The Next Hurrah

Why is our director of national intelligence letting terrorists roam free?

by emptypockets

Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, writes in an op-ed in this morning's New York Times that FISA, which requires court review of certain kinds of government wiretaps, "slowed -- and sometimes prevented -- our ability to collect timely foreign intelligence." He urges Congress to renew the Protect America Act, a temporary measure passed this year that bypasses FISA, and is due to expire in February.

Having personally transcended outrage, mockery, and scorn, I am going to go ahead and take McConnell at his word.

He writes that FISA has "not kept pace with changes in technology" (FISA was created in response to the illegal government activities of the Nixon administration) and that, under FISA, "our experts were diverted from tracking foreign intelligence threats to writing lengthy justifications to collect information from a person in a foreign country". Bottom line? "The intelligence community should spend its time protecting our nation, not providing privacy protections to foreign terrorists".

Which raises the question -- if they know who the terrorists are, why not go get them? Why is McConnell spending his time fighting political battles in Washington, DC, which even if won, will only let him listen in on phone calls? Why does he want to divert our experts to listening to tapes when they could be out catching bad guys?

I can imagine one reason: monitoring known terrorists may lead to the capture of larger groups of terrorists. But, to me, that stands too great a risk of losing track of them, as occurred with bin Laden. Shouldn't McConnell and the US government capture these terrorists while they can? Why are they playing soft with them?

The other possibility, of course, is that McConnell doesn't actually know yet who the terrorists are, and wants to be able to eavesdrop on lots of private conversations of innocent civilians, with the hopes that that will turn up a handful of terrorists. But that's not what he's saying, and I'm prepared to take him at his word: he knows where they are, he knows who they are. He'd just rather listen in than stop them.

Religion and Politics -- hopefully a series

By Sara

In our times of disorder as to direction and all here at TNH, I propose a series of essays on the matter of Religion and Politics, but limited in the sense that I want to review several highly controversial books of recent pub dates, and I hope that folk will try to keep within the lines, and discuss the books which you have actually read, or the reviews of the books, or at least something that is not just off topic or off the top of the head. 

I have about a dozen books stacked up, read and underlined, and outlined,  that I plan to review, in series.  I have Chris Hedges, "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America" (2006, Free Press), and not really about religion, but about organization, "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy", by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt,  Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007.  Equally about organization, we have Kevin Phillips 2006 work, "American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century" Viking, 2006.  I plan to review "The Theocons: Secular America Under Siege" by Damon Linker. Doubleday, 2006.  I have Michelle Goldberg's "Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism"  Norton, 2007 in the stack, and Ray Suarez's fascinating work, "Holy Vote, The Politics of Faith in America" 2006, Harper Collins.  I may deal with Jim Wallis's 2005 offering, "God's Politics: Why the Right gets it Wrong, and the Left doesn't get it",  Harper, 2005, and finally in the current stack -- underlined and with notes is Peter Singer's "President of Good and Evil: The Ethics of George Bush," Dutton, 2004. 

Now I have another stack that I will refer to -- books about the Salem Witch Trials of 1692 and thereabouts.  This is a history I have followed off and on since Arthur Miller's play of the early 50's, the "Crucible" got my father and grandmother to tell me what was, in fact an eleven generation passed down semi-secret story about an ancestor, Dutch Elwell, who was the last woman to be arrested in the Witch Trials.  I have I suppose a few of her genes.  The new histories of the trials have finally allowed me to recover something of who she was, and recovering her history has always been an objective.  She didn't get stoned or hung, in fact she was released from jail after a few days, as the Governor of Mass had decreed that no more spectral evidence could be introduced in trials.  But she lost in a sense -- she and her husband had to sell the farm, the house and the orchard at Gloucester, along with an interest in the fishing boat, and move first to Rhode Island, and eventually to South Jersey.  Dutch Elwell was no great religious leader or theologian, but she was a target of intolerance, and while my grandmother never attended a play, she did read Miller's script, and approved.  It fit with what she understood from the handi-me-downs of family history.  But in fact Miller wrote the work in the shadow of McCarthyism -- and that is how it was interpreted.  Since then the Salem Phenonema has been through two additional interpretations, the nutty witch stuff was a product of eating rye bread that was infected with a fungus that made people slightly mad, and what is the more recent, the application of demographic methods to both the accusers and the accused really reflects something like PTSD as a result of witnessing the scalping of parents and others during the King Phillips War on the Maine Coast, where many from the Mass. Bay Colony had moved in the decade before the War, and perhaps ten years before the Witch Trials.  In otherwords we have a ton of causes -- 1690's McCarthyism, Rye Bread and PTSD as a result of witnessing bloody massacres.  I still think they have to figure why it was all done 'in the name of God' and under the auspices of the Theocrats of the place.   In the meantime, doggie Elwell, named after Dutch, has come to life and requested a cookie run.  Elwell is a very proud Siberian Husky.  But that earlier Elwell Ancestor, who got jailed in the Salem events yea 13 generation's back, remains an inquisitive spirit.   

