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Friday, July 27, 2007
 
Not Quite So Total Recall


Folks, to use the President’s favorite colloquilism, are wondering if America’s tiniest Attorney General is plain stupid, or like his higher-ranked amigo, craftily complex with specifically imprecise language used before the Senate Judiciary Committee to describe certain White House-instigated activities undertaken by unknown agencies and suddenly objected to by then-new DOJ officials and forcing a late night and ill-fated March 2004 hospital trip with Andrew Card to the medicated bedside of John Ashcroft.

Click for larger image

Perhaps this handy graphic from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (note "Transactional Data") in conjunction with this January 28, 2003 White House Fact Sheet can be retroactively more illuminating than this afternoon’s White House press flurries:

Since September 11, 2001, our government has been working together and sharing information like never before…ensuring that intelligence information from all sources is shared, integrated, and analyzed…[and] to close the “seam” between analysis of foreign and domestic intelligence…The FBI [will]…ensure that the collection and dissemination of intelligence is given the same institutional priority as the collection of evidence.

Is it possible that DOJ officials were objecting to “sharing…like never before…from all sources” without judicial or legislative oversight?
You can bet a block of gel-packed cheese on it as the super-computer crunches the data!

Images: AP, Eff.org, Shutterblade.net
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
 


Oh, Ladybird, send her an A-line...
Did I say, "(yawn!)"?

Photos: AFP, AP, Reuters

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