The magazine said the PAC grilled officials in the presence of foreign secretary Riaz Mohammad Khan and special secretary Sher Afghan on the money paid to lobbyists.

"The disclosure sheds doubt on the integrity and honesty of the members of the 9/11 inquiry commission and, above all, the authenticity of the information in their final report," it said.

The report quoted an officer as saying that dramatic changes were made in the final draft of the inquiry commission after the lobbyists got to work. The panel was formed to probe the September 11 terror attack and make suggestions to fight terrorism.

After the commission tipped the lobbyists about the damaging revelations on Pakistan's role in 9/11, they contacted the panel members and asked them to go soft on the country. The Friday Times claimed that a lot of money was used to silence these members.

According to the report, the lobbyists also helped Pakistan win the sympathy of 75 US Congressmen as part of its strategy to guard Islamabad's interests in Washington. "US softened towards Pakistan only because of the efforts of the foreign office," an official was quoted as saying in the report.

The Pakistan foreign office defended the decision to hire the lobbyists, saying it was an established practice in the US.

An observer at the Islamabad meeting said money could play an important role in buying powerful people. The remark came in response to comments made by some US officials after 9/11 that "Pakistanis will sell their mothers for a dollar".

Pakistan had emerged as front-runner in the fight against terrorism unleashed by the US after the terror strikes. Washington pumped in billions of dollars to win President Pervez Musharraf's support in launching a crackdown on al Qaida network thriving on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Moussaoui, a 37-year-old French Moroccan, is the only person to be tried in a US courtroom for direct involvement in the attacks, even though at the time he was already under arrest for immigration violations.

The Justice Department says that he deserves to die through lethal execution because he lied to investigators about what he knew of al-Qaeda's plans to fly aeroplanes into buildings.

Today's development came after Carla Martin, a lawyer from the Federal Aviation Administration, admitted coaching at least four witnesses by showing them transcripts of evidence - a deliberate attempt to "shape their testimony", according to defence lawyers.

"This is the second significant error of the government affecting the constitutional rights of this defendant," Judge Brinkema said. "More importantly, it affects the integrity of the criminal justice system in the United States."

Last week, the judge ruled out of order a prosecution question that Moussaoui had a responsibility to tell the FBI about his terrorist links. In remarks which may be significant for the outcome of the trial, she warned the prosecution it was treading on shaky legal ground because there was no precedent for a defendant's failure to act resulting in the death penalty.

Edward MacMahon, the defence attorney, moved to have the case thrown out - saying "this is not going to be a fair trial" - or at at least have the FAA witnesses removed.

Even David Novak, the prosecutor, acknowledged that witness coaching was "horrendously wrong". But he said the case should be allowed to proceed after rigourous cross-examination of the witnesses. Judge Brinkema said she would need time to study what to do and adjourned the court until Wednesday.

Moussaoui has already pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in connection with attacks so, even if Judge Brinkema declares a mis-trial, he will still spend the rest of his life in prison.

His court-appointed lawyers, with whom he is not speaking, claim he is mentally unstable and was - at most - only a fringe character in al-Qaeda whose leaders regarded him as unreliable.

They are also attempting to highlight the the Government's negligence in failing to prevent the attacks despite being given a series of clues in the days leading up to September 11. They will suggest Moussaoui knew less about the plot than many US federal agents.

"You can't judge him to get revenge for 9/11," or for the failure of the US government to act on other leads, Mr MacMahon told the jury, "no one should be executed on such flimsy evidence, not even a member of Al Qaeda."

But the Government remains eager to use the trial as catharsis for both its own troubles and the anguish of victims' relatives. It has made special arrangements to accommodate family members in the court and around television screens at six locations elsewhere in the US.

While Moussaoui may not be an ideal proxy for the 19 suicide hijackers, he does at least proudly - and loudly - declare his membership of al-Qaeda, his hatred for the US and his willingness to kill innocent civilians.

Throughout the first week of the trial, Moussaoui sat quietly through proceedings clad in a green prison jumpsuit and a white knitted cap, frequently stroking his thick beard. But at the end of each session in Alexandria, Virginia, he has made a ritual of jumping up and shouting a declaration such as "God curse America," or "God bless bin Laden."

Equally surprising is that O'Connor's speech to an audience of lawyers at Georgetown University was attended by just one reporter, the diligent legal correspondent for National Public Radio, Nina Totenberg. No transcript or recording of the speech has been made available, so we have only Totenberg's notes to go on. But - assuming they are accurate - the notes are political dynamite.

O'Connor's voice was "dripping with sarcasm", according to Totenberg, as she "took aim at former House GOP [Republican] leader Tom DeLay. She didn't name him, but she quoted his attacks on the courts at a meeting of the conservative Christian group Justice Sunday last year when DeLay took out after the courts for rulings on abortions, prayer and the Terri Schiavo case.

"It gets worse, she said, noting that death threats against judges are increasing. It doesn't help, she said, when a high-profile senator suggests there may be a connection between violence against judges and decisions that the senator disagrees with."

Then she spoke the D-word. "I, said O'Connor, am against judicial reforms driven by nakedly partisan reasoning. Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and former communist countries where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, O'Connor said we must be ever-vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."

