August 19, 2007 – Op-Ed Contributors – New York Times

The War as We Saw It

By BUDDHIKA JAYAMAHA, WESLEY D. SMITH, JEREMY ROEBUCK, OMAR MORA, EDWARD SANDMEIER, YANCE T. GRAY and JEREMY A. MURPHY

(Buddhika Jayamaha is an Army specialist. Wesley D. Smith is a sergeant. Jeremy Roebuck is a sergeant. Omar Mora is a sergeant. Edward Sandmeier is a sergeant. Yance T. Gray is a staff sergeant. Jeremy A. Murphy is a staff sergeant.)

Baghdad

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)

The claim that we are increasingly in control of the battlefields in Iraq is an assessment arrived at through a flawed, American-centered framework. Yes, we are militarily superior, but our successes are offset by failures elsewhere. What soldiers call the “battle space” remains the same, with changes only at the margins. It is crowded with actors who do not fit neatly into boxes: Sunni extremists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite militiamen, criminals and armed tribes. This situation is made more complex by the questionable loyalties and Janus-faced role of the Iraqi police and Iraqi Army, which have been trained and armed at United States taxpayers’ expense.

A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death of one American soldier and the critical wounding of two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb. These civilians highlighted their own predicament: had they informed the Americans of the bomb before the incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite militia would have killed their families.

As many grunts will tell you, this is a near-routine event. Reports that a majority of Iraqi Army commanders are now reliable partners can be considered only misleading rhetoric. The truth is that battalion commanders, even if well meaning, have little to no influence over the thousands of obstinate men under them, in an incoherent chain of command, who are really loyal only to their militias.

Similarly, Sunnis, who have been underrepresented in the new Iraqi armed forces, now find themselves forming militias, sometimes with our tacit support. Sunnis recognize that the best guarantee they may have against Shiite militias and the Shiite-dominated government is to form their own armed bands. We arm them to aid in our fight against Al Qaeda.

However, while creating proxies is essential in winning a counterinsurgency, it requires that the proxies are loyal to the center that we claim to support. Armed Sunni tribes have indeed become effective surrogates, but the enduring question is where their loyalties would lie in our absence. The Iraqi government finds itself working at cross purposes with us on this issue because it is justifiably fearful that Sunni militias will turn on it should the Americans leave.

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

Given the situation, it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.

Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful. The morass in the government has fueled impatience and confusion while providing no semblance of security to average Iraqis. Leaders are far from arriving at a lasting political settlement. This should not be surprising, since a lasting political solution will not be possible while the military situation remains in constant flux.

The Iraqi government is run by the main coalition partners of the Shiite-dominated United Iraqi Alliance, with Kurds as minority members. The Shiite clerical establishment formed the alliance to make sure its people did not succumb to the same mistake as in 1920: rebelling against the occupying Western force (then the British) and losing what they believed was their inherent right to rule Iraq as the majority. The qualified and reluctant welcome we received from the Shiites since the invasion has to be seen in that historical context. They saw in us something useful for the moment.

Now that moment is passing, as the Shiites have achieved what they believe is rightfully theirs. Their next task is to figure out how best to consolidate the gains, because reconciliation without consolidation risks losing it all. Washington’s insistence that the Iraqis correct the three gravest mistakes we made — de-Baathification, the dismantling of the Iraqi Army and the creation of a loose federalist system of government — places us at cross purposes with the government we have committed to support.

Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.

At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps in bordering countries. Close to two million more are internally displaced and now fill many urban slums. Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and sanitation. “Lucky” Iraqis live in gated communities barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than any sense of security we would consider normal.

In a lawless environment where men with guns rule the streets, engaging in the banalities of life has become a death-defying act. Four years into our occupation, we have failed on every promise, while we have substituted Baath Party tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care packages. As an Iraqi man told us a few days ago with deep resignation, “We need security, not free food.”

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

UPLAND SLAPDOWN

Joe Carducci and David Lightbourne, founders of the Upland Breakdown, on why you listen to crappy rock ‘n’ roll

By ELLIOTT JOHNSTON
Rocky Mountain Chronicle

Joe Carducci is in the back corner of Grounds Coffee Lounge with a ball cap on and reading the New York Times weekend arts section when I step inside. The windows of the small shop look out onto Laramie’s main drag, which treads a fine line between rustic and plain old rust, and hardly obscures the massive, wind-battered Wyoming landscape in the distance. The stereo is emitting modern, sappy pop, and before I even introduce myself, I wonder if the music is pissing off Carducci. In print, Carducci comes off as a character who wouldn’t put up with a situation like this, who wouldn’t sit tight while noxious music litters the public’s gullible, fragile eardrums. I half expect him to start flipping chairs over and hold the speaker wires hostage.

