White House Opposes Surveillance... Of Its Own Surveillance Policy

Since it was formed in 2004, on the recommendation of the 9/11 Commission, The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has been blasted by civil libertarians
as a tool of the administration, more interested in whitewashing War on
Terror–related privacy violations than serving as a genuine check on
government intrusion. One of the board's five members even resigned in protest,
citing among other things "the vast array of alphabet soup agencies and
bureaucracies in the national security apparatus" that sought "to control and modify the Board's public utterances."
So last year, Congress sought to give the board greater autonomy by
moving it out from under the aegis of the White House and
reconstituting itself as an independent boad within the executive
branch. The response of the White House, Wired reports, has been to drag its feet in appointing a new board -- meaning there is no one on the board as of January 30th -- prompting bipartisan criticism from top members of the Senate's Homeland Security Committee.



The board's second annual report
(pdf), released late last month, does not exactly inspire confidence in
its assiduousness as a privacy watchdog -- even when staffed. After
touting its excellent working relationship with the White House, it
moves to a "nothing to see here" review of the post-9/11 use of the
material witness statute (MWS) as a detention tool. Aside from one
"terrible mistake," the report asserts the board "was not made aware of
specific problems with the use of the MWS in the anti-terrorism
context" and cites a claim by the Justice Department that "on only nine
occasions since the attacks of September 11, 2001 has the MWS been used
in terrorist-related investigations." That is hard to square with the
findings of a joint report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union,
which found some 70 instances of 9/11-related detention, though the
discrepancy may be explained by the frequent use of immigration
violations as a pretext for detentions that were actually related to
terror investigations.

Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice - washingtonpost.com

Two Months Before 9/11, an Urgent Warning to Rice - washingtonpost.com

On July 10, 2001, two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately.

Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director.