Delivered by someone who was, until recently, one of the nine guardians of the US constitution, these are spine-chilling opinions, and you might have thought they'd have been all over the papers the next day. Not so. I happened to catch Totenberg's NPR report last Friday, and have been following up references to it. A cable TV talkshow and a handful of blogs have mentioned Totenberg's piece: otherwise there's been a disquieting silence, as if the former justice had laid an unsavoury egg and had best be politely ignored.

Why did O'Connor choose such a closed forum to air her thoughts? Why was Totenberg the only reporter present? The possibility that America is sliding toward dictatorship or an unprecedented form of corporate oligarchy ought to be a matter of world concern. And if O'Connor believes what she is reported to have said, surely she owes it to the world to make public the prepared text of her remarks, which so far have the dubious character of the scores of unverifiable leaks that have passed for news in the compulsively secretive world of the Bush administration. It's unsurprising that, say, Colin Powell chooses to leak rather than speak out, but when a supreme court justice prefers to whisper her fears to a coterie audience, it's hard to avoid the inference that the whisper itself speaks volumes about the imperilled democracy it purports to describe.

Death threats to judges figured importantly in O'Connor's speech, with good reason. Last year, an Illinois federal judge found her husband and mother murdered, and a Georgia state judge was shot dead in his courtroom. Within days, Senator John Cornyn of Texas mused: "I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in violence." DeLay, speaking of the judges who had ruled that Schiavo be allowed to die, said: "The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behaviour."

These are peculiar times, and when Republican politicians appear to endorse the killing of judges who make rulings of which they disapprove, it's maybe understandable that a distinguished judge like Sandra Day O'Connor, expressing views calculated to enrage Republican politicians, might sensibly look to a small podium with a weak sound system for fear of being heard too clearly by the likes of Cornyn and DeLay.

On the first Saturday in April of 2002, the temperature in Washington, D.C., had taken a dive. Tourists were bundled up against the cold, and the cherry trees along the Tidal Basin were fast losing their blossoms to the biting winds. But a few miles to the south, in the Dowden Terrace neighborhood of Alexandria, Virginia, the chilly weather was not deterring Royce C. Lamberth, a bald and burly Texan, from mowing his lawn. He stopped only when four cars filled with FBI agents suddenly pulled up in front of his house. The agents were there not to arrest him but to request an emergency court hearing to obtain seven top-secret warrants to eavesdrop on Americans.

As the presiding justice of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA court, Lamberth had become accustomed to holding the secret hearings in his living room. ?My wife, Janis ? has to go upstairs because she doesn?t have a top-secret clearance,? he noted in a speech to a group of Texas lawyers. ?My beloved cocker spaniel, Taffy, however, remains at my side on the assumption that the surveillance targets cannot make her talk. The FBI knows Taffy well. They frequently play with her while I read some of those voluminous tomes at home.? FBI agents will even knock on the judge?s door in the middle of the night. ?On the night of the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, I started the first emergency hearings in my living room at 3:00 a.m.,? recalled Lamberth. ?From the outset, the FBI suspected bin Laden, and the surveillances I approved that night and in the ensuing days and weeks all ended up being critical evidence at the trial in New York.

?The FISA court is probably the least-known court in Washington,? added Lamberth, who stepped down from it in 2002, at the end of his seven-year term, ?but it has become one of the most important.? Conceived in the aftermath of Watergate, the FISA court traces its origins to the mid-1970s, when the Senate?s Church Committee investigated the intelligence community and the Nixon White House. The panel, chaired by Idaho Democrat Frank Church, exposed a long pattern of abuse, and its work led to bipartisan legislation aimed at preventing a president from unilaterally directing the National Security Agency or the FBI to spy on American citizens. This legislation, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, established the FISA court?made up of eleven judges handpicked by the chief justice of the United States?as a secret part of the federal judiciary. The court?s job is to decide whether to grant warrants requested by the NSA or the FBI to monitor communications of American citizens and legal residents. The law allows the government up to three days after it starts eavesdropping to ask for a warrant; every violation of FISA carries a penalty of up to five years in prison. Between May 18, 1979, when the court opened for business, until the end of 2004, it granted 18,742 NSA and FBI applications; it turned down only four outright.

Such facts worry Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor who worked for the NSA as an intern while in law school in the 1980s. The FISA ?courtroom,? hidden away on the top floor of the Justice Department building (because even its location is supposed to be secret), is actually a heavily protected, windowless, bug-proof installation known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. ?When I first went into the FISA court as a lowly intern at the NSA, frankly, it started a lifetime of opposition for me to that court,? Turley recently told a group of House Democrats looking into the NSA?s domestic spying. ?I was shocked with what I saw. I was convinced that the judge in that SCIF would have signed anything that we put in front of him. And I wasn?t entirely sure that he had actually read what we put in front of him. But I remember going back to my supervisor at NSA and saying, ?That place scares the daylights out of me.??

Lamberth bristles at any suggestion that his court routinely did the administration?s bidding. ?Those who know me know the chief justice did not put me on this court because I would be a rubber stamp for whatever the executive branch was wanting to do,? he said in his speech. ?I ask questions. I get into the nitty-gritty. I know exactly what is going to be done and why. And my questions are answered, in every case, before I approve an application.?

It is true that the court has been getting tougher. From 1979 through 2000, it modified only two out of 13,087 warrant requests. But from the start of the Bush administration, in 2001, the number of modifications increased to 179 out of 5,645 requests. Most of those?173?involved what the court terms ?substantive modifications.?

This friction?and especially the requirement that the government show ?probable cause? that the American whose communications they are seeking to target is connected in some way to a terrorist group?induced the administration to begin circumventing the court. Concerned about preventing future 9/11-style attacks, President Bush secretly decided in the fall of 2001 that the NSA would no longer be bound by FISA. Although Judge Lamberth was informed of the president?s decision, he was ordered to tell no one about it?not even his clerks or his fellow FISA-court judges.

Why the NSA Might be Listening to YOU

Contrary to popular perception, the NSA does not engage in ?wiretapping?; it collects signals intelligence, or ?sigint.? In contrast to the image we have from movies and television of an FBI agent placing a listening device on a target?s phone line, the NSA intercepts entire streams of electronic communications containing millions of telephone calls and e-mails. It runs the intercepts through very powerful computers that screen them for particular names, telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and trigger words or phrases. Any communications containing flagged information are forwarded by the computer for further analysis.

The NSA?s task is to listen in on the world outside American shores. During the Cold War, the principal targets were the communications lines used by the Soviet government and military?navy captains calling their ports, fighter pilots getting landing instructions, army commanders out on maneuvers, and diplomats relaying messages to the Kremlin. But now the enemy is one that communicates very little and, when it does, uses the same telecommunications network as everyone else: a complex system of wires, radio signals, and light pulses encircling and crisscrossing the globe like yarn. Picking up just the right thread, and tracing it through the maze of strands, is difficult. Sometimes a thread leads back inside the United States. An internal agency report predicted a few years ago that the NSA?s worldwide sigint operation would demand a ?powerful and permanent presence? on the global telecommunications networks that carry ?protected American communications.? The prediction has come true, and the NSA now monitors not only purely ?foreign? communications but also ?international? ones, where one end of the conversation might be in the United States. As a result, the issue at hand since the revelation last December of the NSA?s warrantless spying on American citizens is not the agency?s access to the country?s communications network?it already has access?but whether the NSA must take legal steps in preparing to target the communications of an American citizen.

It used to be that before the NSA could place the name of an American on its watch list, it had to go before a FISA-court judge and show that it had probable cause?that the facts and circumstances were such that a prudent person would think the individual was somehow connected to terrorism?in order to get a warrant. But under the new procedures put into effect by Bush?s 2001 order, warrants do not always have to be obtained, and the critical decision about whether to put an American on a watch list is left to the vague and subjective ?reasonable belief? of an NSA shift supervisor. In charge of hundreds of people, the supervisor manages a wide range of sigint specialists, including signals-conversion analysts separating HBO television programs from cell-phone calls, traffic analysts sifting through massive telephone data streams looking for suspicious patterns, cryptanalysts attempting to read e-mail obscured by complex encryption algorithms, voice-language analysts translating the gist of a phone call from Dari into English, and cryptolinguists trying to unscramble a call on a secure telephone. Bypassing the FISA court has meant that the number of Americans targeted by the NSA has increased since 2001 from perhaps a dozen per year to as many as 5,000 over the last four years, knowledgeable sources told The Washington Post in February. If telephone records indicate that one of the NSA?s targets regularly dials a given telephone number, that number and any names associated with it are added to the watch lists and the communications on that line are screened by computer. Names and information on the watch lists are shared with the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and foreign intelligence services. Once a person?s name is in the files, even if nothing incriminating ever turns up, it will likely remain there forever. There is no way to request removal, because there is no way to confirm that a name is on the list.

In December of 1997, in a small factory outside the southern French city of Toulouse, a salesman got caught in the NSA?s electronic web. Agents working for the NSA?s British partner, the Government Communications Headquarters, learned of a letter of credit, valued at more than $1.1 million, issued by Iran?s defense ministry to the French company Microturbo. According to NSA documents, both the NSA and the GCHQ concluded that Iran was attempting to secretly buy from Microturbo an engine for the embargoed C-802 anti-ship missile. Faxes zapping back and forth between Toulouse and Tehran were intercepted by the GCHQ, which sent them on not just to the NSA but also to the Canadian and Australian sigint agencies, as well as to Britain?s MI6. The NSA then sent the reports on the salesman making the Iranian deal to a number of CIA stations around the world, including those in Paris and Bonn, and to the U.S. Commerce Department and the Customs Service. Probably several hundred people in at least four countries were reading the company?s communications. The question, however, remained: Was Microturbo shipping a missile engine to Iran? In the end, at the insistence of the U.S. government, the French conducted a surprise inspection just before the ship carrying the mysterious crate was set to sail for Iran. Inside were legal generators, not illegal missile engines.

Such events are central to the current debate involving the potential harm caused by the NSA?s warrantless domestic eavesdropping operation. Even though the salesman did nothing wrong, his name made its way into the computers and onto the watch lists of intelligence, customs, and other secret and law-enforcement organizations around the world. Maybe nothing will come of it. Maybe the next time he tries to enter the United States or Britain he will be denied, without explanation. Maybe he will be arrested. As the domestic eavesdropping program continues to grow, such uncertainties may plague innocent Americans whose names are being run through the supercomputers even though the NSA has not met the established legal standard for a search warrant. It is only when such citizens are turned down while applying for a job with the federal government?or refused when seeking a Small Business Administration loan, or turned back by British customs agents when flying to London on vacation, or even placed on a ?no-fly? list?that they will realize that something is very wrong. But they will never learn why.

