Court Rejects Challenge To Wiretap Program

The Bush administration's warrantless spy effort is protected by the 'state secrets' privilege, federal judges rule.

The LA Times reports:

In rejecting a key element of a legal challenge to the government's warrantless wiretapping program, federal appellate judges on Friday demonstrated once again the willingness of U.S. courts to give the Bush administration considerable latitude in handling the war on terror.

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, by a 3-0 vote, barred an Islamic charity from using a confidential government document to prove that it had been illegally spied upon, agreeing with the administration that disclosure would reveal "state secrets."

The lawsuit, filed by Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation and two of its attorneys, challenged the National Security Agency's spying endeavor, the Terrorist Surveillance Program, launched after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The U.N. Security Council has declared that Al-Haramain, which operates in more than 50 countries, belongs to or is associated with Al Qaeda.

The suit was one of 50 legal challenges brought across the country after the program's existence was revealed in the New York Times.

Other courts have shown similar deference to the Bush administration on the state secrets privilege, which permits the government to bar disclosure in court of information if "there is a reasonable danger" it would affect national security.

But the ruling in this case was particularly striking because it came from a panel of three liberal jurists, all appointed by Democratic presidents.

Moreover, the charity, unlike other plaintiffs, says it has evidence of surveillance -- a call log from the National Security Agency that the government inadvertently turned over in another proceeding.

In the ruling, Judge M. Margaret McKeown wrote that the judges accepted "the need to defer to the executive on matters of foreign and national security and surely cannot legitimately find ourselves second-guessing the executive in this arena."

Erwin Chemerinsky, a liberal constitutional law professor at Duke University law school, said the court showed "how much deference even a liberal panel of judges is willing to give the executive branch in situations like this, and I find that very troubling."

Doug Kmiec, a conservative constitutional law professor at Pepperdine law school, said "the opinion is consistent with" a ruling by the federal appeals court in Cincinnati earlier this year striking down a challenge to the surveillance filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.

He said the dual rulings indicated that "federal courts recognize that the essential aspects of the Terrorist Surveillance Program both remain secret and are important to preserve as such."

The court's ruling was not an absolute victory for the government. McKeown rejected the Justice Department's argument that "the very subject matter of the litigation is a state secret."

That finding could prove important in numerous other cases in which the government contends that even considering legal challenges to warrantless wiretapping would endanger national security.

In addition, the 9th Circuit panel sent the case back to a lower court to consider another issue: whether the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires approval by a special court for domestic surveillance, preempts the state secrets privilege. McKeown said that issue "remains central to Al-Haramain's ability to proceed with this lawsuit."

Georgetown University constitutional law professor David Cole said he thought Friday's ruling showed partial victories for both sides.

Indeed, lawyers for the government and for the charity said they were happy with the outcome.

"The 9th Circuit upheld the government's position that release of this information would undermine the government's intelligence capabilities and compromise national security," the Justice Department said.

Oakland attorney Jon Eisenberg, who argued for Al-Haramain before the 9th Circuit, said: "The government wants this case dead and gone. It is not. We are alive and kicking."

Eisenberg expressed optimism that his client would prevail under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a statute enacted in the aftermath of revelations of illegal spying on civil rights and antiwar activists in the 1960s and '70s.

"That provision would be meaningless if the government could evade any such lawsuit merely by evoking the state secrets privilege," Eisenberg said.

Transcript of 'Democracy Now!' for October 12, 2007

Charlie Savage, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, covers national legal affairs for the Boston Globe with a focus on 9/11 issues. He has written extensively about President Bush’s signing statements and other White House efforts to expand executive branch secrecy and unchecked power. Warrantless wiretapping is one part of this story. Savage has just published a book charting the means the Bush administration devised to circumvent laws and expand Presidential authority. It’s called “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.”

The House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees approved a bill Wednesday granting federal judges greater oversight over the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program. Rejecting President Bush’s request, the bill does not provide retroactive legal immunity to phone and internet companies that shared information with intelligence officials. President Bush criticized the bill Tuesday and outlined his demands to renew the government’s broad eavesdropping authority.

Wednesday’s bill updates the Protect America Act that was pushed through Congress in August of this year and is set to expire in February of 2008. Although the bill restores some of the checks and balances removed by the Protect America Act it also increases other spying powers. It continues the policy of warrantless eavesdropping of overseas communications and increases the period of warrantless emergency surveillance of US residents. Also the so-called “basket” or “blanket” warrants issued by the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court would only need to be reviewed once a year. The American Civil Liberties Union criticized this provision as “not anywhere close to the rigorous privacy safeguards Americans deserve.”

Transcript:

JUAN GONZALEZ: The House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees approved a bill Wednesday granting federal judges greater oversight over the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program. Rejecting President Bush’s request, the bill does not provide retroactive legal immunity to phone and internet companies that shared information with intelligence officials. President Bush criticized the bill Tuesday and outlined his demands to renew the government’s broad eavesdropping authority.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: The final bill must meet certain criteria. It must give our intelligence professionals the tools and flexibility they need to protect our country. It must keep the intelligence gap firmly closed and ensure that protections intended for the American people are not extended to terrorists overseas who are plotting to harm us. And it must grant liability protection to companies who are facing multi-billion-dollar lawsuits only because they are believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend our nation following the 9/11 attacks.

Terrorists in faraway lands are plotting and planning new ways to kill Americans. The security of our country and the safety of our citizens depend on learning about their plans. The Protect America Act is a vital tool in stopping the terrorists, and it would be a grave mistake for Congress to weaken this tool.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Wednesday’s bill updates the Protect America Act that was pushed through Congress in August of this year and is set to expire in February of 2008. Although the bill restores some of the checks and balances removed by the Protect America Act, it also increases other spying powers. It continues the policy of warrantless eavesdropping of overseas communications and increases the period of warrantless emergency surveillance of US residents. Also, the so-called “basket” or “blanket” warrants issued by the secret Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court would only need to be reviewed once a year. The American Civil Liberties Union criticized this provision as “not anywhere close to the rigorous privacy safeguards Americans deserve.”

AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Savage is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter from the Boston Globe, has written extensively about President Bush’s signing statements and other White House efforts to expand executive branch secrecy and unchecked power. Warrantless wiretapping is one part of this story. Charlie Savage has just published a book charting the means the Bush administration devised to circumvent laws and expand presidential authority. It’s called Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy. Joining us now in our firehouse studio, Charlie Savage. Welcome.

CHARLIE SAVAGE: Thanks for having me on.

AMY GOODMAN: Charlie, you begin in a very dramatic way on September 11, 2001. Tell us about what Dick Cheney was doing.

CHARLIE SAVAGE: That’s right. Well, I began with this sort of unusual moment in the midst of the 9/11 attacks, in which the military believed that at least one more plane is still in the air and hijacked, and they asked Dick Cheney in the bunker beneath the White House whether they should shoot this plane down. And Cheney gives them authority to shoot down United 93, as it were. Now, it turns out that that was a moot point, because United 93 had already crashed amid the passenger uprising. They were looking at an image of where it would be if it were still in the air.

But this shoot-down order became the subject of an intense dispute with the 9/11 Commission, because Cheney later told the commission, and Bush agreed with him, that Bush had given Cheney prior authority as the commander-in-chief, who actually commands the military to take such an extraordinary step. But the 9/11 Commission looked at all the notes of the people aboard Air Force One and in the bunker, and they looked at all the switchboard logs from the bunker and the military of communications going in and out, and they found no evidence, no documentary evidence that that call existed.

And so, I use that moment to open this book, Takeover, because it’s a very vivid illustration of, first of all, the climate, you know, the atmosphere of 9/11, which really helped this push to concentrate more power in the White House, but also Cheney taking command inside the administration, especially in the national security context, Bush acquiescing to Cheney’s point of view, and then their effort -- their administration's effort to control the flow of information about kind of what’s happening behind the closed doors at the executive branch.

AMY GOODMAN: And when they had the 9/11 Commission hearing meeting, the insistence by Cheney and Bush that it not be sworn testimony, that Cheney be sitting physically directly next to President Bush, and that there be no recording of their statements made about this conversation, about whether Bush had given the actual command or whether it was Cheney.

CHARLIE SAVAGE: That’s right. You know, and, of course, it is a moot point. The planes were down. It doesn’t really matter that much, but it’s a vivid way of illustrating Cheney's role in the administration, and therefore getting into the topic of what Cheney used that influence to do. And one of the most important things and one of the most successfully implemented policies of this administration, one that they never talk about and that I think has received scant attention, just depending on how sweeping it is and how successfully they pulled it off, was that he had wanted, when they arrived in office long before 9/11, to use that time in office to reshape American democracy by concentrating more power in the White House, by expanding presidential power, by throwing off checks and balances.

This was an agenda that he had with him, dating back thirty years to his time in the White House as chief of staff to Gerald Ford in that period after Watergate and Vietnam, when Congress was re-imposing some checks and balances on the imperial presidency that had grown up during the early Cold War. And Cheney would spend the next thirty years trying to throw that off. Finally, as vice president, the most experienced vice president in history dealing with one of the least experienced presidents in history, he was in a position to shape this administration’s practices and tactics as it went forward, now pushing into eight years, in order to take actions and set precedents across a huge range of issues and ways that were going to leave the presidency much stronger than it was when they arrived.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And specifically the use of the signing statements, which, of course, was the subject of much of your reporting -- how did the signing statements fit into this overall policy?

CHARLIE SAVAGE: The signing statements are one tactic among many, but it’s an illustration of how much more aggressive this administration has been than any that came before and how it’s kind of thrown off sort of unofficial constraints, practices of restraint. A signing statement is an official legal document the President issues on the day he signs a bill into law. It consists of instructions to his subordinates in the executive branch about how they are to implement the new laws created by a bill. And it becomes controversial when the President says, “You will interpret Section 103 as being unconstitutional, because I alone have said it’s unconstitutional, and you do what I tell you. And if it’s unconstitutional, that means you don’t need to enforce it.” And where that becomes very controversial is when Section 103 is a check or a balance on the President’s own power, because then not enforcing that law means not having to obey that law.

Now, previous presidents have occasionally used signing statements like this, but President Bush has challenged more laws than all previous presidents in American history combined, using signing statements, a dramatic escalation of this tactic, in what the American Bar Association has said is evolving into kind of a backdoor override-proof line-item veto power, which can really prevent Congress from ever again imposing any new checks on presidential power. It’s just but -- it’s an extraordinary thing, an extraordinary development in our constitutional law, and yet it’s just one of many, many different tactics the administration has used to concentrate more unchecked power in the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about wiretapping, the controversy now, the frustration that people have with the Democrats, supposedly the opposition party, going along with the Republicans.

CHARLIE SAVAGE: Well, the background is that after 9/11, as we all know now, Bush gave the military the authority to wiretap phone calls without warrants, in defiance of a 1978 law that required warrants for that situation. And he used a very aggressive legal theory about the President's powers as commander-in-chief to bypass laws at his own discretion. Because that program was only legal if that theory were true, that meant that the fact that they did this set a precedent that says that theory is true, and future presidents will be able to cite that precedent when they want to evade any other law that restricts their own authority.

So now, going forward, one of the ways this agenda has been able to be so successfully implemented was that there was no resistance from Congress. At the very moment there was this stronger push coming out of the Vice President's office to expand the presidential power as an end to itself in any way possible, because of one-party rule for six years and because of the atmosphere of crisis after 9/11, there was no push back. And that’s how the ball was moved so far down the field.

And one of the things that’s been very interesting about the last year is now we have split control of government again, and so the question was, how is that going to change things? And what we’ve seen from the Protect America Act in August and the dynamic going forward is that even with split control of government, the dynamic is still there. Congress is just as it was for the first twenty or thirty years of the Cold War, when the original imperial presidency was growing under presidents of both parties, by the way. Congress is again unwilling to push back against the White House's assertion that it needs ever more authority, and checks and balances will result in bloodshed. And so, I think, going forward, that you can see that this dynamic is going to be with us. And, of course, two years from now, we may have one-party control of government again, the other party, but that will just sort of hurl us further down this path, I think.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And this issue of the President seeking to protect those in the corporate world who go along with his policies -- well, first of all, obviously, there was the retroactive immunity to the airline companies after 9/11 for their failure to act to provide a kind of security on their planes, giving them immunity from any possible lawsuits, and now this effort by the administration to try to provide retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that went along with his surveillance program.

CHARLIE SAVAGE: Well, and what this is, is because Congress has demonstrated that it’s really not going to do anything about the basic fact that the President asserted he could bypass a law and then he acted on that assertion, and, you know, that established he can do that, or whoever else is president at any given moment from now on can do that, that the one sort of last place where critics of this sort of extraordinary development could still have some traction was the lawsuit against the companies, which had also evidently broken privacy laws by going along with this. So, by seeking retroactive immunity, it’s sort of the last place closing off the possibility of accountability.

And accountability for how people use their power is one of the great ways in which the administration has successfully expanded their own powers, as well. For example, by dramatically expanding secrecy surrounding the executive branch in all kinds of ways, going after open government laws, expanding executive privilege, expanding the use of the state secret privilege to get rid of lawsuits in courts, and on and on and on, what they’ve done is they’ve made the executive branch much more of a black box so that outsiders, whether Congress, the courts or just voters, don’t know what officials are doing with these powers at the very moment that the powers are being dramatically increased, and that means that the officials who have that power, whoever they are at any given moment, are much freer to do whatever they want with them.

AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Savage, how is the Bush administration remaking the Civil Rights Division in the Justice Department?

CHARLIE SAVAGE: This is another example of the myriad ways in which they're concentrating more power in the White House, in this case centralizing greater control over the permanent government, the bureaucracy. There’s eight or nine case studies in my book that explain different tactics for this, which have been very successfully implemented. One of them is in the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, which is an agency set up by statute with a mission by statute of enforcing the nation's civil rights laws, primarily to protect minorities against discrimination.

Conservative presidents have long tussled with his agency, because they have different ideas about, you know, how much affirmative action should be part of these kinds of things. But no president, until this administration, has messed with longstanding traditional procedures for hiring career lawyers in the Civil Rights Division. And even under Reagan, even under Nixon, they never went this far.

But what this administration did, starting in 2002, is they changed the procedures, whereby -- if there was a vacancy in the career ranks, previously career veterans would decide who should fill that position, and that meant that they were still hiring people who had a demonstrated commitment to enforcing civil rights laws. In 2002, in an unprecedented step, the administration changed that and centralized control among political appointees for hiring replacement career lawyers and stopped hiring people with a demonstrated commitment to enforcing civil rights and started hiring people who are members of the Federalist Society and who had no experience on civil rights law, or if they did have experience, their experience was fighting against the traditional enforcement of civil rights, defending companies against discrimination lawsuits, and so forth.

And so, they’ve been remaking that division as a way of sort of behind the scenes seizing and imposing greater political control over it. Lawsuits alleging systematic discrimination against minorities have fallen -- against African Americans, that is -- and the agency is redirecting its resources now towards reverse-discrimination against whites, discrimination against Christians, these sorts of things that are more in line with the President’s agenda, just one more example of centralizing greater control in the White House.

AMY GOODMAN: We have ten seconds. Do you think the takeover is complete?

CHARLIE SAVAGE: I think this has been the single most successfully implemented policy of this administration, and I think that presidential power acts like a one-way ratchet. It’s easier to increase than it is to roll back again. And I don’t see, because of the continuing dynamic of the war on terror, this being reversed.

AMY GOODMAN: Charlie Savage is the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, won in 2007 for his reporting on this issue. Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy is the name of his new book.

Transcript: White House Press Briefing with Dana Perino

Transcript:

MS. PERINO: Good afternoon. I do not have anything to start with, so we can go to questions.

Deb?

Q Just generally, does the administration -- does the President believe that head-slapping and simulated drowning are necessary tactics to use against suspected terrorists to keep America safe?

MS. PERINO: Let me take a step back. In the days after 9/11, when we were getting a steady stream of intelligence about potential new attacks, the President faced a lot of challenges. And he asked his national security team to make sure that we designed and made sure that within the laws we had all the tools that we needed in order to keep this country safe and to prevent another attack.

In this new war, which is an unprecedented war, facing an enemy unlike we've ever faced before, sometimes -- oftentimes the best information that you get is from the terrorists themselves. They know where the other terrorists are hiding and what the other terrorists are planning. And to win the war on terror we must be able to detain them, interrogate them, question them, and when appropriate, prosecute them -- in America -- when we capture them here in America and on battlefields around the world. The policy of the United States is not to torture. The President has not authorized it, he will not authorize it.

But he had done everything within the corners of the law to make sure that we prevent another attack on this country, which is what we have done in this administration. I am not going to comment on any specific alleged techniques. It is not appropriate for me to do so. And to do so would provide the enemy with more information for how to train against these techniques. And so I am going to decline to comment on those, but I will reiterate to you once again that we do not torture. We want to make sure that we keep this country safe.

And I think another thing that everyone should keep in mind is that here in this country, it's quite a testament that even though we have a sworn enemy of the United States that has declared war on us and has acted upon that and killed thousands of our own citizens here just seven -- six years ago, we are still having a debate to talk about how we should make sure that we treat people, and that we don't torture them. That is quite a testament to this country. And the President is very proud to lead it.

Q Some of the members of Congress are already upset that they weren't aware of these second memos that are classified, and have asked for the administration to release them. What's the administration's position on why a briefing was released about what they are about?

MS. PERINO: Well -- I would have to refer you to Department of Justice and also the Central Intelligence Agency. As I understand it, appropriate members of Congress have been briefed. Releasing classified information is not prudent, it is not a smart thing to do. So I -- let me refer you to them to talk about the procedures that they went through to talk to members of Congress.

Q Dana, in September of last year the President told the country about what had been a classified program of CIA prisons in other countries around the world. At that time, he said all the terrorists who were held -- or alleged terrorists -- who were held in those sites were no longer there. Today, do those prisons still exist and are there alleged terrorists being held?

MS. PERINO: The President said that a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war had been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program that was run by the CIA. The President also at the time said that we were not going to -- while we had talked about the people that had been held -- people, I should say terrorists that were held, they were then transferred to Guantanamo Bay -- that we were not going to tell you every time that that happened.

I think there was an instance last spring when someone was transferred to Guantanamo Bay, and there was a public release of that information, but he said, and General Hayden has said, that we are not going to do a press release every time we have somebody. And one of the reasons for that is that you want to have these individuals isolated, and you don't want to send signals that might trigger an attack or send a signal to -- back to the other operatives that want to attack America.

Q Without referring then to specific individuals who may be held in these sites in countries outside the United States operated by the CIA, are they still actively operational?

MS. PERINO: I'm not going to comment on that. If the CIA decides to comment, I'll let them. What I can tell is that any procedures that they use are tough, safe, necessary, and lawful.

Q Is it reasonable to assume if those prisons were closed, that the President would have deemed that something to tell the country, and in the absence of that, we should assume they are still working?

MS. PERINO: I'm not going to comment whether or not -- and I -- the President said that while he -- on September 6, 2006, when he disclosed that information in a speech in the East Room, that we would not get in the habit of doing press releases every time we had a prisoner. It's not smart. It's not a good way to do national security.