His influential-in-some-circles-but-hardly-ever-in-print challenge to the establishment of music criticism, 1990’s monkey-wrench on rock, Rock and the Pop Narcotic, is so clear about what is good and what is bad in rock, and so abrasive in its approach, that it’s difficult to watch the author sit quietly and politely as a bouncy song about smooching boys blasts through the sound system.

The first section of Rock and the Pop Narcotic, entitled “The Riff,” is an unprecedented bitching out of the rock critic, in particular those who pioneered the trade at Rolling Stone in the late sixties and early seventies. After disclaiming that “rock music isn’t the only music worth listening to,” Carducci charges that real rock criticism hardly exists; it is so blinded by its own liberal, collegiate upbringing that it lathers all kinds of bogus criteria — political and social relevance, the lead singer’s literary abilities and charisma, unnecessary pretensions like technical skill, studio trickery and more — on top of the music. Perhaps most heinous, by Carducci’s rule, is a rock critic’s rampant susceptibility to the ever-fleeting, ever-market-driven Next Big Thing.

Carducci, who once considered himself an anarchist and now plainly ascribes to the apolitical title “do-it-yourself intellectual,” and Narcotic are far from PC. The book indicts David Bowie as a key instigator of “fag” rock and claims that bands who strive for a female audience are so pop and not rock that they might as well give up and start dry-humping the Walt Disney Company. For Carducci, anything besides the simple live equation of three or four (usually dudes) in everyday clothes with standard-issue rock instruments (guitar, bass, drums), no game plan for stardom and a whole lot of untrained energy is not rock but pop.

That Carducci helped manage SST Records from 1981 to 1986, the trailblazing indie label owned by the iconic, hardcore punk band Black Flag, is a context that strips naked the belligerence of his argument. Carducci’s gig at SST demanded arguing the label’s consciously noncommercial bands like Black Flag, The Minutemen, Sonic Youth, Husker Du and The Descendents into the print media, onto radio and into record stores at a time when punk was thought to be dead and overproduced arena-rock bands and Reaganomics were clouding the cultural climate.

When Black Flag broke up, Carducci moved to Chicago and spent four years on Narcotic. In 1990, he self-distributed about two thousand copies of the meticulously researched, left-field attack on music scribes. Though the book has since been through three small printings and was updated in 1995, it remains primarily a jab at champions of Bruce Springsteen, Sting and “girly” European New Wavers who had ignored, willfully or not, the importance of Carducci’s friends and former coworkers, like Henry Rollins and Mike Watt.

Carducci presents more rock history in Narcotic than just his small part in it. The second half, “The Psychozoic Hymnal,” is his attempt to sum up the last fifty years of rock worth listening to. He sends his rock theory back to organic, untainted fifties groups (led by Muddy Waters, Elvis, Chuck Berry), argues the virtue of sixties instrumental surf music, and champions early Black Sabbath as rock royalty. His purposefully loose prose attacks are aimed at subverting familiar, over-educated odes to wussy, studio eggheads like The Beatles and The Beach Boys.

“No one wants rock ’n’ roll, really,” Carducci says, with a calm, almost scholarly seriousness. “But bars will take it if girls are interested in the music, because if they are there, then the guys who will buy them drinks are there and, suddenly, you are making money. You don’t make money on Black Flag fans. Some people made money, but it was a hassle. You had to have a certain kind of PA that kids could climb on, and extra bouncers and police detail sometimes and all this stuff. So rock ’n’ roll has always been a problem. I don’t glorify that particularly, but I did intend to make fun of the people who think they are into rock ’n’ roll.”

One of the many targets of the book, Robert Christgau, the self-appointed “Dean of American Rock Critics,” who has filled plenty of column space in Rolling Stone over the years, wrote a review of Carducci’s book for The Village Voice in 1991. After calling Carducci a “flaming homophobe” and all but a misogynist, Christgau wrote that although Carducci’s argument is sloppy and narrow in scope, it is an important book, one that “deserves the attention of every disgruntled clubgoer out there.”