More than seventy-five years ago, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis envisioned a day when technology would overtake the law. He wrote:

Subtler and more far-reaching means of invading privacy have become available to the government ? The progress of science in furnishing the government with means of espionage is not likely to stop with wiretapping. Ways may some day be developed by which the Government, without removing papers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home ? Can it be that the Constitution affords no protection against such invasions of individual security?

Brandeis went on to answer his own question, quoting from an earlier Supreme Court decision, Boyd v. U.S. (1886): ?It is not the breaking of his doors, and the rummaging of his drawers that constitutes the essence of the offence; but it is the invasion of his indefeasible right of personal security, personal liberty, and private property.?

Eavesdropping in the Digital Age

oday, the NSA?s capability to eavesdrop is far beyond anything ever dreamed of by Justice Brandeis. With the digital revolution came an explosion in eavesdropping technology; the NSA today has the ability to scan tens of millions of electronic communications?e-mails, faxes, instant messages, Web searches, and phone calls?every hour. General Michael Hayden, director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005 and now principal deputy director of national intelligence, noted in 2002 that during the 1990s, e-communications ?surpassed traditional communications. That is the same decade when mobile cell phones increased from 16 million to 741 million?an increase of nearly 50 times. That is the same decade when Internet users went from about 4 million to 361 million?an increase of over 90 times. Half as many land lines were laid in the last six years of the 1990s as in the whole previous history of the world. In that same decade of the 1990s, international telephone traffic went from 38 billion minutes to over 100 billion. This year, the world?s population will spend over 180 billion minutes on the phone in international calls alone.?

Intercepting communications carried by satellite is fairly simple for the NSA. The key conduits are the thirty Intelsat satellites that ring the Earth, 22,300 miles above the equator. Many communications from Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to the eastern half of the United States, for example, are first uplinked to an Intelsat satellite and then downlinked to AT&T?s ground station in Etam, West Virginia. From there, phone calls, e-mails, and other communications travel on to various parts of the country. To listen in on that rich stream of information, the NSA built a listening post fifty miles away, near Sugar Grove, West Virginia. Consisting of a group of very large parabolic dishes, hidden in a heavily forested valley and surrounded by tall hills, the post can easily intercept the millions of calls and messages flowing every hour into the Etam station. On the West Coast, high on the edge of a bluff overlooking the Okanogan River, near Brewster, Washington, is the major commercial downlink for communications to and from Asia and the Pacific. Consisting of forty parabolic dishes, it is reportedly the largest satellite antenna farm in the Western Hemisphere. A hundred miles to the south, collecting every whisper, is the NSA?s western listening post, hidden away on a 324,000-acre Army base in Yakima, Washington. The NSA posts collect the international traffic beamed down from the Intelsat satellites over the Atlantic and Pacific. But each also has a number of dishes that appear to be directed at domestic telecommunications satellites.

ntil recently, most international telecommunications flowing into and out of the United States traveled by satellite. But faster, more reliable undersea fiber-optic cables have taken the lead, and the NSA has adapted. The agency taps into the cables that don?t reach our shores by using specially designed submarines, such as the USS Jimmy Carter, to attach a complex ?bug? to the cable itself. This is difficult, however, and undersea taps are short-lived because the batteries last only a limited time. The fiber-optic transmission cables that enter the United States from Europe and Asia can be tapped more easily at the landing stations where they come ashore. With the acquiescence of the telecommunications companies, it is possible for the NSA to attach monitoring equipment inside the landing station and then run a buried encrypted fiber-optic ?backhaul? line to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, where the river of data can be analyzed by supercomputers in near real time.

Tapping into the fiber-optic network that carries the nation?s Internet communications is even easier, as much of the information transits through just a few ?switches? (similar to the satellite downlinks). Among the busiest are MAE East (Metropolitan Area Ethernet), in Vienna, Virginia, and MAE West, in San Jose, California, both owned by Verizon. By accessing the switch, the NSA can see who?s e-mailing with whom over the Internet cables and can copy entire messages. Last September, the Federal Communications Commission further opened the door for the agency. The 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act required telephone companies to rewire their networks to provide the government with secret access. The FCC has now extended the act to cover ?any type of broadband Internet access service? and the new Internet phone services?and ordered company officials never to discuss any aspect of the program.


he NSA won?t divulge how many people it employs, but it is likely that more than 38,000 worldwide now work for the agency. Most of them are at Fort Meade. Nicknamed Crypto City, hidden from public view, and located halfway between Washington and Baltimore, the NSA?s own company town comprises more than fifty buildings?offices, warehouses, factories, laboratories, and a few barracks. Tens of thousands of people work there in absolute secrecy, and most never tell their spouses exactly what they do. Crypto City also houses the nation?s largest collection of powerful computers, advanced mathematicians, and skilled language experts.

The NSA maintains a very close and very confidential relationship with key executives in the telecommunications industry through their membership on the NSA?s advisory board. Created shortly after the agency?s formation, the board was intended to pull together a panel of science wizards from universities, corporate research labs, and think tanks to advise the agency. They keep the agency abreast of the industry?s plans and give NSA engineers a critical head start in finding ways to penetrate technologies still in the development phase.

