Remarkable if true:

A documentary says French special forces had Osama bin Laden in their sights twice about three years ago but their U.S. superiors never ordered them to fire. . . . The documentary, due to air next year and seen by Reuters on Tuesday, says the troops could have killed the al Qaeda leader in Afghanistan but the order to shoot never came, possibly because it took too long to request it. "In 2003 and 2004 we had bin Laden in our sights. The sniper said 'I have bin Laden'," an anonymous French soldier is quoted as saying.

Wanted dead or alive? Maybe not. Grain of salt however:

The French military, however, said that the incidents never happened and the report was "erroneous information."

h/t Devil's Tower

Who knows how long Bush's NSA warrantless wiretapping has been going on, but it was a year ago today that Bush 'fessed up to it:

On Dec. 17, 2005, Bush publicly acknowledged for the first time he had authorized the NSA to monitor, without approval from a judge, phone calls and e-mails that come into or originate in the U.S. and involve people the government suspects of having terrorist links.

Bush said he had no intention of halting what he called a "vital tool" in the war on terror.

It's up to the Dems now. Will they have the spine and the wherewithal to put an end to it...without passing more laws that increase the executive's power to order spying on more of us without adequate judicial oversight?

Here we go again. Threats of new al-Qaeda attacks are in the air, courtesy of the FBI.

Radical Egyptian cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, 68, spat up blood on December 6 and was rushed to a hospital, the FBI notice said. He had a small tear in his esophagus and was treated with a "needed transfusion to replace lost blood," said the FBI bulletin to staffers. Medical personnel then discovered the cleric had a tumor on his liver, the FBI said.

The FBI has put out a bulletin raising fears of terror attacks if the Sheik dies in jail.

Abdel-Rahman, who is serving life in a U.S. prison, has called for attacks if he dies in jail. Law enforcement sources said there is no intelligence to suggest there are any attacks being planned.

The Sheik was returned to jail three days ago.

Of course he's going to die in prison. That's what happens to inmates with life sentences. It's just a question of when. Why is there a terror bulletin going out if there is no intelligence to support it.

According to the bulletin:

With much fanfare, the government indicted Derrick Shareef, described here as "a black Muslim convert accused of plotting alone to set off hand grenades inside a Rockford, Illinois shopping mall a few days before Christmas."

Shareef had no connection to any terrorist organization. He had no hand grenades. He had no cash with which to buy hand grenades, although he had a couple of stereo speakers he hoped to swap for some. Not the most sophisticated of terrorist plots.

Shareef talked of jihad, a word that can describe violent or nonviolent intentions. Shareef's may have been violent, but he seems to have had little ability to carry out his plan.

So Shareef fits a pattern of indicted "wanna be" terrorists with big ideas but no apparent means or backing from our real enemies.

Much about this story, including the state of Shareef's mental health, is unknown. Many of the unanswered questions are explored here.

An airplane passenger lit a match on an airplane to mask her flatulence. The plane made an emergency landing in Nashville. The woman wasn't charged with an offense.

An off-beat, semi-amusing story so far, until you read the comments section to the news article. The article does not mention the woman's nationality, but here's an example of the responses.

While the body odor of foreigners is a problem, we have to remember that many foreign countries lack indoor plumbing. France is a good example.

****

I've been on many flights sitting near foreigners and wished we would have made emergency landings due to "body odor"

I wish we could banish people who say things like this to foreign countries. Their state of mind is far more offensive than body odor.

Khaled el-Masri reasonably believes he's entitled to an explanation, or at least an apology, for the U.S. government's decision to kidnap him, fly him to Afghanistan, and torture him before realizing he wasn't a terrorist. His lawsuit was thrown out, however, on the theory that the government can't be held accountable without revealing "state secrets." How shockingly illegal conduct can legitimately be kept secret, particularly after it's been revealed, is a mystery.

"I think courts are beginning to recognize that this administration is using secrecy to avoid accountability," says ACLU attorney Ben Wizner, who argued El-Masri’s appeal Tuesday in Richmond.

Don't expect the Fourth Circuit to be one of those courts.