But why blog a series on Religion and Politics?  Why read all these books, or at least some of them?  Chris Hedges opens his work with a quote from Pascal;  "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from Religious Conviction."   How does that help us comprehend that grand Morman statement of last week -- or the referenced earlier Kennedy Contribution?  How do we essentially set up Pascal against the demands for religious confession in politics, and then the reviews as to whether it is complete and authentic, and put that against the "no religious test" language of Jefferson, Madison and the other founders?  But that is just the ideal -- reality is quite different.   

Chris Hedges gives us many ways to think about Fascism -- his introduction is a very lengthy quote from Umberto Eco, all of the criteria worth a good meditation, but what caught my attention was material in his last chapter -- Hedges Harvard Ethics Professor, one James Luther Adams (Interesting name for a Harvard Theological Don), had spent much time in Germany in the 30's watching the struggles of Protestants to not renounce the Old Testiment as had been demanded, and to attempt to stay independent from the Nazi Christian Church.  But then during the war he was recruited (by my great interest, George Marshall) to instruct officers designated for the occupation Army.  Testing them, he found these Officers more given to Nazi Attitudes than to American Ideals.  He found little difference between attitudes toward American Blacks and the perception of Nazi attitudes toward Jews -- and among the American Officers, no sensibility that either were really wrong.  He found no sense that a Christian Church should oppose white, gentile supremacy attitudes, and in fact, no attachment to any theology that stood in opposition.  Questioned on Roosevelt's Four Freedoms, they associated more with Nazi dogma than with FDR's various proclamations on war objectives.  Adams concluded that 100% Americanism covered over these blatent attitudes, that it was used as cover, and that it was a reliable measure of something of a fascist tendency buried well into the American psychic, at least at the US Army Officer level in the 1940's.  He sees it as deeply attached to Religion, but Religion mixed with American Culture.  (What difference from some of the current concerns with Boyden and others at the General rank?)   In effect, Hedges is convinced that little has really changed vis a vis the religious-political connection since the formal fascist era (and with the exception of Spain and Portugal) since the 1940's. 

I have questions about this historical construct -- but next post. 

Barbers

by emptypockets

I recall after the September 11th attacks, probably on the 12th or 13th, going for a haircut. I was living in San Francisco at the time and, being originally from the northeast, I remember feeling disconnected, like a great shuffling underground was just out of reach. I was far from family, and California friends didn't feel the way I did. At the barber's, though, something clicked. It was crowded on a midweek afternoon, the TV was turned to CNN, and everyone was quiet and serious. Where coworkers had been chatty, the barber's was meditative.

I revisited those thoughts the other day, at a barber's here in New York. It was a far more normal midweek afternoon, and I was the only customer there until an older guy entered and took the chair beside me. The barber made conversation with him: "How was your Thanksgiving?" "Hm? Oh, Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving... hm... not bad..." He was at his sister-in-law's. She's a good cook. "But I'm not having Christmas this year."

The barber let that rattle around the room for a while, and finally gave a nonconfrontational "Okay." Another long pause. "My wife passed away, so that's why." There was the sensation of the little ties that bind human strangers growing tighter. "When did that happen?" "Oh, a long time ago, long time ago..." A bit of a loosening. "June." Tight again.

"Damn, I miss her."

My first thoughts were for the old man and the poignancy of someone lonely but proud, reaching out for human contact but not able to appear to be reaching. My second thoughts were for the other families having a first Christmas without a loved one, or afraid that they will. I thought first of one family I know whose son will be sent soon on his first trip to Iraq, and then, in the abstract, of other families split by the war, and, finally, of families like the old man's, the elderly and infirm. And so, in this little stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas, I'll stop a bit right now as I go through my usual stressful holiday routines to give thanks that those routines haven't changed, that everyone who is supposed to be near me still is, and I don't have to contemplate a first Christmas "without."

