(January 17, 2006 -- 10:42 AM EST // link)
Talkingpointsmemo.com
I was finally able to give a close read to the Al Gore's speech from yesterday. And I wanted to add my voice to all of those around the web who've been praising what the former vice president said. When I think about the Gore now, in the period since he left elected office, what stands out most about him is the way that he has become a standing rebuke to the shame and moral indolence of today's custodians of received opinion. You can see it in the sneering and bemused responses his speeches receive from the usual cast of characters.
These really aren't normal political times we're living in. And I think Gore is right to say that we're in the midst of a constitutional crisis, even though too few people are taking notice of it. Our constitution becomes the proverbial falling tree.
The point Gore makes in his speech that I think is most key is the connection between authoritarianism, official secrecy and incompetence.
The president's critics are always accusing him of law-breaking or unconstitutional acts and then also berating the incompetence of his governance. And it's often treated as, well ... he's power-hungry and incompetent to boot! Imagine that! The point though is that they are directly connected. Authoritarianism and secrecy breed incompetence; the two feed on each other. It's a vicious cycle. Governments with authoritarian tendencies point to what is in fact their own incompetence as the rationale for giving them yet more power. Katrina was a good example of this.
The basic structure of our Republic really is in danger from a president who militantly insists that he is above the law.
-- Josh Marshall
On April 20, 2004, President Bush said, "Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."
To halt the movie choose choosethistostopmove.flv in the dropdown menu below or right click on the movie itself and opt for 'stop movie'. Choose dropdown menu for short clips and other footage used to make this clip.
This administration has shown itself to be willing to trample on the civil liberties of everyone, whether American or not, in its sophomoric pursuit of terrorists however defined. Mr. Risen, a former and fully credible member of the American intelligence community and now a respected writer and analyst of America's global intelligence policies, should not be besmirched with partisan attacks. Rather, he should be read, evaluated, considered for what he posits and then accepted or rejected for the quality of the contribution he makes, and not before. Cool heads will value this work.
There is also a significant limit imposed on the ability to monitor voice communications, resulting from the failure of extensive U.S. efforts to produce "word spotting" software that would allow computer transcription of intercepted conversations. Maybe not anymore....
"When the House Select Committee on Intelligence started asking questions about the legality of Echelon activities (since US law severely limits the ability of the intelligence agencies to engage in domestic surveillance), the NSA invoked the attorney-client privilege and refused to disclose the legal standards by which Echelon might have conducted its activities."
In 2001, the CIA's Office of Advanced Information Technology began developing a number of data-mining enhancements to make eavesdropping on electronic communications easier. One program, called Oasis, automatically converts audio signals into conveniently readable, and searchable, text (distinguishing the speakers).
It seems Cheney forgot that in 1995 the Republicans rejected Clintons proposed expansion on the FBI's wiretap authority in order to combat terrorism. The same year the OKC bombing happened....then in 1996 when Clinton asked for more counterterrorism funding...THE REPUBLICANS REJECTED HIM.
Mr. Madsen is a Senior Fellow of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a non-partisan privacy public advocacy group in Washington, DC. He works with member of Congress and congressional committees on legislation and hearings of common interest.
He is also a freelance investigative journalist, and has written for The Village Voice, The Progressive, CAQ, Counterpunch, and the Intelligence Newsletter. Mr. Madsen is the author of The Handbook of Personal Data Protection (London: Macmillan, 1992), an acclaimed reference book on international data protection law.
Mr. Madsen has some twenty years experience in computer security and data privacy. As a U.S. Naval Officer he managed one of the first computer security programs for the U.S. Navy. He subsequently worked for the National Security Agency, the Naval Data Automation Command, Department of State, RCA Corporation, and Computer Sciences Corporation.
...These men planned for suspension of the Constitution, not just after nuclear attack, but for any "national security emergency," which they defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as: "Any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States." Clearly 9/11 would meet this definition.
The above written by Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He was born in Montreal in 1929, the only son of the poet F.R. Scott and the painter Marian Scott.
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I would think one reason that is possible is that perhaps a system already existed that you could do this with, and all you had to do is change the venue. And if that's the case, and this system was a broad brush system, a vacuum cleaner that just sucks things up, this huge systematic approach to monitoring these calls, processing them, and filtering them--then ultimately a machine does 98.8 percent of your work.
A huge, computerized "vacuum cleaner" system that already existed, but that needed its "venue" changed for domestic surveillance, huh? That sounds a hell of a lot like the Echelon program to me. It seems like it would've been very tempting—and, I imagine, relatively easy—to just turn a system developed for mass analysis of foreign communications inward.
Tice: I've thought about this for a while, and as I said, I can't tell you how things are done, but I can foresee it, especially with what we've seen now. We're finding out that NSA conducted surveillance on U.S. citizens. And FISA could have been used but wasn't, was sidestepped. No one even made the attempt to see if they had a problem they could have fixed through FISA.
That would lead one to ask the question: "Why did they omit the FISA court?"
I would think one reason that is possible is that perhaps a system already existed that you could do this with, and all you had to do is change the venue. And if that's the case, and this system was a broad brush system, a vacuum cleaner that just sucks things up, this huge systematic approach to monitoring these calls, processing them, and filtering them—then ultimately a machine does 98.8 percent of your work. What you come out with from a haystack is a shoebox full of straw. Once you have that, you have people that can look at it.
Now here's an interesting question: If this approach was used, and hundreds of thousands if not millions of communications were processed in that manner, and then if and when the truth ever came out, a lawyer—and I think lawyers are going to be arguing semantics in this case—the argument could be made, well, if a machine was doing the looking and the sucking in, it doesn't matter because that's not monitoring until a human looks at it.
WHISPERS FROM THE NSA: I've got an interview with NSA whistleblower Russell Tice just up at Reason. He's got to speak in pretty general terms or hypotheticals for most of the conversation, but I did want to flag this bit:
That would lead one to ask the question: "Why did they omit the FISA court?"
Dead Republic Blues: Bush Illegal Wiretapping Scheme Gets Darker and Dirtier (NEW! - OCT. 2007)
by Chris Floyd The latest revelations in the Bush Administration's long-unfolding, ever-growing illegal wiretapping scandal carry with them a multiple string. For not only do they bear upon Bush's vast system of lawless espionage aimed at the American people, but they also underscore the perversion of the Justice Department into an armed enforcer of partisan thuggery and confirm that that the unprecedented authoritarian powers that Bush has seized have nothing to do with their ostensible justification, the 9/11 attacks, but were part of a pre-planned evisceration of the constitutional republic that began in the first days of his ill-gotten presidency.
What's more, the revelations give strong indications that nothing about the domestic spying program will change under a Democratic administration – because the heart of the scheme was in fact created under Bush's predecessor, who bears the same last name as Bush's likely successor.
The new data has emerged from the case of Joseph Nacchio, the former CEO of the telecommunications giant, Qwest. Nacchio was prosecuted by the Justice Department and convicted of insider trading -- after he turned down a request from the National Security Agency to give the Bush Administration unrestricted access to the telephone records of Qwest customers without a warrant. According to recently unsealed filings in Nacchio's appeal of the conviction, the Bush Administration first pressured him to sign up with the warrantless surveillance program in February 2001 -- seven months before the 9/11 attacks that "changed everything" and ushered in a new era of acquiescence to draconian measures.
After this refusal, Nacchio -- who at the time was chairman of the government's National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee, holding top security clearances to work on secret projects -- was cut out of lucrative deals to privatize the NSA's non-secret technology, as the NYT reports. When these blows against Qwest -- which was already suffering from falling share prices -- failed to bring Nacchio to heel, the Justice Department then launched its insider trading case against him, pointing to stock sales he had made back in 2001 before a poor financial report.
Nacchio's defense was that the stock sale was a portfolio diversification that had nothing to do with the company's performance -- precisely because he believed government assurances at the time that Qwest would indeed be part of the NSA privatization. Thus he was anticipating a rise in share prices that year, not a fall, and so his sale was not a dump job before bad financial news reached the public. (The kind of thing that once got George W. Bush into hot water -- until he was cleared by his father's Securities and Exchange Commission, whose chief was a longtime Bush family retainer and whose general counsel became Dubya's own lawyer two years later.)
However, at his trial Nacchio was forbidden from bringing up these dealings with the NSA in his defense by the judge, Edward Nottingham -- a longtime political partisan appointed to the bench by Bush's father, as Scott Horton notes. (Nottingham, by the way, has been under investigation by the FBI for possible misuse of his federal computer, after rancorous divorce proceedings revealed that he had spent thousands of dollars at a Denver strip club and subscribed to a porn-laden adult dating service that he perused in his judicial chambers. When questioned about the $3,000 he laid out during a single trip to the strip joint, the judge testified that he was too drunk to remember just how he spent the money.)
Let’s put this in sharper focus. Nacchio discovered that the NSA was engaged in a project to gather warrantless surveillance data on millions of Americans. He took advice of counsel. His lawyers told him, correctly, that this was illegal. They probably also warned him that if Qwest participated in the program, it would be committing a felony. So Nacchio said, no, sorry, I can’t work with you on this. But I can help if you want to change the law. And the reaction of the NSA? It was, apparently, to cut Qwest out of a series of contract awards by way of retaliation. (If that charge sticks, it would probably be yet another felony.) And the second reaction? To try to build a criminal case against Nacchio as a means of retaliation against him. (And if that charge sticks, it would probably be yet a third felony–on the part of the Government officials who did it). We are seeing the Government engaging in a sweeping pattern of criminal dealings, and ultimately, one of the biggest crimes of all, abusing the criminal justice process to strike out at an individual who refused to play their crooked game. Oh, and by the way: who was heading the NSA when all of this transpired? Michael Hayden, the man who now runs the CIA, and is busily dismantling the CIA Inspector General’s office because it has apparently raised questions about potentially criminal conduct on his watch there, too.
See how neatly it all ties together. Hayden was the NSA honcho who pushed the illegal surveillance on Qwest and other telecoms. (Who, unlike Nacchio, willingly did their "patriotic" duty to break the law -- and for their service gladly pocketed those fat privatization contracts that Qwest was denied.) Now Hayden is even more powerful, and obviously willing to kill the career of anyone who threatens to air the Administration's dirty laundry.
Meanwhile, his boss -- Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence, overseeing 16 organs in the security apparat -- was hip-deep in NSA contracts, including the privatization deals, in his pre-DNI role as senior vice-president at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the many "private security firms" who have made billions in the golden revolving door between hugger-mugger government service and "top secret" private pork.
But aside from the sheer chutzpah of the move, there is really nothing surprising about it. Not only are Democrats deeply in thrall to telecom money and thus eager to please their paymasters; they've already effectively immunized George W. Bush and his minions for their perpetration of the illegal wiretapping – a crime which the Administration has openly, even proudly embraced. The ex post facto exoneration of the telecoms is part of a larger renewal of one of the most shameless pieces of legislative hackery passed by the new Congress (and that's saying something): the retroactive authorization of Bush's warrantless surveillance program. To be sure, the upcoming renewal of these tyrannical powers will be hedged in with a few toothless "safeguards" – but is there anyone (outside the Washington Post editorial board) who is stupid enough to believe that the Bush Administration will feel bound by any restrictions that Congress tries to place on the arbitrary will of the "Unitary Executive"?
Nor is there much hope for any real change should a Democrat win the White House in 2008 – especially not the current front-runner, whose nomination seems all-but-certain now. For there was one nugget in the Nacchio papers that has not received much attention. As Wired magazine reports, his appeal quoted from a lawsuit filed against the telecom Verizon for turning over its call records to the NSA. The suit alleged:
…that AT&T began building a spying facility for the NSA just days after President Bush was inaugurated….The project was described in the ATT sales division documents as calling for the construction of a facility to store and retain data gathered by the NSA from its domestic and foreign intelligence operations but was to be in actuality a duplicate ATT Network Operations Center for the use and possession of the NSA that would give the NSA direct, unlimited, unrestricted and unfettered access to all call information and internet and digital traffic on ATT's long distance network…
The NSA program was initially conceived at least one year prior to 2001 but had been called off; it was reinstated within 11 days of the entry into office of defendant George W. Bush.
Read that last paragraph again: the NSA program to gain "direct, unlimited, unrestricted and unfettered access to all call information and internet and digital traffic" was conceived and pushed "at least one year prior to 2001" – by the Clinton Administration. If this is what the Clintons wanted to do in 1999 or 2000, why wouldn't they want to do it in 2009 – especially when it's already been done for them, by Bush, and approved by Congress?
The illegal spying scandal broke into the open almost two years ago. It was clear then that it was a make-or-break issue, a last chance for the American republic. As I wrote at the time: "Now the choice for the American Establishment is clear, and inescapable: do you hold for the Republic, or for autocracy?"
Two years later, the answer is equally clear. As with every other criminal racket perpetrated by the Bush Administration – from the monstrous war of aggression in Iraq to the adoption of torture as an official instrument of national policy to the practice of state murder in "targeted assassinations" to the lawless capture and indefinite detention of American citizens without charge and on and on – the Establishment has held for autocracy. They would rather be the well-paid slaves of a two-bit tyrant than honest citizens of a genuine republic. As long as they can keep their choice spot at the trough, they will gulp down the foulest swill that Bush, or his autocratic successor, can serve.
When I wrote the 2005 piece quoted above, this grim outcome – although very likely – was not yet clear. But I think the conclusion of the piece still stands, albeit with the conditional nature of its first sentence removed.
The next few weeks will show us if there is still some hope of restoring the Republic through the old institutions, or if we will have to follow the course laid out by Bob Dylan some 40 years ago: "Strike another match, go start anew." Who knows? Maybe we can make a better republic next time: one not born of blood, greed and fury -- those all-too-common elements of human organization -- but made from a new compound of mercy, justice, communion and liberty. Still imperfect, of course, still corrupt -- because that's our intractable human nature -- but with our worst instincts restrained by enlightened, ever-evolving law, and the predatory ambitions of the rich and powerful reined by elaborate checks and balances.
