A2 Politics & The Nation
Guantanamo detainee Ibrahim al-Qosi’s plea deal kept secret.....A4 For BP, a $3 billion start as end is in sight ......................................A6 National Digest W.Va. mine monitors were not tampered with............................A3
The World
Pakistan pushing for quick infusion of U.S. flood aid ....................A6 Landslide victory for Kagame is predicted in Rwanda election....A7 Foreign Digest North Korea fires artillery rounds in response to Seoul ............A7
Economy & Business
Fed will meet amid slowed growth.................................................A10 Business Digest Honda to recall nearly 400,000 vehicles....................................A10 Market Summary..............................................................................A14
WASHINGTON BUSINESS Freddie’s loss narrows, but firm needs more aid...........................A14
Opinion Editorial: Remedying the chaos at Arlington................................A16 Editorial: Virginia’s bad call on education standards. .................A16 Eugene Robinson: The oil spill’s point man on lessons learned...A17 Greg Sargent: GOP’s credibility gap on deficits. ............................A17
on
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This advice was offered more than 100 years ago by a British friend of Teddy Roosevelt’s. The nation has matured since then, and so has the presidency. Now the president is about 12. While President Obama’s wife and younger daughter were conducting international relations in Majorca on Sunday with Spain’s King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia, the commander in chief was at home hosting a fantasy camp for himself. He and his buddies had a birthday weekend barbecue and basketball game with LeBron James, Alonzo Mourning, Magic Johnson and other legends of the sport. The day before, it was a four-hour golf outing for Obama and the boys. On Monday, he hosted the Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints at the White House and talked about his own exploits on the gridiron last year with Saints quarterback Drew Brees. “He tossed me a nice tight spiral that I then lateraled to a kid on [Dallas Cowboys linebacker] DeMarcus Ware’s shoulders,” the president recalled. “I also want to point out I beat [Pittsburgh Steelers safety] Troy Polamalu over the middle on that throw.” Obama turned to Brees. “You remember?” Boys will be boys — even if
“Y
they’re presidents. It’s a good thing Michelle Obama is back from her foreign trip. Otherwise Obama might have already invited the networks to film him playing H-O-R-S-E on the White House basketball court. Oh, wait: He already did that, in the spring, when basketball star and CBS Sports announcer Clark Kellogg shot some televised hoops with him.
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According to unofficial presidential statistician Mark Knoller of CBS News, Obama has left the White House to play basketball 16 times so far, in addition to the countless times he has played on his home court. He’s shot 44 rounds of golf, gone fishing and played tennis. Total sporting-related events hosted at the White House: 45. That’s about six times the number of
S
KLMNO
ou must always remember that the president is about 6.”
DANA MILBANK Washington Sketch
news conferences he has held. He’s been to see the Nationals
twice this year, the last time in June with Malia and Sasha to see the Nats play Obama’s White Sox. Last week, he took Sasha to see the Washington Mystics of the WNBA at Verizon Center. Obama’s foes have mocked him for playing golf more often than his sports-mad predecessor, who played only 24 rounds during his entire eight-year presidency. “Obama skips Polish funeral, heads to golf course,” was one Washington Times headline. Liberals who once mocked George W. Bush’s “watch this drive” moment on the golf course now speak of the need for Obama to clear his head. Whatever the merits of head clearing (or in Bush’s case, brush clearing), Obama’s bachelor birthday weekend at the White House set some sort of new
standard for presidential game playing: the golf at Andrews with his buddies, then basketball Sunday with pros (and former pros) such as Grant Hill and Bill Russell (and Kobe Bryant watching from the sideline), and finally, first thing Monday morning, the adoration of the Saints.