One of the NSA?s strategies is to hire people away from the companies that make the critical components for telecommunications systems. Although it?s sometimes difficult for the agency to keep up with the tech sector?s pay scale, for many people the chance to deal with the ultimate in cutting-edge technology and aid national security makes working for the NSA irresistible. With the help of such workers, the agency reverse-engineers communication system components. For example, among the most crucial pieces of the Internet infrastructure are routers made by Cisco. ?Virtually all Internet traffic,? says one of the company?s television ads, ?travels across the systems of one company: Cisco Systems.? For the NSA, this is an opportunity. In 1999, Terry Thompson, then the NSA deputy director for services, said, ?[Y]ou can see down the road two or three or five years and say, ?Well, I only need this person to do reverse-engineering on Cisco routers (that?s a good example) for about three or five years, because I see Cisco going away as a key manufacturer for routers and so I don?t need that expertise. But I really need somebody today and for the next couple of years who knows Cisco routers inside and out and can help me understand how they?re being used in target networks.??

The Temptations of Secrecy

he National Security Agency was born in absolute secrecy. Unlike the CIA, which was created publicly by a congressional act, the NSA was brought to life by a top-secret memorandum signed by President Truman in 1952, consolidating the country?s various military sigint operations into a single agency. Even its name was secret, and only a few members of Congress were informed of its existence?and they received no information about some of its most important activities. Such secrecy has lent itself to abuse.

During the Vietnam War, for instance, the agency was heavily involved in spying on the domestic opposition to the government. Many of the Americans on the watch lists of that era were there solely for having protested against the war. Among the names in the NSA?s supercomputers were those of the folk singer Joan Baez, the pediatrician Benjamin Spock, the actress Jane Fonda, the civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and the newspaper editor David Kahn, whose standard history of cryptology, The Codebreakers, contained information the NSA viewed as classified. Even so much as writing about the NSA could land a person a place on a watch list. The NSA, on behalf of the FBI, was also targeting religious groups. ?When J. Edgar Hoover gives you a requirement for complete surveillance of all Quakers in the United States,? recalled Frank Raven, a former senior NSA official, ?and when Richard M. Nixon is a Quaker and he?s the president of the United States, it gets pretty funny.?

f course, such abuses are hardly the exclusive province of the NSA; history has repeatedly shown that simply having the ability to eavesdrop brings with it the temptation to use that ability?whatever the legal barriers against that use may be. For instance, during World War I, the government read and censored thousands of telegrams?the e-mail of the day?sent hourly by telegraph companies. Though the end of the war brought with it a reversion to the Radio Act of 1912, which guaranteed the secrecy of communications, the State and War Departments nevertheless joined together in May of 1919 to create America?s first civilian eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, nicknamed the Black Chamber. By arrangement, messengers visited the telegraph companies each morning and took bundles of hard-copy telegrams to the agency?s offices across town. These copies were returned before the close of business that day.

A similar tale followed the end of World War II. In August of 1945, President Truman ordered an end to censorship. That left the Signal Security Agency (the military successor to the Black Chamber, which was shut down in 1929) without its raw intelligence?the telegrams provided by the telegraph companies. The director of the SSA sought access to cable traffic through a secret arrangement with the heads of the three major telegraph companies. The companies agreed to turn all telegrams over to the SSA, under a plan code-named Operation Shamrock. It ran until the government?s domestic spying programs were publicly revealed, in the mid-1970s. The discovery of such abuses in the wake of the Watergate scandal led Congress to create select committees to conduct extensive investigations into the government?s domestic spying programs: their origin, extent, and effect on the public. The shocking findings turned up by the Church Committee finally led to the formation of permanent Senate and House intelligence committees, whose primary responsibility was to protect the public from future privacy abuses. They were to be the FISA court?s partner in providing checks and balances to the ever-expanding U.S. intelligence agencies. But it remains very much an open question whether these checks are up to the task at hand.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

Today, the NSA has access to more information than ever before. People express their most intimate thoughts in e-mails, send their tax returns over the Internet, satisfy their curiosity and desires with Google searches, let their hair down in chat rooms, discuss every event over cell phones, make appointments with their BlackBerrys, and do business by computer in WiFi hot spots.

NSA personnel, the customs inspectors of the information superhighway, have the ultimate goal of intercepting and reviewing every syllable and murmur zapping into, out of, or through the United States. They are close to achieving it. More than a dozen years ago, an NSA director gave an indication of the agency?s capability. ?Just one intelligence-collection system,? said Admiral William O. Studeman, referring to a listening post such as Sugar Grove, ?can generate a million inputs per half hour.? Today, with the secret cooperation of much of the telecommunications industry, massive dishes vacuuming the airwaves, and electronic ?packet sniffers,? software that monitors network traffic, diverting e-mail and other data from fiber-optic cables, the NSA?s hourly take is in the tens of millions of communications. One transatlantic fiber-optic cable alone has the capacity to handle close to 10 million simultaneous calls. While most communications flow through the NSA?s electronic net unheard and unread, those messages associated with persons on the agency?s watch lists?whether guilty or innocent?get kicked out for review.

As history has shown, the availability of such vast amounts of information is a temptation for an intelligence agency. The criteria for compiling watch lists and collecting information may be very strict at the beginning of such a program, but the reality?in a sort of bureaucratic law of expansion?is that it will draw in more and more people whose only offense was knowing the wrong person or protesting the wrong war.