Note: Last year, my colleague Rich Kastelein created a website where readers could thank Qwest for refusing to take part in the Bush Administration's illegal surveillance of American citizens. You can find constantly updated news on latest revelations and related matters at the bottom right of this site. Rich also created another website at the time, This is Wiretap, where you can find extensive background information on the entire affair, including news, analysis and video.
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Back in 2004, George W. Bush was caught on camera explaining very carefully that the government always requires a court order when "chasing down terrorists." Trying to sell the Patriot Act - which he wanted renewed but which was coming under increasing fire from all sides of the political spectrum - Bush was very clear that "a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way." By that, he meant that neither the Patriot Act nor its ostensible cause - the 9/11 terrorist attacks - changed the absolute legal requirement for the government to get a court order before ordering wiretaps against suspected terrorists.
(One interesting side note: Bush continually refers to ordering wiretaps against "terrorists" - not suspects. This is highly revealing of his mindset: anyone who is suspected of being a terrorist automatically IS a terrorist. This mindset has permeated the entire military and security apparatus: that's why countless innocent people have been jailed and tortured around the world: because all suspects are regarded as guilty - no matter how shaky or specious or non-existent the basis of their capture.)
But this week, Bush has outed himself as a liar. He has admitted - even boasted - of his secret spy program that operated without any warrants or any recourse to judicial oversight whatsoever - not even the FISA program which could have given him the broadest possible scope to order wiretaps and surveillance of suspected terrorists. Last year, before the election, Bush was insisting that wiretaps could be only issued by a court order; now, after the election, he freely admits that this is not the case.
For more than four years now, I've written about Bush's claims of preemptory presidential power, his claim that he has the right to jail, hold, torture and, yes, even kill anyone on earth that he wants to, by his arbitrary will, above any and all laws. When I wrote my first column on this theme, in October 2001, I knew only that these arbitrary powers were being secretly asserted by Bush in various executive orders, which were deliberately leaked to papers like the Washington Post and the NY Times, where they were seen not as naked grabs for dictatorial powers, but as "tough measures" from a "tough leader" willing to "do what it takes" to fight terrorism. It was part of the broader PR offensive at the time which included Dick Cheney's open statement, on national television, that the U.S. would have to "walk on the dark side" in this "new kind of war." What I didn't know then is what has since been revealed: the fact that Bush's legal team, including John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, had erected an entire scaffolding of legal perversion to buttress this "new kind of tyranny," all of it based on the sinister philosophy of the president's "plenary power" - i.e., his right override any and all laws in his capacity as "commander-in-chief." But the fruits of this then-secret legal pretzeling was self-evident in every act of the Administration over the past few years.
Now, it's all tumbling out of the closet; the filth is so mountainous and rank that even the comfortable coddlers of power in the mainstream media are starting to notice. Bush's secret spying on Americans is just the tip of a vast iceberg of sludge, but its emergence could be a tipping point, as its howling illegality is too glaring to be overlooked. This lawlessness may, in the end, be countenanced by the political/media establishment - at which time we can well and truly close up shop on the American Republic and line up to receive our junta uniforms. But for now, we must press the case as hard as we can.
This video gives smoking gun proof that all of Bush's current "justifications" for his spy program are - like the reasons for the Iraq war - outright lies. Here you can see him condemn himself in his own words.
With each passing day, it becomes more evident that the main purpose behind Bush's illegal, warrantless domestic spying program is not collecting intelligence on terrorists and would-be terrorists – a task for which the government's existing draconian powers of surveillance were more than sufficient. As many people have noted, Bush already possessed the legal right to order the immediate surveillance of any person in the country, subject to the sole restraint of having to seek approval from the secret FISA court within 72 hours. Given the established record of this court's near-total acquiescence to thousands of such requests over the years, it is simply impossible to believe that it would not grant its ex post facto approval to any surveillance ordered by Bush which had even the most tenuous connection to a potential terrorist threat.
This undeniable reality leaves us with only one logical conclusion: Bush's secret spy program is designed for activities not covered by FISA's copious security blanket. It is now apparent that these activities include using the vast powers of federal, state and local governments to spy on the Bush Administration's perceived political "enemies" – a vast group, given that the Bushist definition of an "enemy" is anyone who opposes any of their policies. (The Bushists don't have "opponents," in the traditional sense – honorable rivals in the give and take and compromises of ordinary politics ; like all radical extremists, they have only "enemies" who must be "destroyed.")
The Raw Story gives us an excellent, and harrowing, glimpse of this authoritarian Geheime Staatspolizei in action – against those well-known dastardly terrorists, the pacifict Quakers – in this story by Kevin Zeese. It's a detailed account, backed by documents pried out of the National Security Agency itself during litigation.
And by the way, the Nazi allusion is not far-fetched, especially if we refer to the Gestapo in the early years of Hitler's tyranny – the best point of comparison to the still-nascent but growing despotism of the Bush Regime. Consider this brief description from Wikipedia: "The role of the Gestapo was to investigate and combat "all tendencies dangerous to the State." It had the authority to investigate treason, espionage and sabotage cases, and cases of criminal attacks on the Nazi Party and Germany.
"The law had been changed in such a way that the Gestapo's actions were not subject to judicial review. Nazi jurist Dr. Werner Best stated, 'As long as the [Gestapo] ... carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally.'"
That last paragraph sounds chillingly familiar. Actions "not subject to judicial review" – this covers not only Bush's warrantless spying, but also the Regime's whole approach to the captives it seizes in the self-declared, eternal "Terror War." Bush has fought at every step to keep these prisoners outside any judicial review whatsoever – save for the rigged "military tribunals" that he himself has concocted. And of course Dr. Best's "philosophy" is directly echoed by Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo and other acolytes of the "unitary executive" – unbridled, arbitrary power for a "war president," who stands beyond the reach or restraint of any law or treaty, able to order torture, aggressive war, even murder ("extrajudicial killing").
Broad, vague, overexcited historial comparisons ("These Bush guys are exactly like Nazis! It's the Third Reich come again!") are incorrect, unsubstantiated and pointless. The particulars of any given political tyranny cannot be replicated in different historical and cultural situations; as Tolstoy says (in a vastly different context), each unhappy family is unhappy in its own special way. But the lineaments of tyranny – its mental framework, its DNA – are remarkably consistent over time and place and cultures, with the same rhetoric, the same justifications, the same tendency toward eliminationism (see Dave Neiwert for more on this), and many of the same policies – such as spying on domestic enemies, evading judicial review, inflicting torture, waging war, etc. – which are the logical, inevitable outgrowths of authoritarian rule.
The Bushists aren't Nazis; they are themselves, and bad enough for all that. But they are demonstrably infected by the common human disease of tyranny that erupted with such unprecedented virulence in Hitlerite Germany and Stalinist Russia.
Look, these ballyhooed Judiciary hearings into Bush's illegal wiretap program are just a PR clown-show from the word go -- literally. They've just convened to hear torture-enabler and execution-lubricator Alberto Gonzales "testify" on how peachy-keen it is to turn over thousands of names of innocent Americans for the security organs to check out. But lo and behold, the nation's "chief law enforcement officer" is not going to testify under oath, despite the Democrats' insistence that he do so. To be sure, AG-AG nobly expresses his willingness to be sworn in, but Committee Chairman Arlen Specter -- yes, he of the tough talk on the Sunday shows about the "illegality" of the surveillance and his own big-balled boldness to stand up for the Constitution -- then insists that Gonzales will NOT testify under oath -- no way, no how. Therefore, anything and everything that Gonzales says today will be so much rag-chewing blather; it won't mean anything, he can't be held accountable for it.
And the Democrats....accepted this. They didn't do the one thing they could have done to challenge the tyranny of the majority on this absolutely crucial issue of American liberty and constitutional government: stand up and walk out of the hearings in protest. Refuse to take part in a seedy, cynical farce. No, they just settled down to ask their "tough questions" while AG-AG sits back and coolly swats them away, either by regurgitating the standard "war powers-national security-loose lips sink ships" dodge or, even more cleverly, simply agreeing with his critics on the odd point here and there -- such as a judicial review of the program, etc. Why the hell not? Who cares? He can say anything he likes; no one can hold him to it.
That's the way it is. We can report, and discuss, and analyze, and live-blog this stuff until the cows come home and go back out again, and it won't make a bit of difference. You have got to quit looking to these chumps on the Dem side and the egregious, bootlicking toadies on the Republican side to do anything -- anything at all -- to stop the Katrina-like floodtide of authoritarian rule. They aren't going to do anything about it. And soon, they won't be able to do anything about it, even if they tried. We're now living in the P.D.A. -- Post-Democracy America. As Dylan told us 20 years ago: "Democracy don't rule the world/You better get that through your head./This world is ruled by violence;/But I guess that's better left unsaid."
It's certainly left unsaid in Washington, where the "opposition" puts on clownface and jumps into the center ring, waiting to be smeared with pies and sprayed with seltzer by the smirking, murderous ringmaster. But violence is ruling us now more than ever: violence to the Constitution, violence to our liberties, violence -- real, bloodsoaked, gut-shredding violence -- being done in our name all over the world. When the 2006 elections come -- wired, rigged, filled with "stunning upsets" that cement the Bush Faction further in power despite their deep unpopularity -- the game will already be over. And sitting there in a nice panelled room, in well-wadded chairs, asking "tough questions" of a torture-enabler who doesn't even have to pretend to give truthful answers is not the action of people who want to save the Republic from the vast ruin that hangs over us.
So we will blog no more on the hearings from this popsicle stand. We will do what the Democrats are too spineless, clueless and co-opted to do: we will "walk out" and leave the clowns to their stupid, pointless, malevolent gags.
Good story in the NYT today about the pathetic ineffectiveness of Bush's illegal wiretap program in fighting terrorism – the ostensible reason offered for the scheme. But the story completely ignores what has rapidly become the most important aspect of this scandal (aside from its inherent – and impeachable – illegality): the fact that Bush ordered the illegal, warrantless, widespread wiretapping of American citizens MONTHS BEFORE the September 11 attacks, as the ever-intrepid Jason Leopold revealed last week: Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11.
Leopold's bombshell has yet to penetrate the cotton-packed ears of the mainstream media – even though it gives the lie to Bush's only "defense": the threadbare falsehood that Congress' Sept. 14th authorization for him to deal with the Sept. 11 attackers was a blank check "Enabling Act" allowing him to circumvent any law that might conflict with this mandate. As any sentient being knows, this argument is a great big crock of Crawford cowflop – so naturally, we will soon have long, detailed and utterly pointless Senate hearings into the matter, which will doubtless end with a Congressional surrender to the dictator's whim, albeit with a bit of harrumphing and tut-tutting to save face.
But Leopold has the "smoking gun" evidence that Bush's spy program had nothing at all to do with 9/11 – since it began days after Bush took office in January 2001. It also demolishes Dick Cheney's shameless – and shameful – propaganda ploy: claiming that the program "could have prevented the attacks on 9/11" if only it had been in place beforehand. Well, now we know, Dick: it was in place beforehand, and it didn't prevent the attacks on 9/11, did it?
What's more, Leopold reveals that Bush did not tell Congressional leaders about the program when it began: it was carried out, at his express order, without any judicial or legislative oversight whatsoever.
The evidence is irrefutable: Bush ordered and carried out a program of espionage against the citizens of the United States in defiance of the law, the Constitution, and the will of Congress. This is a high crime. This is, in fact, high treason. He should be impeached, indicted and brought to trial.
But you know and I know that this will never happen. The American Establishment – political, financial, journalistic – will, in the end, countenance this high crime, just as they have countenanced the horrific crimes of mass murder and international aggression in Iraq. Bush has called the Establishment's bluff – and whether this was an act of cool cunning by a high-riding tyrant or, as the estimable Steve Gilliard insists, a wild throw of desperation by a weak and stupid man, it doesn't really matter: it becomes more obvious every day that the Establishment has no stomach for a fight. The rot has gone too deep. The institutional elites will not stand up for the Republic; they have betrayed and abandoned it, content to hold on to their own pockets of power and privilege.
We are now a posthumous generation, living in the gutted, burned-out ruins of our ancestors' mansion. This is a new, unprecedented reality: a post-Revolutionary, post-democracy America. We're on our own now, "with no direction home;" we'll have to find some kind of different path, new ways of confronting and reshaping this dark reality. It would be much better, infinitely better, if it were not so; but it is so. "The weight of this sad time we must obey; speak what we feel, not what we ought to say."
Below are some excerpts from Leopold's sterling work:
The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document.
The NSA's vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups.
What had long been understood to be protocol in the event that the NSA spied on average Americans was that the agency would black out the identities of those individuals or immediately destroy the information.
But according to people who worked at the NSA as encryption specialists during this time, that's not what happened. On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law.
James Risen, author of the book State of War and credited with first breaking the story about the NSA's domestic surveillance operations, said President Bush personally authorized a change in the agency's long-standing policies shortly after he was sworn in in 2001.
"The president personally and directly authorized new operations, like the NSA's domestic surveillance program, that almost certainly would never have been approved under normal circumstances and that raised serious legal or political questions," Risen wrote in the book. "Because of the fevered climate created throughout the government by the president and his senior advisers, Bush sent signals of what he wanted done, without explicit presidential orders" and "the most ambitious got the message."
The declassified report says that the "Director of the National Security Agency is obligated by law to keep Congress fully and currently formed of intelligence activities." But that didn't happen.
The nation's electronic intelligence agency warned President Bush in 2001 that monitoring U.S. adversaries would require a "permanent presence" on networks that also carry Americans' messages that are protected from government eavesdropping.
"Make no mistake, NSA can and will perform its missions consistent with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws," the document says. But, it adds, senior leadership must understand that the NSA's mission will demand a "powerful, permanent presence" on global telecommunications networks that host both "'protected' communications of Americans" and the communications of adversaries the agency wants to target.
The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document.
The NSA's vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups.