Today, Carducci muses pendulously about Narcotic’s impact.

“I think the book changed the later generation of rock critic,” he says. “But it’s hard to tell exactly. They would hear from someone that they had to read this book, and then they at least got in touch with a counterargument.”

Seventeen years since the book’s first edition, Carducci’s theories are still relatively cemented. There is still a small spittoon of quality in an ocean of crappy rock. And damned if those critics — those who are, in Carducci’s view, responsible for siphoning out the good stuff for the public — know the difference.

“So much rock criticism is just a fantasy,” he says. “Just a fantasy of the writer. And the early ones in particular were college kids in the late sixties, and they were writing as if to justify the music with their parents or their English professor. Like, ‘This is literature’ or ‘This is important’ or ‘This is as good as Shakespeare’ or whatever. And again, that’s wrong. That’s collegiate and white, and you’re gonna kill rock ’n’ roll if you stay on that track.”

Thus, white equals upper class equals pretentious. Pretentiousness then takes rock away from its black roots as rhythmically powerful dance music. Carducci says this race-based critique is influenced by his friend David Lightbourne, who is keen on “focusing on what black blues musicians were before white hipsters believed they identified them as something they were not.”

For the past seven years, Carducci and Lightbourne have curated the Upland Breakdown, an outsider roots and alt-country festival held in a homey cafe in Centennial, Wyoming. And although Carducci and Lightbourne are both as white as the people they attack and many of musicians they congregate with, they speak as if the discrepancy has never crossed their minds.

“The first impulse of white people is to remove the black from rock ’n’ roll,” Carducci continues. “And then rock criticism becomes an exercise in convincing you it is still rock ’n’ roll.”

A central legacy of Carducci’s critique delivers a challenging addition of class awareness to the genre: aggressive and smart, but not conceited, rock enjoyed and played by the working and middle class = good; overly arty rock that is philosophized over by the academic and upper classes = bad. This awareness, he says, along with his complete contempt for political correctness, is a direct byproduct of his involvement with SST.

“The hippie thing was righteous and punk was not, to say the least. … I wrote the book because rock music deserves a definition and a defense.”

For those not versed in the cultural about-face that occurs in the hour-long drive between Fort Collins and Laramie, the sheer number and variation of mounted animals that border the upper walls of the Buckhorn Bar in Laramie is a ponderous sight. As I take inventory of the stuffed menagerie — double digits of elk and moose heads, a bison head, an owl, a calf, a turtle, a fox, a badger, a boar — I’m well aware of my not-from-around-here faux pas.

It’s Sunday evening, and I’m here for Lightbourne’s weekly open jam, where the Laramie-based singer mines his encyclopedic memory of songs, playing bygone American rhythm and blues, and invites locals and passers-through to join him onstage, follow along and play their own material when he takes a break.

Tonight he is joined by Laramie mandolinist and songwriter Birgit Burke, a young banjoist and a young violinist from a Chattanooga roots band who happen to be in town, and three or four more folks that trade time among the stage, the barstools and the smoking circle outside the Buckhorn’s front door.

Lightbourne — accompanied by an acoustic guitar and what he calls a jazzhorn, a makeshift instrument worn around his neck that sounds like a cousin to the kazoo — has been playing professionally since the 1960s. In many ways, his appreciation for obscure and antique American musical styles came by way of necessity. When he was playing coffeehouses during the sixties’ folk revival, there was a kind of folkloric Darwinism afoot: The songwriters who knew the most original, rarified material were invited to sing another day.

Lightbourne moved to Laramie from Chicago in 1995 and started the Stop and Listen Boys, a revolving lineup that helps him realize his sincerely obsessive take on early twentieth century American folk forms. And while it may seem to some, especially those born in late seventies or early eighties, that Lightbourne is playing roots music, maybe folk-blues or maybe bluegrass, Lightbourne says, in a one-half disgruntled curator, one-half crazy old man manner, that what he plays is rock ’n’ roll.

“I formed my first band in the mid- to late-seventies, ’78 for the sake of argument,” he says. “And in 1978, the only venues available to you were NHL arenas. There were no bands that didn’t have a stack of 27 Marshalls on top of each other for every instrument.