Q It's been more than a year now. And, as you know, countries who -- especially in Europe -- had raised concerns with the President about those locations of prisons outside the U.S. So it has been a diplomatic issue as well. So it's been more than a year. So hardly --

MS. PERINO: What I can tell you is that this program has prevented attacks on this country and in countries of our allies. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and National Security Advisor Steven Hadley work very closely with their counterparts overseas to make sure we're sharing information. Again, they were safe, necessary and lawful -- these techniques -- and they've helped save American lives and those of our allies. But I'm not going to comment as to whether or not there are individuals that are being held in prisons at the moment.

Martha.

Q In a conference call in July, a senior administration official said that they would no longer -- or wouldn't use extreme temperatures of heat and cold. Is that true?

MS. PERINO: I don't know. I don't -- I wasn't on -- I don't recall.

Q I guess the point is that if the senior administration official told us on a conference call that these methods wouldn't be used, why won't you say whether or not head-slapping, waterboarding, would be used?

MS. PERINO: I don't believe that I -- I'm not in a position to be able to do that. I am not going to comment on specific techniques. And if there's -- I don't know who that individual was, and maybe you can follow up with them and get more.

Q But your point is that you're giving away things to the enemy, but it was okay for someone to do it, but not okay for you to do it? Or are you just --

MS. PERINO: I don't know. I don't know. I don't know who was on the conference call. I don't -- what I -- I know what I know, which is that techniques that we use are classified, and classified for a reason. To the extent that there was one ruled out, then so be it. But I'm not going to comment on others.

Q And you won't say whether waterboarding is being ruled out, or head-slapping has been ruled out?

MS. PERINO: I'm not going to comment on those.

Q What is your definition of "torture?"

MS. PERINO: Well, that's clearly spelled out in the -- in the Detainee Treatment Act, and interpreted under the December 2004 opinion that governs, and has governed -- and if you look at the footnote from that opinion, governs all subsequent opinions that have been made by the Justice Department.

Q And has -- have any attacks been averted since President Bush revealed the existence of his program, because terrorism suspects have been held in the program?

MS. PERINO: I don't know, Toby. It's not -- I can tell you that General Hayden and Fran Townsend, the President's National -- Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Advisor, have said that this program continues to save lives. When we can, we declassify information so that we can provide it to you. But right now I don't have any to provide.

Elaine.

Q Dana, you talk about being within the corners of the law. But are you satisfied that there's enough clarity, in sort of the definition --

MS. PERINO: Very. I'm very satisfied that this country is following the laws, and that American personnel, no matter where they are in the world, are held to that standard.

Q My question is approaching it from a different way, though. I mean, are you satisfied that the U.S.'s position on what torture is is clear enough to other countries so that if an American were --

MS. PERINO: I am. We follow our laws and our -- we meet our international obligations, absolutely.

Q But in terms of another country, then, you feel that there is enough clarity in the definition that the administration has put forward that they wouldn't be able to look at something and say, well --

MS. PERINO: I'm not saying that reasonable people couldn't disagree on complex questions. That's possible.

Q But doesn't it open the door, doesn't the sort of --

MS. PERINO: No, I think that this country meets its -- meets the laws of our nation and meets its international obligations. We share information. We have helped prevent attacks in countries that we consider to be our allies. And we have prevented attacks here.

Now, if there were an attack on this country, all of the questions in here would be very different. You would be asking me, how did you allow this to happen? And what I am telling you is that within the law, we are making sure that we are doing everything we can to prevent it from happening again.

Q But what's to stop another country from then taking their own definition and interpretation based on the administration's --

MS. PERINO: As I understand it, under the Geneva Conventions, every country was supposed to interpret it for themselves, and now we have.

Q You don't think there's any ambiguity there in the definition of torture for other countries to abuse Americans if they are captured?

MS. PERINO: No, I think that the countries that we deal with that are our allies, that are a party to the Geneva Conventions, follow that, and they follow their laws. And obviously, if any American was tortured anywhere, we would have big problems with that.

Q You just said something, Dana --

MS. PERINO: I'm going to go to Mark. Go ahead.

Q Is it your view that disclosure of this memo and the level of detail --

MS. PERINO: Is disturbing?

Q Has it -- well, yes, harmed American security --

MS. PERINO: I think any time anything that is classified that is -- you know, it's secret for a reason. It's not secret just because we want it to be a secret. It's secret because it is classified, and classified for the reasons to protect the country from terrorists who are determined to attack us. And we live in a society where we have a free press, and if classified information gets out into a free press and that organization decides to publish it, that's their decision to make.

Q You've said that you don't want these methods to be disclosed because that would tip off potential terrorists. Don't you think that they know about this kind of stuff already and have been training against head-slapping and waterboarding?

MS. PERINO: I think that it's classified for a reason, because our professionals, who know what they're doing when it comes to interrogation techniques and fighting the global war on terror, have it classified for a reason. And I trust them.

Q I just wonder to what extent has information about this program or these memos been shared with the Attorney General nominee, Mukasey? And do you --

MS. PERINO: I would have to check. I would assume -- I would have to check. I don't know.

Q And is the President concerned at all that the Mukasey hearings will become, in essence, a forum for a discussion of these --

MS. PERINO: Well, if at his hearings the members of the Senate want to have a conversation about whether or not this country follows its laws when it comes to interrogation techniques, we could have that discussion. Obviously Judge Mukasey is there to have a confirmation hearing and to see if, on the merits, he should be the Attorney General of the United States. We think he should be. And the senators are free to ask him whatever questions they want.

Q His views about this program will be probably a central issue of those hearings. Is the White House prepared to --

MS. PERINO: I'm not going to speculate on that. And I think that across the country people will be -- are grateful to the federal government and the men and women that we have across the intelligence community and in law enforcement, that are working to apply the laws of the United States -- which is not to torture -- and to make sure that we prevent attacks on this country. And if they want to have a conversation with that, with Judge Mukasey, I think that'd be fine.

Q When you say, I'm not disputing there can be legal disagreements between reasonable people, do you mean disagreements on whether specific interrogation techniques amount to torture?

MS. PERINO: I wasn't thinking of that in particular, but that could be true as well.

Q And when you say that if we had just had an attack, the questions would be very different, what then would you say to someone like Senator McCain, who feels that harsh interrogation techniques are not more effective in generating valuable information?

MS. PERINO: Well, I think -- I think what we'd say to Senator McCain is that we appreciated the work he did on the Detainee Treatment Act, and the President was proud to sign it into law, that we don't torture, and that we appreciate his attention to this effort and to this issue, and that we follow the law as he would want us to.

Q But if there can be reasonable disagreements on what amounts to torture, then what you are actually saying is, we don't believe what we do is torture.

MS. PERINO: Look, under the United States' interpretation and -- we -- in that December 2004 opinion that is publicly available at the Justice Department for everyone to see, we believe that we are following our laws and that we are meeting our international obligations in order to prevent attacks on Americans and our allies. And we're meeting that.

Peter.

Q Dana, to what extent has the President been personally involved in deciding what is tough, safe, and legal?

MS. PERINO: I don't know. I think those decisions are made at the -- at a level where they have lawyer -- individuals like Steven Bradbury, who's discussed in the article, at the Office of Legal Counsel. But I am not aware of presidential involvement.

Q So he doesn't necessarily sign off on these then?

MS. PERINO: No, I don't think so. But I --

Q The Attorney General does though, right?

MS. PERINO: I would guess. Can I refer you to the Justice Department, because I just don't know what their chain of command is.

Olivier.

Q Dana, a couple. First, would you like Syria to attend, or to send a representative to the Middle East conference in the United States?

MS. PERINO: Well, one of the things that we're looking at is -- for that Middle East conference that's going to take place at the end of November -- Syria is a part of the Arab League follow-up committee, and as a member of -- that committee is going to be invited. They are a member of that, and I think the State Department has said that they would be there for that meeting, that committee would be.

Q And in the comments in the responses on North Korea, on the Koreas summit, you all emphasized the six-party process -- there's an agreement that's coming out of this, there's a process. Do you show that the Korea summit has in any way sidetracked, undermined, changed that process? Are you worried that now your --

MS. PERINO: I've not heard that. I've not heard that that has derailed any effort or cast a pall on them. Obviously, Ambassador Chris Hill was just here the other day. The President signed -- told him that he could instruct the other capitals in Beijing that the President had signed off on the agreement, and you have the President's public statement from yesterday. And we're going to hold the North Koreans to account for dismantlement of Yongbyon, and then leading to the dismantlement by the end of the year. That's the action-for-action priority that the President has laid out. And we'll hold their feet to the fire on it.

Q Senator Clinton said that she had changed her view on torture and the possibilities after talking with the generals. Are those not the same generals that you've been talking to or that the White House has been talking to?

MS. PERINO: I have to say, I just have no idea who Senator Clinton spoke to. I don't know.

Keith.

Q Representative Conyers has requested copies of the legal opinions that Justice issued, the secret legal opinions. Should he get those?

MS. PERINO: Well, I'll let him have that conversation with the Justice Department.

Q Does the White House believe that he should, even if it's -- I mean, do you have an opinion on that, whether they should be released, even if they're secret?

MS. PERINO: As I said, appropriate members of Congress were provided the information. I understand that there is a desire by some of the individuals who are on the Judiciary Committees in both the House and the Senate. And that has been a conversation that's been going on over time. That is not -- I don't believe that's a new request.

Q About these particular opinions?

MS. PERINO: I don't think it's a new request.

Q And will the Justice Department solely make that decision about whether these are released, or will the White House have some input into what they do?

MS. PERINO: Well, I -- obviously that we work closely with our agencies, and we'll take a look at it. I know that that -- as I said, Keith, I don't think that that's a new request. And we've been -- Fred Fielding has been working with both the House and the Senate Judiciary Committees.

April.

