The CIA has only itself to blame for further erosion of its authority in the intelligence overhaul order signed by President Bush today.

"I don't see a lot of change here," said Mark Lowenthal, a former CIA assistant director. He described the revised order as an "organizational update" that seemed "underwhelming" after months of speculation inside the government about how the powers of various agencies might shift.

The next time you're asked to give information to a government agency or official, you not only won't know where that information might go, you may not even know who's really asking the question in the first place. What effect these changes ultimately will have is unclear because the Department of Justice has previously issued a secret legal opinion saying the President does not have to follow executive orders. This kind of concentrated power, exercised in secret, is a lit fuse with our Constitution likely in danger of being burned.

UPDATE: DNI chief Mike McConnell called the order, "truly a historic day for our Community and the nation."

This Executive Order is the next, necessary step in intelligence reform and upholds the key themes of intelligence reform, namely: that the sum of our parts will produce better intelligence than each intelligence element individually; that we need a dedicated official - the DNI - with the responsibility and authority to lead and integrate this Community; and that the decentralized structure of the Community should remain intact, with most IC elements remaining embedded in cabinet departments.

Chinese intelligence has ordered hotel chains to wiretap the internet communications of foreign visitors in Beijing during the Olympics Games, a U.S. Senator charged today.

At a news conference in the Capitol, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan, produced orders to the hotels chains, allegedly originating with the Chinese Public Security Bureau, or PSB.

"The Chinese government has put in place a system to spy on and gather information about every guest at hotels where Olympic visitors are staying," Brownback told reporters.

"This means journalists, athletes' families, human rights advocates and other visitors will be subjected to invasive intelligence gathering by the Chinese Public Security Bureau."

Brownback said the hotel chains had provided him with additional documentation since he first heard about the eavesdropping demand "several months ago."

"Over the past few months, we've had the chance to gather more information directly from the source, the sources," Brownback told reporters. "As it stands now, separate international hotel chains have confirmed the existence of this order. More significantly, we received separate copies of the text of this order translated."

Aides handed out translations of the purported PSB documents.

Brownback called on China to reverse its plans and said he would introduce a resolution condemning them.

We reported here over the weekend that China was preparing a well-organized espionage campaign against foreign visitors.

Fortunately, for those who love political history, the tape recorder was rolling when JFK telephoned two people just after seeing a photo in the morning's Post of an Air Force officer with the furniture.

"There's nothing wrong with the government seeking to do a better job of properly sharing legitimately acquired information about law enforcement investigations -- indeed, that is one of the things that 9/11 tragically showed is very much needed," the report's executive summary states.

"But in a democracy, the collection and sharing of intelligence information--especially information about American citizens and other residents--need to be carried out with the utmost care. That is because more and more, the amount of information available on each one of us is enough to assemble a very detailed portrait of our lives. And because security agencies are moving toward using such portraits to profile how 'suspicious' we look."

"There are a couple of ways to look at the issue," Rollins told me. "The first is that the centers are efficiently organized and capable of undertaking domestic intelligence collection activities -- they are not.

"Second, nefarious intentions are afoot by the leaders within these centers with the desire to sacrifice civil liberty protections in the name of thwarting a possible terrorist attack -- I don't believe this is the case." 

"The lack of a clear national strategy and undefined federal-state expectations, roles, and responsibilities," he said, "has led to instances where state and local employees have drifted outside the bounds of acceptable law enforcement activities."

A study last February, obtained by my colleague Dan Fowler, identified several problems with DHS's fusion-center efforts.

Barack Obama sounds almost Rumsfeldian when he talks about a couple brigades -- about 7,000 troops -- being enough to save our bacon in Afghanistan. The Pentagon says it wants three, which also could turn out to be far from adequate.

"A lot of intelligence -- much of it unclassified and possible to discuss here -- indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described "jihad against corruption," (said)  he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt -- some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai -- also a Pashtun -- had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people."

The major espionage activity at this year's games will take place far from the fields of play, in Beijing's hotels, with China's agents shadowing important foreign officials and businessmen and women. They have already shown a penchant for targeting the laptops and Blackberries of Western officials. See the whole story today in my weekly SpyTalk column.