And I think of why others must. I wonder, between that haircut and this one, how many families have been changed by two wars, so many deaths, new economic insecurity, poorer health care, less health research. Personally, I don't have much outrage left. I once derived some comfort from politics and blog posts filled with mockery and scorn, but I feel like I've passed through that and it no longer helps, if it ever really did. What hope and comfort I find now derives from those small vestiges of community, found in odd corners like the barber's, though perhaps increasingly less often.

House and Home -- and a little bit about FDR

By Sara

If the numbers I heard today on NPR about the Mortgage crisis are any where near accurate, 1 in 8 Americans with a Mortgage written in the last five years is vulnerable to loss of house and home.  Now there is a lot of rot in the housing bubble, but the consequences of pushing that number of folk out of house and home is profound.  Atrios has a piece indicating that the problem is mirrored in the car payments arena -- and neither say a thing about the credit card debt. 

What Bush did today is peanuts.  He offered a program that does not consider the reality that housing values will fall by 20-30% over the next year, and that everyone is going to wonder why they should pay for over-valued property.  Those with little equity will walk away from it, and in many developments and neighborhoods that will lead to too many houses on the market, and neighborhood problems. The Bush restrictions on who can get help sound vaguely like one of Hoover's plans in about 1930, which thankfully was never adopted. 

Back in the days of the Great Depression the problem was really quite similar.  People bought into mortgages in the 20's that were 5 year, with a balloon at the end (which was all the real equity).  The expectation was that one could refinance.  After 1929 they realized they could not pay up, and that they really had no equity, and thus no reason not to just walk away from the property.   If you want to do interesting reading, pull a classified ad section at the Library from 30 or 31 and try to comprehend all the listed houses for sale.  It got worse when the banks failed, as in those days they held the paper. 

So what did FDR do?  Well the dear darling did FHA.  Not 5 year mortgages, but 20 year mortgages, fixed rate, with US Government insurance.  They were not available for more expensive homes -- just fairly basic homes.   FHA would not loan or write insurance on anything that was wrong zoned or would not pass inspection.  The preference was totally social -- family housing, and the program broke even -- no loss and no profit to the Government.  Post WWII VA housing rules tracked FHA, and again, they lost no money. 

This solution probably needs revision for the current situation, but the point to be made is that once upon a time we did solve the matter, and we need to credit FDR with the solution.  The adjustable rate mortgages of today are little different from the balloon systems of the past of the late 20's and early 30's period. All interest up front, and real equity only in the late years.  Nothing new has been invented as to how to advantage the scam.   

 

Iran, the NIE, Bush, Cheney and whoo-ha.

by Sara

Hopefully everyone is trying to keep their timelines straight on this one, as I suspect the powers behind the throne have just collapsed any war plans that might have existed.  KO tonight had his opportunity to use the term "Liar" in about ten different versions on his Special Comment segment, and there are, I suspect, many more pieces of this are yet to roll out.  What hasn't been emphasized enough yet, is that when the narrative about WMD fell apart on Iraq -- Bush turned to the rhetoric of "Programs to develop WMD's" as opposed to real WMD's -- and in this instance it seems he pulled the same rhetorical trick -- Iran was not really about actually developing a Nuclear Bomb program -- instead it was about getting the knowledge of how to perhaps develop a nuclear bomb program.  Hopefully someone will tell Bush that most of the necessary knowledge about this has been in Physics textbooks since at least about 1946 or 47 -- and once you master that, then the rest of it is in the peer reviewed journals -- American, British, French, Russian, Chinese, and others over the years.  Progressive Magazine did, after all, publish a rather short article on "how to do it" from open sources back in the late 1970's -- and the Supreme Court said since it was all open source, no problem.  I have a fascinating history I've been reading in recent months on the history of India's Nuclear Project -- something with origins in a study committee Nehru set up in 1946, a year before India became Independent.  By 73, and without any great push, they had a device that would explode.  In the meantime, quite independent of much outside assistance, they had a whole nuclear industry.  All this is illustrative of the bias that "knowledge" is something exclusively American, or Western, and it reminds me of the estimates offered to Truman back in the mid-1940's that the Soviets were so backward, they could not get a Nuclear Weapon before perhaps the mid 50's at the earliest.  Well -- 1949 was a little early given those estimates.  You would think that by this time the notion that science and technology knowledge is exclusively American would have worn off a bit.  Anyhow -- Bush seems to be pushing that idea again as a last ditch cover up. 