Q Back on Elaine's question about clarity, you said something that if there's a problem with understanding, it's left up to the countries to try to decipher --

MS. PERINO: As I understand it, I believe that the Geneva Conventions, that every country could interpret for themselves what those -- what that language meant. I'm recalling that from the debate that we had in this country from a year and a half ago.

Q Paraphrasing what the Geneva Conventions said, it said that --

MS. PERINO: Not paraphrasing.

Q No, I'm --

MS. PERINO: You're going to paraphrase?

Q Yes.

MS. PERINO: Okay.

Q Paraphrasing what it said, it basically says that if there is some kind of a problem with clarity it is supposed to be taken to an international crimes court. So --

MS. PERINO: Which we are not going to do.

Q Why not?

MS. PERINO: I don't think it's necessary, April. We have clarified in the Detainee Treatment Act and in this December 2004 opinion that the United States does not torture. And outside of some individuals suggesting that we do, I think that our allies are comfortable -- especially because of the protection that we're affording them, as well.

Q Well, Dana, for many years now this administration -- this issue has come up over and over and over again, it's gone to the Hill, it's gone to courts, it's gone everywhere. And it seems to me that there is a problem with clarity. Maybe the people who put the Geneva Conventions together would be the ones to be able to help you out.

MS. PERINO: I don't think we're seeking their help. I don't think they're offering it. I think that we, here in the United States, are a proud country that is working within our laws to make sure that we are going about protecting the country from al Qaeda and other terrorists that want to attack us.

Q If an American citizen, whether they be a member of the intelligence community or the armed forces, were taken essentially hostage by one of our enemies and they were subjected to waterboarding or head-slapping or loud music, or subjected to extreme temperatures, would the U.S. government consider that to be torture?

MS. PERINO: Look, you're asking me a hypothetical situation about somebody possibly being taken into custody. I'm just not going to go there.

Q Don't you think it's important that the U.S. government draw a line in the sand and say -- to our enemies, essentially -- hey, if you do these things, we consider that torture?

MS. PERINO: I think our enemies would understand what our response would be to any type of attack on an American citizen.

Q And that attack being waterboarding, head-slapping --

MS. PERINO: I'm not going to go there.

Les.

Q Thank you, Dana. Two questions. What is the President's opinion of Congressman Obey's proposal for a surtax to pay for Iraqi military operation?

MS. PERINO: We made it clear the other day that the President won't support a war tax, we don't think it's necessary. And we think that that is just a standard reaction by the Democrats when they want to raise taxes.

Q In California there's a proposed measure to apportion electoral votes by congressional district, which could give the Republican nominee some 20 of the state's 55 electoral votes. My question: The President supports this proposal for minority rights, doesn't he?

MS. PERINO: I haven't asked him about it. Let me go up here to Helen.

Q Well, could you ask him? I mean --

MS. PERINO: No, I'm not -- I'll see. If I see him I'll ask him.

Helen. Let's go to Helen.

Q I have a question on Lebanon. Lebanon has asked Israel for maps to where they planted the cluster bombs in Southern Lebanon, so kids -- some of the cluster bombs are in shapes of toys or candy bars. And also, the task force on Lebanon has made the same request. Do we back up that request?

MS. PERINO: I have to say that I have not heard about that. Can I check on it?

Q Did it come up at all?

MS. PERINO: It may have. Gordon Johndroe was in there, so let me see if I can get some more information for you. It could have -- and Helen, it could have come up before, and let me just check. I'll find out.

Q Okay.

Q Dana, is the President at all concerned that despite his repeated assurances that the U.S. does not engage in torture, that there are persistent concerns and questions raised? Does this suggest he is just not credible when he says the United States --

MS. PERINO: Absolutely not. And I actually think that the people around the country understand that there are things that are secret and classified for a reason, and it's for their protection. And I know that they place trust in this federal government to make sure that a 9/11 doesn't happen again.

Q Is there a sense that because we are talking about suspected terrorists that perhaps the American public would have a different view of how they should be treated, as opposed to accepting these enhanced measures that this administration --

MS. PERINO: Different from who?

Q From other kinds of detainees that might be found around the world.

MS. PERINO: Well, the bottom line is that we do not use torture. And so I think -- I don't think there's a reason to have a distinction.

Q The President does use the phrase "enhanced techniques." Can you add further definition to what that --

MS. PERINO: I can't beyond what is publicly available. But I would just remind you that the most important source of information we have on where the terrorists are hiding and what they are planning is the terrorists themselves, and that's why you have to interrogate them.

Peter.

Q Dana, do you know if the President has talked to Senator Domenici since Domenici made the --

MS. PERINO: Yes, I believe that Senator Domenici spoke to the President day before yesterday -- the day before he made the announcement. And obviously the President has fondness for Senator Domenici. He is a wonderful American who has served the state of New Mexico and his country for many years, and he wishes him the best.

Q What do you think the effect of his departure and the other Republicans who are leaving is going to be on --

MS. PERINO: Well, we'll see. We have good candidate recruitment, and we'll have to see how it goes.

Q Dana.

MS. PERINO: Goyal.

Q Two quick questions. One, please. Thousands of protesters, mostly monks, in Burma have disappeared, and they're -- nobody can see them anywhere. The President believes in God and he's a religious person, and I hope he will protect and not to be killed.

MS. PERINO: Do you have a question?

Q How can he protect that no more monks are being killed or we can --

MS. PERINO: Well, Goyal, let me answer it this way. The President and Mrs. Bush are very concerned about the people in Burma, what they've gone through under this brutal regime. And they have placed a demand on them that -- on the regime -- that they release all political prisoners, including those monks that you mentioned.

Q And second. October 2nd, the United Nations was marked as the non-violence Mahatma Gandhi day around on the globe, and Sonia Gandhi of India was there, and many world leaders. What does President Bush think now, this non-violence day at the United Nations, a great person who believed in non-violence throughout his life?

MS. PERINO: The President supports non-violence and non-violence protests, and appreciates the people who support that, as well.

Paula.

Q Dana, the President has said he's willing to consider an extension -- extended time, perhaps, for the CHIP program. But if he's opposed to a tobacco tax for the existing funding, how would he fund -- what would he support to fund an extended program?

MS. PERINO: That's not quite accurate. First of all, first and foremost, the President wants to expand S-CHIP by 20 percent in the next five years, with an additional $5 billion. So the President doesn't need to raise taxes in order to expand it and to get it beyond five years.

Q But Senator Lott proposed a 33 percent increase and an 18-month extension. So there is a difference --

MS. PERINO: Well, what we said is that the President -- and the President said it yesterday, he wants to try to reach common ground and find an agreement with the Democrats and with other members of -- other members of the Republican Party besides Senator Lott. There's going to be people that come forward with ideas.

One of the things the President wants to do is make sure that the children who are eligible for Medicaid and S-CHIP, who aren't currently enrolled, are served first, that they go to the front of the line. And that he's willing to talk about -- if people that that $5 billion is not going to be able to serve that population, he's willing to talk about, well, then what number would be? But that's the population he wants to serve first.

Q Finally, the tobacco tax rationale. I don't quite understand why the administration would oppose a tax that would discourage poor people or even -- either to cut back, or to cut smoking altogether, if that's -- that would be the result --

MS. PERINO: But the government --

Q -- of the funding for the program --

MS. PERINO: The Bush administration and the government is actively trying to get people to quit smoking. But we also don't think --

Q But this is an opportunity to do that.

MS. PERINO: Let me finish. We also don't think that raising taxes on a product is smart fiscal policy, especially when in the years 2011 and -- through 2014, this program would take, under their proposal that the President vetoed yesterday, a 65 percent cut. So then what taxes are they going to raise after that? And that's the President's position, is that taxes do not need to be raised to expand this program and to take care of the poorest children first.

Q But what's more important though, fiscal policy or encouraging -- taking a step that would encourage poor people to either cut back or quit smoking altogether?

MS. PERINO: The President is actively working to get people to quit smoking. But I would also say to you, what's more important and what's more compassionate is making sure that those 750,000 children who aren't currently covered under programs they're eligible for go to the front of the line before we give money to middle-class families to pay for a government-sponsored health care.

Q Thank you, Dana.

MS. PERINO: Thank you.

Congress Seeks Justice Department Documents On Torture

The New York Times reports:

The Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees asked the Justice Department today to turn over secret legal opinions issued in 2005 that authorized the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terrorism suspects after the Department publicly repudiated torture as “abhorrent” in a 2004 opinion.

The 2005 legal opinions, disclosed for the first time by The New York Times, remain in effect, according to officials familiar with the Bush administration’s policy on interrogation. One provided legal justification for the use of a battery of aggressive tactics and a second said the techniques did not amount to “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” practices under international agreements.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, said it appeared that the Justice Department lawyers had “reversed themselves and reinstated a secret regime, in essence reinterpreting the law in secret.” He said his committee had been seeking information about the Justice Department’s legal interpretations of the law for two years without success and urged the administration to cooperate.

Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, who heads the House Judiciary Committee, requested that the Justice Department’s opinions be turned over to the House panel as well and asked the department to make available for a hearing Steven G. Bradbury, of the department’s office of legal counsel, who signed the 2005 opinions.

Mr. Leahy also said his committee would hold confirmation hearings on the nomination of Michael B. Mukasey to be attorney general on Oct. 17.

Officials at the White House and the Justice Department said the 2005 legal memorandum did not change the administration’s statement in 2004 that publicly renounced torture as “abhorrent.”

“The policy of the United States is not to torture,” said Dana Perino, the White House press secretary. “The president has not authorized it, he will not authorize it.”

“But he had done everything within the corners of the law to make sure that we prevent another attack on this country,” she said at a news briefing today.