In its "Transition 2001" report, the NSA said that the ever-changing world of global communication means that "American communication and targeted adversary communication will coexist."
"Make no mistake, NSA can and will perform its missions consistent with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws," the document says.
However, it adds that "senior leadership must understand that the NSA's mission will demand a 'powerful, permanent presence' on global telecommunications networks that host both 'protected' communications of Americans and the communications of adversaries the agency wants to target."
My decision to join the ACLU lawsuit against the National Security Agency was not only difficult, but painful. During a quarter century of writing about NSA, including the only two books on the agency and countless articles, I have developed a great deal of respect and even awe for the people who work there. A number of junior cryptologists I came in contact with when I first began writing The Puzzle Palace in 1979 had become senior officials by the time I finished the sequel, Body of Secrets, in 2001. Some of them had also become friends. During that period, my relationship with NSA had also changed, from being threatened with prosecution, to being honored with a book signing ceremony at the agency.
In The Puzzle Palace I devoted a considerable amount of pages to a long list of illegal and improper activities conducted by the agency during the Watergate period. But in Body of Secrets I went to great lengths to explain how the agency had put that past behind it and was now paying strict attention to the law. I even defended the agency on many occasions, including when invited to Brussels to testify before the European Parliament which was looking into whether NSA was spying on European businesses and passing the intelligence on to American corporations. I expressed my view that they were not. In his book, Chatter, about eavesdropping around the world, Patrick Radden Keefe noted that I have "gone from being the scourge of the NSA to the agency's hagiographer."
But now it appears that the agency has gone full circle, and just as I will defend it when I think it is being wrongly accused, I will just as vigorously come out against it when I believe it has gone over the line.
On June 5, 1970 President Nixon met in the Oval Office with the then director of the NSA, Vice Admiral Noel Gayler, and directed him to begin eavesdropping on Americans. At NSA, Deputy Director Louis Tordella regarded the change as "nothing less than a heaven-sent opportunity for NSA." This was in part because the agency had already begun secretly spying on Americans even before Nixon's order. Following the meeting, an "Eyes Only" memorandum entitled "NSA Contribution to Domestic Intelligence" was then drafted and signed by the president authorizing NSA "to program for coverage the communications of U.S. citizens using international facilities." No warrant or probable cause would be required, the decision on who would be listened to would be made by agency shift supervisors, and anyone's international telephone calls, telegrams, or faxes could be intercepted and distributed. Given the top secret codename "Minaret," among those targeted in the program were large numbers of anti-Vietnam war protesters who were violating no law.
When Operation Minaret was discovered during the mid-1970s, the Justice Department under the Ford administration made the extraordinary decision to launch a secret criminal investigation of the entire agency. Shocked senior officials were given Miranda warnings and investigators came up with 23 possible areas of criminal prosecution. But because of the secrecy of the information involved, and the fact that the law was very vague in this area at the time, they decided against prosecution. Instead, they recommended that the administration and Congress consider enacting laws making such activities illegal and imposing long prison sentences for those who ignore or go around the law.
Because President Nixon attempted to justify his action by citing the then ongoing war in Vietnam, as well as the Soviet nuclear threat of the Cold War, the crafters included a provision that in time of war – including an all-out Congressionally declared war – the NSA is limited to just fifteen days of warrantless eavesdropping. Later, both Republicans and Democrats enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which required the NSA to obtain a warrant from a special court before eavesdropping on Americans on U.S. soil, and included a penalty of five years in prison for every violation. For three decades, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court functioned smoothly and without a single leak, issuing nearly 19,000 warrants and turning down only five. Those few rejections could then be argued de novo before the Foreign Intelligence Court of Review, which has only heard one case in nearly thirty years.
Then in the fall of 2001, NSA director, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden allegedly began ignoring the FISA law. Instead of allowing FISA court judges to decide which Americans should be targeted, as the law required, he secretly gave the responsibility back to agency shift supervisors, as was done during Watergate. And months later, President Bush issued an order approving and continuing the operation, just as President Nixon had done.
What greatly concerns me as someone who has written more about NSA than any other writer is that in the past, when NSA was allowed to operate in absolute secrecy, without oversight, it became a rogue agency. When the agency discovered that another author, David Kahn, was planning to include a chapter about the agency in his book on the history of cryptology, The Codebreakers, they secretly placed his name on their watchlist and began monitoring his communications. According to an investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, they even considered breaking into his New York house to conduct "clandestine service applications." It may never be known how many other authors and journalists were targeted back then. But with the Justice Department only willing to go after The New York Times whistleblower, and not the agency that continues to violate the FISA law, the ACLU lawsuit seems like the only way to find out who's being targeted today.
[James Bamford is the author of The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, both about the National Security Agency. His most recent book is A Pretext For War: 9/11, Iraq and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies.]
Domestic spying, election theft, and illegal war Mike Dunn
So, after years of very lenient FISA oversight of domestic wiretapping, the cabal decided they needed to circumvent FISA. They did this knowing that they always had an option to get retroactive warrants if they had to act quickly. And they knew they were running a risk of a public battle when this was eventually revealed. But it was worth the risk.
To safeguard America? Maybe, but something tells me that the War on Terror has proved a relatively dry well for the neocons. By now, they should be able to defend the Patriot Act and their domestic spying with a long list of successes. They should be able to list the deadly plots thwarted, the evil-doers incarcerated, and the number of American lives saved. Does anyone doubt that if they had such successes, they would be trumpeting them incessantly to beat back the people who challenge them? These people are all about PR and politics. They would not be able to resist shoving their "victories" in our faces.
If they had them. Instead, the best they've really had so far is Jose Padilla, alleged "dirty bomb" guy, who they can't even charge with anything remotely related to a real plot. Also: John Walker Lindh, poster boy for "Study Abroad Gone Bad". Thus I wonder what the real activities were that drove the incessant desire for pushing the legal and Constitutional boundaries of executive power to spy within America, on Americans. I wish I had a bunch of answers that I had unearthed at this point, but hopefully people have thoughts to contribute. These are my questions:
1. Did any surveillance involve people whose "relation" to the 9/11 attackers was that they opposed a possible war on Iraq?
Such targets might include anti-war groups (Communists, anarchists, Catholics, Quakers, ordinary citizens, Democrats), decision-makers opposed to war (members of Congress), or foreign diplomats at the U.N. and elsewhere, especially those of countries whose co-operation or opposition to military action might impact U.S. plans.
2. Did any surveillance involve communications elements in the electoral system used in the 2002 and 2004 elections?
We know that many elements of the election system, including machine software, machine distribution, result collection and tabulation, as well as many other aspects, potentially fall within the grasp of this kind of data-mining. Certainly all of this could be claimed to be a matter of national security. One story of many was how the holes in voting security potentially violated regulations made by the Department of Homeland Security itself. Even disregarding phone calls between major actors on both sides, there are still all the phone-line and wireless transmissions of voting totals.
3. Did any surveillance involve lawyers defending so-called terror suspects, like Padilla, Yasir Hamdi, or Guantanamo detainees?
We know the administration has fought (with a religious fervor) against affording any rights, even those of the Geneva Conventions, to detainees. They've brought charges against lawyers representing detainees. And they may well have thought it was their business to know everything about anyone who sought to afford legal rights to anyone they had deemed an "unlawful combatant".
4. Did any surveillance involve members of the media?
In particular, one might be curious about members of the media whose work on the conduct of the war, or the policies of torture, or the discrepancies riddling our recent elections were considered "adversarial" to the administration. Is it outrageous to think that their domestic spying was involved in Rove's election night setup to monitor precinct-level results? What would he have done with them? In what way could that have been "actionable" info for him, unless warrantless monitoring of "telecommunications" gave him some mode of action unknown to us?
Is it too suspicious to wonder how far they would go? Or is it the job of an informed citizen?
When Russell Tice, former NSA and DIA employee, first spoke to the public in January about the administration's spying on Americans, he received a lot of attention.
He testified to Congress on February 14 yet this received almost no attention despite the fact that he revealed important information. The only traditional media article I could find was from UPI:
Russell D. Tice told the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations he has concerns about a "special access" electronic surveillance program that he characterized as far more wide-ranging than the warrentless wiretapping recently exposed by the New York Times but he is forbidden from discussing the program with Congress.
Tice said he believes it violates the Constitution's protection against unlawful search and seizures but has no way of sharing the information without breaking classification laws. He is not even allowed to tell the congressional intelligence committees - members or their staff - because they lack high enough clearance.
Tice was one of the New York Times sources for its wiretapping story, but he told the committee the information he provided was not secret and could have been provided by an private sector electronic communications professional.
When Tice refers to a "special access" program, he is referring to something with the legal definition of "Special Access Program". It's what Hollywood movies and ordinary people call a "military black op". It's an operation run by the military which is classified and whose funding comes from a budget which is not described to Congress.
I wrote about them in detail back on January 18 of this year. Essentially SAP's have three sub-classifications. One is "acknowledged", a program which has been declassified and revealed to the public (such as the F-117 stealth fighter). A second is "unacknowledged" which is classified but the members of certain Congressional committees are briefed in detail.
The third, most secretive kind of SAP is called "waived". These are so secret that only the "Big 8" or "Gang of 8", the top 4 Senators and Representatives in certain committees are ever briefed on the programs and they are not allowed to share the information with anyone, including other members of their committees.
The administration (and now much of the media) has been calling the domestic wiretapping program as the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP). This is the one which has been in the news, involving wiretapping international phone calls with one end of the call in the United States. I refer to it as Domestic Spying Program One (DSP1). This program was a "waived" SAP.
As I've said before, this is not the only DSP in operation. In fact when I wrote about Tice on January 20, I mentioned that he warned of a completely different DSP. Since he cannot testify about it in public, we'll probably never learn what that is but it's clear that it's another "waived" SAP.
I was very curious about Tice's comment that it could have been a "private sector electronic communications professional" who was an additional source to James Risen for his NYT article which revealed the existance of DSP1. I wanted to see if I could figure out who that might be.
My best guess is that it would be someone at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC). Back in 1999, the NSA took "quiet steps" to outsource its data centers and "other pieces of information technology infrastructure".
It offered a contract for 2 billion dollars to a private company, the winner of which would then be expected to hire up to 2,000 NSA employees, to handle a number of tasks for the NSA. This contract was known as "Operation Groundbreaker". A number of companies competed for this, including AT&T, but in the end it was awarded to CSC. The good folks over at CSC had won a 1998 contract from the NSA called "Project Breakthrough" which concerned handling the operations and maintenance of the NSA's computer systems.
CSC is well known for its data mining operations. It has a contract with the Department of Education to handle its database and yes, do data mining operations. They've also worked on similar projects with private businesses including IBM and some large banks.
Of course there's no way to know exactly what services CSC has been providing for the NSA but considering the company's long-running relationship and its other activities in the private sector, it seems likely that CSC handled some data mining activities for NSA. But Tice wasn't talking about data mining specifically, he was referring to wiretapping the phone calls of American citizens. Is it possible that CSC was involved in that? I can't say.
Other companies with NSA contracts include Certicom, who was tasked with routing secure sensitive but unclassified data within the U.S. government at large. Certicom has certain patents on how to ecrypt data and it looks like the NSA wants to make that all unclassified but secure data in the U.S. uses these standards.
You may also be surprised to learn that the NSA has contracts with both Reuters and the Associated Press and that both of these contracts are classified.
Back in 2002, the NSA awarded a contract to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) for a program called TRAILBLAZER. SAIC actually was the lead company in a team formed from other companies, including CSC, to handle the contract which originally was for 280 million dollars. This was conceived of in 2000 to help the NSA process the "overwhelming" amount of data it was collecting after its computers blacked out. The TRAILBLAZER program went over budget by several hundred million dollars.
From April 19, 2005:
"Although we can't discuss specifics, several Trailblazer technologies and products have been used successfully by the intelligence community, as well as by the Department of Defense since 9/11," spokeswoman Mary Payne told United Press International. "Trailblazer has contributed to this agency's success while the agency has been on a wartime footing."
So it looks like both DSP1 as well as the numerous data mining programs might be partially operated by the private sector through Trailblazer (which the Chicago Tribune describes as a data mining effort) and Groundbreaker. And that puts the SAIC group and CSC squarely in the position of being the private contractors who could've been some of Risen's sources.
If it's difficult to figure out which private contracter might've spilled the beans on DSP1 to James Risen, it's even more difficult to figure out what all the other DSP's currently in effect are. On February 15, the Washington Post described how the National Counterterrorism Center has an internal database of 325,000 names supposedly linked to terrorists and that some of this information is provided by the NSA.
The traditional media and Congressional hearings have been focusing on DSP1 and how it was "authorized" in violation of FISA. I want to remind everyone what Gonzales said during his testimony about DSP1 in front of the Judiciary Committee on February 6:
GONZALES: I'm sorry. Can I make one point about in response to Senator Kohl? I made this point, but I want to make sure the committee understands this in terms of domestic-to-domestic Al Qaida communications.
I said that we're using other authorities. I mean, to the extent we can engage in intercepting Al Qaida domestic-to-domestic calls, even under FISA, if we can do it, we're doing it.
So I don't want the American people to believe that we're doing absolutely nothing about Al Qaida domestic-to-domestic calls.
The president made a determination, "This is where the line's going to be," and so we operate within those boundaries. And so we take advantage of the tools that are out there.
And if FISA isn't always the most efficient way to deal with that, if that's all we have, that's what we use.
In this he seems to be saying that the DSP1 does not refer to domestic-to-domestic phone calls and that the administration has to rely on FISA if that's "all they have". But they may "have" something else entirely.
There is a little-known exception to FISA and intelligence collecting by the NSA if it's done in the guise of a "training exercise" or "training mission". Sometimes tin-foil hat Wayne Madsen (himself a former NSA employee) wrote about this before the DSP1 was publically revealed:
The political surveillance operations directed against current and former U.S. government officials and serving and retired U.S. military officers who opposed the neoconservative game plan was primarily carried out by NSA's super-classified "black ops" organization, the Special Collection Service (SCS)--a joint NSA/CIA "higher-than-Top Secret" joint activity headquartered in Beltsville, Maryland.