U.S. security officials are worried that China's spy services will have a Olympics field day next month stealing the Blackberrys of  American officials and businessman.

Yet another e-spy case has surfaced in the London Times, which detailed the seduction of a top aide to Prime Minister Gordon Brown by a "Chinese temptress." They met at a discotheque last January, according to the Times. When she left his room, his Blackberry was gone.

Chinese hacking expert Shawn Carpenter told me the newspaper's acccount rings all too true.

"I wouldn't be surprised in the least if this senior aide was targeted. . .The PRC Ministry of State Security / PLA (Peoples Liberation Army) have very high technical capabilities in the realm of hardware hacking and reverse engineering."

Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, who resigned last year after two years as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, today described the military commissions system as fatally "tainted" by politics and designed to produce guilty verdicts, no matter what the costs.       

The possibility of the system delivering "credible verdicts is doubtful," Davis said Tuesday in a remarkable interview on NPR's Diane Rehm Show.

"The process has been so tainted, such a black eye to the country, that we have to make every effort possible to have an open trial...

"I'm afraid that what has happened, though, is that we've had a rush, in order to get things done before the election, rather than taking the time -- and getting evidence declassified in order to have an open trial is a frustrating, time consuming process, but in my view a necessary step if these things are going to have credibility.

Morris said the politicization of the system began at the top, with the appointment of  Susan Crawford, a "political appointee" with no time in uniform, to run the military commissions.

Bricker has identified one of the men, Gerardo "Jerry" Arrechea as a "high-ranking member of the Comandos F4,"  a Miami based anti-Castro exile group that has vowed to carry out armed attacks on Cuba as well as Venezuela. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the connections Bricker turned up on Arrechea and his sidekick Jerry Wilson (AKA Orlando, AKA Andrew Wilson), last seen dragging a Mexican police trainee through his own vomit, are yet another sign that U.S. private security contractors are out of control. 

(Take a peek at my recent review of Tim Shorrock's Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing, in The Washington Post, then read the rest of Bricker's comprehensive take.)

Hamid Mir has the story in The News in Islamabad.

Although officially the government of Pakistan accepts that foreign fighters are present, their unusually large number has set alarm bells ringing in Islamabad and possibly in other capitals as well.

The report follows New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti's piece Sunday on the CIA's troubled relationship with its Pakistani counterpart, the ISI:

It is like a bad marriage in which both spouses have long stopped trusting each other, but would never think of breaking up because they have become so mutually dependent.

In Kabul over the weekend, Sen. Barack Obama called on Pakistan to act against Al Qaeda in the tribal areas.

A former CIA operative's account of how the spy agency wreaked vengeance on him for his unauthorized expose of American bungling during the fall of Saigon is heading to the flat screen.

A Diebold executive installed computer patches that may have swung the elections to Saxby Chambliss and Sonny Perdue, according to Steven Spoonamore, a top cyber-crime consultant to credit card companies and former McCain delegate. 

Representatives of the national capital's security and emergency response agencies met Thursday to begin planning for next January's presidential inauguration. The meeting was chaired by Darrell L. Darnell, director of the District of Columbia's Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency .

Darnell is responsible for coordinating over a dozen local and federal agencies who have roles in the Jan. 2009 festivities, from protecting dignitaries to planning and responding to a terrorist attack to regulating food vendors and issuing special inaugural license plates.  

Once the presidential review stand is erected, the last item on the pre-inaugural checklist of 70 tasks is the responsibility of the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority: "Check and secure manholes on parade route."

"We will be ready to the best of our ability," Darnell said in an interview.

"Orwellian" is an overused -- and often misused -- term. But the master got it right when he created a slogan for the all-seeing totalitarian Party in his prescient 1949 novel1984: "He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future." 

That came to mind when I learned, courtesy of our friend Steve Aftergood at Secrecy News, that the State Department has missed yet another deadline for producing decades-old records on important events in the foreign policy of the United States.

But why should it comply? It's mandated by law to comply, but "no penalty was specified in the 1991 legislation that imposed the requirement," Aftergood told me when I asked the other day.

UPI's Shaun Waterman reports:

A GOP lobbyist and fundraiser with close ties to the White House has quit a Homeland Security Department advisory committee following allegations of influence peddling and quid pro quo donations to the Bush presidential library.

