Patterns
Update: Melanie at Just a Bump in the Beltway has an interesting catch with Just Trust Us: the Pentagon “laundered” $1.4 billion through other government agencies to avoid oversight.
Update 2: In The Emily Litella Strategy Karen points to The Bully Presidency by Jack Balkin that makes the same point about the Shrubbery’s kabuki on warrant-less wiretapping, but more completely.
I have spent most of my working life looking for and using patterns. In intelligence you find the patterns that the “enemy” uses to makes decisions to determine what they will do in a given situation. In law enforcement, patterns can tell you where to expect a criminal to strike next. In computing you look for patterns to move among computer hardware and software, and to check your programs for consistent and accurate performance.
When watching the Shrubbery, the patterns fairly scream at you. The consistency is manic. They continue to follow their routine, whether or not it was successful.
They were told to close down Total Information Awareness, but that guaranteed that they wouldn’t. Since I posted on it earlier in the week, more pieces are becoming obvious. Steve Bates has posted on the Talon project in Pentagon Spies On Antiwar Groups, which is more data for TIA, and Crooks and Liars reports that J. Michael McConnell, the man chosen to replace Negroponte as Director of National Intelligence, comes to the job from Booz Allen, the main contractor on the Total Information Awareness program.
Michael at Musing’s musings has a post on another pattern in One of these is not like the other. The Shrubbery claims to have moved his warrant-less wiretapping under FISA oversight. There is no way of knowing whether or not this has actually happened, but the announcement is the signal feature of another pattern – when faced with a court decision that will put it on the record that the administration is doing something illegal, they move to look like they are complying with the law to make the case moot. This is what they did with Jose Padilla, and a wiretapping case was on the verge of being decided by the 6th Circuit Court.
They never admit error, and can’t be shaken in their belief that the executive branch has the right to do whatever it wants. They have gathered around them a group of “attorneys” who seem to believe that the people who wrote the Constitution really intended to make the President a king with more power than the British monarch who they had rejected.