Tasking was conducted through NSA's Signals Intelligence Directorate (SID) and authority was granted by Hayden to largely bypass USSID 18 legal restrictions by using off-the-books "training missions" as a cover. Although training mission intercept data collected on U.S. persons is to be destroyed after completion of the mission, intercepts of phone calls made by scores of U.S. government and private persons found their way into the hands of Bolton, Cheney, and other neoconservative elements within the Bush administration.
What Madsen saying about exemptions for training missions is true, as I wrote about somewhat here. U.S. intelligence rely on three guidelines (explained in more depth here) for electronic surveillance: Executive Order 12333, FISA and DoD 5240.1-R. According to EO 12333, section 2.4:
Agencies within the Intelligence Community shall use the least intrusive collection techniques feasible within the United States or directed against United States persons abroad. Agencies are not authorized to use such techniques as electronic surveillance, unconsented physical search, mail surveillance, physical surveillance, or monitoring devices unless they are in accordance with procedures established by the head of the agency concerned and approved by the Attorney General. Such procedures shall protect constitutional and other legal rights and limit use of such information to lawful governmental purposes. These procedures shall not authorize:
(a) The CIA to engage in electronic surveillance within the United States except for the purpose of training, testing, or conducting countermeasures to hostile electronic surveillance;
So there's one exploitable loophole right there. The NSA is a division of the DoD so they also must abide by DoD 5240-1r. Here are some quotes:
C5.6.2.2.1. Except as permitted by paragraph C5.6.2.2.2. and C5.6.2.2.3., below, the use of electronic communications and surveillance equipment for training purposes is permitted, subject to the following limitations:
C5.6.2.2.1.1. To the maximum extent practical, use of such equipment for training purposes shall be directed against communications that are subject to lawful electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes under Parts 1, 2, and 3 of this procedure.
C5.6.2.2.1.2. The contents of private communications of non-consenting United States persons may not be acquired aurally unless the person is an authorized target of electronic surveillance.
C5.6.2.3. Retention and Dissemination. Information collected during training that involves communications described in subparagraph C5.6.2.2.1.1., above, shall be retained and disseminated in accordance with minimization procedures applicable to that electronic surveillance.
Information collected during training that does not involve communications described in subparagraph C5.6.2.2.1.1., above, or that is acquired inadvertently, shall be destroyed as soon as practical or upon completion of the training and may not be disseminated for any purpose.
So there you have it. It can be collected as part of a training mission but must not be disseminated. So it can be collected but it's only when it's transmitted that it's breaking the law. Except of course unless it complies with the "minimization procedures" that are "applicable".
That's very key right there because Senator Biden asked Gonzales about the minimization procedures during Gonzales' testimony on February 6:
BIDEN: By definition, you've acknowledged that these minimization -- the very minimization programs that exist under FISA, you're not bound by. You've acknowledged that you're not bound by FISA under this program.
Therefore, are you telling me the minimization programs that exist under FISA, as the way FISA is applied, are adhered to?
GONZALES: OK, I'm sorry if I was confusing in my response.
What I was meaning to say is that there are minimization requirements. Those minimization requirements are basically consistent with the minimization requirements that exist with respect to FISA if FISA were to apply.
BIDEN: Would it be in any way compromising the program if you made available to the Intelligence Committee what those minimization procedures that are being followed are?
GONZALES: Well, of course, the minimization procedures themselves, under 12333, and I believe perhaps under the FISA Court, are classified. I also believe they probably have been shared with the Intel Committee.
BIDEN: They have not, to the best of my knowledge. They have not been shared with the Intelligence Committee to the best of my knowledge, unless you're talking about this very small group of the chairman and the ranking member.
GONZALES: Sir, I'm talking about the minimization procedures for 12333 and for FISA.
BIDEN: Let me very precise.
GONZALES: OK.
BIDEN: I have not heard of NSA saying to the Intelligence Committee, "We are binding ourselves as we engage in this activity under the minimization procedures of 12333, as well as other statutes." I'm unaware that that's written down or stated anywhere or been presented to the Intelligence Committee. Can you assure us that has been done?
GONZALES: No, sir, I can't assure you that.
Again they're discussing DSP1 but Gonzales seems to be indicating that new minimization procedures have been authorized, perhaps for DSP1 and perhaps also for other DSP's.
"Minimization procedures" are the guidelines about what can be distributed to whom (for FISA's see here). The NSA has a set of rules and regulations on what information it can collect but the minimization procedures decide WHO can get the information.
As I wrote in my article Reefer Madness at the NSA, General Hayden more or less admitted that these minimization procedures had been modified post 9/11 and that more "raw" data was being given to the administration. Madsen isn't the only one who noticed this:
But after Bush was sworn in as president, the way the NSA normally handled those issues started to change dramatically. Vice President Cheney, as Bob Woodward noted in his book Plan of Attack, was tapped by Bush in the summer of 2001 to be more of a presence at intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA.
"Given Cheney's background on national security going back to the Ford years, his time on the House Intelligence Committee, and as secretary of defense, Bush said at the top of his list of things he wanted Cheney to do was intelligence," Woodward wrote in his book about the buildup to the Iraq war. "In the first months of the new administration, Cheney made the rounds of the intelligence agencies - the CIA, the National Security Agency, which intercepted communications, and the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. "
It was then that the NSA started receiving numerous requests from Cheney and other officials in the state and defense departments to reveal the identities of the Americans blacked out or deleted from intelligence reports so administration officials could better understand the context of the intelligence.
That right there shows that the minimization procedures have been modified. I'm not sure if any members of Congress are even aware of what those new ones are.
With new minimization procedures in place, this means that the government can do an "end run" around FISA restrictions by using the "training" exemption or that anything new was authorized by the Attorney General. This basically opens the door to unlimited spying on Americans by the NSA.
With the training exemption also in effect for the CIA, this could mean that there are multiple agencies running multiple DSP's which eventually feed into that NSTC database with 325,000 names in it - many of them matching ordinary, innocent Americans.
Incidentally, FISA-acquired information (obtained via FISC warrant) may only be disseminated by minimization procedures established by the Attorney General, with EO 12333 providing "additional instances" where dissemination of that information is permitted. In plainer English, this means that NSA "raw" data can now be fed into the Hydra-like series of government databases which I've written about before, including ADVISE, JPEN, CORNERSTONE, TOPSAIL, SECURE FLIGHT and the SIMAS (State Department) which is then used by various agencies/groups like CIFA and Able Danger.
In summary, after 9/11, the government (specifically the Attorney General) modified the "minimization procedures" in effect for intelligence agencies, with the net result that a LOT of data that had been previously collected but destroyed could now be disseminated to a wide variety of government agencies, which then took that data and conducted surveillance against anti-war groups, Quakers, vegans and also added thousands of names of Americans to their databases and that information was "processed" using data mining techniques supposedly for the "war on terror" but in reality resulted with almost no actionable intelligence.
The minimization procedures themselves are classified, as is the data stored in the various databases, as is the nature and scope of those databases, and not even Congress seemingly has the "security clearance" to be informed about these programs by whistleblowers like Russell Tice.
"O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is!
O brave new world,
That has such people in it!"
You may recall that a few weeks ago I introduced a resolution of inquiry to obtain Justice Department documents about the President's domestic spying program.
Many of you are no doubt familiar with the procedure for resolutions of inquiry; however, for those who are not, a brief explanation. A resolution of inquiry requests information or documents from the Executive Branch. The Committee to which it is referred must vote on it within a specified period of time or the full House must consider it.
As a practical matter, if the Republicans want to dodge an issue, they refer the bill to Committee and then "adversely report" it, which kills it, stopping the request for documents and protecting every non-Committee Republican from having to vote on it.
Today, the House Judiciary Committee considered my resolution of inquiry on the domestic spying program. The Resolution was rejected 16 to 21, with all Democrats and one Republican (Congressman Hostetler) voting for it.
A few quick impressions: first, I was surprised at how half hearted the Republican defense of the program was. I would even go further -- while some offered a full throated defense of the program, many of my Republican colleagues seemed almost sheepish about it, and many did not speak about it at all.
Second, Republicans repeatedly asserted that the documents were not needed because Judiciary Chairman Sensenbrenner has unilaterally submitted 51 questions (pdf) to the Attorney General, and that the Attorney General would testify at a general oversight hearing at some undetermined point in the future. I and the other Democratic Members responded that this was wholly inadequate, and that to fulfill their constitutional oversight role the Committee needed to obtain documents from the Administration and hold separate hearings on the NSA issue.
More to the point, while some news outlets touted the Chairman's letter, his questions are, in my view, inadequate. A close reading of them reveals that the first 38 questions essentially ask the Department whether they think the program is legal. They have already given us their answer on that. The remaining questions are so general, that they can be answered by a google search of what is already in the press.
A few are such softballs it is hard to take them seriously. Take number 18, for example -- "Do you agree that it is debatable as to whether the United States homeland is still a target of al Qaeda?" Wonder what the Justice Department will answer. That sounds like the Fox News question of the day.
My third impression is a very positive one: every single Democrat present spoke passionately and eloquently about the legitimate questions surrounding this program and the desperate need for Congressional oversight of it.
To me, this is one of the most serious problems with one-party, Republican rule: there is no check and balance of Executive Branch wrongdoing. The refusal to assert basic prerogatives to obtain documents and engage in oversight is dangerous and disheartening. We are not giving up -- we, meaning every House Judiciary Democrat, have sent our own questions to the Chairman and asked for a series of hearings on this issue.
Some Republicans are breaking ranks, however, particularly those in competitive districts. They know what many may learn the hard way in November -- the American people expect the Congress to be a check and balance, not to give the President a blank check.
If you are interested in watching the debate (and I highly recommend it) go here.
My prepared statement follows:
STATEMENT OF CONGRESSMAN JOHN CONYERS, JR.
House Judiciary Committee Markup of House Resolution 643
February 15, 2006
I urge my colleagues to support my resolution of inquiry, which has been cosponsored by 44 individuals, including every single Democrat on this Committee,
First, let me make clear what materials this Resolution is requesting. It simply asks the Attorney General to submit all documents in his possession relating to warrantless electronic surveillance of telephone conversations and electronic communications of persons in the United States conducted by the National Security Agency, subject to necessary redactions or requirements for handling classified documents. This request would include any and all opinions regarding warrantless electronic surveillance of telephone conversations and electronic communications of persons in the United States, as well as other records which would allow us to better understand the size, scope, and nature of the program.
Second, I want to explain why we are asking for this information. We are not asking for this information in a conclusory fashion. We are not saying that the President broke the law or has acted contrary to the Constitution. In fact, this resolution may well produce documents that rebut those allegations. What is clear is that, assuming what has been reported is true, many Constitutional and legal experts - Republicans and Democrats - have indicated that this secret domestic surveillance program raises substantial questions about whether the program is legal and whether it is constitutional.
These include the Nation's most preeminent legal and intelligence authorities: (1) Harvard Professor Laurence Tribe; (2) 14 of the nations preeminent legal scholars, including William S. Sessions, the former Director of the FBI under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and William W. Van Alstyne, a Law Professor at William and Mary who was a witness called by this Committee's Republican Members during the impeachment of President Clinton; (3) Bruce Fein, a former Deputy Associate Attorney General in the Reagan Administration, (4) Jonathan Turley, a Constitutional scholar and another witness called by the Republicans on this Committee during the Clinton impeachment, and (5) the non-partisan Congressional Research Service.
The question before us is not whether you agree or disagree with these individuals, but whether you think their judgments are sufficiently serious to warrant further inquiry by this Committee. I would also add that the Justice Department, when it briefed staff on Monday, indicated that some of the legal questions involved here are close calls.
Third, if you agree that this warrants further inquiry, the question is what kind of action this Committee should take?
I commend the Chairman for sending a letter to the Attorney General asking questions about this program. Many of us have questions of our own and I hope the Chairman will forward them to the Attorney General and ask that they be answered with the same speed.
Questions alone - which can be ignored or danced around - are not sufficient. This Committee has always taken the common sense approach that the best way to find out what people were thinking at the time they made decisions, is to get the documents they wrote at that time reflecting those thoughts. In fact, on a number of matters - including biometric passports, judicial sentencing practices, the Civil Rights Commission, and Legal Service Commission - the Chairman's first step has been to obtain and preserve relevant documents.
The Washington Post has written, that the Executive Branch treats Congress "as an annoying impediment to the real work of government. It provides information to Congress grudgingly, if at all. It handles letters from lawmakers like junk mail, routinely tossing them aside without responding."
It is time that Congress begins to serve as a genuine check and balance on the Administration. This is not a partisan issue, to me it's a constitutional issue, and I urge my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to help us, before it's too late.
The King's henchman have sounded the death knell for Presidential accountability. Just a few weeks ago, Republicans from Specter to Hagel to Snowe were calling for a congressional inquiry into the domestic spying program. On the eve of a Senate Intelligence Committee vote to determine whether such an inquiry should take place, the Washington Post reports that a "full court press" by the administration has swayed many Republicans against such an investigation:
Two committee Democrats said the panel -- made up of eight Republicans and seven Democrats -- was clearly leaning in favor of the motion last week but now is closely divided and possibly inclined against it.
[...]
Lawmakers cite senators such as Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) to illustrate the administration's success in cooling congressional zeal for an investigation. On Dec. 20, she was among two Republicans and two Democrats who signed a letter expressing "our profound concern about recent revelations that the United States Government may have engaged in domestic electronic surveillance without appropriate legal authority." [...]
In an interview yesterday, Snowe said, "I'm not sure it's going to be essential or necessary" to conduct an inquiry "if we can address the legislative standpoint" that would provide oversight of the surveillance program. "We're learning a lot and we're going to learn more," she said.
