New intelligence bill expands government power

Compiled by Bob Strott

Dec. 15 (AGR)-- The US Senate has followed the House of Representatives in approving a far-reaching overhaul of the country’s intelligence agencies.

It will lead to the creation of a national intelligence director to oversee the work of the 15 US security agencies, including the CIA and FBI.

In effect, a single individual will be put in charge of coordinating the work of the country’s spy agencies.

The director will have overall control of the $40 billion annual US intelligence budget, and oversee a new national counter-terrorism center. The bill also provides for 10,000 more border guards over the next five years, as well as 4,000 extra immigration officers.

Intelligence officials will also be granted greater surveillance powers.

The changes will represent the most radical shifts in the US intelligence system since the end of the Cold War.

The intelligence reform bill President Bush is about to sign contains anti-terrorism language long sought by outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft and long opposed by civil libertarians.

The new legislation gives the Justice Department vast new powers to prosecute the “War on Terror”. Legal analysts say, in this regard, the bill might as well carry another name — PATRIOT Act II.

“The pressure to pass some intelligence reform ultimately worked to the advantage of the Bush administration,” said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley. “They were able to take a few of the provisions of what’s called PATRIOT II and put them in this bill.”

Ashcroft had long sought tougher anti-terror laws, and had long been formulating a second bill to build on the USA PATRIOT Act, passed just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. But concerns about civil liberties stalled the measure in Congress. Lawmakers supporting the measures managed to tuck a few into the intelligence reform bill that passed overwhelmingly this week.

Bush overcomes internal opposition

The House of Representatives passed the bill after lawmakers resolved differences over Pentagon authority on intelligence needed to help battlefield commanders, and Republican leaders decided to put off a fight over immigration issues until next year.

House Armed Services Committee chairman Duncan Hunter was concerned the new intelligence director might alter the chain of command between the president and military leaders.

The bill was amended to clarify the president’s control of the military.

Wrangling about the chain of command issue and a dispute over immigration provisions sought by House judiciary committee chairman James Sensenbrenner had delayed passage of the bill after House and Senate negotiators thought they had completed a deal last month.

Only heavy pressure from the White House quelled surprise objections from senior House Republicans – a resistance that came close to a direct challenge to President Bush’s authority – just days after he had been re-elected to a second term.

To bring around dissenters, House and Senate negotiators scrambled to find a new form of words to meet complaints that the new intelligence structure would delay the transmission of crucial, time-sensitive military intelligence to commanders in the field.

Passage of the legislation was all but secured when House armed services committee chairman Duncan Hunter and Senate armed services committee chairman John Warner announced their support on Dec. 13 after resolving the Pentagon authority issue.

But dozens of Republicans broke ranks with Bush and voted against it because the compromise bill omitted immigration provisions they wanted.

PATRIOT II

The intelligence package includes a series of little-noticed measures that would broaden the government’s power to conduct terrorism investigations, including provisions to loosen standards for FBI surveillance warrants and allow the Justice Department to more easily detain suspects without bail.

Other law-enforcement-related measures in the bill — expected to be signed by Bush next week — include an expansion of the criteria that constitute “material support” to terrorist groups and the ability to share US grand jury information with foreign governments in urgent terrorism cases.

Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo characterized the measures as “common-sense reforms aimed at preventing terrorist attacks.”

“We are very pleased that the Congress agreed with us that despite having passed the PATRIOT Act right after 9/11, we still had work to do,” Corallo said, referring to the anti-terrorism legislation approved in October 2001.

But civil liberties advocates and some Democrats said the measures will do little to protect the public while further eroding constitutional protections for innocent people caught up in investigations.

Critics also say the proposed changes were overshadowed by the debate over other aspects of the bill, which puts in place many intelligence agency reforms proposed by the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. Some Democrats say they reluctantly approved the package because they favored the broader intelligence changes.

Sen. Russell Feingold (D-WI) said that while he voted for the bill because of its intelligence reforms, he opposed much of the expansion of law enforcement power. Most of it was not part of the Sept. 11 panel’s recommendations.

“I am troubled by some provisions that were added in conference that have nothing to do with reforming our intelligence network,” Feingold said. He later added: “This Justice Department has a record of abusing its detention powers post-9/11 and of making terrorism allegations that turn out to have no merit.”

Charlie Mitchell, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the law enforcement measures are “most troubling in terms of the trend they represent.” He added: “They keep pushing and pushing without any attempt to review what they’ve done.”

Senator Jay Rockefeller, the senior Democrat on the influential Senate Intelligence Committee, welcomed the bill, saying that if it had existed in 2001, “we might have had a chance not to go through the horrible experience that we did on Sept. 11.”

