Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee clarifying his Feb. 6 testimony on Bush's warrantless electronic surveillance activities. I call it backtracking.

In a letter yesterday to senators in which he asked to clarify his Feb. 6 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Gonzales also seemed to imply that the administration's original legal justification for the program was not as clear-cut as he indicated three weeks ago.

The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against the Department of Defense seeking documents related to Bush's warrantless NSA electronic surveillance program requested in December under the Freedom of Information Act. Here is what the Times is seeking:

The Times said a Dec. 16 letter to the Department of Defense requested all internal memos, e-mails and legal memoranda and opinions since Sept. 11, 2001, related to the National Security Agency spying program. The department is the parent agency of the NSA. The newspaper said it asked for meeting logs, calendar items and notes related to discussions of the program, including meetings held by Vice President Dick Cheney and his staff with members of Congress and telecommunications executives.

It also requested all complaints of abuse or possible violations in the operations of the program or the legal rationale behind it. And it sought the names and descriptions of people or groups identified through the use of the program and a description of relevant episodes used to identify the targets of the intercepts.

At a senate committee hearing today, it was disclosed that the Coast Guard had provided earlier warnings on gaps in intelligence with respect to port security and the UAE:

Citing broad gaps in U.S. intelligence, the Coast Guard cautioned the Bush administration that it was unable to determine whether a United Arab Emirates-owned company might support terrorist operations, a Senate panel said Monday. The surprise disclosure came during a hearing on Dubai-owned DP World's plans to take over significant operations at six leading U.S. ports.

``There are many intelligence gaps, concerning the potential for DPW or P&O assets to support terrorist operations, that precludes an overall threat assessment of the potential'' merger,'' an undated Coast Guard intelligence assessment says. `The breadth of the intelligence gaps also infer potential unknown threats against a large number of potential vulnerabilities,'' the document says.

My earlier post on security doubts regarding the UAE is here.

A new Rasmussen Reports poll finds that 36% of the respondents believe the terrorists are winning the terror war, while 39% believe we are winning.

Last month, 44% thought we were winning and only 26% believed the terrorists were winning.

A plurality of women and a majority of Democrats now believe the terrorists are winning. In December, 50% of all Americans thought the U.S. and its allies were winning. Just 25% took the opposite view.

The reason for the decline? Rasmussen says it likely is the Dubai deal:

Think Progress explains why the compromise over the Dubai Port deal is a sham.

The deal is political, not substantive. It's designed take some heat off the White House, not protect the security of the United States.

I think the compromise a delay tactic. Does anyone expect a real investigation by the Treasury Department, another agency in the executive branch of government? I don't. As for none being needed, check out Steve Soto's post at Left Coaster on why the UAE should not be trusted with our security.

...just last year in front of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, in which our own Chief of Staff to the US Mission to the United Nations, told Congress that the UAE was participating in the ferrying of prohibited goods to and from Saddam Hussein in violation of the UN sanctions.

Sen. Arlen Specter has introduced a bill supposedly to require judicial oversight of NSA electronic surveillance applications. But, as Marty Lederman of Balkinization and Glenn Greenwald point out, it's anything but.

It is, of course, so disorientingly bizarre to hear about a proposed law requiring FISA warrants for eavesdropping because we already have a law in place which does exactly that. It's called FISA. That's the law the Administration has been deliberately breaking because they think they don't have to comply with it and that Congress has no power to make them. Reading this article about Specter's proposed legislation is somewhat like hearing that a life-long, chronic bank-robber got arrested for robbing a bank over the weekend and, in response, a Senator introduces legislation to make it a crime to rob banks.

Whatever the outcome of Bush's warrantless NSA surveillance program, it seems clear that government surveillance of our communications and even our social networks is only going to increase. The New York Times reports on recent "shopping trips" by NSA officials to Silicon Valley to purchase new data-mining tools.

On the wish list, according to several venture capitalists who met with the officials, were an array of technologies that underlie the fierce debate over the Bush administration's anti-terrorist eavesdropping program: computerized systems that reveal connections between seemingly innocuous and unrelated pieces of information. The tools they were looking for are new, but their application would fall under the well-established practice of data mining: using mathematical and statistical techniques to scan for hidden relationships in streams of digital data or large databases.

by TChris

TalkLeft has frequently written about detainee abuse at Bagram (coverage collected here). The NY Times reports today that the population of the detention facility in Afghanistan has quiety increased while the world's attention has focused on detainees in Guantánamo.

[S]ome of the detainees have already been held at Bagram for as long as two or three years. And unlike those at Guantánamo, they have no access to lawyers, no right to hear the allegations against them and only rudimentary reviews of their status as "enemy combatants," military officials said.

The Times reports that the military is holding some detainees in Afghanistan to avoid legal protections that might be available to Guantánamo's detainees. About 500 prisoners are now held at Bagram under conditions that are more extreme than those at Guantánamo.

Sen. Bob Dole should have known better than to accept a job lobbying for the Dubai ports deal. His wife, Sen. Elizabeth Dole, is one of those who must be convinced of the propriety of the deal. And now, his hiring has become a headache for him.

The chairman of the North Carolina Democratic Party, Jerry Meek, yesterday called on Sen. Dole to remove herself from "any congressional oversight" of the Dubai port deal. "The fact that Dubai is paying her husband to help pass the deal presents both a financial and ethical conflict of interest for Senator Dole," Meek said.

Sen. Dole, amazingly (or maybe not so) is defending her husband's hiring.

The ACLU has released the results of a new poll by conducted by the Washington-based firm Belden, Russonello & Stewart, measuring voters' attitudes toward the NSA warrantless surveillance of Americans. The full report is available here. Among the poll's findings:

• A majority of voters want Congress to "demand that the warrantless eavesdropping be stopped because it is illegal."
• A majority of voters believe "the president should not be acting on his own in deciding how to fight terrorism without the checks and balances of the courts or Congress."
• A majority of voters oppose the government eavesdropping on Americans' calls to people overseas without a court warrant.
• A majority of voters are skeptical that the President acted within the law:
• A majority of voters express the view that the President can "effectively combat terrorism and follow the law and get court warrants to spy on Americans."
• A majority of voters believe the President is wrong to assume that "the Congressional resolution to go to war in Afghanistan to fight terrorism also gave him permission to eavesdrop on Americans without a warrant."
• Also, at least a third of Republican voters consistently expressed viewpoints that they are concerned that the president is operating outside the law.

The poll also found that American voters have serious concerns about the Patriot Act. Specifically, the poll found that:

Now we know. Leaks of classified information for political purposes are okay for Bush and Cheney, but not for others.

Murray Waas tonight writes about a letter Sen. Jay Rockefeller, Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee sent to John Negroponte, Director of National Intelligence.

There's something strange, to say the least, about the Bush Administration's plan to sell off control of our ports to a Dubai company.

Why are Bush and Chertoff pushing this? [Update: See the ties to the Administration, particularly John Snow]

Think Progress has more.

Update (by TChris): Whatever virtues the private market might otherwise have, John Nichols asks whether the private control of ports, "essential pieces of the infrastructure of the United States," makes sense in a security-conscious era. (via Matthew Yglesias at Tapped)