Republican Senate DeWine says he will introduce a bill sanctioning the program, explicitly exempting it from the requirements of FISA. Both Hagel and Snowe are said to be in favor of the bill. So suddenly, Republicans are comfortable with the President breaking the law? Where was the bill in the 90s condoning Oval Office blow jobs and Presidential perjury? Oh, that's right. The lawlessness of a President is exempted only when that President wears a 10-gallon hat and calls himself a "conservative."
Good lord, our Founding Fathers must be shaking their heads in shame at the mindfuck that is about to occur in Congress. A legislative body, which is constitutionally tasked with oversight and the solemn duty of ensuring that the Presidency acts within the law, is now prepared to gleefully greenlight its blatantly criminal actions? Is this a democratic Congress or the King's Court? What controls the fate of this country, the Constitution or Karl Rove's blacklist?
As with any scandal, its lawlessness is judged by the proportionality of the administration's response:
Sources close to [Democratic Senator] Rockefeller say he is frustrated by what he sees as heavy-handed White House efforts to dissuade Republicans from supporting his measure. They noted that Cheney conducted a Republicans-only meeting on intelligence matters in the Capitol yesterday.
How kind of Cheney to take a break from his Texan target practice long enough to collude with a partisan cabal on how best to absolve this Presidency of its crime. Roberts, Hoekstra, and every other Republican who votes against an investigation is an accomplice in the raping of citizen's rights. Because, as the article explains, Republicans don't want any investigation to be "punitive." It's the same bullshit we dealt with when Phase II was killed, when the August PDB was dismissed as "historical," and when the Katrina hearings weren't meant to place blame but to "fix" problems. Congressional "oversight" in this Republican Congress doesn't include hindsight, only foresight--only forward-looking tunnel vision with a singular purpose: covering up for the most corrupt administration in history.
Look at your party, Republicans. Look at your civil servants, all you logic-minded conservatives out there. Look at your legislative bimbos, your lemmings in Congress. Look at how they serve only the interests of an Executive drunk with power. Your representatives are about to give the ok to the President unilaterally erasing the 4th Amendment from the Bill of Rights. Your so-called "conservatives" don't dare conserve jack, not the separation of powers, not any sense of fairness, and certainly not your rights.
It's party over principle. Party over justice. Party over civil rights. They just keep shredding up that Constitution and feeding it to that goddamn Elephant, because they have to anything and everything to keep that damn Elephant alive and fat and happy, right? Members of Congress, my ass. Every one of them took their oath of office with their fingers crossed behind their back. Every one of them pledged to uphold and defend the Constitution, with a huge asterisk (*) that when the President's ass needs saving, well, that Constitution just has to step out of the way.
If the vote tomorrow fails, and if indeed this Republican Congress passes a law to cover up the President breaking the law, then this becomes a campaign issue in every damn congressional election in every damn county in this country. And as for history...history will never forgive this Republican Congress, who too many times has given this Nixonian President a pardon from his crimes.
There are so many developments on the administration's secret spying program today that I've got to give you a long list of links.They call it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" (TSP), while I call it Domestic Spying Program One (DSP1). As I've written before, there are many other DSP's and Gonzales' testimony and the DSP most people are familiar with (phone call with one end int'l and the other end American) is DSP1.
We'll start with the techies over at CNet, who have a great article describing how they think the NSA actually gets access to all those phone calls, emails and other internet traffic.
The red lines are all the fiber optic cables around the world, which is the main method by which telephones and data networks are connected. There are some purely satellite systems, mainly in Africa and remote spots around the world, but just about everything is done via physical cables. Those across the ocean are underwater of course.
You'll note that nearly all of those cables are either connected to the United States directly or else via very strong American allies such as Britain, Australia or Japan. We already know thanks to this excellent article that American telcoms are working hand-in-glove with the NSA, allowing them to tap into those systems in America.
In other news, the White House has come out swinging to defend DSP1. The LA Times reports that Michael Hayden and Abu Gonzales met with the entire House and Senate Intelligence Committees and gave them a full briefing on the nature of the program, behind closed doors:
"This is a very positive development," said Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.), a key member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who had pressed the matter in repeated discussions with White House officials. "Serious questioning, sharing of information and reviewing of this program began this afternoon."
Wilson, a former Air Force officer who served on the National Security Council in the administration of Bush's father, heads the subcommittee that oversees the National Security Agency, which conducted the surveillance.
She said her concerns about the National Security Agency program grew after Monday's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in which she said Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales offered a "weak" legal rationale for the program.
Rep. Jane Harman of Venice, the top Democrat on the House committee, said the briefing lasted more than three hours and was spent mostly in a description of how the program operated. It was given by Gonzales and Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence and a former National Security Agency director.
Neither Wilson nor Harman would discuss details of the program, though Wilson described the briefing as "very forthcoming and very helpful."
"This is a welcome thaw," Harman said. "After Monday's hearing, it became clear that there was strong and serious bipartisan concern, and the drumbeat wasn't going to get softer -- it got louder."
That line about bipartisan drumbeat is key, because it is getting louder. RAW STORY is reporting that Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, James Sensenbrenner sent a letter of 51 questions to Alberto Gonzales on the DSP1:
Combined with a move by the chairman of a House subcommittee on intelligence, and hearings in the Senate, the move may signal that Republicans are not going to swallow the President's justification for the surveillance, and may be a precursor to hearings in the House.
So Wilson was demanding answers, Sensenbrenner is demanding answers. And now a Libertarian group called the Liberty Coalition is calling for hearings:
In an open letter obtained from The Liberty Coalition, to be released publicly tomorrow, the group -- which features such noted true conservatives as former Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) and the Republican Liberty Caucus -- is calling on Congress to hold comprehensive hearings into the warrantless NSA domestic wiretapping program. As well, the group calls on the Dept. of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the matter and stresses the need for Whistleblower protections to allow employees of national security agencies to come forward to testify to Congress about criminal behavior in their respective agencies.
The letter says Bush's program threatens the ability of America to prosecute terrorists due to "tainted evidence obtained in possible violation of federal law." As well, it asks "what limit is there on any future president to secretly re-write our civil and criminal laws at will" if constitutional transgressions, such as those admitted to by the Bush Administration, continue to go unaddressed.
That letter is signed by a number of groups, including EPIC, the National Lawyers Guild and the Republican Liberty Caucus amongst others.
Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, two former Department of Justice employees, David Rivkin Jr. and Lee Casey, were stumping for the administration:
In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, attorneys David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey defended President Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program by repeating the claim that the program monitors only the communications of "Al Qaeda operatives" either out of or into the United States and that its "domestic footprint" was "minimized."
Of course we know that's not even close to true. But it's part of the damage control slash propaganda effort. And today Bush himself is now trumpeting about a foiled terrorist attack:
President Bush said the U.S.-led global war on terror has "weakened and fractured" al Qaeda and allied groups, outlining as proof new details about the multinational cooperation that foiled purported terrorist plans to fly a commercial airplane into the tallest skyscraper on the West Coast.
Bush has referred to the 2002 plot before. In an address last October, he said the United States and its allies had foiled at least 10 serious plots by the al Qaeda terror network in the last four years, including plans for September 11-like attacks on both U.S. coasts. The White House initially would not give details of the plots but later released a fact sheet with a brief, and vague, description of each.
The president filled in details on Thursday.
He said that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks who was captured in 2003, had already begun planning the West Coast operation in October, just after the September 11, 2001, attacks. One of Mohammed's key planners was Hambali, the alleged operations chief of the al Qaeda related terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah. Instead of recruiting Arab hijackers, Hambali found Southeast Asian men who would be less likely to arouse suspicion and who were sent to meet with Osama bin Laden, Bush said.
Under the plot, the hijackers were to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door of a commercial jetliner, take control of the plane and crash it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, since renamed the US Bank Tower, Bush said.
He didn't go right out there and say the NSA helped crack this case, but it sure is implied. After all, what's the point of giving the president royal powers if he's not catching terrorists?
Bush said that "subsequent debriefings" led to the unraveling of this dastardly "plot". Except that we know Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has never been found by the Red Cross in Guantanamo Bay or other declared American prisons. Where he's even being held is completely secret, and you better believe he's been tortured. I wouldn't give two cents for any "intelligence" he might provide. It's also a little too convenient that these guys wanted to A) use shoe bombs and B) fly a plane into another building. It just plays right into the fears people already have and doesn't really do anything new for the terrorists at all.
I'm guessing most of the "intel" on this came from Indonesia, which has a notoriously bad habit of unapologetic use of torture.
I'm not the only one wondering just how effective all of the DSP's are in stopping terrorism. Newsweek's Michael Hirsh has a blistering article on just what the NSA isn't doing:
The legal controversy over the NSA surveillance program has obscured an intelligence issue that is at least as important to the nation's future: sheer competence. Do we have any idea what we're doing? One reason the NSA is listening in on so many domestic conversations fruitlessly--few of the thousands of tips panned out, according to The Washington Post--is that the agency barely has a clue as to who, or what, it is supposed to be monitoring.
As our esteemed senators fret over whether the NSA has violated their outdated 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, they are not paying enough attention to the competence issue. And no one seems to recall that the same Senate intelligence committee report from 2002 also criticized the "NSA's cautious approach to any collection of intelligence relating to activities in the United States," and its "failure to address modern communications technology aggressively." In recent years the agency tried to do so, but failed.
Indeed, as the Washington Post reports, even FISA judges have been upset with the government:
Twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court, according to two sources with knowledge of those events.
The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly -- who, like her predecessor, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen.
The two heads of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were the only judges in the country briefed by the administration on Bush's program. The president's secret order, issued sometime after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, allows the National Security Agency to monitor telephone calls and e-mails between people in the United States and contacts overseas.
James Baker, the counsel for intelligence policy in the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, discovered in 2004 that the government's failure to share information about its spying program had rendered useless a federal screening system that the judges had insisted upon to shield the court from tainted information. He alerted Kollar-Kotelly, who complained to Justice, prompting a temporary suspension of the NSA spying program, the sources said.
What the WaPo doesn't tell you is that James Baker is the same James Baker who in 2002, when giving professional advice on Senator DeWine's proposal to reduce the FISA standard from "probable cause" to "reasonable suspicion", stated that there were serious constitutional issues in doing so. Sounds like we've got a real hero working in the DOJ, as this is twice he's stood up for the right thing.
What the WaPo does get right however is that FISA judges were quite pissed off when they learned they weren't "fast enough" to catch terrorists. As I reported in my earlier story, Gonzales confirmed during his Senate hearings that FISA is always used to monitor domestic-to-domestic phone calls. Not only that, but on September 12, the FISA court made some (legal) modifications to streamline paperwork. The suggestion that DSP1 had to be created because of some inherent flaw in FISA is complete bunk. It was done to expand the president's powers and that's it.
Well not just to expand the president's powers. It was also done to provide legal cover for a host of domestic spying programs completely different from DSP1. One of them is the hideous Total Information Awareness (TIA) program.
Back to Hirsh at Newsweek:
Ironically, one of the most hopeful new intelligence surveillance programs is one that is still demonized in the media and on Capitol Hill. This is the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, which was canceled after the last big civil-liberties scandal in late 2002. TIA was the creation of Adm. John Poindexter, the Iran-contra figure who was brought in to run the new program but was cashiered after it was uncovered by The New York Times. TIA was an effort to vacuum up as much U.S. transactions information as possible, such as the purchase of plane tickets or, say, large amounts of fertilizer as a way of anticipating terror plots. But the program was dropped after several senators blasted some of Poindexter's odder suggestions, like creating a "futures market" in which terror experts could bet on likely terror events and thereby add to the government's knowledge base.
Yet today, very quietly, the core of TIA survives with a new codename of Topsail (minus the futures market), two officials privy to the intelligence tell NEWSWEEK. It is in programs like these that real data mining is going on and--considering the furor over TIA--with fewer intrusions on civil liberties than occur under the NSA surveillance program. "It's the best thing to come out of American intelligence in decades," says John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. "It is truly Poindexter's brainchild. Of all the people in the intelligence business, he has the keenest appreciation of using advanced information technology for intelligence gathering." Poindexter, who lives just outside Washington in Rockville, Md., could not be reached for comment on whether he is still involved with Topsail.
It wasn't just "cashiered" - there was actual legislation forbidding that it be used, or anything like it. I told you that the DSP1 was not the only Domestic Spying Program going on and this is more proof of it.
The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.
The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.
The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly 50 million in federal funding this year.
You'll remember that TSA is a division of the jolly Department of Homeland Security and TSA is the one who uses its infamous "No Fly List", based on data collection methods that are classified. The ACLU won a lawsuit recently to get an innocent American citizen off the list, but it still remains insanely difficult to clear yourself. Even members of Congress have been added, including Ted Kennedy, allegedly because a terrorist had an "alias" with the name Kennedy. Not to mention all of the infants and very young children who've been blocked from flying because their names were in the database.
The TSA's program used to be called CAPPS II but is now evolving towards Secure Flight. So the DHS has ADVISE and the TSA has Secure Flight.
What other systems are out there? Well I've written extensively about JPEN, which is the military's "internet-like" database where "raw" information about suspicious people (in America ONLY) is not only circulated nationwide, but it's also transferred over to federal and local law enforcement.
And the military's super secret intelligence branch, Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which has no congressional oversight, operates their own little database called Cornerstone, which contains amongst other things, information about peace groups that CIFA has spied on.
The FBI has its own database called Guardian. The State Department has a database known as Security Incident Management and Analysis System. And of course now we know TIA has continued to survive in a form now called TOPSAIL.
Now compare all of these databases to terrorism convictions or even the "plots" that were uncovered or thwarted. You'll note that not once did any of the data mining programs play any part. The LA plane-into-tower "plot" was a result of intel from "interrogating" a known Al-Qaeda leader. The administration also touts the catching of Ayman Ferous, the wacko who thought he could cut the Brooklyn Bridge in half with a blowtorch. Who else? Nutty Zacarias Moussaouai, who was convicted only when he pled guilty.
The administration isn't catching terrorists or preventing attacks with these programs. What they're doing is spying on Americans who dare to dissent against the administration. They're spending untold billions of dollars to eavesdrop, monitor, store data and harass innocent Americans whose sole "crime" is to remain critical of the administration - in a lawful, peaceful way.
The American government is absolutely fixated on technological solutions for everything, from solving domestic dissent to stopping IED's in Iraq (as I've written about before). This may sound incongruous but the same mindset that thinks assembling a massive database on dissenting Americans will solve anything is the same one that leads to justifying torture.
Why do I say that? Because torture is absolutely useless in getting intelligence. There are lots of countries, like our fun-lovin' allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who regularly use torture - and it is a complete failure at stopping radical movements and/or terrorists. What it is good at doing is intimidating and cowing the general populace. You'll notice that Muslims will riot in the streets against cartoons but why don't they march in Tashkent or Damascus or Riyadh against their dictatorship government. Why not? Because torture intimidates them and it does a damn good job of it.
All those data-mining programs and collecting information on dissent and harassing authors who try to fly on commercial jets sends a message to anyone even thinking about stepping up to the line - you better not misbehave or we'll make life a living hell for you. We'll be monitoring your reading lists, we'll be making it hard for you to fly, we'll be recording your phone conversations, we'll be photographing your demonstrations, we'll be inserting law enforcement officers undercover in your meetings and we'll put all your credit card information and emails into a gigantic database so we know everyone you know so we can monitor them.
Have we already forgotten about Operation TIPS, where the government wanted utility workers, letter carriers and ordinary citizens to call into the federal gov't to report suspicious behavior? I guess so.
I live in Romania, where the intelligence service was called the Securitate. East Germany had the STASI. Poland had the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa. The Soviets had the feared KGB Second Chief Directorate. All of them had the same function - to make every citizen feel like they were being watched all the time, that every phone call or action was being monitored, that their neighbor might be a gov't collaborator who would turn them in at the slightest sign of dissent.
As I've written about before, there's a DSP which isn't technical in nature at all. The NSA routinely picks up information on American citizens. By law, it is supposed to destroy this information unless it has permission to conduct surveillance on that individual. But the NSA, under General Michael Hayden, has been feeding raw reports straight to the administration, in particularly the Vice President's office:
But after Bush was sworn in as president, the way the NSA normally handled those issues started to change dramatically. Vice President Cheney, as Bob Woodward noted in his book Plan of Attack, was tapped by Bush in the summer of 2001 to be more of a presence at intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA.
"Given Cheney's background on national security going back to the Ford years, his time on the House Intelligence Committee, and as secretary of defense, Bush said at the top of his list of things he wanted Cheney to do was intelligence," Woodward wrote in his book about the buildup to the Iraq war. "In the first months of the new administration, Cheney made the rounds of the intelligence agencies - the CIA, the National Security Agency, which intercepted communications, and the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. "
It was then that the NSA started receiving numerous requests from Cheney and other officials in the state and defense departments to reveal the identities of the Americans blacked out or deleted from intelligence reports so administration officials could better understand the context of the intelligence.
But the sources said that on dozens of occasions Cheney would, upon learning the identity of the individual, instruct the NSA to continue monitoring specific Americans caught in the wiretaps if he thought more information would be revealed, which crossed the line into illegal territory.
Cheney advised President Bush of what had turned up in the raw NSA reports, said one former White House official who worked on counterterrorism related issues.
"What's really disturbing is that some of those people the vice president was curious about were people who worked at the White House or the State Department," one former counterterrorism official said. "There was a real feeling of paranoia that permeated from the vice president's office and I don't think it had anything to do with the threat of terrorism. I can't say what was contained in those taps that piqued his interest. I just don't know."
Well Cheney knows darn well what it is. He worked for Nixon and Ford and he knows that what led to Nixon's resignation wasn't any burglary, but that government officials were leaking information to Washington Post and New York Times reporters, starting with Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers) and culminating in Deep Throat. Spying on American officials was his way of making sure that any (non-approved) leakers would be identified from the outset.
It's time to put pressure on ALL members of Congress to continue to keep the issue of DSP's in the spotlight. And as much as I hate to say it, I feel I have more liberties here in Romania from the government than I would if I lived in America.
In October 2004, New York Times reporter James Risen goes to his editors with a story on the illegal NSA eavesdropping program. They sit on the story until December 16, 2005, when it makes a huge stir.
The current theory says the NYT ran the piece because Risen was about to publish a book about the secret history of the CIA. The NYT ran Risen's article before they saw the book, which did in fact talk about the NSA wiretapping.
After the story broke, former NSA employee (left the agency in May 2005) Russell Tice makes a public declaration that he was a source for Risen. Neither Risen nor the NYT have ever confirmed (or denied) that.
The Justice Department is conducting an investigation into who leaked the program, so that's a big incentive for the NYT to keep their mouth shut.
More after the fold.
Tice has since gone on something of a media junket, telling everyone he wants to testify to Congress about the issue. Link goes to his appearance on Democracy Now!:
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about the letter you have written to Congress, your request to testify?
RUSSELL TICE: Well, it's just a simple request under the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, which is a legal means to contact Congress and tell them that you believe that something has gone wrong in the intelligence community.
Tice admits he was essentially fired from the NSA, which is discussed in more depth below.
Tice also admits he didn't work on any project involving the eavesdropping of American citizens, or at least didn't do so "knowingly" as only the "higher echelons" knew about the program. He even refers to himself as just a "worker bee".
This is the detail that's been lost in the chatter on the blogosphere. If Tice knew nothing about the eavesdropping program, what exactly does he want to brief Congress on? How can he "blow the whistle" about a program he didn't know about?
You've got to go here to get the matter cleared up:
Tice sent a letter Dec. 16 to the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees saying he wants to report suspected illegal activity. "These acts involve the director of the National Security Agency, the deputy chiefs of staff for air and space operations and the U.S. secretary of defense," he said.
The letter was sent the same day The New York Times reported that President Bush secretly authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens without a court order.
Tice said he did not work on the program referenced in the Times article, but that his allegations are equally explosive.
"That was Hiroshima and this is Nagasaki," he said. "I want to talk about Nagasaki, which nobody's heard about yet."
Got it? Tice wants to testify about some totally different program than the NSA wiretapping issue.
The linked article above goes on to describe how Tice may be restricted to testifying only to the "Big 8", the chair and ranking member of the 4 Senate and 4 House committees which oversee SAP's (see my article on that, here).
Let's connect the dots. Risen and the NYT blow the lid off the NSA eavesdropping program in December 2005. Tice, who was fired 7 months earlier, suddenly appears in public and "confirms" the NSA story even though he didn't work on the program. And now he wants to testify about something completely different.
Earlier this week, Slate looked at Tice's background:
...if he holds forth before Congress about spying abuses, the agency will reply that he was dismissed last year after a pair of psychiatric evaluations deemed him "mentally unbalanced." In 2001, while he was working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Tice became convinced that an Asian-American woman he was working with was a Chinese spy. He reported his suspicions and was told they were unfounded. When he transferred to NSA the following year, he continued to report his concerns to DIA. Learning of his persistence, NSA administered the psychiatric evaluations, which led to what is known as "red badge" status, or suspension of security clearance, a stigma that in Tice's secretive business can be professionally debilitating.
So Tice worked for the NSA a short while and was previously employed by a totally different agency (although he worked for the NSA in the past).
Here is how Tice describes his firing:
RUSSELL TICE: Some time ago I had some concerns about a co-worker at D.I.A. who exhibited the classic signs of being involved in espionage, and I reported that and basically got blown off by the counterintelligence office at D.I.A. and kind of pushed the issue, because I continued to see a pattern of there being a problem. And once I got back to N.S.A., I pretty much dropped the issue, but there was a report that came across my desk in April of 2003 about two F.B.I. agents that were possibly passing secret counterintelligence information to a Chinese double agent, Katrina Leung, and I sent a secure message back to the D.I.A. counterintelligence officer, and I said I think the F.B.I. is incompetent, and the retaliation came down on me like a ton of bricks.
Sounds a little disgruntled to me. Except that the NSA warned Tice on January 9 not to testify to Congress because the members of Congress do not have "property security clearances" for his testimony.
Furthermore, the Pentagon is investigating whether or not Tice was fired on unfair grounds:
The Pentagon inspector general's office is probing the NSA, which specializes in electronic spying, for retaliating against Russ Tice, an 18-year specialist who worked on highly classified intelligence programs. Defense officials say the agency violated rules that protect "whistleblowers" in government who report wrongdoing by federal agencies.
A defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Tice appears to have been punished unfairly.
"It looks like he communicated substantive concerns" to another agency outside of NSA, the official said, noting that investigators are trying to determine whether Mr. Tice was a victim of unfair reprisal by NSA.
That "other agency" seems to be the FBI. Note that the linked article above was written in 2004, before the whole NSA wiretapping issue hit the media.
Tice was fired in May 2005 but his security clearance was revoked in June 2003 (he was assigned to the motor pool). Risen submitted his article on the NSA to the Times in October 2004, so it is definitely possible that Tice spoke to him.
The guy worked in the intelligence community for 19 years. In 2001, he became suspicious of someone in the DIA and nothing was ever done about it. He fired off an angry letter heavily criticizing the FBI. He then lost his security clearance.
Before he was fired he spoke to several members of Congress, including Senator Mikulski, trying to get someone to help him out. The help never came and Tice was fired. When the wiretapping story hit the media in December 2005, Tice piped up and volunteered to testify to Congress.
He doesn't seem to be a kook, but there's no way of telling if Tice is on target or not. The Katrina Leung and Aldrich Ames incidents show quite clearly that intelligence agencies are incredibly inept at policing their own, and they go to great measures to cover up that incompetence. They also detest whistle blowers, even when they're right.
I'm just guessing, but Tice's motivations seem to based on patriotism. Obviously if he had kept his mouth shut about the DIA worker, he'd still have his top security clearance and his job.
In an interview with Reasaon, Tice takes an educated guess as to why Bush bypassed the FISA law:
Russ Tice, a former intelligence analyst with the NSA, said that may be a clue to why Bush decided to bypass the court.
In order to obtain a FISA warrant, the agency requesting the surveillance needs an individual's name.
The NSA has a massive computer system known as Echelon that can search and filter hundreds of thousands of phone calls and e-mails in a matter of seconds much like a vacuum cleaner cleans up dirt, Tice said.
NSA analysts can capture hundreds of thousands of communications at once and filter them with key words in the same way that Google works on the Internet. So, an analyst can type in "terrorist" or "Osama bin Laden" and pull communications of people using those words.
The president may have wanted to avoid obtaining a FISA warrant because "you can't get a warrant for a search word," Tice said. "You need a name."
Sound familiar? Just yesterday, the WaPo reported this:
The Justice Department said yesterday that it subpoenaed four major Internet companies for data on what people search for on the Web as part of an eight-year battle over a federal law designed to shield children from online pornography.
Three of the companies responded to some degree, but Google Inc. said it was resisting the demand. Privacy advocates said the subpoenas raised deep concerns about the government's ability to track what ordinary people view on the Internet.
The government asked Mountain View, Calif.-based Google, which operates the world's most popular search engine, to turn over every query typed into its search engine over the course of one week without providing identifying information about the people who conducted the searches.
AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo all complied with the government's request. Clearly, everyone is against child pornography and those trafficking in it should be punished.
But why did the government ask for a "random sample" of 1 million webpages? Why not ask for targeted searches like "lolita nude" or something like that?
Imagine this. Imagine that Bush is firmly convinced that the NSA can find terrorists in America by searching the internet. So he authorized them to do so, and they come up with tons of information (valid or not) via wiretapping the internet itself. The information is used to conduct further surveillance on Americans.
All is well until December 2005 when the media and the public learn about the program. Two lawsuits are filed. If any terrorist (or potential terrorist) is caught, and the trail of evidence leading to his arrest came from the NSA eavesdropping program, the charges could be thrown out of court.
The DOJ requests were on behalf of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) of 1998. Except that in 2004, the Supreme Court (in Ashcroft v. ACLU) ruled that the law was unconstitutional.
Now suddenly the DOJ wants records of internet searches. How hard would it be for the federal government to say the evidence came from the DOJ's anti-porn files instead of the NSA?
I guess you could call it "intelligence laundering".
Got it? The DOJ is trying to shoehorn this request onto an unconstitutional law (COPA) to get records which may be then used to "launder" an unconstitutional act (bypassing FISA).
The DOJ subpoenas were issued in August 2005. Risen's book was published in January 2006, but he had an advanced copy in December 2005. When did the publisher green-light the book? The timing is certainly interesting.
We, the public, may never get to learn the substance of Tice's testimony to Congress. But here are the Representatives who will:
Jim Saxton, CA (Chairman) (R) (Armed Services Committee) Marty Meehan, MA (Ranking member) (D) (Armed Services Committee)
C.W. Bill Young, FL - Chairman (R) (Appropriations, Defense Subcommittee) John Murtha, PA - Ranking member (D) (Appropriations, Defense Subcommittee)
I wouldn't want to be the one to rile up Murtha any further, that's for sure.
In the months before 9/11, thousands of American citizens were inadvertently swept up in wiretaps, had their emails monitored, and were being watched as they surfed the Internet by spies at the super-secret National Security Agency, former NSA and counterterrorism officials said.
The NSA, with full knowledge of the White House, crossed the line from routine surveillance of foreigners and suspected terrorists into illegal activity by continuing to monitor the international telephone calls and emails of Americans without a court order. The NSA unintentionally intercepts Americans' phone calls and emails if the agency's computers zero in on a specific keyword used in the communication. But once the NSA figures out that they are listening in on an American, the eavesdropping is supposed to immediately end, and the identity of the individual is supposed to be deleted. While the agency did follow protocol, there were instances when the NSA was instructed to keep tabs on certain individuals that became of interest to some officials in the White House.
