Late Night Musings: Time to get mad at THE Man again

Here’s a few head lines to sleep on:

Four months after Trayvon Martin shooting, Sanford police chief fired.  Talk about a little late to hold some one accountable and this would be it!

Sanford Police Chief Bill Lee, who came under fire for his department’s handling of the shooting death of teenager Trayvon Martin, has been fired, City Manager Norton Bonaparte announced in statement on Wednesday evening.

“After much thoughtful discussion and deep consideration for the issues facing the City of Sanford, I have determined the Police Chief needs to have the trust and respect of the elected officials and the confidence of the entire community,” Bonaparte said. “We need to move forward with a police chief that all the citizens of Sanford can support.”

The Bush Administration was totally negligent about preventing 9/11 and now we’ve got the documents to prove it.

Many of the documents publicize for the first time what was first made clear in the 9/11 Commission: The White House received a truly remarkable amount of warnings that al-Qaida was trying to attack the United States. From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency. One from June called “Bin-Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” writes that “[redacted] expects Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days.”

The famous August brief[ing] called “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” is included. “Al-Qai’da members, including some US citizens, have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure here,” it says. During the entire month of August, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas – which tied with one of Richard Nixon’s as the longest vacation ever taken by a president. CIA Director George Tenet has said he didn’t speak to Bush once that month, describing the president as being “on leave.” Bush did not hold a Principals’ meeting on terrorism until September 4, 2001, having downgraded the meetings to a deputies’ meeting, which then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has repeatedly said slowed down anti-Bin Laden efforts “enormously, by months.”

These declassified documents also contradict Cheney’s claim of connections between 9/11 and Iraq.

A document declassified this week by the National Security Archive reveals that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) delivered a briefing to the Bush administration which directly contradicts former Vice President Dick Cheney’s claim that 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta visited an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague.

The document (PDF), dated Dec. 1, 2001 and delivered to the White House on the 8th, claims that Atta “did not travel to the Czech Republic on 31 May 2000,” and adds that “the individual who attempted to enter the Czech Republic on 31 May 2000… was not the Atta who attacked the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.”

Try to run this one through your brain: Security Agency Won’t Release Number of Americans it Spied On Because it Would ‘Violate Their Privacy’

Last month, Democratic Senators Ron Wydon and Mark Udall asked the National Security Agency how many U.S. residents were spied on under Bush’s 2008 expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allowed for warrantless eavesdropping. But on Monday, the agency told the Senators that they couldn’t know how many Americans it spied on because that kind of oversight would violate people’s privacy.

Wired.com acquired Charles McCullough’s response to the two senators, who are members of the Senate’s Intelligence Oversight Committee. McCullough, Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, wrote that the NSA “agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.”

Wyden said that he and Udall simply wanted a “ballpark estimate” of the number.

But McCullough wrote that the agency was incapable of providing such a number, and an attempt to calculate the number would hamper intelligence missions.

With government employees like these, who need enemies?