Masri is thinking about suing Boeing (which presumably has no state secrets since it isn't a state), because one of its subsidiaries apparently played a role in his rendition.

U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins (Los Angeles) issued a 55 page ruling today declaring part of an order by President Bush allowing the seizure of funds by associates of alleged terror groups to be unconsitutional.

U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins found that part of the law, signed by Bush on September 23, 2001 and used to freeze the assets of terrorist organizations, violated the Constitution because it put no apparent limit on the president's powers to place groups on that list.

Ruling in a lawsuit brought against the Treasury Department in 2005 by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Collins also threw out a portion of Bush's order which applied the law to those who associate with the designated organizations.

In a nutshell,

The good news is that Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine announced he will conduct an investigation into how the Justice Department used the information it received from Bush's warrantless, NSA electronic surveillance program. He has also mangaged to get security clearances for his investigators. The bad news is it "won't address whether the controversial program is an unconstitutional expansion of presidential power, as its critics and a federal judge in Detroit have charged."

The ACLU reports:

In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee, Glenn Fine, the Justice Department’s Inspector General, said that his office has "decided to open a program review that will examine the Department’s controls and use of information related to the program and the Department’s compliance with legal requirements governing the program."

Again, it's not enough. It won't address the legality of the program. As the ACLU points out:

Six imams attending a conference in Minneapolis took time to pray at the gate before boarding a U.S. Airways flight to Phoenix. A passenger handed a note to a flight attendant pointing out the "6 suspicious Arabic men" on the plane. Disturbed by their "unsettling" behavior -- which apparently consisted of praying and asking for seat belt extensions -- the crew told the police that the imams needed to be removed. They were escorted from the plane in handcuffs and detained for five hours before authorities conceded that they posed no threat.

U.S. Airways refused to book the imams on another flight to Phoenix. According to the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Muslims (both passengers and airline employees) have more complaints about U.S. Airways than other airlines. The incident prompted the Council and the NAACP to ask for Congressional hearings on racial profiling in airports.

Can you imagine the outcry from the religious right if six Christian pastors were removed from a flight because they prayed together at the gate? U.S. Airways would be deservedly out of business in a week.

Sen. Arlen Specter today introduced the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Oversight and Resource Enhancement Act of 2006." The ACLU responds:

Now is not the time for Congress to focus on controversial issues. The majority of the appropriations bills have yet to be adopted. If there is to be a new spirit of bipartisan cooperation in Congress, lawmakers must not legislate in haste and without a full understanding of the facts. If the new Specter bill were adopted, it would be reconciled with the horrible Wilson bill, putting the privacy of innocent Americans at great risk. Senators must remember: Americans are not the enemy. This is one issue on which the lame-duck Congress should ‘Just Say No!’"

The LA Times today agreed in an editorial, saying the bill was co-sponsored by Diane Feinstein and would make it easier for the NSA to bypass FISA's requirement of a court order in case of an emergency.

For the first time, the Bush Administration is using sting tactics in another country to catch terrorists.

In a recent operation, agents from America's Department of Homeland Security set up a suspect by posing as dealers wanting to illegally sell night-vision goggles for export to Iran. The spies arranged a series of clandestine meetings in London hotels, which they secretly filmed as evidence. It is thought to be the first time American agents have been caught using such sting tactics in Britain.

Urgent questions were being asked about whether the British Government had been aware of the operation. If so, it raises issues of the State collaborating with foreign agencies to entrap suspects - and if not it raises the spectre of American spies working unchecked on British soil.

Here's why this is a big deal:

President Bush is pressing Democratic leaders to have Congress legitimize his warrantless surveillance program. That and confirming John Bolton to the U.N. are high on his agenda for the remainder of the year.

Happily, Democrats don't seem likely to play along.

Senate Democrats, emboldened by Election Day wins that put them in control of Congress as of January, say they would rather wait until next year to look at the issue. "I can't say that we won't do it, but there's no guarantee that we're going spend a lot of time on controversial measures," Democratic Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois said Thursday.

In Senate parlance, that means no.

As to where things stand on the warrantless surveillance bills pending in Congress: