Is anyone watching the 9-11 hearings on Cspan2??

[RainDog]

very interesting.

ben-veniste stood up for the Oct 25th protestors who, apparently, were the subject of a memo from the FBI...

he also talked about having good intelligence, and now a guy is on saying we had good intelligence, but bad tools.

why is it such an issue to have oversight for these tools?

as ben-veniste said, otherwise, what is to stop the govt, whether it's your fav. kind in power or not, from harassing those who disagree with them?

[Gin]

1. I'm watching...Stewart Baker is on.....

gin

[RainDog]

2. Tim Roemer also got in some good points

with Larry Thompson.

Baker, fmr NSA General Counsel.

he frames the issue as privacy getting in the way of stopping Osama...inability to communicate b/t law enforcement.

mentioned Poindexter ONLY person fired since 9-11...and only b/c he "crossed" the privacy issue people...

....but apparently he doesn't find it odd and worth comment that Bush has not held anyone accountable for his or her failure to heed the numerous warnings from numerous countries that an attack was about to happen..

b/c he framed it as a situation where they could not find two they knew were going to attack because of a lack of info sharing.

my question is--then how were they able to find out where they HAD been, 48 hrs afterward? did every hijacker leave a forwarding address in the wallet he conveniently left in a car or that conveniently didn't burn up?

why doesn't anyone ask questions pertaining to that?

[RainDog]

3. day off...have to vacuum to be able to put up christmas tree

will you give me the salient points here?

...I have to put up my tree or I won't do it till new years.

[Gin]

4. Marc Rotenberg says CAPS is going forward even though the required

by law...impact on privacy is not completed.

Ben-Veniste is saying we had all the tools before 9-11...we did not pay attention to the threats.

I am on and off the web....will try to update. get that tree up!

[Gin]

5. Ben-Veniste asked how many agencies are doing data mining?

Miller "I don't know." and proceeds to expand on how to do this data mining effectively. He asked her what restrictions are there on agencies gathering this information on us. She is responding saying we need thoughtfull rule making on these issues..but..That is not happening.

Hes talking about NORTHCOM and its gathering of data...its a Rumsfeld program.(military).."surprise"...they buy info from 50 different agencies on us. They are in the process of working on guidelines on how to use the info...while they are compiling it.

Baker: Doesn't know how many agenices are data mining.

[RainDog]

6. whoooop whoooop whooop

my bullshit detector just went off.

did you see Baker...the cough of oh shit when ben_veniste asked why an agent didn't just call the faa and put the guy on a no fly list??

and Baker's lame, lame remark??? (squinting his eyes..) "but then they might have thought...they're on to us" --and we'd never catch them...

BUT THEY DIDN'T CATCH THEM.

asshole.

[RainDog]

7. I'm not even CLOSE TO getting the tree up..

I've stopped vacuuming for a minute to get the cat hair out of my rug with one those rollers with tape on them.

...that's fun...

and washing my slip covers, and putting rugs out on the porch and beating the bushshit out of them,

and vacuuming...

and trying to put the mess somewhere...