“They were putting drummers in cages. And I said, ‘No. Give me an acoustic guitar, one microphone, a washboard and a mandolin, and I’ll show you what rock ’n’ roll is supposed to sound like.’ And it’s just my reaction against the arena-rock era. I tried to take it all the way down to Elvis and Sun Records in ’53 with just a Martin acoustic bluegrass guitar. He didn’t have a synthesizer. They couldn’t punch in and punch out bad notes. That’s rock ’n’ roll. Not Sting saving the hummingbirds.”

Like his friend Carducci, Lightbourne can spend hours railing against the gargantuan cultural landfill that he opposes, sifting out the pristine gold that he ardently stands up for. It’s almost Southern Baptist in its self-assured pinpointing of good and evil. Unlike Carducci, Lightbourne, who is twelve years older than his friend, never cared much for rock with electric guitars. When he saw what was becoming of rock music in the late sixties, he dove back in time and never returned.

“I couldn’t be interested in Black Sabbath because I was listening to everything recorded between 1920 and 1940. From ’67 on, you couldn’t listen to The Eagles because you were listening to everybody better than The Eagles between 1925 and 1940. You know, it’s like these people don’t count.”

In fact, Lightbourne took his antimodern credo so far that on a radio slot he once held in Portland called “David Lightbourne’s Rock ’n’ Roll House Party,” he had an uncompromising rule to not play any music made after December 31, 1959. His stand turned controversial when local Portlanders would request 1955’s “Louie Louie,” a hometown hit when Portland didn’t have many.

Lightbourne refused, because The Kingsmen recorded “Louie Louie” in ’63.

“I’d offer to sing it over the phone,” he says. “And early Beatles. They’d say, ‘Ahh, we want early Beatles!’ Fuck The Beatles. If you can find me some live recordings from some den of sin in Hamburg in ’59, I’ll put it on, no fucking problem.”

As far as Lightbourne’s own music is concerned, he takes substantial offense to the notion that some may notice the mandolins and the washboards surrounding him and call it bluegrass. Lightbourne says modern bluegrass, another topic he can riff on for days, has morphed from its original incarnation as a Southern lower-class art supported by “people who sit in church pews holding rattlesnakes” to a music taken over by urban intellectuals who impose their European performance standards on it. Lightbourne says now, with all the decedents of original bluegrass fans “at NASCAR races,” bluegrass has been taken over by “egomaniacal technical musicians.”

“They may not really have any soul in their music, but they can sure outplay anybody on the block,” he says, adding that the music has “run out of all of its original purpose for existence.”

“It’s in this weird limbo in which no one takes it seriously, no one is any good, and the people who are the most undisciplined, they go into jam bands.”

Lightbourne does appreciate the musical innovations of black Southerners from the Mississippi Delta and from Memphis in the twenties and thirties. As Carducci puts it, Lightbourne “wants to play guitar like the Delta players Charley Patton or Son House and then have a jug band behind him.”

“My music is more rhythmic than it is melodic or harmonic,” Lightbourne says. “So the emphasis on rhythm means that it’s not like white pop music before my generation. Before my generation, there was hardly any rhythmic ideas at all in white music.”

Tonight at the Buckhorn, the men and women onstage with Lightbourne are jovial. Burke and her friend, who sings along from her seat, are particularly passionate and know most of the songs. Lightbourne has led the bunch through a song that “was at the top of the charts during the Civil War,” “Freight Train” by Elizabeth Cotton, and other dusty faves about ramblin’, gamblin’ and going out on the town.

Target: Audience

The first Upland Breakdown was held in 2000 in Centennial, where Carducci now lives.

The original intent of the Breakdown was to promote Upland Records, an alt-country offshoot of the Fort Collins-based punk label Owned and Operated Recordings, run primarily by former ALL/Descendents/Black Flag drummer Bill Stevenson, who still logs hours at his nationally renowned studio, The Blasting Room. Upland Records was helmed, sometimes by default, by Carducci. The inaugural concert featured the now-disbanded Drag the River, Grandpa’s Ghost, SST-producer-turned-solo-oddball-folkie Spot, and Lightbourne’s group.

Along with a heap of formerly ardent punk rockers, Carducci’s tastes have mellowed over the years to a more roots-influenced music.

“A lot of these folkies are really ex-punk rockers,” he says. “They were listening to punk when they were kids, and they just couldn’t hack the band thing.”

Seven years later, with Upland Records now defunct, Carducci and Lightbourne still maintain the Breakdown yearly in Centennial. The small town is thirty miles west of Laramie, a locale Lightbourne lovingly calls “a failed ski town — it’s Aspen three hundred years ago.”