But some Republicans said that despite the amendments, they still opposed the entire bill because they saw it as useless.

“I believe creating a national intelligence director is a huge mistake,” said Representative Ray LaHood, an Illinois Republican.

“It’s another bureaucracy, it’s another layer of government. It would not have prevented 9/11 and it will not prevent another 9/11,” he said.

‘May we see your papers?’

Congressman Ron Paul (R-CO) has denounced the national ID card provisions contained in the intelligence bill.

“National ID cards are not proper in a free society,” Paul stated. “This is America, not Soviet Russia. The federal government should never be allowed to demand papers from American citizens, and it certainly has no constitutional authority to do so.”

“A national identification card, in whatever form it may take, will allow the federal government to inappropriately monitor the movements and transactions of every American,” Paul continued. “History shows that governments inevitably use such power in harmful ways. The 9-11 commission, whose recommendations underlie this bill, has called for internal screening points where identification will be demanded. Domestic travel restrictions are the hallmark of authoritarian states, not free nations. It is just a matter of time until those who refuse to carry the new licenses will be denied the ability to drive or board an airplane.”

“Nationalizing standards for drivers licenses and birth certificates, and linking them together via a national database, creates a national ID system pure and simple. Proponents of the national ID understand that the public remains wary of the scheme, so they attempt to claim they’re merely creating new standards for existing state IDs. Nonsense! This legislation imposes federal standards in a federal bill, and it creates a federalized ID regardless of whether the ID itself is still stamped with the name of your state.”

“Those who are willing to allow the government to establish a Soviet-style internal passport system because they think it will make us safer are terribly mistaken,” Paul concluded. “Subjecting every citizen to surveillance and screening points actually will make us less safe, not in the least because it will divert resources away from tracking and apprehending terrorists and deploy them against innocent Americans! Every conservative who believes in constitutional restraints on government should reject the authoritarian national ID card and the nonsensical intelligence bill itself.”

Sources: Agence France-Presse, BBC, Fox News, House.gov, Independent (UK), Washington Post

EPA to reverse sewage standard

Washington, DC, Dec. 9 — Millions of Americans will face an increased threat of bacteria, viruses and parasites in their water thanks to a new federal policy allowing sewer operators to dump inadequately treated sewage into the nation’s waterways. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s new plan, which reverses a current rule requiring sewer operators to fully treat their waste in all but the most extreme circumstances, will allow operators to routinely dump sewage anytime it rains. The EPA is expected to issue the policy sometime in the next few weeks.

“This new policy will expose millions of Americans to disease-causing parasites, viruses and bacteria in our drinking water and in waterways where we fish and swim,” said Nancy Stoner, director of NRDC’s Clean Water Project at NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council). “More Americans — especially the elderly, very young infants, and those with weakened immune systems — will get sick, and more of them will die.”

For the last 50 years standard sewage treatment has involved a two-step process: solids removal, and biological treatment to kill bacteria, viruses and parasites. The new policy allows facilities to routinely bypass the second step and “blend” partially treated sewage with fully treated wastewater before discharging it into waterways. (Some treatment facilities include a third step in which they use chlorine to disinfect sewage, but disinfection does not kill viruses and many other pathogens.)

Currently sewer operators are allowed to blend partially treated sewage only in extreme cases, such as hurricanes and tropical storms, and when there is no feasible alternative, such as adding more capacity to handle sewage or storing it until it can be fully treated. The new policy will allow plants to dump partially treated sewage anytime it rains or snows.

Untreated sewage contains a variety of dangerous pathogens, including bacteria (such as E coli), viruses (such as hepatitis A), protozoa (such as Cryptosporidium and Giardia) and helminth worms. The pathogens in sewage can cause illnesses ranging from diarrhea and vomiting and respiratory infections to hepatitis and dysentery. Even with the current, stronger sewage treatment standard, experts estimate that there are 7.1 million mild-to-moderate cases and 560,000 moderate-to-severe cases of infectious waterborne disease in the United States annually.

A November 2003 NRDC-commissioned study by Michigan State University biologist Joan B. Rose concluded that the EPA’s new policy would pose a significant threat to public health. For example, Dr. Rose, an expert in water pollution microbiology and waterborne diseases, determined that “[t]he risks associated with swimming in waters receiving the blended flows were…100 times greater than if the wastewater were fully treated.”