The process of outing this NIE is probably going to be one of the most fascinating bits of Bush History.  Eventually we will get the back story, but in the meantime we live in interesting times.  Clearly the various Intelligence Services had some of this information for at least a year, though I would imagine much had to survive confirmation efforts.  A few weeks ago I finished reading "Curveball" by Bob Drogin -- which I recommend highly, precisely because the raw detail is so illuminating.  Drogin sub-titles his book as "Spies, Lies, and the Con Man who Started a War."  In fact, any reasonable validation of Curveball's motivation would have revealed the problems with his Iraq intelligence.  But Curveball did provide the basis for a war against Iraq, precisely because no validation took place, and no efforts to develop corroboration took place.  And most of his evidence was worthless in the end -- no bio moble trailers at all. 

But now we have the odd story that Cheney went to the situation room a couple of weeks ago, and was briefed on the final version of the NIE, and then, in the week between that briefing, and when Bush says he understood the intelligence, they apparently never spoke or consulted.  In the meantime, we have more attacks on "knowledge" as opposed to actual weapons or existant industry that can produce them.  Cheney skipped the Xmas party at the WH with the press and many others, as he is apparently out shooting birds in South Dakota. 

I suspect alienation of affection. 

But others are out of town too while Bush has to try to find simple words to deal with his problem -- Bob Gates is in Iraq and Afghanistan, and my guess is that Gates probably forced the issue on this.  DoD just doesn't want another war right now, and this is how things are done, particularly when a former DCI is heading DoD.   

In one sense this is about Republicans trying to prove they can control the child and do national security.  They could pull it off.  What I want to know is whether the Democrats have an intelligent response to all this.  So far, I don't really hear it. 

 

About Conspiracy Theory

By Sara

Two reasons I have been off-line for about ten days.  Had to help a friend who found herself in the hospital on an emergency basis, (heart problems) who about two years ago legally adopted her grandchildren because her daughter was about to loose them.  Got more shopping than I ever expected done (and have done in years) because it was a way to occupy time and entertain pre-teens.  No -- not the usual tour of Mall of America, instead I took them to a fabric warehouse, because this winter's project is to slipcover a seven foot couch, and as is the norm, they could not imagine that someone knew how to sew, make slipcovers, ask questions about fabric content and all the rest.  So between Hospital Visits and making demands on the social welfare system for the supports that are needed so that my friend can raise her grandchildren, I have had my hands full. 

But I am also concerned about the too easy migration toward the explanation of politics through the vehicle of conspiracy reasoning -- and just before Thanksgiving I had piled up all my Kennedy Assassination books on Conspiracy to "consult" while reading Vincent Bugliosi's 1500 page "small book" on this matter.  (The book comes with a CD that is supposedly 900 extra pages of notes, and I have not attempted to read that yet.)

I think I have nearly finished the Bugliosi book, which I did not read exactly in sequence.  In it, he attempts to defeat every critique of the Warren Report that has ever gained traction -- but if something was out there and obvious, but not a major critique, it just gets passed over. 

I always begin Kennedy Assassination books on one level -- how do they deal with the one person in the saga that I knew, Ruth Paine.  Ruth was an Antiochian, and while she graduated before I entered, she was still living in Yellow Springs and taking Nursing Courses at Ohio State, but also working on ceramics -- and we ended up having wheels next to each other for a time, so I knew something of her.  At the time Ruth was much involved with the Bruderhoff Community with which she had lived in Germany a year earlier.  Part of the Ceramics course was to throw 50 flower pots, and cut them in half with a wire, and do an analysis of technique.  Throwing perfect flower pots is pretty mindless -- so the conversations were important.  But even with Bugliosi who claims deep research, I find nothing of Ruth really represented.  Given what Ruth had to say about Bruderhoff and all, I fully understand why she invited Mariana Oswald to live with her, but for all that has been written, including Bugliosi's huge work, no one really captures it properly. 

