During the investigation, Gonzales’ bad memory was much in evidence. He said he could not remember receiving a briefing on security procedures in 2001 and again in 2005 when he became Attorney General (although he had signed forms acknowledging that he had). He could not remember that a safe that had been installed in his residence when he was White House Counsel was kept on after he became Attorney General. He could not remember ever having used the safe or if it was approved for SCI materials. He could not remember an instance in March 2005 when an assistant tried to find out the combination from security managers because the Attorney General did not know it. He could not remember that he had forgotten the combination.

With regard to his notes describing the March 10, 2004 briefing (the same day as the famous Ashcroft hospital visit, see item 12) of Congressional leaders discussing Acting Attorney General James Comey’s objections to the NSA warrantless wiretapping program, Gonzales could not remember the security level of the materials used or if their security level had been marked even though he knew the program was “very, very limited access” and described it in December 2005 has “one of the most highly protected in the United States government.” An NSA official at the meeting confirmed that briefing materials were marked TS/SCI. NSA officials also confirmed that portions of Gonzales’ notes contained TS/SCI information.

When Gonzales was sworn in on February 3, 2005, he took the notes from the White House in his briefcase but could not remember what he did with them afterwards. He said he might have taken them home with him and left them in his briefcase which he did not always lock. He did not put them in his safe because he did not remember that he had a safe at home, and as described above the following month could not remember the combination to it anyway. He described his removal of the notes from the White House as “instinctive”. At some point Gonzales could not recollect, he put both the notes and the other materials in question in a non-SCI approved safe at the Justice Department which both he and his assistants had access to. While his notes carried no security markings but contained TS/SCI information, the remaining documents were clearly marked TS/SCI.

Gonzales did remember looking for the notes in May or June 2007 after Comey testified before Congress and finding them in the safe just outside his office. At that time, he made a copy of them for Fred Fielding the White House Counsel. Two White House Counsel Office lawyers who had been read into the NSA program and recognized the classified nature of the notes asked Gonzales in a July 25, 2007 meeting about his security arrangements for the notes. Gonzales said that they were the only documents he had taken from the White House and that he kept them in a safe. He did not know but thought it was SCI approved. Their notes also state, “he thinks he may have taken them home to look at and probably kept in safe at home”. But of course, as he told the Inspector General investigators he could not really remember. After the White House lawyers began asking questions, Gonzales turned over the notes to Steven Bradbury the Acting head of the OLC. Shortly thereafter, Gonzales announced his resignation on August 27, 2007 to become effective on September 17, 2007. On September 14, Gonzales turned over to Bradbury the remaining documents which made up the subject of the IG’s inquiry.

The IG report concluded that Gonzales had “violated basic Department regulations and procedures governing the proper handling of such classified materials.” The IG turned over its findings to the Justice Department’s National Security Division which, unsurprisingly in this Administration which protects its own, declined prosecution of Gonzales.

An August 4, 2008 article in the Politico on a soon to be published book by Ron Suskind “The Way of the World” alleges that the White House ordered the CIA to create the memo to link Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks and so justify Bush’s invasion of Iraq. The order was transmitted by the DCI George Tenet to Robert Richer, then deputy director of clandestine operations, and Robert Maquire, then head of the Iraq Operations Group. All involved issued non-denail denials. The problem was that Suskind had Richer on tape and released a transcript of their discussion of the memo:

Rob: To characterize it right, I would say, right: it came to us, George had a raised eyebrow, and basically we passed it on–it was to–and passed this on into the organization. You know, it was: ‘Okay, we gotta do this, but make it go away.’ … It was: ‘This is unbelievable. This is just like all the other garbage we get about … I mean Mohammad Atta and links to al Qaeda. ‘ Rob,’ you know, ‘do something with this.’ I think it was more like that than: ‘Get this done.’ […]

Rob: What I remember is George saying, ‘we got this from’–basically, from what George said was ‘downtown.’

Ron: Which is the White House?

Rob: Yes.

It is illegal to use the CIA to deceive the American people. But with this Administration what is one more criminal offense? Who will hold them to account? Besides they lie to us for our own good because just like Colonel Jessep in A Few Good Men they feel that we can’t handle the truth.

