The Ninth Circuit ruled that a person can challenge the inclusion of their name on the government's no fly list. Sounds pretty obvious that you should have that right, but that isn't the Bush Administration's position.

The Case is Ibrahim v Department of Homeland Security and it was decided by a two to one decision of the Ninth Circuit Court if Appeals.

Ms. Ibrahim was a Stanford student on a student visa from Malaysia, who also happens to be a Muslim. When she tried to fly home from San Francisco, she was blocked from boarding the flight, detained and handcuffed in front of her fourteen year old daughter, and taken to a police station. Two hours later she was released and she was permitted to fly home the following day after being subjected to "enhanced searches."

In 1989, the Wall Street Journal reported that Richard Perle and Douglas Feith had set up a lobbying company called International Advisors Inc [IAI] to lobby for "appropriation of U.S. military and economic assistance’ to Turkey.""  When news of the $600,000 per annum contract got too hot to handle, Perle and Feith folded IAI and helped establish the American Turkish Council (ATC) to accomplish the same goals, but with a more respectable veneer.

Now, nineteen years later, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Richard Perle is "exploring going into the oil business in Iraq and Kazakhstan" with a "consortium founded by Turkish company AK Group International... Potential backers include two Turkish companies as well as Kazakhstan."

Richard Perle issued a strange-sounding denial to the Wall Street Journal that he is involved with these latest oil projects, although he also issued a similarly "bizarre" denial to the 1989 WSJ article which reported on his consulting company IAI.

Last week, Scott Horton interviewed (audio) investigative journalist Joe Lauria. Lauria was one of the co-authors of the three-part (1, 2, 3) series on the case of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds for the UK's Sunday Times.

In the interview Lauria discusses the Sibel Edmonds case, the state of the US media, and the Military Industrial Complex in the context of his new book with presidential candidate Mike Gravel: "A Political Odyssey: The Rise of American Militarism and One Mans Fight to Stop It"

It's true: the FBI can listen in on your conversations through your cell phone–even when it’s turned off. This rather startling fact was first revealed in a mob trial two years ago.  The FBI had been trying to nail some cunning goodfellas who kept uncovering the bugs.  So the FBI resorted to the new technology in place since about 2002: it turned on the locator chip in their cell phones remotely and listened to their conversations–even when they weren’t talking on the phone.  

The most amazing thing about this new eavesdropping technology is not that it exists and is being used...

http://www.youtube.com/...
http://news.zdnet.com/...

...but rather that so few Americans seem to have heard about it. Other than Shepherd Smith’s 42 second story I can’t find anything on MSM cable.  I can’t pretend that I can accurately monitor the output of the American media with Google searches, but it does seem that the mainstream media have largely ignored the story of the most intrusive technology yet seen.  Why do you think that is?

Anyone who was paying attention knew it was going this way:

Federal investigators probing the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks recovered samples of human hair from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., but the strands did not match the lead suspect in the case, according to sources briefed on the probe.

FBI agents and U.S. Postal Service inspectors analyzed the data in an effort to place Fort Detrick, Md., scientist Bruce E. Ivins at the mailbox from which bacteria-laden letters were sent to Senate offices and media organizations, the sources said.

For all you scared, greedy, stupid, or cynical Representatives and Senators who voted for the FISA revisions last month, here’s a little something that got lost in the Friday Olympics-vs.-sex-scandal news dump. . . .

According to today's LA Times, Congressmen John Dingell and Bruce Stark are probing deeper into  security breaches at Defense Department BioWarfare laboratories following FBI allegations revealed after the recent suicide of Army anthrax / vaccine researcher Bruce Ivins. The FBI of Bush Administration Justice Department fame, has named Ivins as the Governments "Prime Suspect" in the heretofore unsolved anthrax attacks that were mailed in 2001 and claimed the lives of five people.

The Anthrax / Defense Department / Army BioWar Labs case has all the making of a Fitzmas Reunion. With quite possibly a very different result.

Analysis of Recent Developments in this Anthrax / "Ivins" case draws parallel lines to
Cheney's "outing" of Valerie Plame in the "CIA Leak Case",
the Colin Powell "Evidence" Case,
The George-Rudolf-Hess-Tenent "Slam Dunk" Case,  
The Case-for-War-in-Iraq-Case,
The Only-Case-There-is-Case.

But there is a Price..."National Security" is the ticket for Admission.

The most damaging evidence I've seen thus far linking Dr. Bruce Ivins to the anthrax mailings is his uncharacteristic spike in night work in the days leading up to both mailings. I've also seen a lot of mischaracterization of this time in both directions.

Let me make my position clear from the beginning. We don't have all the evidence we need to conclude that Ivins is the anthrax mailer, nor that he was part of a group that did this. The FBI released a great deal of information in its release of search warrant affidavits, and I think they had a case for probable cause there. But contrary to their assertions, I've not seen anything like enough evidence to overcome a reasonable doubt defense, not if I was in the jury box. And the work hours, while the strongest evidence the FBI has got, is still just not enough.

In fact, their own release of evidence shows that there's more to the story that they haven't revealed.

They picked a great day to dump this news. It will all but be buried as people rant about some guy and his sex life.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Friday that it had improperly obtained the phone records of reporters for The New York Times and The Washington Post in the newspapers’ Indonesia bureaus in 2004.

Robert S. Mueller III, director of the F.B.I., disclosed the episode in a phone call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, and apologized for it. He also spoke with Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post, to apologize.