Moreover, as Internet and wireless communications have grown exponentially, users have seen a corresponding decrease in the protections provided by the two institutions set up to shield the public from eavesdroppers. The first, the FISA court, has simply been shunted aside by the executive branch. The second, the congressional intelligence committees, have quite surprisingly abdicated any role. Created to be the watchdogs over the intelligence community, the committees have instead become its most enthusiastic cheerleaders. Rather than fighting for the public?s privacy rights, they are constantly battling for more money and more freedom for the spy agencies.

Last November, just a month before The New York Times broke the story of the NSA?s domestic spying, the American Bar Association publicly expressed concern over Congress?s oversight of FISA searches. ?The ABA is concerned that there is inadequate congressional oversight of government investigations undertaken pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,? the group stated, ?to assure that such investigations do not violate the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.? And while the administration did brief members of Congress on the decision to bypass FISA, the briefings were limited to a ?Gang of Eight??the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate and the chairmen and ranking members of the two intelligence committees. None of the lawmakers insisted that the decision be debated by the joint committees, even though such hearings are closed.

Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who led the first probe into the National Security Agency, warned in 1975 that the agency?s capabilities

could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn?t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it is done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capacity of this technology.

It was those fears that caused Congress to enact the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act three years later. ?I don?t want to see this country ever go across the bridge,? Senator Church said. ?I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.?

Copyright © 2006 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

Professor Miguel Tinker-Salas said the deputies entered his office without an appointment Tuesday during hours normally set aside for student conferences. He said the deputies were there for about 25 minutes and asked him about the Venezuelan community and his relationship with it. They also told him he was not the subject of an investigation.

"They cast the Venezuelan community as a threat," said Tinker-Salas, an outspoken critic of U.S. policy in Latin America who was born in Venezuela. "They asked me if the Venezuelan government had influenced me one way or another. I think they were fishing to see if I had any information they could use."

Sheriff Lee Baca said Friday that his deputies were doing nothing more than gathering information on the political situation in Venezuela for a federal anti-terrorism task force coordinated by the FBI. But he said he would discourage workplace interviews in the future, especially with members of academia.

Venezuela has had strained relations with the United States for years. In recent months, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has broadened his criticism of the U.S. and touched American nerves by strengthening ties with Iran.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Congress last month that the administration was pursuing an "inoculation strategy" in other Latin American countries to limit Venezuelan influence.

Tinker-Salas figured in a Christian Science Monitor story last month dealing with whether Iran and Venezuela could forge a political counterweight to U.S. power. He said the detectives questioned him on subjects that easily could have been answered elsewhere.

"They asked me about the Venezuelan community. Where do they congregate? Do they have a leadership?" he said. "They asked about the consulate and the embassy. They wanted to know if I had contact with the Venezuelan government."

Tinker-Salas said the deputies also questioned waiting students about him and examined cartoons on his office door.

"They asked them about my classes," he said. "My students were intimidated."

Pomona College President David Oxtoby said Friday that he was "extremely concerned about the chilling effect this kind of intrusive government interest could have on free scholarly and political discourse. I am also concerned about the negative message it sends to students who are considering the pursuit of important areas of international study, in which they may now feel exposed to unwarranted official scrutiny."

Oxtoby said the school, in Claremont, was consulting with legal advisors about the strongest way to protest Tinker-Salas' questioning. "He's a national expert," Oxtoby said. The deputies "could have called. They could have made an appointment."

The Venezuelan government weighed in as well Friday, issuing a statement that called the questioning "a violation of freedoms of expression, thought and academic inquiry," and said the government "views the move as a desperate attempt to link Venezuela to terrorism."

U.S. law enforcement officials said Friday that the concerns raised about the interview have only underscored the importance for federal agents - or others handling interviews - to follow accepted procedures.

"We're mindful of the need to be sensitive about these discussions, no matter how benign the subject may be," said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the controversy the incident has generated.

In a statement, the FBI said law enforcement officials should be mindful of the timing and location of an informational interview. As for the Pomona College meeting, the FBI said there was no intent "to place the professor, his students or Pomona College in an uncomfortable situation."

Baca, meanwhile, said the deputies were not working on any particular case. But he said he would have preferred it if the deputies had avoided the college grounds or at least called ahead.

"It is important not to go to college campuses and interview professors and students in such a way that leads to questions like, 'Why are they under suspicion?' " he said.


Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

Unfortunately, those of us in the American Muslim community who want to give to legitimate causes in a lawful manner are getting mixed messages from the U.S. government. We are told that if we conduct due diligence and function transparently, we should be able to give to charities of our choice. Then the government closes most of these charities, using the weakest of evidence to support its actions and leading many American Muslims to believe that our government opposes efforts to help needy Muslims around the world. Moreover, the arbitrary freezing of assets ensures that the money will never reach the destination intended by the donors -- the truly indigent. The government has consistently denied requests to have the frozen funds released to reputable organizations (that are not on any lists) doing similar work so that the donors' intentions are honored.

Under the USA Patriot Act, the U.S. government is authorized to close down a charity while an investigation is going on. The government is under no obligation to reveal the evidence used to justify the seizure of assets and the designation of the charity as a "specially designated national," i.e. a bad guy on the list of suspected terrorists issued by the Treasury Department.

The organization can file an appeal, but as was noted in a recent paper titled "Muslim Charities and the War on Terror" by the organization OMBWatch, "appealing Treasury actions to the federal courts is relatively useless, as the court's scope of review is very limited."

