Open Thread for Night Owls & Early Birds

Three decades ago, some people came together to start a non-profit advocacy group, Infact. It got underway with a boycott of Nestlé, targeted because its aggressive infant formula marketing was leading to the deaths of millions of African babies through malnutrition. Ultimately, in 1984, the boycott spurred the World Health Organization to establish a planetwide code governing the marketing of breast-milk substitutes, and Nestlé agreed to follow it. Watchers continue to put pressure on the company - and others - to follow the code.

Infact is now Corporate Accountability International. It’s a multi-campaign organization that has taken on big tobacco, big oil, agribusiness, the nuclear industry, a major hospital operation, and corporate influence on elections. The current campaign is Think Outside the Bottle, getting people to consume tap water instead of water in environmentally unsound plastic bottles.

Vote for your top three choices now. You can also offer your own nominations.

Days since Mission Accomplished: 1787

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

Rifling Obama's passport file

Barack Obama's passport file was breached without his consent, in violation of the Privacy Act, at least three times this year (on Jan. 9, Feb. 21, and Mar. 14). On Thursday night State Department spokesman Sean McCormack blamed the snooping on mere curiosity. Two of the three contract employees of the Bureau of Consular Affairs reportedly involved were fired, and the third disciplined.

The officials, all contract workers, used their authorized computer network access to look up files within the department's consular affairs section, which processes and stores passport information, and read Mr. Obama's passport application and other records, in violation of department privacy rules, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was notified of the security breach yesterday, and responded by saying security measures used to monitor records of high-profile Americans worked properly in detecting the breaches.

Mr. McCormack said the officials did not appear to be seeking information on behalf of any political candidate or party.

"As far as we can tell, in each of the three cases, it was imprudent curiosity," Mr. McCormack told The Washington Times....

In this case, it does not appear that records were copied or altered, Mr. McCormack said.

There's clearly a concerted effort by the administration to portray the three breaches as trivial and coincidental.

A senior official told NBC News there was "no political motivation" to the incidents, adding that the three were low-level contract employees doing administrative work and accessed Obama's records out of "curiosity."

This official told NBC News that he does not believe any of the information was sent anywhere.

It could well be that nothing much was afoot; there are fools at every level of this administration. Indeed, this government has failed terribly in maintaining the privacy of records, especially when it hires private contractors to do its work.

However the last time a Bush occupied the White House, in 1992, another Democratic presidential candidate had his passport files rifled. And just as today, the initial cover story floated by the White House to explain the snooping portrayed it as innocuous.

The State Department confirmed today that senior officials personally took charge of a routine request for Gov. Bill Clinton's consular records and ordered a sweeping search for information from the 1960's about his travels in Europe.

The department said the search, conducted here and in London, was fruitless. It also said the search was a routine response to requests from news organizations. But an official of the American Embassy in London said officials there dealt with the search urgently because of its political overtones.

There were just a few hints that partisan politics might lie behind the cover story:

Officials of two of the news organizations involved, The Associated Press and Hearst Newspapers, said they had asked for Mr. Clinton's visa, passport, draft and citizenship records because of claims made to them by Republicans that Mr. Clinton, the Democratic Presidential nominee, had tried to renounce his citizenship in the 1960's...

The [State] department also confirmed that Elizabeth Tamposi, the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs, a political appointee of Mr. Bush's former chief of staff, John H. Sununu, took personal charge of the records search, an extremely unusual move for someone in her position.

After lengthy investigations, however, we learned that the initial story was highly misleading and omitted crucial details.

In 1992, for instance, George H.W. Bush’s White House pulled strings at the State Department and at U.S. embassies in Europe to uncover and to disseminate derogatory information about Bill Clinton in the final weeks of the campaign.

The Bush assault on Clinton’s patriotism moved into high gear on the night of Sept. 30, 1992, when assistant secretary of state Elizabeth Tamposi – under pressure from the White House – ordered three aides to pore through Clinton’s passport files in search of a purported letter in which Clinton supposedly sought to renounce his citizenship.

Though no letter was found, Tamposi still injected the suspicions into the campaign by citing a small tear in the corner of Clinton’s passport application as evidence that someone might have tampered with the file, presumably to remove the supposed letter. She fashioned that speculation into a criminal referral to the FBI.

Within hours, someone from the Bush camp leaked word about the confidential FBI investigation to reporters at Newsweek magazine. The Newsweek story about the tampering investigation hit the newsstands on Oct. 4. The article suggested that a Clinton backer might have removed incriminating material from Clinton’s passport file, precisely the spin that the Bush people wanted.

Monitoring systems are tripped when an employee accesses the records of the high-profile individual, a department official told NBC News. "When the monitoring system is tripped, we immediately seek an explanation for the records access. If the explanation is not satisfactory, the supervisor is notified."

That's odd. McCormack stated on Thursday that the contractors who employed the workers were contacted "immediately" in each instance. Thus three separate investigations, the first going back more than two months, and the news reaches Condoleezza Rice only now?

On Thursday evening, the Obama campaign emailed to Daily Kos the following statement.