Department spokeswoman Laura Keehner confirmed to United Press International that Stephen Payne was asked to resign after being surreptitiously videotaped by a British newspaper apparently offering to arrange meetings with senior administration officials in return for a six-figure fee, including a quarter-million-dollar donation to the library.

"The department asked him to step down" from his post on the Secure Borders and Open Doors Subcommittee of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, Keehner said, declining to comment on the reasons.

Retired FBI Special Agent Robert Levinson vanished on Kish Island, a duty-free Iranian resort just off its coast in the Persian Gulf, on March 8, 2007.

The FBI has obtained information that Mr. Levinson arrived on Iran's Kish Island on March 8, 2007, had several meetings at the Maryam Hotel, and then checked out the next day, a bureau bulletin late Tuesday said. 

"However, Mr. Levinson did not fly to Dubai on a previously scheduled flight. There is no record of Mr. Levinson leaving Kish Island. Nor is there any record of Mr. Levinson using his passport or credit cards after March 9, 2007," the FBI said.

"Anyone with information about Mr. Levinson's disappearance should contact their local FBI field office, or if outside the U.S., the legal attaché at the nearest U.S. Embassy or Consulate."

    The FBI added that people with information could also submit information at its Web site.

Levinson was a Russian organized crime expert who worked as a consultant since his retirement, according to several reports.  
  
The Iranians have said they have no information on Levinson.

"A sobbing Canadian teenager begged for help as he was interrogated at the US 'war on terror' camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the very first video glimpse of any such questioning released on Tuesday," AFP reports.

The video was posted online by attorneys for terror suspect Omar Khadr, who is shown being questioned at the prison by Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) agents in February, 2003. He was 16 years old.

Khadr, accused of killing a US soldier in a firefight in Afghanistan, has been held at Gitmo since his arrest in 2002, when he was 15 years old.

"Help me, help me, help me," Khadr says in the video, weeping, holding his head in his hands.

Readers may remember my July 7 post questioning hyper-blogger Spencer Ackerman's  calling Tim Weiner's book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, as "the greatest ever written about the CIA." 

In any event, it got me to thinking about whether there might actually be a "best" book about the CIA. So I invited some veteran Washington national security writers to put forth their own nominations.

[UPDATE: On July 23 Marie Arana, the longtime books editor of The Washington Post, blogged on our list and added some of her own.  "I have to confess: I'm fascinated by spy books, intelligence histories, CIA memoirs, KGB confessionals," she writes. "I'm not sure why."]

The company signed the deal with Ziad Cattan, the man the United States chose to oversee Iraq's defense procurement, signed the contract. As the LA Times reported,  Cattan has since been accused of massive corruption, much it involving no-bid contracts for Soviet-era equipment.

The American Civil Liberties Union vowed Wednesday to sue President Bush before the ink is dry on his signature putting new electronic snooping measures in play.

"This fight is not over. We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. "The bill allows the warrantless and dragnet surveillance of Americans' international telephone and email communications. It plainly violates the Fourth Amendment."

The Senate approved legislation earlier in the day overhauling the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which includes legal immunity for telecommunications companies which collaborated with the administration's warrantless monitoring of Americans' e-mails and telephone calls.   

The White House hailed passage of the act.

We know that information we have been able to acquire about foreign threats will help us detect and prevent attacks on our homeland," Bush said in a statement. "Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, has assured me that this bill gives him the most immediate tools he needs to defeat the intentions of our enemies. And so in signing this legislation today I am heartened to know that his critical work will be strengthened and we will be better armed to prevent attacks in the future.

The ACLU called the bill "a blatant assault upon civil liberties and the right to privacy." See its full statement, here.

The Senate today cleared an historic overhaul of a 30-year-old statute on electronic spying, 69-28,  

The House had earlier approved the measure, which gives immunity to telecom  companies that participated in the Bush administration's warrantless electronic intercepts, 293 to 129.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois voted for the bill. His primaries opponent, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., voted against it.

Earlier in the day, the Senate stripped amendments holding telecom companies legally liable for allowing Bush administration spy agencies to  eavesdrop on Americans' e-mail and telephone calls without a warrant.

Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, hailed the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) overhaul.

"This bill gives our intelligence operators and law enforcement officials the tools they need to conduct surveillance on foreign terrorists in foreign countries planning to conduct attacks inside the United States, against our troops, and against our allies," said Bond.  "This is the balance we need to protect our civil liberties without handcuffing our terror-fighters."

The  measure will quickly go to the White House for President Bush's signature.
 

The Senate, having stripped amendments holding telecom companies liable for participating in the Bush administration's warrantless electronic intercepts, has voted to end a cantankerous, three-year long debate over expanding the limits of eavesdropping on Americans' e-mail and telephone calls.

The measure ending Senate debate on an overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, passed by a 72 to 26 margin.

CQ's Tim Starks reports from the Senate:

The bill gives telecommunications companies immunity if a federal district court determined they received assurances from the government that the program was legal and authorized by the president. According to a Senate Intelligence Committee report, they did receive such assurances.

An amendment offered by Democratic Sens. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, Christopher S. Dodd of Connecticut and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, that would have stripped the bill's retroactive legal immunity provisions fell, 32-66.

The Senate also defeated 37-61 an amendment by Arlen Specter, R-Pa., which stated that the federal district court would not determine whether the government assured the companies that the program was legal and authorized, but instead review the constitutionality of the president's program before the suits could be dismissed.

Specter said his amendment would have ensured court scrutiny of a program on which few members of Congress have been briefed.

An amendment offered by Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., also was defeated 42-56. It would have stayed all pending lawsuits until 90 days after Congress receives a report, required by the bill, by inspectors general on the president's surveillance program.

It would have given Congress a chance to decide on immunity based on a third-party review. If lawmakers took no action within 90 days, the provisions would go into effect.

The administration opposes all three amendments, maintaining that any provision that jeopardizes or delays retroactive legal immunity threatens future private sector cooperation with spying programs. Administration officials have said Bush would veto any bill that includes the amendments.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, D-Ky., said the current immunity provisions represent a bipartisan deal that would speed legislation to Bush's desk before broad surveillance orders issued under a temporary spying law (PL 110-55) begin to fall away in August.


   

In the waning hours of Senate debate over a rewriting of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, Washington State Democrat Maria Cantwell took to the floor to argue that the legislation "doesn't protect the privacy rights of innocent Americans."

"Even the communications of Americans with no terrorist connections" will be monitored by U.S. counterterrorism agencies, she said.

The bill is expected to pass without amendments holding telecom companies liable for cooperating with the administration's warrantless electronic surveillance activities.

CQ's Tim Starks is in the Senate Press Gallery.

They're moments away from going into votes on those three amendments on
retroactive immunity. All three amendments are unlikely to survive. Then
they'll vote on cloture, and then final passage.

Watch the debate here. 

The curtains are coming down on a lingering, virtually meaningless Senate debate on "several apparently doomed amendments" to electronic surveillance legislation, my CQ colleague Tim Starks reports, with final votes scheduled for tomorrow,

Passage of the legislation overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act without amendments that would make telecommunication companies legally liable for their participation in the adminstration's warrantless monitoring of phone calls and emails is all but certain.

"Currently it looks like they'll finish up tomorrow afternoon," Starks just told me by e-mail from the Senate press gallery, where he's he's following debate.

 And Sen. Barack Obama is expected to vote for it, he says.

I'm thinking it'll get about 75 votes, maybe more. Cloture on the motion to proceed (aka a vote against filibustering, in essence) got 80, with 15 "no" votes, but that may have been a reflection more of people wanting to get on with it. The five who didn't vote on cloture include Obama, who said he's on board with the bill, and he's now expected to attend the vote tomorrow. The earlier Senate bill that was slightly more Republican-friendly got 68 votes in February, so this will get more than that, at least.

Obama's vote has created some very unhappy campers on the left, Starks notes.

His positional shifts on this matter -- he was adamant in his opposition this version of the FISA bill once upon a time -- have driven some on the left absolutely bonkers.  Last I checked last week, a group of his supporters opposed to immunity was the biggest group in the www.my.barackobama.com house, his very own website.

Bush administration officials have signaled their opposition to all three amendments pending to the bill, Stark writes.

Each would modify or cut out a provision of the bill that would effectively wipe out lawsuits against companies being sued for assisting President Bush's warrantless surveillance program.

"I do believe at this point in time to give this retroactive immunity kind of makes a mockery of the fact that we're supposed to be a government of laws, not people," said Sen. Barbara Boxer , D-Calif.

The leaders of the Senate Intelligence Committee, however, argued against the amendments.

"Private companies who cooperated with the government in good faith, as the facts before the congressional intelligence committees demonstrate they did, should not be held accountable for the president's bad policy decisions," said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV , D-W.Va.

Liberals, meanwhile, announced the formation of Accountability Now, http://www.actblue.com/page/accountabilitynow, whose goal will be to defeat members of congress who voted for the bill.

Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald writes that the fight against telecom immunity is not over, and that members of Congress who opposed it will be targeted in the elections.

(T)he campaign we have been conducting is intended to be only the first step -- not the last -- in taking a stand against the endless erosion of core constitutional protections and the rapidly expanding Lawless Surveillance State. We have created a new organization, Accountability Now, to conduct the ongoing battle to target and remove from power those who enable these abuses; to force these issues into our political discourse; and to prevent the Washington Establishment from continuing to trample on basic constitutional protections with impunity.

According to Spencer Ackerman, writing in the July 14 issue of The Nation magazine, it's Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

"It is not hyperbolic to say that Weiner's book is the greatest ever written about the CIA.," writes Ackerman, hyperbolically, calling it a "subtle and beautifully written history."

Stirring, it is.  I told Weiner as much personally when I finished reading the galleys of Legacy last summer, congratulating him for concocting such a terrific read, which struck me as an overdue jeremiad and needed corrective to so much Cold War-era Hollywood  blather about the CIA's cool persona, skills and expertise.

But then I began to drill down into it.

As Ackerman dutifully notes, I began to discover serious attacks on Weiner's methods in "specialist journals, on the Web and in a flurry of e-mail among historians and investigative reporters." (See my March 2008 column, "Celebrated History of the CIA Comes Under Belated Fire.")        

Ackerman brushes off the scholarly attacks on Weiner's sourcing and interpretation of documents.

The critics--some of whom are affiliated with the agency--allege errors of fact; Weiner concedes nothing and countercharges that it's his detractors who have the facts wrong. "I think there is some fact mangling going on here," Weiner told Stein, "and I don't think I'm the one mangling." 

Case closed?

But without examining the very serious allegations themselves, how can Ackerman --- a lively, smart  reporter himself -- possibly write that, it is "not hyperbolic to say that Weiner's book is the greatest ever written about the CIA"?

Dunno.

Meantime, I have alternate nominations for "the greatest ever" books about the CIA.

At the top of my list is The Man Who Kept the Secrets, Richard Helms and the CIA, Thomas Powers' masterful biography of the legendary cold war spy agency leader.

 Number two on my list also belongs to Tom Powers.  Last year I re-read his collection of essays on the CIA, Intelligence Wars: American Secret History from Hitler to Al-Qaeda and found them as fresh as a newly cut fairway.

There are more terrific CIA books. Which are your favorites? I'd like to hear them. (Just click on the Comments link at the top of this blog.)

UPDATE: Ackerman now says his use of "it's not hyperbole to say..."  was probably "Freudian." Hmmm.... Ask him (sackerman@washingtonindependent.com).

Also, nominations for "the best book ever written about the CIA" have been pouring in. I'll post them later. -js



 

 
  

Melissa Fleming, a spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, says that IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei has not changed his estimate on how quickly Iran could develop a nuclear weapon, as we reported two weeks ago.

In a June 21 Arab-language interview on al-Arabiya television, the UN's top nuclear watchdog seemed to shave years as many as eight years off his previous estimates on Iran's capabilities, as CQ editor Chuck Hoskinson, an Arabic linguist, reported here.

In Hoskinson's translation, ElBaradei seemed to be saying Iran could have a bomb in as little as six months.

But Fleming says elBaradei didn't mean to leave the impression he was talking about bombs.
 
"Although it may have come across that way, he had no intention to revise any previous time lines," she said via e-mail.