How many people said the abuse of wiretaps would end up this way ? I know I commented about it. Now with FISA it may not be a issue any more since it's now legal.

A couple of days ago I posted a diary  examining the extremely thin connection the FBI established between Bruce Ivins and the Princeton N.J. mailbox where the anthrax letters were posted on two seperate dates.  The F.B.I. has established another rather tenuous connection between Ivins and another key peice of evidence; the envelopes used in the mailings.  And while this connection may be a little (very little, in IMHO) tighter than the Princeton nexus, it is still a stretch...

After reading Dr. Nass's excellent logical analysis of holes in the FBI case against Dr. Ivins, I kept thinking about how inconvenient it would be for Dr. Ivins to be working overtime at the Ft. Detrick lab in Frederick, MD, home of Barbara Fritchie (where her Union flag is on display, allegedly shot full of holes by marching rebels, whilst she defiantly held it below her window, daring them to "Shoot if you must this old gray head; but spare your country's flag.": a disputed legend also fraught with holes, such as the facts that the 95 year old was sick in bed that day & the Confederates never passed by her house!)

and then drive 7 hours round trip to mail the anthrax laced letters in a postal box in Princeton, NJ, home of Princeton University.

No matter how strong the evidence presented by the Justice Department -- and at first blush, it appears damning -- it is an ex parte presentation and will never be subject to the scrutiny and challenge of the other side.

Such evidence, even when seemingly overwhelming and conclusive, is the very sort of circumstantial argument that pegged Richard Jewell as the Atlanta bomber, that linked Oregon attorney Brandon Mayfield to the Madrid bombings, that fingered Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee as a spy, and that cast biodefense expert Steven Hatfill as the original anthrax suspect. In each of those investigations, the news media were largely complicit, conveying incriminating details of the government's case as if they were the gospel.

  The words are those of Ted Gup, a journalism professor at Case Western Reserve University and author of Nation of Secrets, and they appear today in a Washington Post op ed entitled The Anthrax Case: Solved(?) But Unresolved  I want to use the quoted words as an illustration of the broader issue of whether we can trust our government.

On Countdown on August 1st, I watched Keith Olbermann interview Gerald Posner, the investigative reporter working on the anthrax case.  This is how that interview concluded:

Olbermann: Do you see a scenario in which simply this government took advantage of this situation, whether or not... let’s assume for a moment that there’s no proactivity, that this was Dr. Ivins flipping out to whatever degree was required to do this, that the government simply took advantage of this to use it as a tool to build up a case to go to war in Iraq?

Posner:  I have absolutely no doubt about that.  From everything that I’ve done on my own investigation following up from 2001, I am now more convinced than ever that there were individuals inside the Bush administration and in the government who wanted the war in Iraq so badly that they decided if there was something that they could use to push it forward, they would. Anthrax fell into their lap. Even if he is a deranged solo killer, they used it in order to scare this country and say Iraq is somebody we have to go after, and we did.

But who were these individuals that wanted the war this badly?

Check. This. Out. Literally. I figure with some 150+ thousand users we can run down a few questions...

After Army BioWarfare and Vaccines Researcher Bruce Ivins' suicide, We've heard a vertible gush of motives offered via Bush's Justice Department as to "Prime Suspect" Ivins "guilt" in the Anthrax attacks of 2001. We've heard the guy was motivated by a desire to be "needed", that he had a troubled home life and that he may have had addiction problems, mental illness, etc. Well, THAT should narrow down the Adult Male Suspect pool to 30 or 40 Milliion guys. For all the bullshit the Administration, the Justice Department and the FBI is flinging on the wall, surely some of it will stick and our questions will be answered, no?

Funny, because you'd think Cheney and the Pentagon might take the lead on this , huh?? < Crickets >

I'd like some F@*#!^& Answers after reading two reports that ARE in the Public Domain, noted below.

It's hard to believe, but the case against Ivins, as far as being the "Anthrax Killer" just keeps getting worse.  And more embarrassing to the FBI.

Now it turns out that the FBI was offering Big Bucks, millions of dollars, for people to turn on Ivins and report incriminating stories about him.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims.

It gets worse ....

As it turns out, the Washington Post had interviewed Bruce Ivins' group therapy counselor, Jean Duley, in 1999. Except that in 1999, according to the Post's account this evening, she wasn't using the name Duley. She was Jean Wittman, a recovering drug user who attended a "clean and sober" bikers' convention at the Frederick County Fairgrounds in Maryland.

A frontpage diary (hat tip to JeremyA)with over four hundred comments is already posted today on the WSJ op-ed piece by Richard Spertzel explorint one aspect of the Anthrax case; the make-up of the anthrax spores, and whether Ivins could have made the granular "weaponized" type of material that was mailed to various news outlets and two democratic senators.  

But there is another aspect of this case that has always intrigued me, and that is the Princeton connection.  That part of the case broke yesterday, and it raises far more questions than it provides answers...

Glenn Greenwald beat me to today's update on the anthrax case, showing pretty conclusively that the FBI's case, which is being dribbled out slowly, just doesn't add up to much.  One thing I learned from Greenwald is that yesterday's revelation about Ivins' obsession with a sorority being the reason he mailed the letters near their house at Princeton, which already sounded ridiculous (they don't have sororities at the several dozen other campuses closer to his Frederick, MD home?), was also completely factually wrong.