I was never really negative on conspiracy notions until after the Wellstone Plane Crash, when, once the investigations were done, all of which just assessed it as pilot error and an accident, kept pushing the conspiracy  idea.  I have become particularly allergic to those who use terms such as "doing a Wellstone on him/her".    Sadly, I think sometimes small planes just crash, and at times less than Professional Pilots do not know how to deal with critical situations.  Not everything is a conspiracy -- and when you find an author who has been doing conspiracy Kennedy stuff suddenly shifting to Wellstone stuff, with the same framework, well one needs to wonder.  Always looking for a Hook, I suppose. 

Just as there is really a Military/Industrial Complex, so are there other complexes, and one of them is the conspiracy complex.  If you adopt it you avoid the necessity of doing the economic/political/social analysis of various events and circumstances, circumstances that help us comprehend why things happened as they did. 

Bush Won't Hand Over His Interview Transcript to Waxman

by emptywheel

For those of you looking for my post on the news that Fitzgerald has been handing over files to Waxman, but Bush won't let him have the White House files?

That post is over at my new digs. Come check it out!

Jeb Bush, Worse than Neil?

by emptywheel

Via Atrios, people are beginning to wonder whether Jeb Bush was responsible for approving Florida's purchase of a hefty chunk of the shitpile when he was Governor.

A government money market debacle unfolding in Florida is raising questions about former governor and presidential brother Jeb Bush's possible involvement in the mess.

Florida froze withdrawals from a state investment fund earlier this week when local governments withdrew billions of dollars out of concern for the fund's financial stability.

In the past few days, municipalities have withdrawn roughly $9 billion, nearly a third of the $28 billion fund (which is similar to a money market fund) controlled by the Florida's State Board of Administration (SBA). The run on the fund was triggered by worries that a percentage of the portfolio contained debt that had defaulted.

A majority of this paper was sold to SBA by Lehman Brothers (nyse: LEH - news - people). Bush, as the state's top elected official, served on a three-member board that oversaw the SBA until he retired as governor in January. In August, Bush was hired as a consultant to the bank. Lehman spokesperson Kerrie Cohen, speaking on behalf of Bush, said they had no comment and would not say when the bank had sold Florida the paper. SBA did not return calls.

Which made me wonder what happened to investigations into Jeb's role in the last piece of shitpile Florida bought: Over $300 million in Enron stock, also approved while Bush was in charge of Florida's State Board of Administration.

According to a report by AFSCME Florida Council 79, Inside the Florida State Board of Administration: Mismanagement Made the Enron Loss Inevitable, the State Board of Administration (SBA) repeatedly engaged in poor investment practices under the watch of its Board of Trustees, chaired by Gov. Jeb Bush. Despite warnings from inside and outside the SBA, the trustees failed to correct these problems, leading to a stunning loss on Enron stock nearly three times greater than that of any other state retirement fund. The trustees failed to act as Alliance Capital Management, one of the pension fund's money managers, continued to invest in Enron even as its financial instability became public and the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating the corporation.

Michael Froomkin has a detailed description of what this means for FL here.

The possibility that Jeb presided over not one but two massive transfers of money from Florida's government coffers into the pockets of his friends raises the possibility he'll be remembered as more corrupt than his brother, Neil. I know it's a tough contest, trying to figure out which Bush brother is the most corrupt. But Neil Bush only indirectly stole from taxpayers with his Silverado Savings & Loan. And while it's pretty clear Neil's company was shafting taxpayers to put money in Ignite's bank accounts, I'm not sure if that matches the scale of Jeb's apparent wholesale emptying of Florida's coffers into corrupt and losing business deals.

Wolfie's Back?

by emptywheel

Bmaz sent me Isikoff's latest, which thankfully does more than report on events from his past as if they were news. It reports the frightening news that Condi's about to appoint Paul Wolfowitz to an advisory position at State.

Nearly three years after Paul Wolfowitz resigned as deputy Defense secretary and six months after his stormy departure as president of the World Bank—amid allegations that he improperly awarded a raise to his girlfriend—he's in line to return to public service. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has offered Wolfowitz, a prime architect of the Iraq War, a position as chairman of the International Security Advisory Board, a prestigious State Department panel, according to two department sources who declined to be identified discussing personnel matters. The 18-member panel, which has access to highly classified intelligence, advises Rice on disarmament, nuclear proliferation, WMD issues and other matters. "We think he is well suited and will do an excellent job," said one senior official.