About 100 players and others were led into the East Room of the White House for a dress rehearsal of their meeting with Obama. “You’re going to take the position you’re in now, then we’ll call out the president,” a young White House aide commanded the beefy men, who were taking pictures of each other with iPhones. The players stood on
heavy-duty metal risers that were bent from the weight of the many athletes who had stood there before them. Behind the players, an oil painting of George Washington made it appear that the first president was introducing the Saints with his outstretched right arm. The 44th president was considerably more animated when he arrived for the event, preceded by jazz music and cheers of “Who dat?” He eschewed his usual teleprompter — no need for a crutch when
TUESDAY, AUGUST 10, 2010 The jock in chief, getting his fill of sports?
talking sports — and frequently looked up from the text on the lectern to ad-lib.
“I must point out, [head coach] Sean [Payton] is a Chicago guy. I’m just sayin’, ” Obama teased. “You’ve got to be tough to be a Chicago guy. I make some tough decisions every day, but I never decided on an onside kick in the second half of the Super Bowl. That took some guts.” He turned to the team owner. “Were you okay with that?”
Obama made clear where his loyalties remain, as he did when he wore his White Sox cap to throw out the first pitch for the Nationals. “Look, I’m a Bears fan — I’m not going to lie,” he told the Saints. Still, he accepted the New Orleans jersey with number 44 on it. “Wear it in Chicago!”
somebody in the audience called out.
“Don’t press it,” Obama shot back. “I like you all, but don’t press it.” The Super Bowl champs then
watched Obama fly off in his helicopter, which would take him to his waiting 747. For a 12-year-old president, it doesn’t get any better than this.
milbankd@washpost.com
SAUL LOEB/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES President Obama is a Bears fan, but he wasn’t about to turn down the Saints jersey Drew Brees gave him. ‘John Doe’ reveals concerns with FBI letters
With gag order eased, man says data requests looked unconstitutional
by Ellen Nakashima
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For six years, Nicholas Merrill has lived in a surreal world of half-truths, in which he could not tell even his fiancee, his closest friends or his mother that he is “John Doe” — the man who filed the first-ever court challenge to the FBI’s ability to obtain person- al data on Americans without ju- dicial approval. Friends would mention the case when it was in the news and the normally outspoken Merrill would change the subject. He would turn up at the feder-
al courthouse to hear the argu- ments, and in an out-of-body mo- ment he would realize that no one knew he was the plaintiff challenging the FBI’s authority to issue “national security letters,” as they are known, and its ability to impose a gag on the recipient. Now, following the partial lift- ing of his gag order 11 days ago as a result of an FBI settlement, Merrill can speak openly for the first time about the experience, although he cannot disclose the full scope of the data demanded. “To be honest, I’m having a hard time adjusting,” said Mer- rill, 37, a Manhattan native. “I’ve spent so much time never talking about it. It’s a weird feeling.” Civil liberties advocates hope
that Merrill’s case will inspire others who have received the FBI’s letters and have concerns to come forward. They also hope it
will inform the public debate on the proper scope of the govern- ment’s ability to demand private data on Americans from Internet and other companies for coun- terterrorism and intelligence in- vestigations.
“One of the most dangerous and troubling things about the FBI’s national security letter powers is how much it has been shrouded in secrecy,” said Melis- sa Goodman, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union who helped Merrill sue the gov- ernment in April 2004 and was one of a handful of people out- side the FBI — all lawyers — who knew he had received a letter. The government has long ar- gued, as it did in this case, that “secrecy is often essential to the successful conduct of counterter- rorism and counterintelligence investigations” and that public disclosure of the receipt of a let- ter “may pose serious risks to the investigation itself and to other national security interests.” FBI spokesman Mike Kortan said, “The FBI needs the ability to pro- tect investigations, sources and methods.” The recent request by the Oba- ma administration to amend the law governing the letters has prompted debate in Congress over which types of electronic records should require a judge’s permission before the FBI can seek them, and which types should not, as is the case with na- tional security letters. A letter may be issued by FBI field office supervisors if they think the data will be relevant to a terrorism probe. The FBI between 2003 and 2006 issued more than 192,500
letters, an average of almost 50,000 a year. The Justice De- partment inspector general fault- ed the bureau in 2007 for not ad- equately justifying the issuance of such letters, though progress has been made in cleaning up the process.
