The Senate may have yielded to the White House command, and will not investigate the NSA wireless eavesdropping, but a federal judge and the House will not please the Bush administration.
The judge has given it 20 days to turn documents relative to the program, or explain the reasons why they can not be released.
The House seems fortified by the first results obtained after Congresswoman Heather Wilson, an Air Force veteran, demanded more information on the program. Unlike the Senate, where the chairman of the Intelligence Committtee has worked out a deal (a collaboration on adjusting the law and no public inquiry), the House will investigate. Now the Congresswoman will have to rally troops to win the next fight: the battle on the scope of the inquiry.

The NSA engages in warrantless eavesdropping, but the director of national intelligence, John Negroponte, engaged in a bit a selective hearing during the Q and A at Georgetown University.
He casually ignored the only question about the domestic surveillance program.
The softball, by a prospective intelligence candidate, was further buffered by the fact that it was introduced as a two-parts question. The intelligence boss helpfully oriented the young man for his future carreer, but did not breathe a word about the NSA program.

The latest group to oppose the Bush warrantless eavesdropping: The American Bar Association.
Its bipartisan experts group, some of them veterans of the Justice Department or the CIA, has unanimously concluded that the president exceeded his constitutional powers. They demand an congressional inquiry.
In the document attached to their letter to President Bush, they already formulate an obvious suggestion: if the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is inadequate to fight today's threat, don't ignore it - change it.
Respect the law? Sounds suspiciously like lawyers talk.

Who are the "worst of the worst", those 500 detainees kept in Guantanamo? Two of their lawyers, Mark and Joshua Denbeaux, aided by students of Seton University School of Law, have attempted to compile their profile, based on the official information provided about 517 of them.
Only 8% turned out to be Al Qaida fighters, by the Pentagon's own data. Only 5% have been captured by the United States forces. Most of them were delivered to the US by the Pakistani government, the Northern Alliance, or bounty hunters. 55% have not committed any hostile acts.
How were some of those "enemy combatants" spotted? Amongst the tell-tale signs cited: they stayed at guest houses, and/or they wore olive drab clothing, and/or they possessed a Kalashnikov. Or a Casio watch. Bad taste can be deadly.

The White House disqualifies the UN report on Guantanamo because its authors have not been at the US prison camp in Cuba. Or, more precisely, because they refused the guided tour that was offered to 3 out of the 5 international experts. They would not have been allowed to speak to the detainees during this perfunctory visit.
The draft report, leaked, concludes that some of the practices at the prison camp are acts amounting to torture. It mentions the new coercive feeding methods that have been used to break the most recent hunger strike. It establishes that several of the detainees rights are violated, including their right to a fair trial.
"Hearsay", says the administration, discounting the testimonies of prisoners that have been released, and of their lawyers. The only thing that would not be "hearsay", apparently, would be the word of the Pentagon. Mum.

The dots are getting further apart, but George Bush does not seem to mind. The newest Al Qaida plot? Vintage 2002. This time, even the main stream media seemed to notice the coincidence: just a few days to go before the renewal of the Patriot Act is put to a vote...

Alberto Gonzales has a new mantra: "no operational details".
Armed with these three words, the attorney-general rebuffed any efforts by the senators on the Judiciary Committee to find out how and when the warrantless eavesdropping program was initiated. He stuck with the administration's reasonning that the president, as commander in chief in time of war, has the power to bypass the courts set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978.
What else, if anything, is being done under this broad presidential authority was also left unsaid.
When it might end does not appear clear either. "When Al Qaida is destroyed and does not pose a threat", says Alberto Gonzales. Considering the administration has compared this "fight of a generation" to the Cold War, that could be a while.
Yet, the president who was in the White House during that "war" and who signed the FISA law has declared the administration's actions "disgraceful and illegal". Jimmy Carter is convinced that if the question reaches the Supreme Court, it will rule that George Bush broke the law.

The first death in riots sparked by the controversy about cartoons initially published in Denmark and reproduced by major european media outlets might finally help the US government concentrate on the real issue - the manipulation of the "arab street" by undemocratic regime.
You'd think the promoters of the democratization of the Middle-East would be able to spot those maneuvers easily. Not so. The first reaction from the State Department was more in line with a government that, after all, invokes God as a rationale for its action and occasionally protests a cartoon.
The debate was couched in familiar terms: freedom of expression versus respect for religion or,worse, as a "clash of civilizations"... as if the Christian conservatives had not protested depictions of their religion in the Western media. What is different, obviously, is that those protesters do not call for the death of cartoonists or editors, nor suggest boycotting entire nations because they object to the actions of some of its citizen.
The real issue, in this crisis artificially incited four months after the drawings were first published, would be to understand how and why the spiral of hatred was unleashed.
Who are the zealots that went on tour in the arab world and added extreemly offensive cartoons to the 12 original ones? Who were their relays, in Saudi Arabia and Syria? How unusual is the gesture of the Saudi publications that printed the cartoons - resulting in the condemnation of one of the publishers? And what is the purpose of this agitation targeting mostly European interests, at this time, in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine?
That a part of the arab populations can be whipped into a frenzy at the drop of a turban should not surprise anyone. The only pertinent question should be: why now?

In the middle of a terror plot, senators are accused of wanting to "weaken" the USA Patriot Act. Fiction? Rather, the latest in advertisement placement.
As - fictional - special agent Jack Bauer runs against the clock to prevent terrorists from acquiring nerve gas in the Fox "24" show, real senators are targeted. The voice that accuses them is that of Debra Byrlingame, the sister of one of the pilots of the plane that hit the Pentagone on 9/11. She is the public face of the Coalition for Security, Liberty and the Law, a group that has in its membership a collection of former Bush administration officials that helped shaped the Patriot Act. Determined to insure its renewal, those veteran hawks are not going after democrats, but after republicans that dared express doubts about the lasting impact of the law on civil liberties.
"What if they are wrong?", asks the ad, echoing the new Karl Rove line. And why expect anyone watching "24" to be impressed by nuances?

Once the Toxic Texan, George Bush now wants to be the Detox Texan. Aiming to reduce the 'addiction" to oil, he sounds more and more like Nixon, who promised energy independence by 1980. Nice diversion from the less cheerful topics of the war in Iraq, the crisis with Iran, and others. However - Nixon, really, when the continuing saga of the illegal eavesdropping shows no sign of a prompt resolution?