As described in a November 2007 ACLU report and a July 2008 update, fusion centers were cooperative efforts to share information that grew up haphazardly beginning around 2003 among local, state, and federal authorities. Almost every state has or is planning to have one. Since state and local laws vary, each fusion center is different. Mixed jurisdictions and chains of command within and between fusion centers and with no overarching regulation have led to an uncontrolled growth in mission. The goal has moved from counterterrorism to more general law enforcement to even broader information gathering on ordinary Americans. Military (in violation of posse comitatus) and private actors have also become involved.

In this, the centers can be seen as the next iteration in a long line of domestic surveillance programs from the old Red squads to the infamous FBI’s COINTELPRO which targeted Americans like Martin Luther King to the Total Information Awareness/Terrorist Information Awareness program which Congress defunded in 2003 just as fusion centers were taking off. By the end of 2006, the Department of Homeland Security had spent $380 million on them.

Like its predecessors, the system is ripe for abuse. It mixes criminal, public, and private information into profiles of large numbers of Americans and is perfect for data mining. It allows users to “policy shop” and acquire information from another jurisdiction which is against the law in one’s home state or locality. It includes reports on perfectly legal activities, such as using binoculars, taking notes, and espousing “extremist” views. Some of these extremist views include being Muslim, a peace activist, or against the death penalty. While these reports supposedly do not contain names, they do contain enough information for identification using other sources. They are also in violation of Title 28 Part 23 of the Code of Federal Regulations which states that law enforcement “shall collect information concerning an individual only if there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in criminal conduct or activity and the information is relevant to that criminal conduct or activity.” In 2006, the DHS and Justice Department came up with guidelines for fusion centers which ignored this regulation completely and suggested the following as an incomplete list of possible information sources:

• Private sector entities such as food/water production facilities, grocery stores and supermarkets, and restaurants.
• Banks, investment firms, credit companies and government-related financial departments.
• Preschools, day care centers, universities, primary & secondary schools and other educational entities providing information on suspicious activity.
• Fire and emergency medical services in both the public and private sector such as hospitals and private EMS services.
• Utilities, electricity, and oil companies, Department of Energy.
• Private physicians, pharmaceutical companies, veterinarians.
• The gaming industry, sports authority, sporting facilities, amusement parks, cruise lines, hotels, motels, resorts and convention centers.
• Internet service and e-mail providers, the FCC, telecom companies, computer and software companies, and related government agencies.
• Defense contractors and military entities.
• The U.S. Postal service and private shipping companies.
• Apartment facilities, facility management companies, housing authorities.
• Malls, retail stores and shopping centers.
• State and child welfare entities.
• Governmental, public, and private transport entities such as airlines and shipping companies.

This is breathtaking in its scope. The result is that some 800, 000 of the nation’s law enforcement officials have in effect become intelligence agents, and not very good ones, of the government. It is not an exaggeration to say that what this is about is Big Brother and the creation of a surveillance state. Fusion centers operate in the dark with no oversight. They have shown no ability in their original counterterrorism mission and in their current form violate the First and Fourth Amendments massively and repeatedly. They are antithetical to American values of privacy and democracy.

On July 31, 2008, the Justice Department posted proposed rule changes in light of “the new, post-9/11 information sharing environment” that would legalize the illegal activities under Title 28 Part 23 the fusion centers have been engaged in for the last few years. It would also increase the length of time information could be held by such centers without any updating from 5 years to 10 years. This is another example of a government department seeking to institutionalize Administration power grabs and legitimize lawless behavior before Bush leaves office. The rules changes are set to go into effect on October 1, 2008.

The New York Times did publish an apology for its part in hyping the case for WMD in the run up to the war. It did so on May 26, 2004 more than a year after the war began. It concentrated on 6 articles: 2 of which were written by Judith Miller and 2 she co-wrote with Michael Gordon. Yet this fact is never mentioned. Judith Miller’s name does not appear at all, and Michael Gordon is cited only once and that approvingly as a further source opining on the complexity of the aluminum tubes debate. Somehow this complexity went unappreciated by the IAEA which saw almost immediately that the aluminum tubes story was bogus. Judith Miller was let go by the Times but not for her role in lying the nation into an expensive, unnecessary, and endless war but for the far worse sin of embarrassing the paper in the Valerie Plame case. Gordon remains at the Times where he continues his career shilling for the Pentagon.