"This is an outrageous breach of security and privacy, even from an 
Administration that has shown little regard for either over the last eight 
years.  Our government's duty is to protect the private information of the 
American people, not use it for political purposes.  This is a serious 
matter that merits a complete investigation, and we demand to know who
looked at Senator Obama's passport file, for what purpose, and why it took so long for them to reveal this security breach," said Obama campaign
spokesman Bill Burton.

That's a reasonable thing to ask, and all the more urgent it seems when a member of the Bush family resides in the White House. I'd like to add my own request, if an investigation does turn up political wrongdoing, that this time Democrats not participate in sweeping it under the Oval Office carpet.

Oh, and this won't be adequate:

Speaking to reporters in a conference call, U.S. officials said they had asked the State Department's inspector general to conduct an independent investigation of the matter.

Open Thread and Diary Rescue

This evening's Rescue Rangers are Avila, grog, jlms qkw, joyful, PaintyKat, watercarrier4diogenes, and Wes Opinon, with Unitary Moonbat shuffling the scrolls.

March 20, coincidentally enough, has played host to several prior episodes of interracial discourse: previous todays have seen the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin in book form (1852); Lyndon Johnson asserting federal authority to protect a civil rights march in Alabama (1965); and John Lennon and Yoko Ono getting married (1969).

• For those of us that remember our nation's shameful conduct toward Vietnam vets, jimstaro says OIF/OEF, Welcome Home, But Not In My Neighborhood!, a sad reminder that not all of us have learned from it. (watercarrier4diogenes)
• vox humana analyzes the many ways that President Bush has lost his "War on Terror" in Iraq: In Fighting This Battle, Mr. Bush Lost the War. (PaintyKat)
• mommyof3 concludes a fine, user-friendly breakdown of the "suppressed" Iraq War documents in Saddam & Terrorism: IDA Summary (Part 4)...Last One! (joyful)

• A heartrending diary on the tragedy that is New Orleans: mlharges furiously demands "Debates in NOLA: I Want To Know when candidates are going to start to address the issue of this broken city and her people." (joyful)
• exotrip wonders if Dubya will handle The 2008 Flood, live from small town America better than he did Katrina. The guess here is that if the residents are white and vote Republican, yes. (grog)

• Remember Ernie Pyle and reporting in WWII? markthshark says that things have changed, for the worse, in U.S. Military Rounding up Journalists in Iraq. (watercarrier4diogenes)
• Tibet Roundup: signals reports on Presidential Election in Taiwan; and Thoughts on China, Tibet. (watercarrier4diogenes), while Far Easterner gives us a report from Dharamsala, with pictures, and urges us to Cry For Tibet. (jlms qkw)

• imported beer reminds us that no matter who we are, we're all composed of various shades of grey in The Color of My Skin. (Wes Opinion)
• Avenging Angel knocks down the administration's latest attempt to compare itself to a great president in Abraham Lincoln Bush. (jlms qkw)
• prewitt shares a beautiful story on the ugliness of bigotry in My Grandmother on Race. Her Daughter. Me. (joyful)
• Michael Gene Sullivan details the ever-changing labels used to deride, and divide, the Democratic Party in What's Wrong With Being a Peace-Loving, Tree Hugging, Red Feminist Lawyer? (PaintyKat)
• 61 days and counting, and then Nameless Soldier will transition back into civilian life as well as A Return to Activism. (joyful)

Enjoy, and please promote your own favorite diaries in this open thread.

Dana Perino: Missed the point or lied

Yesterday's five year anniversary of the greatest foreign policy blunder in U.S. history was marked by George Bush telling us we must stay the course, and with Dick Cheney saying whether we like it or not.  And between the two, Dana Perino's baldfaced lie almost fell through the cracks:

Q The President warned of the danger that al Qaeda could gain access to Iraq's oil resources. But I don't understand how a fragmented, clandestine, non-Iraqi terrorist organization could produce and sell Iraqi oil on the global market, especially when the majority of Iraqis have turned against al Qaeda. Could you describe a plausible scenario?

MS. PERINO: The purpose of what the President said is that al Qaeda should not be allowed to have safe haven in Iraq and take over --

Q How can they take over Iraq's oil reserves --

MS. PERINO: Well, if we were to leave we would certainly ensue chaos and not be able to -- if we were to leave too soon, it would certainly be chaos and it would be terrible for not only the innocent Iraqis, but the entire region and, in fact, our own national security. That's what the President --

Q But the Iraqis would let a foreign terrorist organization take over their oil?

MS. PERINO: You're missing the point, and I think that you should go back and read --

Q No, I --

MS. PERINO: Yes, actually, I think you are missing the point. And I call on you because I see what you write about how you come here and you really want to have questions asked. And I'm calling on you and I'm providing it to you, but I suggest that you read the President's speech and read it in context, because that's -- what you're suggesting is not what the President said.

Well, there's nothing like a Perino challenge to read the President's own words for context and meaning.  Here's what Bush said:  

Out of such chaos in Iraq, the terrorist movement could emerge emboldened -- with new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to dominate the region and harm America. An emboldened al Qaeda with access to Iraq's oil resources could pursue its ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction to attack America and other free nations.

So, who missed the point?