The event has always had a sort of purposefully outsider quality to it, and not just because the musicians who play it are sometimes better known on either coast than in Wyoming or Colorado. It’s also been a logistical issue: Highway 287, which runs north and south along the northern Front Range to Laramie, is a picturesque though sometimes death-defying one-lane trip, where even those who carefully keep their eyes on the road are subject to ravenous, ticket-mongering highway patrol and all kinds of furry animals crossing at will.

Partly in response to this inconvenience, the eighth annual Breakdown will hold a second day at the Swing Station, the honky-tonk in LaPorte. On Sunday, August 26, psychedelic alt-country groups The Places and Souled American will join eccentric folk veteran Michael Hurley and Breakdown-mainstays Stop and Listen Boys and Spot.

The Breakdown, Lightbourne says with unveiled pride, attracts “musician’s musicians who aren’t in it for commercial success. People who have an insanely huge positive rep in the musical community, old timers who are playing for the fun of it” and fans who “want the most un-fucked-with music.”

Despite their façades as antisocial musical curmudgeons holing up in the Cowboy State, Carducci and Lightbourne have ties in faraway musical centers. During the past few years, Lightbourne has been asked to play at the Knitting Factory in New York, because, as he puts it, the city’s musical elite have taken a liking to string-band music from the twenties. Carducci, besides his friendships with now culturally important figures Henry Rollins and Mike Watt, has written sporadically for the influential L.A.-based music, arts and political monthly Arthur Magazine, which, despite going out of business for a spell, is sponsoring this year’s Breakdown.

Last October, Carducci and Lighbourne were taken aback by just how “with it” they were by booking avant-folkie Will Oldham (a.k.a. Bonnie “Prince” Billy) at the Buckhorn. On an icy Wednesday evening that made Highway 287 all the more treacherous, the Buckhorn was loaded with young indie-rock fans. The hipsters thought the stuffed animals on the wall looked funny, but the bartenders thought the hipsters did. Carducci reports that Oldham may play next year’s Breakdown if his schedule allows.

But while both Carducci and Lightbourne say they want to correct the public record in their respective field of homemade expertise, they both scoff at the idea that they may be going about it the wrong way. Both could care less that their language can be polarizing. In fact, that is often their intention.

“We didn’t make this stuff up,” Carducci says. “I mean, there are different people, whether in the social sciences or in the arts, they feel something about their world, and they can’t let it go just because everyone around them is oblivious to it.

“Dave and I, a long time ago, decided we don’t care about things most people care about.”

“Um, what we really want to do,” Lighbourne says, “is we want to offend anybody who has anything to do, on any level, with lifestyle culture: designer music, designer magazines, designer clothes, designer skateboards, designer guitars, designer houses, designer cars. Anything that’s just specifically serving a niche that wants comfort without any type of artistic challenge. And they are all over the fucking map. These lifestylers are all over the map.

“There goes one right now,” he says, tilting his head toward a pedestrian. “And you know, if they are offended by that, they are not circumspect enough to realize that a great deal of the culture is mediocre.”

“I am not able to share your enthusiasm for the deplorable conditions which obtain in the U.S. at this time,” William Burroughs wrote to Allen Ginsberg in 1949 from Mexico City. “I think the U.S. is heading in the direction of a Socialistic police state similar to England and not too different than Russia.”

Burroughs died Saturday, Aug. 3, 1997 in Lawrence, Kansas. He was 83.

From the August 19, 2007 New York Times

Concern Over Wider Spying Under New Law
By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Aug. 18 — Broad new surveillance powers approved by Congress this month could allow the Bush administration to conduct spy operations that go well beyond wiretapping to include — without court approval — certain types of physical searches of American citizens and the collection of their business records, Democratic Congressional officials and other experts said.

Administration officials acknowledged that they had heard such concerns from Democrats in Congress recently, and that there was a continuing debate over the meaning of the legislative language. But they said the Democrats were simply raising theoretical questions based on a harsh interpretation of the legislation.

They also emphasized that there would be strict rules in place to minimize the extent to which Americans would be caught up in the surveillance.

The dispute illustrates how lawmakers, in a frenetic, end-of-session scramble, passed legislation they may not have fully understood and may have given the administration more surveillance powers than it sought. It also offers a case study in how changing a few words in a complex piece of legislation has the potential to fundamentally alter the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a landmark national security law. Two weeks after the legislation was signed into law, there is still heated debate over how much power Congress gave to the president.