"Former congressman Curt Weldon is helping broker deals between Russian and Ukranian weapons suppliers and the Iraqi and Libyan governments as part of his new job with a private American defense consulting firm," says Weinberger, author of A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry.

Weldon did not respond to e-mails and phone requests to be interviewed or comment for this article. But in a 2006 interview, before the FBI probe was public, Weldon spoke enthusiastically about setting up a "front company" to work with the Russian arms agency, Rosoboronexport. Weldon hoped this company could sell weapons to the Middle East, and other regions, particularly to countries where the U.S. has strained relations. He claimed the director of Rosoboronexport approached him to work with "an American company that would act as a front for weapons these nations want to buy."

Present and former FBI officials say there's nothing really new coming in the bureau's domestic counterterrorism program, despite headlines this week about new "ethnic profiling" measures in the works.

"The Justice Department is considering letting the FBI investigate Americans without any evidence of wrongdoing, relying instead on a terrorist profile that could single out Muslims, Arabs or other racial and ethnic groups," the Associated Press reported in an exclusive story.

The FBI already takes into account a person's national origins, particularly if he or she is a native Pakistani, Iranian, or other nationality of high interest to U.S. intelligence, when opening preliminary investigations into potential terrorist conspiracies, the officials say.

And as the A.P. itself reported,  among the factors that spur an FBI investigation is travel to regions of the world known for terrorist activity, access to weapons or military training, along with the person's race or ethnicity.

But national origin alone is not enough to trigger an investigation, officials say.

For awhile in the South San Francisco-San Jose area, which have large numbers of Iranian exiles, the FBI did run a pilot program sifting through grocery store sales records in search of "ethnic food" purchasing patterns, sources told me last year.

But the FBI denied it was trying to follow a "falafel trail" to potential terrorists.  

However, because the FBI's aggressive new "domain management" program, in which bureau field offices are expected to gather intelligence about immigrant groups of interest in their territory, has left investigators unsure of their limits, the Justice Department is working on guidlines to codify existing practices.

This does not amount to a new "ethnic profiling" program, officials insisted.

The American Civil Liberties Union was not convinced.

"This country should not abandon the presumption of innocence," said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office. "If the FBI is allowed to investigate based on racial or ethnic characteristics, it will make everyone of a certain color or creed a suspect. That stands our traditional presumption of innocent until proven guilty on its head," she said.

Harry B. "Skip" Brandon, a former deputy assistant  director of the FBI for counterintelligence, said the headlines about racial profiling may be overblown.

"It does not seem unreasonable for a preliminary look at someone if you combine some of the factors above," Brandon told me. 

While it does not include everyone, and there are certainly exceptions, it seems to me that the majority of those involved in acts of terrorism here or abroad have traveled to "regions of the world known for terrorist activity,"   for training and some have had weapons or military training and the vast majority have been of a certain ethnicity.  

 Of course people always make the argument, what about (Timothy) McVeigh etc.? And there is no question that terrorists are not limited by race or ethnicity. But anyone with any sense at all has to look at the big picture and see what fits a majority.  From a practical standpoint, you can't look at everyone so you have to go where your facts and experience tell you a prospective operative or terrorist have a common background -- and that can include race and ethnicity. 
 

The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. 

I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. 

David Ignatius has the gem down low in today's Washington Post column, which describes a half-hearted, even feckless U.S. covert action program to send operatives from Iraq into Iran.

He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.

Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups.

Even the most successful bombing raid would leave Iran with some nuclear capability. At best, proponents of this option admit, bombing would set back the [nuclear] program five years. During that time the [White House] expectation is that the Iranian people miraculously would unseat the country's ruling clergy and dismantle the nuclear program permanently.

China may wish it never got the Olympics. On top of shoddy goods and suspect food turning Americans sour on the Beijing regime, two Republican members of Congress now want the Bush administration to boycott the Olympics scheduled to open in less than five weeks.

China said Wolf and Smith had gone too far. 

"We suggest they stop their arrogance and prejudice and never do anything to intervene in China's internal affairs and thus undermine China-U.S. relations," a foreign ministry spokesman said at a press conference.

As I reported in 2006. Chinese security agents, operating from Beijing's Washington embassy, have been brazen enough to follow and threaten Chinese human rights activists in exile here. The Chinese deny it.