They don't yet have Wolfie listed on the website, so maybe there's some time to embarrass Condi out of putting Wolfie in an advisory position again. I suggest we start an embarrassment campaign by focusing on two issues.

Condi, someone committed a security indiscretion to give Wolfie's girlfriend a job at State. Are you sure you should repeat the mistake by giving Wolfie more access to classified information?

Remember that when people started complaining that Wolfie was giving Shaha Reza preferential treatment at the World Bank, his "solution" was to set her up at State? Remember Sidney Blumenthal's description of how unusual Reza's security clearance process was?

Riza was unhappy about leaving the sinecure at the World Bank. But in 2006 Wolfowitz made a series of calls to his friends that landed her a job at a new think tank called Foundation for the Future that is funded by the State Department. She was the sole employee, at least in the beginning. The World Bank continued to pay her salary, which was raised by $60,000 to $193,590 annually, more than the $183,500 paid to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and all of it tax-free. Moreover, Wolfowitz got the State Department to agree that the ratings of her performance would automatically be "outstanding." Wolfowitz insisted on these terms himself and then misled the World Bank board about what he had done.

[snip]

Riza, who is not a U.S. citizen, had to receive a security clearance in order to work at the State Department. Who intervened? It is not unusual to have British or French midlevel officers at the department on exchange programs, but they receive security clearances based on the clearances they already have with their host governments. Granting a foreign national who is detailed from an international organization a security clearance, however, is extraordinary, even unprecedented. So how could this clearance have been granted?

State Department officials familiar with the details of this matter confirmed to me that Shaha Ali Riza was detailed to the State Department and had unescorted access while working for Elizabeth Cheney. Access to the building requires a national security clearance or permanent escort by a person with such a clearance. But the State Department has no record of having issued a national security clearance to Riza.

So, after turning State Department into a scam to allow Wolfowitz to break ethical rules and expose US secrets to a foreign national with no apparent clearance, Condi now wants to use a State advisory board to give Wolfie clearance himself.

Condi, aren't you a little ashamed at the way Wolfie used your agency the last time?

The FISA Document Dump, An Inventory

by emptywheel

I've put together an excel file listing the documents included in Friday's document dump on the communications DNI McConnell had regarding the FISA amendment. I've still got a turkey hangover, so let me know if you spot any errors.

Here's what I've noticed:

• There's a weird chronology behind the response to the FOIA request
• The DNI's definition of duplicative is different than my definition of duplicative
• The DNI must consider Republican correspondence classified
• The DNI seems to lose Democratic correspondence

Weird Chronology

First, the chronology. EFF originally FOIAed documents on August 31, asking for records on both meetings with telecoms and discussions with Congress (there were actually two separate FOIA requests--see exhibits K and L here). On both FOIA requests, EFF asked for materials dating from April 2007 to "the present." On September 10, DNI responded to EFF saying it would expedite the EFF request.

Now look at the dates on the documents included. They start with one document from before the time frame--a March 23 letter from the SSCI leadership asking for a FISA bill. It's a pretty important document because it shows Congress taking the lead on this, which may be why they included it. But then the documents go through September 26--long after the August 31 request, and more than two weeks after DNI said it was expediting the EFF request. But then, it stops short of what are likely to be some interesting events leading up the October 18 SSCI bill.

There is probably a very reasonable explanation: that DNI took "present" to mean that time when it started working on the request. Though if that's true, it suggests DNI sat on the request for almost two weeks, before it started expediting anything.

"Duplicative"

Now, when DNI explained why the review process took so long (and presumably, why they couldn't give us document through the "present" of late November), one of the things they claimed they would do is remove duplicate documents.

As the records are located and forwarded to the IMO, the FOIA analyst handling this case conducts a continual analysis and review of the documents located. During the review process the analyst handling this case first removes any non-responsive and duplicative material from the records that are received. She then creates working copies of the documents and document indexes and assesses whether there would be  any necessary consultations and/or referrals with those entities maintaining equity in the documents. She also reviews the records for the application of any FOIA exemptions. [my emphasis]

Which is why I find it curious that there are two copies of McConnell's May 1 testimony before SSCI and two copies of his September 18 testimony before HJC. I'll need to go back and look closely to see if these are just two revisions. But if not, it appears that this analyst, who spent at least two months reviewing these documents, still couldn't find all the duplicative documents.

Also, what's with the date on McConnell's September testimony to SSCI? It took place on September 25, but is dated September 20.