“This may give the administration even more authority than people thought,” said David Kris, a former senior Justice Department lawyer in the Bush and Clinton administrations and a co-author of “National Security Investigation and Prosecutions,” a new book on surveillance law.

Several legal experts said that by redefining the meaning of “electronic surveillance,” the new law narrows the types of communications covered in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, by indirectly giving the government the power to use intelligence collection methods far beyond wiretapping that previously required court approval if conducted inside the United States.

These new powers include the collection of business records, physical searches and so-called “trap and trace” operations, analyzing specific calling patterns.

For instance, the legislation would allow the government, under certain circumstances, to demand the business records of an American in Chicago without a warrant if it asserts that the search concerns its surveillance of a person who is in Paris, experts said.

It is possible that some of the changes were the unintended consequences of the rushed legislative process just before this month’s Congressional recess, rather than a purposeful effort by the administration to enhance its ability to spy on Americans.

“We did not cover ourselves in glory,” said one Democratic aide, referring to how the bill was compiled.

But a senior intelligence official who has been involved in the discussions on behalf of the administration said that the legislation was seen solely as a way to speed access to the communications of foreign targets, not to sweep up the communications of Americans by claiming to focus on foreigners.

“I don’t think it’s a fair reading,” the official said. “The intent here was pure: if you’re targeting someone outside the country, the fact that you’re doing the collection inside the country, that shouldn’t matter.” Democratic leaders have said they plan to push for a revision of the legislation as soon as September. “It was a legislative over-reach, limited in time,” said one Congressional Democratic aide. “But Democrats feel like they can regroup.”

Some civil rights advocates said they suspected that the administration made the language of the bill intentionally vague to allow it even broader discretion over wiretapping decisions. Whether intentional or not, the end result — according to top Democratic aides and other experts on national security law — is that the legislation may grant the government the right to collect a range of information on American citizens inside the United States without warrants, as long as the administration asserts that the spying concerns the monitoring of a person believed to be overseas.

In effect, they say, the legislation significantly relaxes the restrictions on how the government can conduct spying operations aimed at foreigners at the same time that it allows authorities to sweep up information about Americans.

These new powers are considered overly broad and troubling by some Congressional Democrats who raised their concerns with administration officials in private meetings this week.

“This shows why it is so risky to change the law by changing the definition” of something as basic as the meaning of electronic surveillance, said Suzanne Spaulding, a former Congressional staff member who is now a national security legal expert. “You end up with a broad range of consequences that you might not realize.”

The senior intelligence official acknowledged that Congressional staff members had raised concerns about the law in the meetings this week, and that ambiguities in the bill’s wording may have led to some confusion. “I’m sure there will be discussions about how and whether it should be fixed,” the official said.

Vanee Vines, a spokeswoman for the office of the director of national intelligence, said the concerns raised by Congressional officials about the wide scope of the new legislation were “speculative.” But she declined to discuss specific aspects of how the legislation would be enacted. The legislation gives the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales broad discretion in enacting the new procedures and approving the way surveillance is conducted.

The new legislation amends FISA, but is set to expire in six months. Bush administration officials said the legislation was critical to fill an “intelligence gap” that had left the United States vulnerable to attack.

The legislation “restores FISA to its original and appropriate focus — protecting the privacy of Americans,” said Brian Roehrkasse, Justice Department spokesman. “The act makes clear that we do not need a court order to target for foreign intelligence collection persons located outside the United States, but it also retains FISA’s fundamental requirement of court orders when the target is in the United States.”

The measure, which President Bush signed into law on Aug. 5, was written and pushed through both the House and Senate so quickly that few in Congress had time to absorb its full impact, some Congressional aides say.

Though many Democratic leaders opposed the final version of the legislation, they did not work forcefully to block its passage, largely out of fear that they would be criticized by President Bush and Republican leaders during the August recess as being soft on terrorism.

Yet Bush administration officials have already signaled that, in their view, the president retains his constitutional authority to do whatever it takes to protect the country, regardless of any action Congress takes. At a tense meeting last week with lawyers from a range of private groups active in the wiretapping issue, senior Justice Department officials refused to commit the administration to adhering to the limits laid out in the new legislation and left open the possibility that the president could once again use what they have said in other instances is his constitutional authority to act outside the regulations set by Congress.