Since Sept. 11, 2001, six American Muslim charities have been shuttered in this fashion. The government still doesn't have a single terrorism conviction against any of the employees or board members of any of those charities. Similarly, the government has never been able to document a bona fide trail showing how money from the charity got into the hands of actual terrorists. Never.

We believe it is possible to provide sustenance to people in need without supporting terrorism. But the message we are hearing is this: "All Muslims are suspected of supporting terrorism. Your charities are guilty of this crime until proven innocent. But don't bother trying to prove your innocence because you won't have the chance." The government has not taken action against a single non-Muslim charity that works in the same region helping to feed, educate and sustain people who had also received assistance from the Muslim charities accused of financing terrorism.

We are among those American Muslims who decided that because it is our right as Americans to fulfill our religious obligation to help the needy both here and abroad, we would start a new charity. We did so in 2002 and have experienced our fair share of government harassment as a result.

None of us is interested in engaging in illegal activity; it is immoral, unethical and un-Islamic, and it serves no useful purpose whatever. Our crime is that we care about what happens to the children of Palestine. Who knows what price we will have to pay for our hot-breakfast program for hungry kids in Gaza, for our playground project in the West Bank, for our psychosocial trauma center in Hebron.

Under former attorney general John Ashcroft, American Muslim charities were closed as part of the charade to make the American people believe the government was disrupting terrorist financing. Today, under Alberto Gonzales, the message is that Muslim Americans will be punished if they want to help Palestinians. Either way the assault on our charities is not about the safety and security of the American people but about politics.

The writers, both physicians, are board members of KinderUSA, a Muslim American nonprofit humanitarian organization.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Why, in your opinion, has a conflict developed with regard to the Muhammad cartoons? Who profits from this scandal?

I believe this scandal is of a political rather than religious nature. Certainly, there are Islamic organizations connected with certain forces in the West and their aim is to cause the Arab states to quarrel with Europe. It is known that after the September 11 events, millions of dollars were transferred from banks in the U.S. to Europe. And now there are forces interested in bringing this money back to the United States. Each country has used the cartoon scandal to solve its own problems. Both Iran and Syria have problems in relations with the world community. In Lebanon, society is split into pro-Syrian and anti-Syrian groups.

As is known, 'the Iran dossier' is being widely discussed now, and it is in the interests of Iran to see to it that this issue is absent from the agenda, on one hand, and that it becomes the center of the Islamic world, on the other. Besides, the UN Security Council will soon consider the situation around Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafik Hariri.

At the same time it is noteworthy that in Saudi Arabia, where radical Islamic organizations are principal players, there are no disturbances of such a scale as in these three countries.

'The cartoon' scandal is profitable to the U.S. who condemned the publication of the cartoons thus looking concerned for the image of the Muslims in the eyes of the public. But I do not understand why one would set the Danish and Norwegian embassies on fire, whereas the Islamic world should focus precisely on the United States as the country that has as much as occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, not just drew some cartoons or spoke bad of Islam.

I believe it will continue, since there are forces interested in keeping up this conflict. The only way out is to express protest, if any, only in a peaceful way.

Why did protesters in Lebanon deliver their main blow on Christians?

It was not aimed at Christians. Those who organized this action did know that the Danish embassy is located in a Christian quarter and, naturally, some sought to cause Christians to quarrel with Muslims. Thank God, it failed, otherwise a civil war would break out. Thank God, Christians did nothing in response.

Do you think the head of a state should apologize for the actions of an independent newspaper?

That there is freedom of speech in Europe is a fact for me, just as it is a fact that governments in European countries cannot interfere in the work of the mass media. I do not understand why many demand an apology from Denmark which does not bear any responsibility for the policy of a particular periodical. So, the way in which the Islamic world has reacted to the publication is a way of silencing the press and journalists, and it is very dangerous.

I would like to add however that, on one hand, I am for freedom of expression, but on the other, I cannot approve of involving religious symbols, especially because it is the Prophet Mohammed in this case.

What do you think of Russia's decision to invite Hamas leaders to Moscow?

It is a very important, and I would say, historic statement of the Russian president, especially when made against the background of Bush's administration's accusations of Hamas as a terrorist organization. In my opinion, the Russian initiative relieves the tension that has been created by the U.S. At the same time, Russia has shown the United State indirectly that there should be no double standards with regard to the elections in the Palestinian Authority. I suppose Russia will play a considerable role after the failure of the U.S. in the Middle East. The success of the Russian leadership's initiative will depend in many ways on whether they will be able to come to a compromise with Israel.

In April 2001 Robertson supported China's brutal policy of forced abortion and said that the Communist country was "doing what they have to do" in keeping population numbers down. It is not Christian to advocate even voluntary abortion on the part of the mother, never mind such a tyrannical model of forced abortion as part of a wider eugenics agenda as is the case in China.

Whenever the subject of implantable chips has been raised on the 700 Club, Robertson has whitewashed the issue, saying that it doesn't represent the mark of the beast and that Christians should not be concerned about it. This directly contradicts the Bible and Revelations.

Last year Robertson caused waves when he advocated the assassination of Venezuelan populist president Hugo Chavez. In doing so Robertson is nailing his colors to the wall as a firm minion of the New World Order. Chavez has rallied against the Globalists at every turn, including his recent spat with Vincente Fox and his rejection of the FTAA.