“I am not going to comment on any specific alleged techniques,” Ms. Perino said. “It is not appropriate for me to do so. And to do so would provide the enemy with more information for how to train against these techniques.”

Asked whether the disclosure of the 2005 memorandum could harm national security, Ms. Perino said. “You know, it’s secret for a reason. It’s not secret just because we want it to be a secret. It’s secret because it is classified, and classified for the reasons to protect the country from terrorists who are determined to attack us.”

The Justice Department’s spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said in a statement that he could not comment on classified legal advice, but he reiterated that any opinions by the department were consistent with the public 2004 memorandum on interrogations. He said the Bush administration’s “strong opposition to torture” had been consistent.

He expressed the department’s support for Mr. Bradbury, whose nomination to be permanent head of legal counsel’s office has been blocked by Senate Democrats. Mr. Roehrkasse said Mr. Bradbury “has worked diligently to ensure that the authority of the office is employed in a careful and prudent manner.”

In the areas of domestic surveillance and detainee issues, Mr. Roehrkasse said Mr. Bradbury’s “efforts have strengthened cooperation among the branches in these key national security areas.”

Spies Prep Reporters on Protecting Secrets

The New York Sun reports:

Frustrated by press leaks about its most sensitive electronic surveillance work, the secretive National Security Agency convened an unprecedented series of off-the-record "seminars" in recent years to teach reporters about the damage caused by such leaks and to discourage reporting that could interfere with the agency's mission to spy on America's enemies.

The half-day classes featured high-ranking NSA officials highlighting objectionable passages in published stories and offering "an innocuous rewrite" that officials said maintained the "overall thrust" of the articles but omitted details that could disclose the agency's techniques, according to course outlines obtained by The New York Sun.

Dubbed "SIGINT 101," using the NSA's shorthand for signals intelligence, the seminar was presented "a handful of times" between approximately 2002 and 2004, an agency spokeswoman, Marci Green, confirmed yesterday. Officials were pleased with the program, she said.

"They believe they were very successful in being able to talk to journalists regarding our mission and the sensitivities of our mission in an unclassified way," Ms. Green said.

The syllabi make clear that the sessions, which took place at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., were conceived of not merely as familiarization tours, but as part of a campaign to limit the damage caused by leaks of sensitive intelligence.

"Course Objective: to convey the fragility of SIGINT and to increase editors' and reporters' understanding that there are other ways to express similar thoughts in an article without compromising the story and without compromising SIGINT," the syllabi said.

The NSA's seminars, delivered over tea and pastries, and accompanied by a clip from "Top Gun," seemed designed to elicit a chummy atmosphere and to highlight commonalities between reporters and the agency's electronic sleuths. "Reporters go to great lengths to protect their sources, as do we," one talking point for the classes said. "We need your help."

Journalists were also treated to technical demonstrations and encouraged to feel that they had gotten a rare behind-the-scenes view of the agency. "Stress that this is the first-ever such course in NSA's history," another talking point said. During one sensitive discussion, journalists were to be told they could not take any notes.

Among the news stories singled out for redrafting by the NSA were an Associated Press rewrite of a 1999 USA Today article by Jack Kelley reporting that officials used a "reconnaissance satellite" to intercept Osama bin Laden's telephone calls and head off six attacks on American embassies, a 1998 Knight Ridder dispatch by Neely Tucker reporting that an "exhaustive review of electronic intercepts of the traffic on bin Laden's communications network" picked up evidence of his involvement in the bombing of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and a 1998 New York Times story by Steven Lee Myers reporting that a Pentagon warning about a possible attack on American interests in the Persian Gulf was prompted by "eavesdropping on conversations between Mr. bin Laden" and his cohorts.

The exact substitutions of language that the NSA proposed were deleted from the syllabi released to the Sun under the Freedom of Information Act. The agency did leave in the caveat that it was "neither confirming nor denying the accuracy" of the reports it used as examples.

Mr. Tucker, the author of the Knight Ridder story, said in an interview yesterday that he was never invited to the course and never knew the NSA had a problem with the report. "Nobody ever said a word," he said. Mr. Tucker, who now writes for the Washington Post, noted that he was in Africa at the time and that the passage probably originated with another reporter in Washington.

Told of his involvement in the NSA seminar, he said, "Always glad to help NSA any way I can."

Mr. Myers did not respond to a phone message yesterday seeking comment. Mr. Kelley, who quit USA Today in 2004 amid a probe into fabricated stories, could not be reached.

Ms. Green said the program stopped in late 2004 due to staffing changes at the NSA's public affairs operation.

In 2005, following the publication of a New York Times story on a secret program for warrantless wiretapping of some phone calls placed or received in America, the Bush administration's attitude toward leaks became far more confrontational. Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss crusaded against leaks at the CIA and later told a Senate committee that he hoped reporters would be called before grand juries to identify their sources. Attorney General Gonzales also discussed the "possibility" of prosecuting journalists who wrote stories based on leaked intelligence.

The syllabi, which are marked as drafts, list presenters including the director of the NSA at the time, General Michael Hayden, the agency's general counsel, Robert Deitz, and the head of the signals intelligence division, Maureen Baginski.

Ms. Baginski, who left NSA in 2003 and is now in the private sector, said yesterday that she had no recollection of making such a presentation. Told of the rewriting element of the class, she chuckled and said, "It's an interesting approach."

The Sun obtained the syllabi in response to a Freedom of Information Act request regarding an investigation into leaks about NSA intercepts that may have presaged the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The released course materials contain no obvious reference to those leaks, but they may have been mentioned in portions of the syllabus the NSA deleted from the released copy.

Cheney Heads to Utah for a Private Speech

The Salt Lake Tribune reports:

Vice President Dick Cheney will speak to a super-secret,conservative policy group in Utah on Friday during his second trip to the state this year.

Cheney will address the fall meeting of the Council for National Policy, a group whose self-described mission is to promote "a free-enterprise system, a strong national defense and support for traditional Western values."

The organization -- made up of few hundred powerful conservative activists -- holds confidential meetings and members are advised not to use the name of the group in communications, according to a New York Times profile of the group.

"The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before [or] after a meeting,'' a list of rules obtained by The Times showed. The group did not respond to an e-mail seeking comment.

Czech Republic President Václav Klaus is also expected to address the Council for National Policy's meeting in downtown Salt Lake City. After his speech, Cheney will meet with Klaus, the vice president's office said Tuesday.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who ran the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, will also be in Utah on Friday but his campaign did not respond to a question about whether he would talk with the group.

Cheney's visit is expected to be short, only a few hours, according to people familiar with the trip's details. The trip coincides with fundraisers in California, Colorado, Nevada and Wyoming, Cheney's spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride said.

All of the events on the trip are closed to the public and the news media, McBride said.

Cheney last visited the state April 26 to give the commencement speech at Brigham Young University.

Clinton's First-Lady Records Locked Up

Archivists say the documents at her husband's presidential library won't be released until after the '08 vote.

The LATimes reports:

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton cites her experience as a compelling reason voters should make her president, but nearly 2 million pages of documents covering her White House years are locked up in a building here, obscuring a large swath of her record as first lady.

Clinton's calendars, appointment logs and memos are stored at her husband's presidential library, in the custody of federal archivists who do not expect them to be released until after the 2008 presidential election.

A trove of records has been made public detailing the Clinton White House's attempts to remake the nation's healthcare system, following a request from Bill Clinton that those materials be released first. Hillary Clinton led the healthcare effort in 1993 and 1994.

But even in the healthcare documents, at least 1,000 pages involving her work has been censored by archives staff because they include confidential advice and must be kept secret under a federal law called the Presidential Records Act. Political consultants said that if Hillary Clinton's records were made public, rivals would mine them for scraps of information that might rattle her campaign.

"Those files -- that's the mother lode of opposition research," said Ray McNally, a Republican political consultant in Sacramento. "Opposition researchers would be very hungry to see what's there." Robert Shrum, senior political strategist in Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign, said: "In 2 million pieces of paper, would opposition researchers hope to find one where she wrote a memo saying, 'I wish I'd never gotten involved in healthcare?' Sure. That's what they'd love to find."

At the Clinton library overlooking the Arkansas River, federal archivists clad in protective smocks are sorting through 80 million pages of records and another 20 million e-mails from a Clinton presidency that ended in January 2001. About 2 million of those pages concern the first lady's office.

A staff of 11 spends most of its time answering some 250 requests for documents submitted under the Freedom of Information Act. Requests are fulfilled largely on a first-come, first-served basis. Because the earliest requests involved other Clinton administration activities, the requests for the now-New York senator's records are further back in line, staff members said.

A list of Freedom of Information Act requests that have been completed by the archives staff includes one for a photo of Bill Clinton jogging with a "Yale Whiffenpoof Club insignia" on his clothing; another for various files on UFOs and flying saucers and one for the full name of the pastry chef who made a birthday cake for Chelsea Clinton.

Before documents are released, archives staff must read them and, by law, must redact material that they determine contains classified information, invades a person's privacy, reveals trade secrets, reveals confidential advice from presidential advisors or raises other concerns specified in the records law.

Asked how long it might be before Hillary Clinton's records are released, the library's chief archivist said it could take years.

"We're processing as fast as we can," Melissa Walker said.

Not fast enough, in the view of some who have been waiting. A conservative watchdog group called Judicial Watch filed suit against the National Archives last month, demanding the release of Hillary Clinton's diaries, telephone logs, daily planners and schedules. In the 1990s, the group filed suits against the Clinton administration that led to revelations about fundraising practices, including Democratic campaign donors being tapped for official trade missions. In the most recent suit, Judicial Watch said it had submitted its request more than a year ago and had received nothing, save for confirmation that the library possessed "a substantial volume" of such papers.