At the meeting, Bruce Fein, a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan administration, along with other critics of the legislation, pressed Justice Department officials repeatedly for an assurance that the administration considered itself bound by the restrictions imposed by Congress. The Justice Department, led by Ken Wainstein, the assistant attorney general for national security, refused to do so, according to three participants in the meeting. That stance angered Mr. Fein and others. It sent the message, Mr. Fein said in an interview, that the new legislation, though it is already broadly worded, “is just advisory. The president can still do whatever he wants to do. They have not changed their position that the president’s Article II powers trump any ability by Congress to regulate the collection of foreign intelligence.”

Brian Walsh, a senior legal fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation who attended the same private meeting with Justice Department officials, acknowledged that the meeting — intended by the administration to solicit recommendations on the wiretapping legislation — became quite heated at times. But he said he thought the administration’s stance on the president’s commander-in-chief powers was “a wise course.”

“They were careful not to concede any authority that they believe they have under Article II,” Mr. Walsh said. “If they think they have the constitutional authority, it wouldn’t make sense to commit to not using it.”

Asked whether the administration considered the new legislation legally binding, Ms. Vines, the national intelligence office spokeswoman, said: “We’re going to follow the law and carry it out as it’s been passed.”

Mr. Bush issued a so-called signing statement about the legislation when he signed it into law, but the statement did not assert his presidential authority to override the legislative limits.

At the Justice Department session, critics of the legislation also complained to administration officials about the diminished role of the FISA court, which is limited to determining whether the procedures set up by the executive administration for intercepting foreign intelligence are “clearly erroneous” or not.

That limitation sets a high bar to set off any court intervention, argued Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, who also attended the Justice Department meeting.

Ten-minute trailer for documentary on the Brotherhood of Eternal Love.

Watch the four-minute TV essay here.

Excerpts:

“Like the proverbial hedgehog, Karl Rove knew one big thing: how to win elections as if they were divine interventions. You may think God summoned Billy Graham to Florida on the eve of the 2000 election to endorse George W. Bush just in the nick of time, but if it did happen that way, the Good Lord was speaking in a Texas accent.

“Karl Rove figured out a long time ago that the way to take an intellectually incurious, draft-averse, naughty playboy in a flight jacket with chewing tobacco in his back pocket and make him governor of Texas, was to sell him as God’s anointed in a state where preachers and televangelists outnumber even oil derricks and jack rabbits. Using church pews as precincts, Rove turned religion into a weapon of political combat — a battering ram, aimed at the devil’s minions. Especially at gay people. It’s so easy, as Karl knew, to scapegoat people you outnumber. And if God is love, as rumor has it, Rove knew in politics to bet on fear and loathing. Never mind that in stroking the basest bigotry of true believers you coarsen both politics and religion.

“At the same time he was recruiting an army of the Lord for the born-again Bush, Rove was also shaking down corporations for campaign cash. Crony capitalism became a biblical injunction. Greed and God won four elections in a row — twice in the Lone Star state and twice again in the nation at large. But the result has been to leave Texas under the thumb of big money with huge holes ripped in its social contract, and the U.S. government in shambles — paralyzed, polarized, and mired in war, debt and corruption. Rove himself is deeply enmeshed in some of the scandals now being investigated, including those missing emails that could tell us who turned the Attorney General of the United States into a partisan sock puppet.

“Rove is riding out of Dodge City as the posse rides in.

“At his press conference this week he asked God to bless the President and the country, even as reports were circulating that he himself had confessed to friends his own agnosticism. He wished he could believe, but he cannot. That kind of intellectual honesty is to be admired, but you have to wonder how all those folks on the Christian right must feel discovering they were used for partisan reasons by a secular skeptic, a manipulator.

“On his last play of the game all Karl Rove had to offer them was a Hail Mary pass, while telling himself there’s no one there to catch it.”

Animation by Sally Cruikshank. Mindblowing stuff. And there’s more!

PUBLIC FRUIT JAM 2007
Sunday, August 19th,from 12 noon to 3pm
CITIZENS OF LOS ANGELES! COME JAM WITH US! Bring your hand picked fresh neighborhood or home grown fruit.
Bring (recycled?) glass jars and good cheer! we will supply everything else for an afternoon of great jamming fun. Collaborate! Improvise! Jam!

MACHINE PROJECT
1400 Alvarado Street, LA, CA, 90039.
http://www.machineproject.com

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