Robertson has been caught on numerous occasions flashing El Diablo Satanic hand signals on his show (pictured above) and soft-peddling for the beast system by telling Christians not to worry about Big Brother surveillance and biometric scanning.

Robertson is pro Skull and Bones, Bohemian Grove Bush, pro war, and pro government. He is a modern day Judas Iscariot. How does this help an image of Christianity that has already been hijacked and soiled by evil men who veil themselves in religion to obscure mass criminality?

Atheists channel surfing reach the God Channel, CBN and Trinity Broadcasting Network and are confronted by maniacal drooling televangelists who bark like dogs and claim to have the power to save someone's life by touching them on the head. They see the ravings of these demented lunatics and immediately say to themselves, "if that's God I want nothing to do with it."

Texe Marrs has exposed these scribes and pharisees for who they are, most notably in his video The Blind and the Dead.

We have thousands of different sects nitpicking about whose bizarre interpretations of Biblical minutia is correct while ignoring the crystal clear fundamental basics of how to successfully live your life using the example of Jesus Christ.

A culture that drills into people's heads that being cool is about mindlessness and wearing the right trainers doesn't help either. Don't talk about politics or religion! Simon Cowell said something funny last night on American Idol, let's twitter on about that for hours while the house around us burns to the ground!

These factors have directly led to the near destruction of Christianity in Europe and replaced it with Hollywood fad driven faux 'spirituality' like Kabbahlah, which you can trace right back through Anton LaVey, Aleister Crowley and the origins of Satanism itself.

"The goal of Islam, ladies and gentlemen whether you like it or not, is world domination," says Robertson.

The only Muslim invasion taking place is on the immigration front and it's being promulgated and given safe passage by the very government's supposedly fighting radical extremists. The clash of civilizations is being deliberately engendered so the elite can swoop in and pick up the pieces after civil society and the economy go down in flames.

Pat Robertson is an agent of the Globalists and his controversial comments only serve to enhance their Satanic agenda of bringing true Christianity to its knees and forcibly replacing it with a Godless one world government where the only allegiance permitted is to the state itself.

I shall never forget the glimpse, at the close of Alan Rickman's production, of Rachel when 10 years old, shot on a little family movie camera, making her speech about world poverty and the urgent need to end the misery. The New York Theatre Workshop have silenced that little girl, as well as the girl who confronted the Israeli army Caterpillar bulldozer.

There has to be a court case on the sheer fact of the cancellation of this production. I suppose lawyers were consulted about the word "postponed". We in the theatre know however what cancelling a production means, whatever words are used. Megan Dodds, and a crew lose their jobs. The Royal Court Theatre lose a production that was a few weeks from opening in New York City.

For the Royal Court Theatre were producing "Rachel Corrie", with the New York Theatre Workshop, and putting up a lot of money--$100,000 dollars.

I hope that all theatre artists, writers, designers, actors, directors, independent producers and artists' representatives will make their protests known publicly as well as directly to the New York Theatre Workshop management. I hope that American Actors Equity will be asked to take up and support the Royal Court Theatre producer, Elyse Dodgson, the director, Alan Rickman, and the actress Megan Dodds.

If this cancellation is not transformed into a new production, somewhere in New York, immediately, we would be complicit, all of us, in a catastrophe that must not be allowed to take place. This play is not about taking sides. It is about protecting human beings.

In this case, Palestinian human beings who have no protection, for their families, their homes or their streets.

Rachel Corrie gave her life to protect a family. She didn't have or use a gun or bomb.

She had her huge humanity, and she gave that to save lives.

A spokesman for the North's Korea People's Army (KPA) said distrust is high between the United States and North Korea, and Pyongyang "will never remain a passive onlooker to the U.S. pre-emptive attack on the DPRK," its official news agency reported.

DPRK is short for North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

"The KPA side is of the view that a pre-emptive attack is not (the) monopoly of the U.S. and the DPRK, too, has the right to pre-empt an attack as the most effective and positive act for self-defense in the light of the hard reality that the DPRK and the U.S. sides are still technically at war," the spokesman was cited as saying.

The 1950-1953 Korean War ended in a truce and not a peace treaty meaning that the two Koreas are technically still at war. The United States led U.N. forces in defense of South Korea and signed the armistice agreement in that capacity.

U.S. and South Korean forces will stage annual field exercises from March 25 to March 31 designed to coordinate defenses of the southern half of the peninsula.

"The KPA will follow with a high degree of vigilance the grave situation prevailing on the Korean peninsula due to the projected war maneuvers and keep itself fully ready to go into action to cope with any event on its own initiative," the spokesman said.

North Korea has said the joint drills are an impediment to progress in six-party talks aimed at ending North Korea's nuclear weapons programs.

The last round of the talks among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States was held in November 2005.

The talks have hit a snag over Washington's decision to crack down on firms it suspects of helping North Korea in illicit activity such as counterfeiting.

North Korea has said it is unthinkable for it to return to the talks while Washington is trying to topple its leaders through the financial measures.

Washington, Seoul and others have said the crackdown is a matter for law enforcement and not related to the six-party talks.

In previous years, North Korea has placed its civil defense system on high alert at the time of the joint drills that have been taking place for four decades.

There are about 30,000 U.S. troops in South Korea in support of some 690,000 South Korean troops. The North has about 1.2 million troops.