Even though by the time of its apology it was clear there were no WMD in Iraq, the Times was still not willing to give up on them entirely: “It is still possible that chemical or biological weapons will be unearthed in Iraq.” The apology is rife with weasely phrases. “These accounts have never been independently verified.” Note the use of the passive. Translation: “We never verified them.” Or “we, along with the administration, were taken in.” Translation: “We didn’t verify this either, but it’s not our fault.”

The only bright spot in the Times apology is that it took the Washington Post even longer to come up with one. The Post published its apology on August 12, 2004. Bob Woodward’s laughably illogical take was “We did our job, but we didn’t do enough.” Translation: “We did our job, except for the part about doing our job, which we did not do."

Along these lines, on May 28, 2008, former Bush Press Secretary Scott McClellan (July 17, 2003 – April 26, 2006) of all people wrote a more accurate and scathing assessment of the press than any it was willing to make itself:

And through it all, the media would serve as complicit enablers. Their primary focus would be on covering the campaign to sell the war, rather than aggressively questioning the rationale for war or pursuing the truth behind it. … [T]he media would neglect their watchdog role, focusing less on truth and accuracy and more on whether the campaign was succeeding. [Page 125]

If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq. … In this case, the "liberal media" didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served. [Pages 156-157]

On June 5, 2008, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released what has come to be known as its Phase II report on intelligence and the run up to the Iraq war. It is actually two reports. The first of these compares what Bush and others said to what they knew as evidenced by the intelligence assessments at the time. In keeping with the Public Integrity report, it finds many discrepancies (lies) where the Administration overstated the case (lied) or made erroneous statements (more lies). Phase I came out on July 7, 2004. Phase II was stalled first by the Republicans while they were in the majority and then by weak kneed, conservative leaning Democrats like Jay Rockefeller the Committee Chair. While the report contains many interesting tidbits, the delay in its writing, measured in years, vitiates most of its findings (which was rather the point of the delay). Yes, Bush and Cheney lied the country into a war. Yes, this is an impeachable offense, a high crime if ever there was one, but the Democrats have done and will do nothing about it.

Overall the report is very badly written. It does not look at why the October 2002 NIE after considerable White House prodding made a more robust (although still highly conditioned) case for Iraq as a threat. It does not connect the dots. The intelligence community, for instance, concluded that even under optimum conditions if Iraq had somehow reconstituted its nuclear program, it would still take it 5-7 years to produce a nuclear device. This is important because it takes away the argument of Iraq as an imminent threat and turns a justified pre-emptive war into a preventive war, which is a war crime. Nor does it look at the likelihood that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program. Nuclear weapons are not something that are thrown together in one’s garage. They require a vast industrial undertaking which can not be hidden. It is also a multi-phased process: uranium ore must be acquired, enriched, processed, and machined; there must be a design; a device must be made and tested; then it must be miniaturized to fit on a vehicle (in this case a missile); finally the missile must be built and tested. When you consider how much of Iraq’s nuclear infrastructure was dismantled and destroyed in the inspections following the First Gulf War, the idea that Saddam could reconstitute a fully functioning nuclear weapons program on the sly is in the realm of pure paranoid fantasy. Now most Americans were not aware of this at the time but the Bush Administration, the intelligence community, and members of defense and intelligence committees in the Congress certainly were.

The run up to war, how it was treated then and later, is the paradigm for the Bush years. The White House committed acts which it knew to be illegal and then lied to us about them. Congressional Republicans covered for the Administration by blocking investigations when they were in the majority and belittling them when they went into the minority. Congressional Democrats (with few exceptions) did nothing to stop what was happening. The media (also with few exceptions) gave up their role as investigator for that of cheerleader. Now years later, we are at last beginning to see some investigation. Yet for the most part, it is too little, too late. Actual accountability remains as far off as ever.