What sets this type of operation apart from the unprecedented covert domestic spying activities the NSA had been conducting after 9/11 is a top secret executive order signed by President Bush in 2002 authorizing the NSA to target specific American citizens. Prior to 9/11, American citizens were the subject of non-specific surveillance by the NSA that was condoned and approved by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, according to former NSA and counterterrorism officials.
The sources, who requested anonymity because they were instructed not to talk about NSA activities but who hope they can testify before Congress about the domestic spying, said that in December 2000, the NSA completed a report for the incoming administration titled "Transition 2001," which explained, among other things, how the NSA would improve its intelligence gathering capabilities by hiring additional personnel.
Moreover, in a warning to the incoming administration, the agency said that in its quest to compete on a technological level with terrorists who have access to state-of-the-art equipment, some American citizens would get caught up in the NSA's surveillance activities. However, in those instances, the identities of the Americans who made telephone calls overseas would be "minimized," one former NSA official said, in order to conceal the identity of the American citizen picked up on a wiretap.
"What we're supposed to do is delete the name of the person," said the former NSA official, who worked as an encryption specialist.
The former official said that even during the Clinton administration, the NSA would inadvertently obtain the identities of Americans citizens in its wiretaps as a result of certain keywords, like bomb or jihad, NSA computers are programmed to identify. When the NSA prepares its reports and transcripts of the conversations, the names of Americans are supposed to be immediately destroyed.
By law, the NSA is prohibited from spying on a United States citizen, a US corporation or an immigrant who is in this country on permanent residence. With permission from a special court, the NSA can eavesdrop on diplomats and foreigners inside the US.
"If, in the course of surveillance, NSA analysts learn that it involves a US citizen or company, they are dumping that information right then and there," an unnamed official told the Boston Globe in a story published October 27, 2001.
But after Bush was sworn in as president, the way the NSA normally handled those issues started to change dramatically. Vice President Cheney, as Bob Woodward noted in his book Plan of Attack, was tapped by Bush in the summer of 2001 to be more of a presence at intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA.
"Given Cheney's background on national security going back to the Ford years, his time on the House Intelligence Committee, and as secretary of defense, Bush said at the top of his list of things he wanted Cheney to do was intelligence," Woodward wrote in his book about the buildup to the Iraq war. "In the first months of the new administration, Cheney made the rounds of the intelligence agencies - the CIA, the National Security Agency, which intercepted communications, and the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency. "
It was then that the NSA started receiving numerous requests from Cheney and other officials in the state and defense departments to reveal the identities of the Americans blacked out or deleted from intelligence reports so administration officials could better understand the context of the intelligence.
Separately, at this time, Cheney was working with intelligence agencies, including the NSA, to develop a large-scale emergency plan to deal with any biological, chemical or nuclear attack on US soil.
Requesting that the NSA reveal the identity of Americans caught in wiretaps is legal as long as it serves the purpose of understanding the context of the intelligence information.
But the sources said that on dozens of occasions Cheney would, upon learning the identity of the individual, instruct the NSA to continue monitoring specific Americans caught in the wiretaps if he thought more information would be revealed, which crossed the line into illegal territory.
Cheney advised President Bush of what had turned up in the raw NSA reports, said one former White House official who worked on counterterrorism related issues.
"What's really disturbing is that some of those people the vice president was curious about were people who worked at the White House or the State Department," one former counterterrorism official said. "There was a real feeling of paranoia that permeated from the vice president's office and I don't think it had anything to do with the threat of terrorism. I can't say what was contained in those taps that piqued his interest. I just don't know."
An NSA spokesperson would not comment for this story. Because of the level of secrecy at the agency, it's impossible to ascertain for the record how far the agency has gone in its domestic surveillance.
James Bamford, the author of the bestselling books The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, which blew the door wide open by first revealing the NSA's covert activities, said he doesn't believe terrorism was a priority for the administration before 9/11 and he doesn't think the agency targeted specific Americans as it is doing now.
"I looked into that theory," Bamford said in an interview. "And I was assured that domestic surveillance was a black area the NSA stayed away from before 9/11. The NSA was sort of a side agency before 9/11. At that point they were looking for a mission. Terrorism was not a big priority. (American) names may have been picked up but I was told they dropped them immediately after. That's the procedure."
But Bamford said it's possible the NSA may have conducted the type of spying prior to 9/11 that the former NSA officials described. "It's hard to tell" if that happened, Bamford said. "It's a very secret agency."
In the summer of 2001, the NSA spent millions of dollars on a publicity campaign to repair its public image by taking the unprecedented step of opening up its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland to reporters, to dispel the myth that the NSA was spying on Americans.
In a July 10, 2001, segment on "Nightline," host Chris Bury reported that "privacy advocates in the United States and Europe are raising new questions about whether innocent civilians get caught up in the NSA's electronic web."
Then-NSA Director Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, who was interviewed by "Nightline," said it was absolutely untrue that the agency was monitoring Americans who are suspected of being agents of a foreign power without first seeking a special warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
"We don't do anything willy-nilly," Hayden said. "We're a foreign intelligence agency. We try to collect information that is of value to American decision-makers, to protect American values, America - and American lives. To suggest that we're out there, on our own, renegade, pulling in random communications, is - is simply wrong. So everything we do is for a targeted foreign intelligence purpose. With regard to the - the question of industrial espionage, no. Period. Dot. We don't do that."
But, when asked "How do we know that the fox isn't guarding the chicken coop?" Hayden responded by saying that Americans should trust the employees of the NSA.
"They deserve your trust, but you don't have to trust them," Hayden said. "We aren't off the leash, so to speak, guarding ourselves. We have a body of oversight within the executive branch, in the Department of Defense, in the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which is comprised of both government and nongovernmental officials. You've got both houses of Congress with - with very active - in some cases, aggressive - intelligence oversight committees with staff members who have an access badge to NSA just like mine."
One former NSA official said in response to Hayden's 2001 interview, "What do you expect him to say? He's got to deny it. I agree. We weren't targeting specific people, which is what the President's executive order does. However, we did keep tabs on some Americans we caught if there was an interest" by the White House. "That's not legal. And I am very upset that I played a part in it."
James Risen, the New York Times reporter credited with exposing the NSA's covert domestic surveillance activities that came as a result of a secret executive order President Bush issued in 2002, wrote in his just-published book, State of War, that the administration was very aggressive in its intelligence gathering activities before 9/11. However, Risen does not say that means the administration permitted the NSA to spy on Americans.
"It is now clear that the White House went through the motions of the public debate over the (2001) Patriot Act, all the while knowing that the intelligence community was secretly conducting a far more aggressive domestic surveillance campaign," Risen wrote in State of War.
Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.
Although I am named in this suit in my own behalf, I am motivated to join it by concerns well beyond my own. I have been frankly appalled by the discrepant and contradictory positions taken by the Administration in this matter. First, the entire existence of the NSA's monitoring was a secret, and its very disclosure denounced as a threat to national security.
Then it was argued that Congress had already implicitly granted the power to conduct warrantless surveillance on the territory of the United States, which seemed to make the reason for the original secrecy more rather than less mysterious. (I think we may take it for granted that our deadly enemies understand that their communications may be intercepted.)
It now appears that Congress may have granted this authority, but without quite knowing that it had, and certainly without knowing the extent of it.
This makes it critically important that we establish an understood line, and test the cases in which it may or may not be crossed.
Let me give a very direct instance of what I mean. We have recently learned that the NSA used law enforcement agencies to track members of a pacifist organisation in Baltimore. This is, first of all, an appalling abuse of state power and an unjustified invasion of privacy, uncovered by any definition of "national security" however expansive. It is, no less importantly, a stupid diversion of scarce resources from the real target. It is a certainty that if all the facts were known we would become aware of many more such cases of misconduct and waste.
We are, in essence, being asked to trust the state to know best. What reason do we have for such confidence? The agencies entrusted with our protection have repeatedly been shown, before and after the fall of 2001, to be conspicuous for their incompetence and venality. No serious reform of these institutions has been undertaken or even proposed: Mr George Tenet (whose underlings have generated leaks designed to sabotage the Administration's own policy of regime-change in Iraq, and whose immense and unconstitutionally secret budget could not finance the infiltration of a group which John Walker Lindh could join with ease) was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
I believe the President when he says that this will be a very long war, and insofar as a mere civilian may say so, I consider myself enlisted in it. But this consideration in itself makes it imperative that we not take panic or emergency measures in the short term, and then permit them to become institutionalised. I need hardly add that wire-tapping is only one of the many areas in which this holds true.
The better the ostensible justification for an infringement upon domestic liberty, the more suspicious one ought to be of it. We are hardly likely to be told that the government would feel less encumbered if it could dispense with the Bill of Rights. But a power or a right, once relinquished to one administration for one reason, will unfailingly be exploited by successor administrations, for quite other reasons. It is therefore of the first importance that we demarcate, clearly and immediately, the areas in which our government may or may not treat us as potential enemies.
Former vice president Al Gore gave what I believe to be the most important political speech in my lifetime, and the New York Times, "the newspaper of record," did not report it. Not even excerpts.
For the New York Times, it was a nonevent that a former vice president and presidential candidate, denied the presidency by one vote of the Supreme Court, challenged the Bush administration for its illegalities, rending of the Constitution and disrespect for the separation of powers.
So much for "the liberal press" that right-wingers rant about. If a "liberal press" exists, the New York Times is certainly no longer a member.
The Washington Post had a short report on Gore’s address at Constitution Hall, but the newspaper, if that is what it is, managed to water down the seriousness and urgency of the message that Gore brought to the country with sneers.
Gore’s address is the first sign of leadership from the Democratic party in six years. This alone makes it a major news event. But not even his own party took notice. According to reports, only one Democratic senator, Dianne Feinstein (CA) was in the audience. One would have thought the entire Democratic congressional delegation would have turned out in support of Gore’s challenge to Bush’s extraordinary claims of power.
The lack of an opposition party makes the media vulnerable to intimidation by a dictatorial-minded administration.
The New York Times ownership suppressed for one year the leaked information in the paper’s possession that the Bush administration was violating the Foreign Intelligence Services Act and was spying on Americans without court warrants. Had the New York Times not placed a gag in its reporter’s mouth and suppressed the story, Bush may have gone down in defeat as the new Richard M. Nixon. Clearly, the New York Times is failing the obligations of a free press.
Bush is angry at the New York Times and at the government officials who leaked the story that Bush illegally spied on American citizens. Both may be prosecuted for making Bush’s illegal behavior public. By ignoring Gore’s speech, is the New York Times signaling to Bush that the newspaper is willing to be a lap dog in exchange for not being prosecuted?
The "unitary executive" theory, that the President has nearly absolute authority as Commander-in-Chief in "wartime" goes much, much further than has previously been reported.
Movies and books refer to "black operations" or "black programs", referring to top secret military projects. The Pentagon however refers to them as Special Access Programs (SAP) to avoid any negative connotation or association with the word "black".
Obviously the military sometimes has legitimate reasons to conduct secret operations, secret from the public that is.
There are 3 kinds of SAP's:
Acknowledged SAP's - Those which can be spoken about in public, often declassified. This includes the SAP project to build the F-117 stealth fighter.
Unacknowledged SAP's - The existence, name and details of these programs is classified to the public. These are however revealed to 2 House subcommittees and 2 Senate subcommittees (see below)
Waived SAP's - Actually a subset of "unacknowledged" SAP's. Only a handful of members of Congress are informed about these projects, known as the "Big 8". They are the chairperson and ranking member of the 2 House Subcommittees and 2 Senate subcommittees
While "unacknowledged" and "waived" SAP's are not disclosed to the public, the law requires that Congress be notified of and approveall SAP's.
U.S. Code Title 10, Subtitle A, Part I, Chapter 2, § 119 specifically deals with this:
(f) A special access program may not be initiated until—
(1) the defense committees are notified of the program; and
(2) a period of 30 days elapses after such notification is received.
(g) In this section, the term “defense committees” means—
(1) the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Appropriations, and the Defense Subcommittee of the Committee on Appropriations, of the Senate; and
(2) the Committee on Armed Services and the Committee on Appropriations, and the Subcommittee on Defense of the Committee on Appropriations, of the House of Representatives.
So far, so good. The Pentagon established SAP's and a select group of Congress reviews this top-secret material. If Congress approves, the SAP can begin after 30 days.
Army Regulations (380-381) list in great detail exactly how SAP's can be conceived, submitted for approval and put into action. This is consistent with the law cited above.
Again, the public is not informed about the details or budget for these secret projects. But elected members of Congress have oversight, right?
Section 8007 of the Act prohibits use of funds to initiate a special access program until 30 calendar days of congressional session have elapsed after the executive branch has notified the congressional defense committees of initiation of the program.
The U.S. Supreme Court has stated that the President's authority to classify and control access to information bearing on national security flows from the Constitution and does not depend upon a legislative grant of authority.
Although 30-day advance notice can be provided in most situations as a matter of comity, situations may arise, especially in wartime, in which the President must promptly establish special access controls on classified national security information under his constitutional grants of the executive power and authority as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.
The executive branch shall construe section 8007 in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the President.
In plain English, this means that the President will tell Congress about black op programs whenever he feels like it. Screw the law!
Was the NSA wiretapping program one of those SAP's that the President used to bypass Congress? It looks like it might have been a "waived SAP". Senator Rockefeller said he had raised concerns on the NSA wiretapping project when he was briefed in 2003, which was hotly denied by Pat Roberts.
The record needs to be set clear that the Administration never afforded members briefed on the program an opportunity to either approve or disapprove the NSA program. The limited members who were told of the program were prohibited by the Administration from sharing any information about it with our colleagues, including other members of the Intelligence Committees.
Back in 2004, Seymour Hersh was on the trail of another SAP:
The Abu Ghraib story began, in a sense, just weeks after the September 11, 2001, attacks, with the American bombing of Afghanistan. Almost from the start, the Administration’s search for Al Qaeda members in the war zone, and its worldwide search for terrorists, came up against major command-and-control problems. For example, combat forces that had Al Qaeda targets in sight had to obtain legal clearance before firing on them. On October 7th, the night the bombing began, an unmanned Predator aircraft tracked an automobile convoy that, American intelligence believed, contained Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban leader. A lawyer on duty at the United States Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Florida, refused to authorize a strike. By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach. Rumsfeld was apoplectic over what he saw as a self-defeating hesitation to attack that was due to political correctness.