Staffing pressures have prevented the National Archives from keeping up with an expanding workload. In 2002, the agency employed 334 archivists. This year, the number is down to 301. That 10% drop came during a period when the National Archives assumed jurisdiction over two more presidential libraries: those of Clinton and Richard Nixon.

"If we have fewer trained personnel, we are unable to do as many preservation projects as we might like, and we're less able to serve the public in ways we would like to," said Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the National Archives.

But advocates for open records said that had it made savvier use of technology, the Clinton library could be moving more quickly. Computers can sort through e-mail to flag classified documents, as distinguished from material that can be speedily released, said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a research institute at George Washington University.

"There's no reason why a load of a few hundred FOIA requests should absorb 11 full-time people perpetually," Blanton said, referring to requests made under the Freedom of Information Act.

What records that have been made public offer tantalizing details about Hillary Clinton's White House years. One memo reveals details about the "war room" for the healthcare plan. Aides wrote of the need for secrecy, but also presented Hillary Clinton with arguments she could make that the process of drawing up a healthcare plan was "the most open in the history of the federal government."

A 1993 memo discussed a plan to create reports on members of Congress, tracking their positions on healthcare. The files would log when members met with Hillary Clinton, how they voted on key bills, and -- under a category called "influence" -- whom they consulted for advice. One 1994 memo offers a historical curiosity: It draws Clinton's attention to a rising Republican politician, Mitt Romney, who is now a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination.

In the memo, Clinton's aides discussed a trip to Boston, where the then-first lady was to appear at a fundraising event for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass). Kennedy was then running for reelection against Romney.

"Romney, a millionaire business consultant with no political experience, is a Mormon," the memo reads. "His religion is a delicate issue, which Kennedy himself has not raised but other Democrats have."

At other presidential libraries -- which in some cases have had decades to process the material -- some first lady records are now open to the public.

About 75,000 pages of Rosalynn Carter's records are publicly available, including scheduling and social office files. Both the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush libraries also said that some records covering former first ladies Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush were open.

The healthcare papers that have been released contain gaps when it comes to the part played by Hillary Clinton. A number of records involving her have been kept secret because they include confidential advice between presidential aides. Among the withheld documents are memos about meetings between Hillary Clinton and Democratic Sens. Christopher J. Dodd and Joseph R. Biden Jr. -- now her rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Other records kept from public view include a 1993 memo to the first lady entitled "positioning ourselves on healthcare," and another from that year called "public portrayal of the Medicare program."

Judge's Secret Ruling Curbed Spy Program

The judge, whose name could not be learned, concluded early this year that the government had overstepped its authority in attempting to broadly monitor communications between two locations overseas that are passed through routing stations in the United States, said two other government sources familiar with the decision.

The Seattle Times reports:

A federal intelligence-court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration's wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by lawmakers this week to expand the president's spying powers.

House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, disclosed elements of the judge's decision Tuesday to Fox News as he was promoting the administration-backed wiretapping legislation.

Boehner has denied revealing classified information, but two government officials privy to the details confirmed that his remarks concerned classified information.

The judge, whose name could not be learned, concluded early this year that the government had overstepped its authority in attempting to broadly monitor communications between two locations overseas that are passed through routing stations in the United States, said two other government sources familiar with the decision.

The decision was a blow to the administration, which had long held that all the National Security Agency's (NSA) enhanced surveillance efforts since 2001 were legal.

The administration for years had declined to subject those efforts to the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The ruling blocked the NSA's efforts to collect information from a large volume of foreign calls and e-mails that pass through U.S. communications nodes clustered around New York and California. Democrats and Republicans have said they are eager to fix that problem through amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

"There's been a ruling, over the last four or five months, that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States," Boehner told Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto on Tuesday.

"This means that our intelligence agencies are missing a wide swath of potential information that could help protect the American people."

Gaining access to the foreign communications at issue would allow the NSA to tap into the huge volume of calls, faxes and e-mails that pass from one foreign country to another by way of fiber-optic connections in the United States.

"If you're calling from Germany to Japan or China, it's very possible that the call gets routed through the United States, despite the fact that there are geographically much more direct routes to Asia," said Stephan Beckert of TeleGeography.

That was not true when Congress passed FISA in 1978.

Testifying on the Hill in May, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell said the law needed to be updated to accommodate technology's advance.

Under the revision the administration is pressing Congress to approve this week, the attorney general would have sole authority to authorize the warrantless surveillance of people "reasonably believed to be outside the United States" and to compel telecommunications carriers to turn over the information in real time or after it has been stored.

Democrats this week offered a proposal that also would expand the government's wiretapping authority but would keep it under FISA court supervision. The authority would expire in six months.

White House Follows New Path To Secrecy

The AP reports:
In the past year, lawyers for President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney directed the Secret Service to maintain the confidentiality of visitor logs, declaring them to be presidential records.

The drive to keep secret the lists of visitors to the White House complex and Cheney's home, the administration says, is essential to ensuring the president and vice president receive candid advice to carry out their duties. The decision made the logs exempt from a law requiring their disclosure to whoever asks to see them.

The latest part of the strategy emerged this week when the government disclosed a letter from Cheney's counsel placing visitor logs for his personal residence on the Naval Observatory grounds in the category of presidential records.

Lawsuits are bringing to light new details about the White House push to make sure the public doesn't learn who has been meeting with top Bush administration officials.
Cheney's counsel wrote the Secret Service last September, instructing the agency not to preserve copies of visitor data for the vice president's personal residence. The Secret Service has been giving the originals to the vice president's office since the start of the Bush administration.

A week ago, the government filed court papers stating that the Secret Service is retaining copies of the visitor logs because of pending lawsuits, and that Cheney's office agrees with the decision.

A private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, has filed two lawsuits under the Freedom of Information Act seeking Secret Service visitor logs. But the FOIA does not apply to presidential records.

The Bush administration has exploited that different treatment of records between the two laws, which prompted the fight in federal court. The administration is seeking dismissal of the lawsuits.

In trying to get the cases thrown out, the Justice Department has filed documents in court outlining a behind-the-scenes debate over whether Secret Service records are subject to public disclosure. The discussions date back at least to the administration of President Bush's father and involve the Justice Department and the National Archives as well as the White House and Secret Service.

The government's court filings show that the Bush White House focused on the issue in the months before Election Day 2004.

Discussions moved into high gear when the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal prompted news organizations and private groups to demand that the administration release Secret Service records of visitors to the White House complex and the vice president's residence.

There was precedent for the demands.

During the Clinton administration, Republican-controlled congressional committees obtained Secret Service visitor logs while conducting investigations of the president and first lady.

Christopher Lehane, a former special assistant counsel to President Clinton and press secretary to then-Vice President Al Gore, points out the political implications of the Bush administration campaign to close off access to the records.

``The question it raises is 'What are these guys hiding?''' said Lehane, now a Democratic consultant. ``They can live with it because they've only got a year or so left, but it doesn't do a lot for public confidence in open government.''

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said Thursday, ``I can't comment on a case in litigation, and I can't speak to the decisions made by other administrations.''

The Bush administration says it is standing on principle.

``It is important that the president be able to receive candid advice from his staff and other members of the administration,'' Fratto said. ``To ensure that he receives candid advice, it is essential as a general matter that the advice remains confidential.''

In a declaration filed in court a week ago, Cheney's deputy chief of staff, Claire O'Donnell, said that ``systematic public release of the information regarding when and with whom the vice president and vice presidential personnel conduct meetings would impinge on the ability of the OVP (office of the vice president) to gather information in confidence and perform its essential functions, including assisting the vice president in his critical roles of advising and assisting the president.''

In May 2006, the Secret Service and the White House signed a memorandum of understanding designating visitor records as presidential.

They are ``not the records of an 'agency' subject to the Freedom of Information Act,'' says the agreement that was not disclosed until months later, in late 2006. The records are ``at all times under the exclusive legal custody and control of the White House.''

Four months after the memorandum of agreement, Cheney's counsel wrote to the Secret Service, stating that visitor records for the vice president's personal residence ``are and shall remain subject to the exclusive ownership, custody and control of OVP.''

The Sept. 13, 2006, date on the Cheney letter coincides with requests by The Washington Post seeking records on the vice president's visitors under the Freedom of Information Act.

The law enforcement agency ``shall not retain any copy of these documents and information upon return to OVP,'' said the letter to the Secret Service's chief counsel.

``If any documents remain in your possession, please return them to OVP as soon as possible,'' the letter added.

The Justice Department filed the Cheney letter last Friday in one of the lawsuits brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which is invoking the FOIA law in seeking the identities of conservative religious leaders who visited the White House complex and the vice president's residence.

The group, which represents Valerie Plame and her husband in their lawsuit against Cheney and other key administration figures in the leak of Plame's CIA identity, also is seeking White House visitor logs in the Abramoff scandal.

According to government documents, the Secret Service routinely destroyed five of eight categories of information relating to visitors to Cheney's residence. Of the records it retained, the Secret Service regularly turned over handwritten visitor logs to Cheney's office.

The Secret Service stopped the destruction in June 2006 because of lawsuits by various groups, according to the court papers. The law enforcement agency also is retaining copies of the material, contrary to the directive in the September 2006 letter from Cheney's counsel.

The court filings by the government show that:

-On three occasions late in the administration of the first President Bush and during the first term of President Clinton, the Secret Service proposed treating copies of White House visitor documents as non-presidential records. In its court filings, the current Bush administration opposes releasing details of the Secret Service proposals, saying this ``poses a substantial risk of creating public confusion'' because the proposals were never adopted.

-In January 2001, as Clinton prepared to leave office, White House lawyers proposed the transfer of visitor records from the Secret Service to the White House. The proposal was entitled ``Disposition of certain presidential records created by the USSS,'' or the Secret Service. The records are now at the Clinton library in Little Rock, Ark., the National Archives confirmed Thursday.

