makes us look like chickens. Reclaiming Gary Cooper, not Chicken Little, as our national icon is part of what I argued here.

But given the way politics works, security theater is a ratchet. If a public figure dares suggest reducing some for-show "protective" measure, then when an attack occurs -- as it will, someday, in a country this large and open -- the politician will be in trouble. So it's easy to add extra "safeguards"; almost impossible to remove them.

Because feeling safe is more important than actually being safe.

I also strongly agree with Fallows' plea that the Department of Homeland Security be renamed into something that does not sound like it would be at home in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Soviet Union.

Murray Waas has an important exclusive:

Vice President Dick Cheney, according to a still-highly confidential FBI report, admitted to federal investigators that he rewrote talking points for the press in July 2003 that made it much more likely that the role of then-covert CIA-officer Valerie Plame in sending her husband on a CIA-sponsored mission to Africa would come to light.

Cheney conceded during his interview with federal investigators that in drawing attention to Plame's role in arranging her husband's Africa trip reporters might also unmask her role as CIA officer.

Cheney denied to the investigators, however, that he had done anything on purpose that would lead to the outing of Plame as a covert CIA operative. But the investigators came away from their interview with Cheney believing that he had not given them a plausible explanation as to how he could focus attention on Plame's role in arranging her husband's trip without her CIA status also possibly publicly exposed. At the time, Plame was a covert CIA officer involved in preventing Iran from obtaining weapons of mass destruction, and Cheney's office played a central role in exposing her and nullifying much of her work.

The Vice President may need a pardon.

This is an important story because people take reported anthrax attacks seriously, even as those who claim the United States has not been attacked since September 11 have suffered an outrageous case of historical amnesia:

There has not been a real anthrax attack in the United States since the 2001 anthrax mailings that killed five people, sickened 17 others and shut down Congress.

But Marc Keyser still worries about the state of the nation's emergency preparedness, as well as Osama bin Laden's plans to continue attacking the nation.

"This nation's got to deal with reality," Keyser said this week during an interview in his small Sacramento apartment.

Keyser, it should be noted, is the 66-year-old former teacher indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury for allegedly mailing out 120 letters nationwide containing packets of sugar marked "anthrax." The packets were accompanied by CD copies of his book, "Anthrax Shock and Awe Terror," which notes on the cover that "America has never been in such graver (sic) danger."

It is not the first time he has been accused of a hoax anthrax mailing, and he doesn't deny he did it.

"Nothing was meant to happen," said Keyser, who faces 10 counts of hoax mailings and three counts of mailing threatening communications. "It was a warning of the dangers we face."

Keyser, who is free on $25,000 bail, faces up to 70 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

Sometime before January 20, 2009, leading Republican Party leaders are going to rediscover their severe concern and outrage about Executive Branch abuses of power.

I cannot imagine why they would suddenly change their minds on this important issue.

And now we will see some of the fruits of the legislative branch's refusal to protect its prerogatives and tell the Bush-Cheney administration, "No." One of the most important checks on federal power--the prohibition against deploying the military in the United States--has been weakened, and the Bush Administration is going to take advantage. As Glenn Greenwald writes:

For more than 100 years -- since the end of the Civil War -- deployment of the U.S. military inside the U.S. has been prohibited under The Posse Comitatus Act (the only exceptions being that the National Guard and Coast Guard are exempted, and use of the military on an emergency ad hoc basis is permitted, such as what happened after Hurricane Katrina). Though there have been some erosions of this prohibition over the last several decades (most perniciously to allow the use of the military to work with law enforcement agencies in the "War on Drugs"), the bright line ban on using the U.S. military as a standing law enforcement force inside the U.S. has been more or less honored -- until now. And as the Army Times notes, once this particular brigade completes its one-year assignment, "expectations are that another, as yet unnamed, active-duty brigade will take over and that the mission will be a permanent one."

The first step may not seem like an important or dangerous one. Even Glenn Greenwald downplays some of the internet speculations about canceled elections and other dire warnings.

But this is a dangerous road upon which to travel. It would be helpful if the legislative branch of our government were to start defending the checks and balances at the heart of our federal Republic.

(Hat tip: Jen R.)

In catching up on the week, I must highlight Glenn Greenwald's continued outstanding analysis of the unanswered questions created by the reporting of the anthrax terrorist attack "investigation." For example, the FBI presented us with this huge error:

In the documents that the FBI disclosed two weeks ago, it itself defined the "window of opportunity" for mailing the September 18 postmarked letters as beginning on September 17 at 5:00 p.m. (after which letters dropped in that mailbox would have received a postmark of September 18, but before which they would be postmarked September 17). Thus, based on the FBI's own facts, it would be physically impossible for Ivins -- as the FBI claimed to the Post -- to have driven to New Jersey after taking administrative leave in the morning in order to mail the anthrax letters, since he returned that day to Maryland for a 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. meeting, and thus could not have dropped the letters in the mailbox after 5:00 p.m.

That seems like a pretty sloppy error -- and one wonders just how many times our friends in the main-stream media are going to let their reporters uncritically act as stenographers of the talking points they receive. As Greenwald notes:

And let's just spend a brief moment marveling at how mindless and uncritical the establishment media is in how they report on these matters. It was The Post's Carrie Johnson and Joby Warrick who first reported the FBI's leak on August 8 that Ivins had likely traveled to New Jersey after taking administrative leave in the morning, and they reported it without an iota of critical thought, and certainly didn't point out that the FBI's own timeline was impossible on its own terms. More amazingly, it was one of those same Post reporters -- Carrie Johnson -- who on Thursday printed the FBI's brand new and mutually exclusive theory -- that Ivins traveled to New Jersey at night, after work -- without even bothering to mention the most important fact: that it was a brand new theory that contradicted the one she mindlessly passed on from the FBI the week before.

The need for an independent investigation of the FBI's handling of the anthrax terrorism case gores more urgent by the day.

Here's another reminder that, despite the oft-repeated talking point, our nation has indeed been attacked since 9/11.

The Washington Post reports that the United States Department of Justice has agreed to pay $5.85 million to Dr. Steven Hatfill as a settlement to the lawsuit he filed after former Attorney General John Ashcroft named him a person on interest in the anthrax attacks that began on September 18, 2001.

The government admits no wrongdoing in the settlement. But, I have to agree with the following observation:

"I don't think anyone would believe the Department of Justice would . . . pay that kind of money unless they felt there was significant exposure at trial," said Brian A. Sun, a defense lawyer who represented nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee in a leak case.

While far too many reporters and Republicans reading their talking points today often suggest that we have not been attacked since 9/11, the Washington Post story reminds us just how seriously all of us took the anthrax attacks at the time.

The October 2001 anthrax mailings, sent to then-Sen. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), network television offices in New York and the company that owns National Enquirer, gripped the nation and disrupted correspondence. In addition to the two D.C. postal workers, a Florida photographer, a New York hospital worker and an elderly Connecticut woman died after being exposed to the powder.

Just as we have not captured Osama bin Laden, just has we have not finished the job in Afghanistan, just as terrorist attacks have risen dramatically around the world -- the Bush Administration has failed to solve these anthrax attacks.

And people wonder why I am not impressed by the Bush Administration's record on such issues.

Darn -- James Fallows mentions what would have been my entry in this contest to improve Homeland Security.

(People who look closely will note that the category for this post is not the icky "Homeland Security" but "Domestic Security.")