Homeland Security

Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Wednesday that proposed new guidelines wouldn't allow the Federal Bureau of Investigation to start a preliminary probe solely because of a person

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is hailing the rescue of three American defense contractors from Colombian rebels.

Marc Gonsalves, Keith Stansell, and Thomas Howes had been held by rebels, along with kidnapped presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt, since 2003 when their surveillance plane crashed in the Colombian rainforest.

Colombian spies rescued the hostages yesterday, posing as rebels and tricking their captors into handing them over.

"The news that three Americans and their fellow captives held by Colombian rebels have been freed is the answer to the hopes and prayers of so many," Pelosi said in a statement last night.

House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) today asked the Defense Department to investigate what he says may be thousands of criminal cases involving fraudulent contracting in Iraq.

Waxman's committee received a report in May from Department of Defense (DoD) Inspector General for Audit Mary Ugone finding that the U.S. Army had not provided enough documentation for its disbursements in Iraq, Egypt, and Kuwait. The audit centered on concerns of waste, fraud, and abuse related to over $10.7 billion in Army payments.

More than 7,000 of the audited transactions may indicate criminal behavior, Waxman said today in a letter to DoD Inspector General Claude Kicklighter.

In the letter, Waxman officially requested an investigation and asked Kicklighter to make recommendations to DoD and Congress on how to identify, investigate, and prosecute criminal activity in Army contracting in Iraq.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee want Attorney General Michael Mukasey to clarify his claim that the the government failed to act on a phone call about the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Mukasey said last month in San Francisco that the government failed to wiretap a phone call from an Afghanistan "safe house" to somebody in the United States prior to the September 11th strike. Mukasey made the claim while arguing that that Congress should renew a 2007 expansion of government surveillance capabilities.

On Monday, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Robert "Bobby" Scott (D-Va.) and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to Mukasey asking what he was referring to. Mukasey's statement, they wrote, was "very disturbing" because it was the first time someone had referred "to a call from a known terrorist safe house in Afghanistan to the United States which, if it had been intercepted, could have helped prevented the terrorist attacks.

They added: "If such calls were known about and not intercepted, serious additional concerns would be raised about the government's failure to take appropriate action before 9/11."

Here's Mukasey's quote under scrutiny, as reported by the New York Sun:

Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody picks up the phone in Iraq and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went."

Mukasey made the claim while calling on Congress swiftly renew an amendment to the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act (FISA) that had allowed for expanded surveillance activities.

House Democrats have bucked the Bush administration's request, passing their own FISA update last month that does not include retroactive legal immunity for telecom companies that participated in the government's domestic warrantless wiretapping program. President Bush has said he would veto any FISA bill that lacks immunity for the companies.

Read the Democrats' letter to Mukasey here (.pdf).