-In September 2004, a lawyer for the Bush White House and a special assistant to the director of the Secret Service proposed ``informal views on one way to address the disposition'' of visitor records, according to court documents. The unnamed associate White House counsel and the Secret Service assistant jointly authored a July 29, 2004, document bearing the same title as the Clinton administration document from 3 years earlier.

-In July 2005, the Secret Service gave a presentation on the issue to the White House counsel's office, the Justice Department and the National Archives.

-On May 11, 2006, the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel provided a legal opinion on the issue, which is among the many documents the government is refusing to disclose. Six days later, the White House and the Secret Service signed the agreement designating the records as presidential.

Presidential records are released starting five years after a president leaves office. Under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, nonclassified material is disclosed first, with classified documents and advice to the president released later after review by federal agencies, the White House and the former president.

Under an executive order President Bush signed in 2001, the archivist of the United States cannot unilaterally release the records without the permission of the current president, former presidents and their representatives.

``The scary thing about this move by the vice president's office is the power grab part of it,'' said Tom Blanton, head of the National Security Archive, a private group that uses the FOIA law to pierce government secrecy.

``We're looking at a huge problem if the White House can reach into any agency and say certain records have something to do with the White House and they are presidential from now on,'' Blanton said. ``This White House has been infinitely creative in finding new ways and new forms of government secrecy.''

Behind Closed Doors

Who is The Council For National Policy and What Are They Up To? And Why Don't They Want You To Know?

At Americans United, Jeremy Leaming and Rob Boston write:

When a top U.S. senator receives a major award from a national advocacy organization, it’s standard procedure for both the politician and the group to eagerly tell as many people about it as possible.

Press releases spew from fax machines and e-mails clog reporters’ in-boxes. The news media are summoned in the hope that favorable stories will appear in the newspapers, on radio and on television.

It was odd, therefore, that when U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) accepted a “Thomas Jefferson Award” from a national group at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in August, the media weren’t notified. In fact, they weren’t welcome to attend.

“The media should not know when or where we meet or who takes part in our programs, before or after a meeting,” reads one of the cardinal rules of the organization that honored Frist.

The membership list of this group is “strictly confidential.” Guests can attend only with the unanimous approval of the organization’s executive committee. The group’s leadership is so secretive that members are told not to refer to it by name in e-mail messages. Anyone who breaks the rules can be tossed out.

What is this group, and why is it so determined to avoid the public spotlight?

That answer is the Council for National Policy (CNP). And if the name isn’t familiar to you, don’t be surprised. That’s just what the Council wants.

The CNP was founded in 1981 as an umbrella organization of right-wing leaders who would gather regularly to plot strategy, share ideas and fund causes and candidates to advance the far-right agenda. Twenty-three years later, it is still secretly pursuing those goals with amazing success.

Since its founding, the tax-exempt organization has been meeting three times a year. Members have come and gone, but all share something in common: They are powerful figures, drawn from both the Religious Right and the anti-government, anti-tax wing of the ultra-conservative movement.

It may sound like a far-left conspiracy theory, but the CNP is all too real and, its critics would argue, all too influential.

What amazes most CNP opponents is the group’s ability to avoid widespread public scrutiny. Despite nearly a quarter century of existence and involvement by wealthy and influential political figures, the CNP remains unknown to most Americans. Operating out of a non-descript office building in the Washing ton, D.C., suburb of Fairfax, Va., the organization has managed to keep an extremely low profile an amazing feat when one considers the people the CNP courts.

New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick was finally able to pierce the CNP veil in August when he attended a gathering of the group in New York City just before the Republican convention, where the organization presented Frist with the “Jefferson Award.”

The Times described the CNP as consisting of “a few hundred of the most powerful conservatives in the country” who meet “behind closed doors at undisclosed locations…to strategize about how to turn the country to the right.”

Accepting the award, Frist acknowledged the group’s power, telling attendees, “The destiny of the nation is on the shoulders of the conservative movement.”

The CNP meeting was perhaps more important than what took place on the carefully choreographed GOP convention stage a few days later, said Barry W. Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“The real crux of this is that these are the genuine leaders of the Republican Party, but they certainly aren’t going to be visible on television next week,” Lynn told The Times days before the start of the GOP convention. “The CNP members are not going to be visible next week, but they are very much on the minds of George W. Bush and Karl Rove every week of the year, because these are the real powers in the party.”

The Times’ Kirkpatrick was able to obtain the CNP’s current membership list and reported that its roster includes Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation, Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association and Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. A CNP financial disclosure form for 2002 lists Norquist and Howard Phillips, founder of the ultra-conservative Constitution Party, as directors. The current president of the group is Donald P. Hodel, former executive director of the Christian Coalition.

Other CNP directors include names that would not mean a lot to most people, but they are key players in the right-wing universe. Becky Norton Dunlop is vice president for external relations at the Heritage Foundation. James C. Miller III is former director of Citizens for a Sound Economy. Stuart W. Epperson owns a chain of Christian radio stations. E. Peb Jackson is former president of Young Life. T. Kenneth Cribb Jr., vice president of the CNP, was a domestic policy advisor to President Ronald W. Reagan and runs the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a group that funds right-wing newspapers on college campuses. Ken Raasch is a businessman who works in partnership with popular artist Thomas Kinkade.

Others who have been affiliated with the CNP include TV preachers Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, longtime anti-feminist crusader Phyllis Schlafly, Iran-Contra figure turned right-wing talk radio host Oliver North, former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), wealthy Cali fornia savings and loan heir Howard Ahmanson, former House Majority Leader Dick Army (R-Texas), Attorney General John Ashcroft and Tommy Thompson, secretary of the U.S. Depart ment of Health and Human Services.

Republican Party glitterati and top government officials frequently appear at CNP meetings. During the gathering before this year’s GOP convention, The New York Times reported that several Bush administration representatives were scheduled for speeches. Under secretary of State John Bolton spoke about plans for Iran, Assistant Attorney General Alexander Acosta talked about human trafficking and Dan Senor, who worked for Paul Bremer in Iraq, was scheduled to talk about the war there.

The Times said the CNP meeting was focused on the Bush-Cheney re-election efforts and quoted an anonymous participant who called the gathering a “pep rally” for the president’s campaign. Passing a federal marriage amendment and using that subject as a wedge issue was also a top priority.

The newspaper noted that another CNP meeting that took place shortly after the American invasion of Iraq included visits from Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A Canadian newspaper reported that Rumsfeld provided the gathering’s keynote address and that Cheney was scheduled to speak. (See “People & Events,” June 2003 Church & State.)

In April of 2002, according to an ABC News story that ran online, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was the keynote speaker at a CNP meeting in a northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and Timothy Goeglein, a White House liaison to religious communities, also spoke.

Heavy-hitters such as these show that the CNP is a force to be reckoned with, and Republican politicians ignore the group at their peril. In 1999, GOP presidential candidate George W. Bush appeared before a CNP gathering in San Antonio, and, in a closed-door meeting, assured the members of his right-wing bona fides. Bush critics demanded that the president release the text of his remarks, but he refused. Nonetheless, rumors soon surfaced that Bush promised the CNP to implement its agenda and vowed to appoint only anti-abortion judges to the federal courts.

How did this influential organization get its start? To find the answer, it’s necessary to go all the way back to 1981 and the early years of the Reagan presidency.

Excited by Reagan’s election, Tim LaHaye, Richard Viguerie, Weyrich and a number of far-right conservatives began meeting to discuss ways to maximize the power of the ultra-conservative movement and create an alternative to the more centrist Council on Foreign Relations. In mid May, about 50 of them met at the McLean, Va., home of Viguerie, owner of a conservative fund-raising company.

Viguerie had a knack for networking. Shortly before helping launch the CNP, Viguerie and Weyrich initiated the Moral Majority and tapped Falwell to run it, making the obscure Lynchburg pastor a major political figure overnight. Viguerie’s goal was to lead rural White voters in the South out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party by emphasizing divisive social issues such as abortion, gay rights and school prayer.

Back when the CNP was founded, it was a little less media shy. In the summer of 1981, Woody Jenkins, a former Louisiana state lawmaker who served as the group’s first executive director, told Newsweek bluntly, “One day before the end of this century, the Council will be so influential that no president, regardless of party or philosophy, will be able to ignore us or our concerns or shut us out of the highest levels of government.”

From the beginning, the CNP sought to merge two strains of far-right thought: the theocratic Religious Right with the low-tax, anti-government wing of the GOP. The theory was that the Religious Right would provide the grassroots activism and the muscle. The other faction would put up the money.

The CNP has always reflected this two-barreled approach. The group’s first president was LaHaye, then president of Family Life Seminars in El Cajon Calif. LaHaye, a fundamentalist Baptist preacher who went on in the 1990s to launch the popular “Left Behind” series of apocalyptic potboilers, was an early anti-gay crusader and frequent basher of public education and he still is today.

Alongside figures like LaHaye and leaders of the anti-abortion movement, the nascent CNP also included Joseph Coors, the wealthy beer magnate; Herbert and Nelson Bunker Hunt, two billionaire investors and energy company executives known for their advocacy of right-wing causes, and William Cies, another wealthy businessman.

Interestingly, the Hunts, Cies and LaHaye all were affiliated with the John Birch Society, the conspiracy-obsessed anti-communist group founded in 1959. LaHaye had lectured and conducted training seminars frequently for the Society during the 1960s and ’70s a time when the group was known for its campaign against the civil rights movement.

Bringing together the two strains of the far right gave the CNP enormous leverage. The group, for example, could pick a candidate for public office and ply him or her with individual donations and PAC money from its well-endowed, business wing.

