One of the good things about going to school is that you learn things. In a course I am taking now, we had to read the book Terrorism: Informing the Public, which is a report of a conference held by the McCormick Tribune Foundation in early 2001. You can order the book for free from the Foundation, still, I think.

Anyway, there was a passage in the book I found pretty interesting, from a chapter entitled "Terrorism in a Free Society." The speaker is Kate Martin, a civil liberties lawyer, a former ACLU lawyer. She says this in her talk:

In 1994, for the first time, Congress authorized secret searches of Americans' homes and papers in the name of national security, so that if the FBI obtains what's called a FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant from the court on the grounds that you are suspected of being a foreign agent, it has the authority to enter your house, photograph your papers, duplicate your computer hard drive, and never let you know it's been there.

In other words, "sneak and peek" has existed since 1994, before President Bush held elected office (he was elected Texas governor in 1994, so he took office in 1995). The President that signed this legislation was President Clinton. And of course, John Kerry was serving in the Senate. So there should be a record. Searching Thomas, it seems that the "sneak and peek" provision under FISA was a separate bill proposed as part of improvements to counterintelligence measures. The whole of this bill was later incorporated into another bill on national competitiveness. This bill was passed in the Senate by a roll call vote, 59-40 (1 not voting). In the voting record, we find:

Interestingly, almost all of the Yea's are Democrats, and all but one Nay is a Republican. At any rate, Kerry voted for "sneak and peek" from it's first appearance in US law, and he voted for it in the Patriot Act. And now - now he is offended by it. He has a record, and he can run, but he can't hide from it.

So far in the debates, I think the questions have improved each time. Lehrer was just a partisan hack, with his "Senator Kerry, you've called President Bush a reckless baby-eating war criminal, could you elaborate on that for the next 2 minutes, please," and Gwen Ifill was somewhat better, with the old, "Hey, flip-flopping is good, isn't it Senator Edwards?" The citizens at the second Presidential debate were light years ahead of them. No ponytail guy Oprah question, they were real questions about stuff that wasn't the campaign, but issues. That's the problem with the Washington based reporters, I think - they focus on the campaign stuff, and it just elicits boilerplate. Nothing edifying in boilerplate. The citizen questions were on good topics, and were well worded - not much wiggly room in them. And they got good, cear, non-boilerplate answers, I thought, though certainyl the pre-prepared rhetoric was in evidence. For example, I thought the draft question was great - if it was intended to put the President on the defensive, it certainly didn't do that. The question about anti-American feelings may have been intended to give Kerry a platform to talk about how he would be better, but it provided the President an opportunity to talk straight about it.

Oh, I had a point, and I forgot to make it (as if that were somehow different than a lot of posts!). Basically, "regular folks" did a much better job at asking questions than the credentialled journalists. This is becoming a trend.

UPDATE: Tim Graham at NRO agrees.

Bush handled the debate much better this time.

The questions once again, were a disgrace.

BTW, I think that last question was; "What 2 mistakes have you made," not what 3 mistakes has Bush made. Terrible question.

And the question about the Patriot act was also very partisan.

I think Kerry's abortion answer will once again come back to bite him. It is a very curious thing to watch a Democrat straddle this issue. If you need proof that Conservatism is on the rise, there is one item of proof. Clinton was very pro-choice. Kerry has always enjoyed huge NARAL support while he was in the Senate, and he is backing off that stance as fast as he can.

The nod goes to Bush tonight.

Oh, his one liner about wanting to scowl again was very nicely done. If you want to see how someone gracefully acknowledges a screwup, that is how it is done.

Update

In the comments, Scott, asserts that polling data indicates that Bush lost. A quick trip over to Polling Report suggests a very partisan breakdown. Almost all Democrats thought Kerry won, and almost all Republicans thought Bush won. The results are easliy within a statistical tie. Most probably skewed by the distribution of party sample. Therefore, the intitial perception seems to be a tie.

It's 9:20. W is laying the smack down. Wish that guy had shown up at the last debate.

UPDATE: Already. Holy crikey. Maybe they got that Rove wire connection working this time.

9:24. BTW, I only have radio, no video. So I don't get the visuals. Dunno if that makes a difference. W shoulda just said he didn't fire or retire Shinseki right then, though.

9:26. Wow, the Iran question. Kerry is using this as an attack. W is calling Kerry naive and dangerous. That's good stuff. Holy crap, W repeated the Axis of Evil.

9:30. Thanks for the draft question, junior. Now let Kerry spin that. "We are not going to have a draft so long as I'm President." Kerry wants to be like Reagan. "Tell Tony Blair we're going alone!" Ouch.

9:35. No more terrorist attacks - good question. Either the folks in the audience are just that sharp, or Charlie Gibson is picking some really good questions. And this was the debate they said W would do the worst in. Strategery.

UPDATE: Next day. I wanted to blog the whole thing, but, I was working last night. The joys of supporting data centers. I did get to listen, kind of, to the rest, and while I didn't hear the detail, I thought the President was great. I got home and listened to some pundits, and on Fox Ceci Connolly said there were some visuals that didn't look good for the President, but I heard it on the radio.

Also, I saw some of the replay on C-SPAN and one big difference between the candidates is, as they say on Queer Eye, products. W may have some hairspray for TV, but what that mess is on Kerry's hair isn't playing well in the red states, I think.

I've said often that the biggest scandal that came out of the whole Niger-yellowcake thing is that on what was the single most important intelligence issue of the day, the CIA chose to send not a trained operative to seriously investigate, but that they sent the husband of an operative to go hang around the hotel pool. This is how Michael Ledeen put it:

Oh, I see. The vice president of the United States asks for information about the story. The CIA sends this lout to Niger. He hears from the prime minister of the place that the story is true, and reports as much to the CIA (while saying the opposite to the pressies). And the CIA never bothers to tell Cheney. Is this not a scandal? What have I missed?

So what's the deal with this - was the CIA that strapped for agents? Or maybe they were just not interested in Iraq WMD stories, as Ledeen recounts in that same article - "I'm sticking with it because I know — as Senator Roberts and the committee staff know, because I told them — that there are very credible reports of WMD sites, but the CIA chooses not to go look at them."

This comports with my experience speaking with someone who worked with ISG - that the CIA directed the removal of WMD information from ISG reports.

It's almost as if the CIA were working against the President. Which seems ridiculous at first, but it isn't all that extreme an idea. I got an email from Michael Ledeen saying that the CIA is doing just that, and he has written that, I think, in The Corner, but I can't find the link. Laurie Mylroie, a well-known terrorism expert, wrote a book on that very topic, Bush vs. the Beltway : How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror. Even Bob Novak, no neo-con, not necessarily a friend of the administration and certainly on record against the war in Iraq, has written a column where even he has noticed something amiss:

In the final days of World War II, the German Abwehr conspired against Hitler. Soviet intelligence was a state within a state. More recently, Pakistani intelligence was plotting with Muslim terrorists. The CIA is a long way from those extremes, but it is supposed to be a resource -- not a critic -- for the president.

So Loftus suggested last night that the CNS News documents were part of that interagency sniping. That seems likely, give this part of the CNS News report:

The senior government official and source of the Iraqi intelligence memos, explained that the reason the documents have not been made public before now is that the government has "thousands and thousands of documents waiting to be translated.

"It is unlikely they even know this exists," the source added.

The government official also explained that the motivation for leaking the documents, "is strictly national security and helping with the war on terrorism by focusing this country's attention on facts and away from political posturing.

It is as if the contents of the Duelfer report were known, and the impact of it, and that these were sent out pre-emptively. If these are true documents, then the Duelfer report (and remember, I think Duelfer is a good guy in this) - which is CIA product - can't be true. And that would make the CIA look pretty bad.

Whatever else about the various reports that have come out - Senate Intelligence Report, 9/11 Commission Report, one thing is clear - our intelligence system is broken, and badly. It's bad enough we have to fight an external threat.

The lady who cuts my hair is an interesting woman. She is Iranian, immigrated before the Revolution, but still has a lot of family back there. She also travels there frequently. Additionally, she was, until the last debate a Kerry supporter.

She told me that all of her relatives, and friends in Iran are huge Bush supporters. This surprised me. But having gotten to know her, I don't think she would make something like that up.

What was most interesting was her take on the debate. She thought that Kery won, but that he was extremely slippery. She doesn't trust him to make a decision. Bush, she doesn't really like, but she trusts to make a decision and stick to it. Cheney, she likes as well. She closely watched the VP debate.

Edwards really teed her off with the crack about Americans taking 90% of the casualties. As she put it, "what about the Iraqis?"

Don't know what this means in the big scheme of things, it was just interesting to me.

Last night he mentioned the CNS News documents. Batchelor notes that the information in those documents shouldn't be surprising because we've found others like it. Loftus suggests what is really going on - more on that later.

I love Mary Matalin, despite the fact that she evidently has relations with James Carville. But evidently, she just came back from a Trekker convention and didn't have time to change out of her Vulcan costume.

The CNS documents do seem a bit too good to be true. But they aren't something totally new and surprising. Deroy Murdock in the National Review Online in June had a piece on the Atta/al-Ani connection, and quoted a document that a Senate staffer had given him:

"The following is a summary of the main activities and opportunities of the working party, following the orders issued by Excellency on 4/1/1992" (January 4, 1992). So reads a March 28, 1992 letter from "Republic Presidency" to "Mr. M.A.A.S." designated "Top Secret" by the Iraqi Intelligence Service. The 12-page, Arabic-language document — translated into English and shared by a U.S. Senate staff member — describes Baathist espionage from Tunisia to Kuwait.