On a cold February day in 2004, an FBI agent pulled an en- velope out of his trench coat and handed it to Merrill, who ran an Internet startup called Calyx in New York. At the time, like most Americans, he had no idea what a national security letter was. The letter requested that Mer- rill provide 16 categories of “elec- tronic communication transac- tional records,” including e-mail address, account number and billing information. Most of the other categories remain redacted by the FBI. Two things, he said, “just leaped out at me.” The first was the letter’s prohibition against disclosure. The second was the absence of a judge’s signature. “It seemed to be acting like a search warrant, but it wasn’t a search warrant signed by a judge,” said Merrill. He said it seemed to him to violate the con- stitutional ban against unreason- able searches and seizures. The letter said the information was sought for an investigation against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activ- ities. Merrill said he thought it “outlandish” that any of his cli- ents, many of whom were ad agencies and major companies as well as human-rights and other nonprofit groups, would be in- vestigated for terrorism or espio- nage.
Although Merrill cannot fur-
ther discuss the types of data sought, he said, “I wouldn’t want the FBI to demand stuff like that about me without a warrant.” The information an Internet company maintains on custom- ers “can paint a really vivid pic- ture of many private aspects of their life,” he said, including whom they socialize with, what they read or write online and which Web sites they have vis- ited. Goodman said Merrill’s letter
“sought the name associated with a particular e-mail address” and other data that, in a criminal case, likely would require a court order. Merrill confided in his lawyer, who suggested they turn to the ACLU. The civil liberties group decided to file a case, Doe v. Ash- croft, referring to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft. The case yielded two signifi- cant rulings. The first was a Sep- tember 2004 district court deci- sion that the national security letter statute was unconstitution- al, which prompted Congress to amend the law to allow a recipi- ent to challenge the demand for records and the gag order. The second was a December 2008 appeals court decision that held that parts of the amended gag provisions violated the First Amendment and that, to avoid this, the FBI must prove to a court that disclosure would harm national security in cases where the recipient resists the gag or- der. Senior administration offi- cials have said the FBI has adopt- ed that ruling as policy. The FBI withdrew its letter to
Merrill in November 2006.
nakashimae@washpost.com
JetBlue attendant exits via emergency slide
Man fled plane at JFK after argument with passenger, officials say
Associated Press
www.gwu.edu/gradapply 35502
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new york — A JetBlue flight attendant got into an argument with a passenger on a jetliner ar- riving at John F. Kennedy Inter- national Airport on Monday, cursed the passenger, grabbed a beer from the galley and then de- ployed an emergency exit slide
and fled the plane, authorities said.
Flight attendant Steven Slater was arrested at his home in the nearby Belle Harbor section of Queens by Port Authority of New York and New Jersey police on charges of criminal mischief, reckless endangerment and tres- passing. Slater, 39, remained in custody
Monday night. His attorney’s name wasn’t available, and there was no home telephone number listed for him. A woman who an- swered a phone at a previous res- idence listed for Slater in Thou-
sand Oaks, Calif., identified her- self as his mother but said she wasn’t speaking to the media. JetBlue Airways said in a
statement that it was working with the Federal Aviation Ad- ministration and Port Authority police to investigate the matter. It said the safety of its customers and crew members was never at risk.
Slater was working on JetBlue Flight 1052 from Pittsburgh when he got into an argument with a passenger who was pull- ing down baggage from an over- head bin, the Port Authority said.
The luggage apparently struck the attendant in the head, and he asked for an apology, but the pas- senger refused, the agency said. As the plane was landing, Slat-
er got on the public-address sys- tem and cursed at the passenger, the Port Authority said. Slater then grabbed at least one beer, activated the slide, slid down and went to his car, the agency said. Port Authority police were no-
tified about 25 minutes later. JetBlue would not say how long Slater had been employed by the company.
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