The goals of the CNP, then, are similarly two-pronged. Activists like Nor quist, who once said he wanted to shrink the federal government to a size where it could be drowned in a bathtub, are drawn to the group for its exaltation of unfettered capitalism, hostility toward social-service spending and low (or no) tax ideology.

Dramatically scaling back the size of the federal government and abolishing the last remnants of the New Deal may be one goal of the CNP, but many of the foot soldiers of the Religious Right sign on for a different crusade: a desire to remake America in a Christian fundamentalist image.

Since 1981, CNP members have worked assiduously to pack government bodies with ultra-conservative lawmakers who agree that the nation needs a major shift to the right economically and socially. They rail against popular culture and progressive lawmakers, calling them the culprits of the nation’s moral decay. Laws must be passed and enforced, the group argues, that will bring organized prayer back to the public schools, outlaw abortion, prevent gays from achieving full civil rights and fund private religious schools with tax funds.

The CNP does not directly fund these activities itself. In fact, a glance at the group’s publicly available financial statements reveals a modest budget. In 2002, the CNP operated with income of just over $1.2 million. The national office has just a handful of staff members.

(In no way a grassroots organization, the CNP gets much of its money from far-right foundations. The Coors family and Richard DeVos, founder of Amway, have been among the CNP’s largest financial backers. The group received $125,000 from a Coors family philanthropic arm, the Castle Rock Foun dation, and the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation. Richard DeVos was also one of the CNP’s early presidents and Jeffrey and Holly Coors have been members for many years.)

The CNP’s budgetary figures don’t tell the whole story, however. Financial data shows that the bulk of its money $815,227 in 2002 is spent on “educational conferences and seminars for national leaders in the fields of business, government, religion and academia to explore national policy alternatives.” An additional $69,108 was spent on “weekly newsletters…distributed to all members to keep them apprised of member activities and public policy issues.”

In other words, the CNP is merely a facilitator. While the group has an affiliated arm CNP Action that does some lobbying, in the main it does not work directly to implement the schemes its members devise during the three yearly meetings. The well-heeled leaders and their affiliated organizations are expected to come up with their own funds to pay for the plots hatched during the meetings.

Despite the group’s obsessive desire for secrecy, some information has leaked out over the years, mainly due to the persistent efforts of a few writers and researchers.

In 1988, writer Russ Bellant noted in his book The Coors Connection, which details the beer dynasty’s funding of right-wing causes and groups, that many CNP members have been associated with the outer reaches of the conservative movement. Bellant found that among the far right, there is a certain cachet to being a CNP member. Members pay thousands of dollars yearly to keep their CNP membership. Bellant noted that at the time, individuals paid $2,000 per year for membership and those seeking a spot on the CNP’s board of directors shelled out $5,000 each.

Research undertaken by a now-defunct watchdog group, the Institute for First Amend ment Studies (IFAS), shed some more light on the group’s activities. For many years running, IFAS founder Skip Porteous was able to obtain CNP membership lists, which he posted online.

Bellant noted that Tom Ellis, a top political operative of the ultra-conservative Jesse Helms, followed LaHaye as the CNP president in 1982. Ellis had a checkered past, having served as a director of a foundation called the Pioneer Fund, which has a long history of subsidizing efforts to prove blacks are genetically inferior to whites.

Bellant’s book, as well as work by the IFAS, reveals other CNP members who have flirted with extremist and hateful propaganda.

In addition to obsessing over communist threats and buttressing white supremacist ideology, the CNP has included many members bent on replacing American democracy with theocracy.

LaHaye, like the whole of the nation’s Religious Right leaders, nurtures a strong contempt for the First Amendment principle of church-state separation, because it seriously complicates their goal of installing fundamentalist Christianity as the nation’s officially recognized religion. LaHaye has worked within the CNP and other groups to replace American law with “biblical law.” (See “Left Behind,” February 2002 Church & State.)

Former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed has also been involved with the CNP and addressed the group during the August GOP meeting in New York. Asked about his relationship with the CNP by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Aug. 29, Reed fell back on the common ploy of asserting that the group is just a ramped-up social club.

“I think it’s like-minded individuals who believe in conservative public policy views. And they get together a few times a year,” said Reed (whose CNP topic was “The 2004 Elections: Who Will Win in November?”).

Reed, now a top official of the Bush-Cheney campaign, said he is no longer a CNP member, asserting that he quit because “I was just busy doing other things.”

The CNP goes way beyond LaHaye and Reed in its effort to embrace the Religious Right. For many years, the late leader of the Christian Recon struc tionist movement, Rousas J. Rushdoony, was a member. Reconstructionists espouse a radical theology that calls for trashing the U.S. Constitution and replacing it with the harsh legal code of the Old Testament. They advocate the death penalty for adulterers, blasphemers, incorrigible teen agers, gay people, “witches” and those who worship “false gods.”

Another CNP-Reconstruc tionist tie comes through Howard Phillips, the Con stitution Party leader. Phillips, a longtime CNP member, is a disciple of Rushdoony and uses rhetoric that strikes a distinctly Reconstructionist tone. In a 2003 Constitution Party gathering in Clackamas, Oregon, Phillips told party members and guests, “We’ve got to be ready when God chooses to let us restore our once-great Republic.” A report by the Southern Poverty Law Center said that Phillips proclaimed that his party was “raising up an army” to “take back this nation!”

The CNP has provided more prominent Religious Right figures, such as Dob son, with a forum to promote church-state merger and shove the Republican Party toward the right. In 1998, Dobson ap peared before a CNP gathering where he admitted he voted for Constitution Party nominee Phillips in the 1996 presidential election instead of Republican candidate Bob Dole. Dobson threatened to bolt the Republican Party and take “as many people with me as possible” if the GOP did not stop taking Christian conservatives for granted. (Dobson’s speech, like all addresses before CNP functions, was not intended for media coverage. A transcript was published by the IFAS, which was able to gain access to the meeting. The transcript remains avail able on the Internet at www.buildingequality.us/ifas /cnp/dobson.html.)

Dobson railed against the Repub lican-controlled Congress for apparently giving short shrift to the “pro-moral community” and easily acquiescing to a “post-modern notion, that there is no moral law to the universe.” That notion, Dobson said, has spread throughout the nation like a cancer.

For Dobson, the moral law of the universe is clear and should be evident to all lawmakers. The universe “has a boss,” he said. “And He has very clear ideas of what is right and wrong.”

Dobson blasted the Republican-led Congress for increasing funding to Planned Parenthood and the National Endowment of the Arts and for espousing a “safe sex ideology” that he said includes advocacy of the use of condoms to help prevent sexually transmitted diseases.

All of this, Dobson said, directly contravenes God’s law.

“It’s a lack of conviction that there is a boss to the universe and that there are moral standards that we are held to and we need officials that will stand up and respect them,” Dobson said.

Dobson concluded his lecture by begging CNP members “shamelessly, to use your influence on the party at this critical stage of our history. You have a lot of influence on the party. A lot of you are politicians. I beg you to talk to them about what’s at stake here because they’ve laid the foundation for a revolt and I don’t think they even know it because they’re so out of touch with the people that I’m talking about.”

Dobson seemed fully aware that he was speaking to an ultra-partisan group. Indeed, the ABCNews.com report noted that some CNP members have bragged about helping “Christian conservatives” take over Republican state party operations in several Southern and Mid western states.

The CNP’s current executive director, a former California lawmaker named Steve Baldwin, has tried to downplay the organization’s influence on powerful state and national lawmakers. He has remained cagey about the CNP’s goals, insisting it is merely a group that counters liberal policy arguments.

In many ways, Baldwin himself exemplifies the CNP’s operate-in-secret strategy. As a political strategist in Cali fornia in the early 1990s, Baldwin was one of the key architects of the “stealth strategy” that led to Religious Right activists being elected to school boards and other local offices.

“Stealth candidates” were trained to emphasize pocketbook issues such as taxes and spending. But once elected, they would pursue a Religious Right agenda, such as demanding creationism in public schools. A spate of the candidates won election in Southern Cali fornia in the early 1990s, but most were later removed by the voters when the true agenda became apparent.

Baldwin tried to use the stealth strategy during his own campaign for the California Assembly in 1992. He lost that race but fared better in 1994, winning election to a seat in the 77th Assembly District. While in office, he helped lead efforts by Religious Right conservatives to take over the state GOP and, briefly, the entire Assembly.

Baldwin had to leave the Assembly in 2000 after serving six years due to California’s term-limits law. According to one California media outlet, his hard-right views had by then alienated most other members of the Assembly.

But Baldwin refused to let up. In the spring of 2002, while working at the CNP, he penned a controversial article for the law review at TV preacher Pat Robertson’s Regent University. The piece, “Child Molestation and the Homosexual Movement,” linked pedo philia to homosexuality.

The article went on to become a staple in the Religious Right’s anti-gay canon, despite the fact that its claims were challenged by legitimate researchers.

“It is difficult to convey the dark side of the homosexual culture without appearing harsh,” wrote Baldwin. “However, it is time to acknowledge that homosexual behavior threatens the foundation of Western civilization the nuclear family.”

What might the future hold for Baldwin and the CNP? Already Jenkins’ vision of a day when powerful politicians would pay heed to the group has come to pass. With social issues such as same-sex marriage increasingly dominating the Religious Right’s agenda, the organization is not likely to want for things to do.

Americans United, which has monitored the activities of the CNP for years, says the groups holds radical views and is especially dangerous because of its success in connecting Religious Right activism with the secular right’s deep financial pockets.

AU’s Lynn said he hopes the media begins to pay more attention to the CNP and expose its goals.

“If the CNP gets its way,” Lynn said, “the First Amendment, along with the rest of the U.S. Constitution, will be replaced with fundamentalist dogma. In order to ensure religious liberty for future generations of Americans, the CNP’s agenda must be derailed.”