The Bush administration’s fiscal year 2005 budget called for cutting $492 million from the Clean Water Act State Revolving Fund, which loans money to states to help pay for sewage treatment. Congress ultimately cut $250 million from the fund. Stoner said substantially more funding is needed to adequately protect the public. “The federal government should require treatment plants to upgrade their aging sewer systems and help them out with more funding,” she said. “Instead, it cut funding and now will allow these facilities to discharge viruses and bacteria directly into our water.”

Besides the obvious threat to public health, allowing inadequately treated sewage in US waters will have dire long-term environmental and economic consequences, said Stoner. More sewage in waterways will close beaches, kill fish and destroy shellfish beds, which will hurt the fishing and tourism industries. Sewage is the second largest known cause of US beach closures and advisories every year.

The new policy also is illegal, Stoner added. The Clean Water Act requires sewer operators to fully treat sewage before discharging it except in an emergency. Blended sewage does not meet this requirement, and the EPA has taken enforcement actions against sewer operators in which the agency has clearly stated in writing that blending violates the Clean Water Act.

“The Bush administration claims that the ‘blended’ sewage will meet all Clean Water Act standards, but that’s not good enough to protect the public,” Stoner said. “In fact, the law does not specifically cover many dangerous viruses and parasites, but biological treatment — the step the administration is making optional whenever it rains — removed those contaminants. Now they will wind up in our water.”

Public health officials, state environmental officials, shellfishermen, marina operators, and tens of thousands of citizens have urged the EPA to drop its sewage-dumping plan. Among those weighing in against the proposal were state environmental agencies in Florida, Georgia, New Jersey and Washington, the American Public Health Association, the Pacific Coast Shellfish Growers, several county public health agencies, and the Children’s Environmental Health Network. In addition, 62 US representatives have called on the administration to abandon the proposal.

Source: Natural Resources Defense Council

US tapped ElBaradei calls, claim officials

By Suzanne Goldenberg and Ian Traynor

Dec. 13 — The Bush administration has been listening in on telephone conversations between the director of the international nuclear agency and Iranian diplomats with the aim of gathering evidence to remove the United Nations bureaucrat from his post.

With Washington’s campaign against the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief, Dr. Mohammad ElBaradei, now in its second year, the administration has acquired dozens of telephone intercepts of such conversations in the hopes of finding evidence of wrongdoing, the Washington Post reported on Dec. 2. The newspaper quoted three anonymous US government officials as saying that the administration embarked on its eavesdropping mission to collect material that would discredit ElBaradei in his dealings with Tehran in the crisis over its clandestine nuclear program.

At the IAEA headquarters in Vienna it is taken for granted that ElBaradei’s phone calls are tapped. Officials shrug that such activities go with the territory. The CIA had no comment when contacted yesterday.

For the neo-conservatives in the Bush administration, ElBaradei has been an enemy since he exposed the hollowness of Washington’s claims about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear arsenal during the run-up to the war on Iraq. In recent months, as global efforts to halt Iran’s clandestine nuclear program gathered pace, some US officials who were skeptical of a diplomatic resolution accused ElBaradei of hiding evidence of Tehran’s weapons program from the nuclear watchdog.

Under a deal brokered by Britain, Germany and France, Tehran agreed last month to suspend uranium enrichment. However, Washington has been pressing for Iran to be taken to the UN security council.

State Department hard-liners, such as the under secretary for arms control, John Bolton, have openly complained about ElBaradei’s differing approach. However, the wire taps produced no clear evidence of inappropriate contact between ElBaradei and officials in Tehran. “Some people think he sounds way too soft on the Iranians, but that’s about it,” one official told the Post.

The IAEA director has said he intends to seek a third term when his current mandate at the agency expires next summer. ElBaradei, a 20-year veteran of the IAEA, enjoys broad support among the agency’s 35-strong executive board.

Some experts argued yesterday that Washington would do better to expend its diplomatic capital on urging the IAEA to get tougher on Iran, rather than conducting a covert campaign against its chief. “I think we should be more wholeheartedly supporting the Europeans,” Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser for the first President Bush, told CNN Dec. 12. “I think we have little to lose by reaching out, and trying to draw them [Iran] at least into freezing their program.”

During the run-up to the Iraq war, the nuclear chief was viewed as an obstacle to America’s campaign to convince the international community that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The feud between ElBaradei and the hawks in the Bush administration flared again during last autumn’s US presidential campaign when the nuclear chief pointed out that hundreds of tons of explosives had gone missing from Iraq’s nuclear complexes following the US takeover.

Earlier this year the former British international development secretary, Clare Short, alleged in a BBC interview that the office of the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, had been bugged. The UN’s former chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, also told the Guardian he suspected both his UN office and his home were bugged before the Iraq war.

Source: Guardian (UK)