Under "Saudi front/M4," the letter says, "Contacted and continued relations with (4) of our old sources which still live in Saudi Arabia, and they are...d- Saudi Osama Bin Ladin/ he is well known Saudi businessmen [sic] founder of Saudi opposition in Afghanistan, had connection with Syrian division." Bin Laden, in fact, left Saudi Arabia for the Sudan in April 1991, but this need not have precluded "continued relations" between Baghdad and bin Laden.

The Telegraph had a report from April 2003 of finding a document in the rubble of the Mukhabarat in Baghdad:

One paper is marked "Top Secret and Urgent". It is signed "MDA", a codename believed to be the director of one of the intelligence sections within the Mukhabarat, and dated February 19, 1998. It refers to the planned trip from Sudan by bin Laden's unnamed envoy and refers to the arrangements for his visit.

A letter with this document says the envoy is a trusted confidant of bin Laden. It adds: "According to the above, we suggest permission to call the Khartoum station [Iraq's intelligence office in Sudan] to facilitate the travel arrangements for the above-mentioned person to Iraq. And that our body carry all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden."

More from the documents here.

Going into the Metro station yesterday, some dude in a "Bush Sucks" T-shirt is coming out, and he's yelling "Sieg Heil! Heil Bush! Heil Bush! Heil Bush!"

Umm, okay. Dude, if you're reading this, two words: Sanka brand.

Homes of Republicans vandalized.

Hey, stupids, we have guns!

I am suspicious of the documents that CNS News has. Because they are just too convenient. And of course, the CBS fiasco just heightens that awareness - the other side will question the timing, and then the authenticity of them. Not to mention that all WMD items have a 24 hour hold time.

Imagine the result, though, if a rigorous process of authentication - they will be no doubt highly scrutinized before the first word of them hits the MSM - shows them to be true documents, the whole of the Kerry candidacy goes down in flames.

I've said it before, I'll say it again - putting yourself in a position where success for America means failure for you is not a good place to be. Especially if you are running for President of the US.

A stack of documents shows up purporting to prove a story you've been promoting for years. The sourcing is kind of anonymous, and the papers are exactly what you need to prove your case. So, do you run with it, hoping they are real? And if you are called on it, then what? Make up stories about where they came from? Do you call your critics names? Do you threaten your "experts" with lawsuits?

All good to keep in mind with this over at CNSNews:

Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com, show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders.

Yeah, bloggers are pipsqueaks, no good at this business, right? Read this:

To protect against the Iraqi intelligence documents being altered or misrepresented elsewhere on the Internet, CNSNews.com has decided to publish only the first of the 42 pages in Arabic, along with the English translation. Portions of some of the other memos in translated form are also being published to accompany this report. Credentialed journalists and counter-terrorism experts seeking to view the 42 pages of Arabic documents or to challenge their authenticity may make arrangements to do so at CNSNews.com headquarters in Alexandria, Va.

Ladies and gents, that is the way to do it. Had CBS done this, things would have been different.

And if these are real....

Well, John Loftus (see below) start picking up some cred points in my book.

Right now on Drudge, some deal about how Kerry may have had paper or notecards at the debate, in violation of rules.

What would have been on that paper? Some clues from the debate, I think. I noticed this right away while watching, but forgot about it, until seeing this supposed cheat sheet thing.

First this is something Lehrer said at the beginning:

The umbrella topic is foreign policy and homeland security, but the specific subjects were chosen by me, the questions were composed by me, the candidates have not been told what they are, nor has anyone else.

In the answer to the first question, Kerry concluded with the following:

All of these, and especially homeland security, which we'll talk about a little bit later.

Now, Lehrer had just said that homeland security was a topic, so maybe Kerry was simply keying on that. But he sort of nodded at Lehrer when he said that, as if he knew what the questions would be. And, in fact, a more specific question about Homeland Security was on the way:

LEHRER: We'll come back to Iraq in a moment. But I want to come back to where I began, on homeland security. This is a two-minute new question, Senator Kerry.

As president, what would you do, specifically, in addition to or differently to increase the homeland security of the United States than what President Bush is doing?

Kerry had a setpiece answer for this, full of detailed criticisms of the President. Now, it could be that this is all just good debate preparation. What would you do differently from the President is a pretty obvious question, so it would be smart to have an answer prepared.

But the possibility of a cheatsheet made me think of what Kerry said, again, and that nod to Jim Lehrer, and of course the collusion between CBS News and the Kerry campaign over the National Guard memos.

Time has an article about the plot that was broken up in London, related to the financial district plots here. Evidently, it was a dirty bomb plot.

Reports on the British investigation, now circulating among U.S. law-enforcement agencies, assert that the group was trying to construct a crude radiological dirty bomb. The arrests (which followed a yearlong surveillance operation, code-named Operation Spangle) turned up a cache of household smoke detectors, which the British suspect the group wanted to cannibalize for their minute quantities of americium-241, a man-made radioactive chemical.

Smoke detectors, sounds paranoid, right? Read this and scroll down to Example 3: Americium.