Of course it wasn't "political correctness", it was the military following its own rules. If the chain of command rules were too slow, then they could be changed. But Rumsfeld (and Stephen Cambone) decided to bypass all that:
Rumsfeld reacted in his usual direct fashion: he authorized the establishment of a highly secret program that was given blanket advance approval to kill or capture and, if possible, interrogate “high value” targets in the Bush Administration’s war on terror. A special-access program, or sap—subject to the Defense Department’s most stringent level of security—was set up, with an office in a secure area of the Pentagon. The program would recruit operatives and acquire the necessary equipment, including aircraft, and would keep its activities under wraps.
They created code words, and recruited, after careful screening, highly trained commandos and operatives from America’s élite forces—Navy seals, the Army’s Delta Force, and the C.I.A.’s paramilitary experts. They also asked some basic questions: “Do the people working the problem have to use aliases? Yes. Do we need dead drops for the mail? Yes. No traceability and no budget. And some special-access programs are never fully briefed to Congress.”
They carried out instant interrogations—using force if necessary—at secret C.I.A. detention centers scattered around the world. The intelligence would be relayed to the sap command center in the Pentagon in real time, and sifted for those pieces of information critical to the “white,” or overt, world.
Sound familiar? Remember that was written in 2004. Secret detention centers scattered around the world? I've already written a 20-part series on those secret CIA jails and there's a lot more information to come out.
Back to Hersh:
The solution, endorsed by Rumsfeld and carried out by Stephen Cambone, was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents.
Rumsfeld and Cambone went a step further, however: they expanded the scope of the SAP, bringing its unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib. The commandos were to operate in Iraq as they had in Afghanistan. The male prisoners could be treated roughly, and exposed to sexual humiliation.
Cambone then made another crucial decision, the former intelligence official told me: not only would he bring the sap’s rules into the prisons; he would bring some of the Army military-intelligence officers working inside the Iraqi prisons under the sap’s auspices. “So here are fundamentally good soldiers—military-intelligence guys—being told that no rules apply,” the former official, who has extensive knowledge of the special-access programs, added. “And, as far as they’re concerned, this is a covert operation, and it’s to be kept within Defense Department channels.”
We already know that there are photos and videos of what occurred (still occuring?) at Abu Ghraib that have yet to be released to the public. We already know that Bush has annually stated that he will bypass notification of even senior Congress members on the existence of SAP's, one of which was in operation at Abu Ghraib.
And at the end of 2005, we learned that he bypassed the FISA law and "authorized" secret NSA wiretapping and eavesdropping in Americans.
In that same "addendum" to his signing the Defense Bill on December 2005, Bush also added a paragraph denying prisoners' rights to habeas corpus as well. A few blogs picked that story up but not the traditional media.
On January 2, 2006, the WaPo discussed Bush's regular practice of adding those "interpretive signing statements" when he signed bills into law:
President Bush has been especially fond of them, issuing at least 108 in his first term, according to presidential scholar Phillip J. Cooper of Portland State University in Oregon. Many of Bush's statements rejected provisions in bills that the White House regarded as interfering with its powers in national security, intelligence policy and law enforcement, Cooper wrote recently in the academic journal Presidential Studies Quarterly.
The Bush administration "has very effectively expanded the scope and character of the signing statement not only to address specific provisions of legislation that the White House wishes to nullify, but also in an effort to significantly reposition and strengthen the powers of the presidency relative to the Congress," Cooper wrote in the September issue. "This tour d' force has been carried out in such a systematic and careful fashion that few in Congress, the media, or the scholarly community are aware that anything has happened at all."
And guess who was one of the original backers of this idea? None other than Samuel A. Alito, Jr., currently on his way to being confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice.
In 1986, as an attorney in Reagan's Office of Legal Counsel, he put forth the idea of adding "interpretations" when the President signed a bill into law, to "help curb some of the prevalent abuses of legislative history".
Let's connect the dots. Bush authorized NSA wiretaps, bypassing the law that Congress wrote. Bush authorized an SAP to conduct interrogations (torture) of inmates at Abu Ghraib. Was Congress bypassed as well? And now we know he has unilaterally declared he and Rumsfeld can bypass Congress whenever they want to when creating and managing black ops.
The law requires that the House Armed Services Committee be informed of and approve all SAP's. The subcommittee on "Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities" handles this.
It's even on the official website. List of current members of this subcommittee:
If these are your representatives, might be a good time to ask them if they know the President feels he can bypass the law and not get their approval for SAP's.
The law also states that the Committee on Appropriations, Defense Subcommittee be informed and give approval to SAP's.
All of these rules have been in place since Watergate, when Congress began to routinely get security clearances and access to classified executive branch information. Over the years, the number of SAPs has grown, and though there was a flurry of effort during the Clinton administration to reduce the number of SAPs, since 9/11, there has been an explosion.
Ask any intelligence or national security professional with real clearances why SAPs exist and what is the purpose of covert or clandestine operations and they will tell you that they exist as much to cover illegal and unpalatable activity as to "protect" intelligence sources and methods.
Then last week Arkin discovered the Pentagon is evading even the SAP's by calling them ACCMs:
ACCMs are on top of the existing system of "special access programs," which I have previously written about. SAPs, as they are called, are often applied to protect classified information on acquisition programs where a technology such as "stealth" is shielded during research and development and even procurement. Since acquisition SAPs can often run in the hundreds of millions of dollars or even the billions, Congress has established laws and procedures for special oversight of them.
There are SAPs that apply to intelligence activities and operations, but the establishment of an SAP requires high-level Defense Department approval and extremely expensive security practices that cover everything from the contracts to internal communications. Everyone accessing SAP information must be "read into" a program formally, be specially cleared, and sign a non-disclosure agreement. Their very restricted nature to some degree limits their promiscuous application.
So enter ACCMs. According to the Navy directive
"When an Original Classification Authority (OCA) determines that other security measures … are insufficient for establishing "need-to-know" for classified information and where Special Access Program (SAP) controls are not warranted, Alternative or Compensatory Control Measures (ACCM) may be employed. The purpose of ACCM is to strictly enforce the "need-to-know" principle. Personnel requiring access to ACCM protected information shall receive specialized training regarding the procedures for access, control, transmission, storage, marking, etc."
"… Each request for the establishment of ACCM shall consider the criticality, sensitivity, and value of the information; analysis of the threats both known and anticipated; vulnerability to exploitation; and countermeasures benefits versus cost when assessing the need to establish an ACCM."
But there is no special clearance required, no non-disclosure agreement, no separate communication system needed to transmit ACCM information.
To cut through the bureaucratic gobbledy-gook, here's how I interpret the invention and application of the ACCM: A formal special access program requires high-level approval and oppressive practices to maintain internally, but formal SAPs also must be briefed to Congress. (Even the NSA domestic surveillance program, called a "waived" SAP, was briefed to the Congressional leadership.)
So here is a program for compartmentalizing information where the security standards internally are the same as an SAP, but the compartment is easier to establish and the program doesn't have to be reported to Congress!
Arkin reports that there have been hundreds of ACCMs since 9/11. These are "black ops" which not even the 8 Senators and Representatives in charge of overseeing (and funding) the nation's intelligence budget are informed about.
It seems like we are falling down the rabbit hole towards an absolute ruler...
By NEIL KING JR. Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
January 18, 2006; Page A4
WASHINGTON -- Senators will have scads of questions when they open hearings on President Bush's wiretapping program. But the pivotal one -- Is it legal? -- will be hard to answer.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to hold hearings early next month, followed by a possible closed round of questioning within the Senate Intelligence Committee. The legality issue likely will be center stage in both venues, with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez set to argue that Mr. Bush has the right to authorize the National Security Agency to conduct widespread wiretaps outside legal channels. Later, Congress may weigh proposals to tighten or loosen the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which has governed domestic wiretaps since 1978.
Yet the hearings won't yield what critics of the program are seeking: a binding decision on whether Mr. Bush broke the FISA law. For that, lawyers across the U.S. are pursuing a range of efforts to bring the matter before a judge. Their goal is a court ruling, possibly within weeks, to uphold or strike down the government's eavesdropping program.
Getting quick legal clarity in the courts, though, may also prove tricky.
Two civil lawsuits filed yesterday -- one in Detroit by the American Civil Liberties Union and another in New York by the Center for Constitutional Rights -- opened another front in the battle, and showed some of the hazards that lie ahead.
Both suits allege that the U.S. government violated the privacy and free-speech rights of certain named plaintiffs -- including lawyers, journalists and academics -- by possibly eavesdropping on their communications without a warrant. The two suits seek to have the program ruled unconstitutional. But in both cases, the plaintiffs have no evidence that they were caught up in the NSA program. Without evidence of harm -- or what is called legal standing -- neither case is likely to go far.
Lawyers in more than a dozen criminal cases from Oregon to Florida face a similar hurdle. They are arguing that their clients were targeted under the secret NSA program but must rely on prosecutors to confirm that is the case. "And who's to say that the NSA will give the prosecutors the straight story?" says Joshua Dratel, a New York attorney who is seeking new wiretap information for two possible terror-related appeals.
The next step will be to convince a judge that wiretaps conducted under the program undermined a defendant's case, potentially leading to a new trial. Even a favorable procedural ruling in an individual case, though, might not also yield the unequivocal constitutional decision about the NSA program that civil libertarians are seeking.
"It's going to be hard to get a lower-court decision that clearly states that this is wrong, much less one that gets the government to stop what it's doing," says Morton Halperin, who helped to draft the original FISA law and is now the Washington director of the Open Society Institute, a public-policy think tank.
Several former government lawyers and constitutional scholars, including Mr. Halperin, have challenged Mr. Bush's legal defense of the NSA eavesdropping program, which targets phone calls and emails of people in the U.S. communicating with suspected terrorists overseas. One critique, signed by 14 legal scholars and sent last week to certain members of Congress, said the analysis failed "to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance."
Others have weighed in to the contrary, arguing that Mr. Bush has an inherent right to gather intelligence in the interest of national security and that his powers were made stronger when Congress authorized the use of military force in the war on terrorism.
The government says the program began in 2002 and is used only to target specific suspicious communications between the U.S. and other countries. Mr. Bush says the warrantless wiretaps were used to listen to "a few numbers," as when "the enemy is calling somebody, and we want to know who they're calling and why."
NEW YORK -- Federal lawsuits were filed Tuesday seeking to halt President Bush's domestic eavesdropping program, calling it an ''illegal and unconstitutional program'' of electronic eavesdropping on American citizens.
The lawsuits accusing Bush of exceeding his constitutional powers were filed in federal court in New York by the Center for Constitutional Rights and in Detroit by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The New York suit, filed on behalf of the center and individuals, names Bush, the head of the National Security Agency, and the heads of the other major security agencies, challenging the NSA's surveillance of persons within the United States without judicial approval or statutory authorization.
It asked a judge to stop Bush and government agencies from conducting warrantless surveillance of communications in the United States.
The Detroit suit, which also names the NSA, was filed by the ACLU, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Greenpeace and several individuals.
E-mail, international calls checked
Messages seeking comment were left Tuesday morning with the National Security Agency and the Justice Department.
Bush, who said the wiretapping is legal and necessary, has pointed to a congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that authorized him to use force in the fight against terrorism as allowing him to order the program.
The program authorized eavesdropping of international phone calls and e-mails of people deemed a terror risk.
But the New York lawsuit noted that federal law already allows the president to conduct warrantless surveillance during the first 15 days of a war and allows court authorization of surveillance for agents of foreign powers or terrorist groups.
Instead of following the law, Bush ''unilaterally and secretly authorized electronic surveillance without judicial approval or congressional authorization,'' the lawsuit said.
Democratic principles at risk?
At a news conference, Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director Bill Goodman portrayed the president as a man on an unprecedented power grab at the expense of basic democratic principles.
He said the public was starting to understand the assertion that the erosion of individual rights is a slippery slope that lets the government ''brand anyone a terrorist with no right to counsel, no right to be brought before a judge and no right to privacy in communications.''
WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances (PRCB) today called upon Congress to hold open, substantive oversight hearings examining the President's authorization of the National Security Agency (NSA) to violate domestic surveillance requirements outlined in the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, chairman of PRCB, was joined by fellow conservatives Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR); David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Paul Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, in urging lawmakers to use NSA hearings to establish a solid foundation for restoring much needed constitutional checks and balances to intelligence law.
"When the Patriot Act was passed shortly after 9-11, the federal government was granted expanded access to Americans' private information," said Barr. "However, federal law still clearly states that intelligence agents must have a court order to conduct electronic surveillance of Americans on these shores. Yet the federal government overstepped the protections of the Constitution and the plain language of FISA to eavesdrop on Americans' private communication without any judicial checks and without proof that they are involved in terrorism."
The following can be attributed to PRCB members:
"I believe that our executive branch cannot continue to operate without the checks of the other branches. However, I stand behind the President in encouraging Congress to operate cautiously during the hearings so that sensitive government intelligence is not given to our enemies." -- Paul Weyrich, chairman and CEO, Free Congress Foundation
"Public hearings on this issue are essential to addressing the serious concerns raised by alarming revelations of NSA electronic eavesdropping." -- Grover Norquist, president, Americans for Tax Reform
"The need to reform surveillance laws and practices adopted since 9/11 is more apparent now than ever. No one would deny the government the power it needs to protect us all, but when that power poses a threat to the basic rights that make our nation unique, its exercise must be carefully monitored by Congress and the courts. This is not a partisan issue; it is an issue of safeguarding the fundamental freedoms of all Americans so that future administrations do not interpret our laws in ways that pose constitutional concerns." -- David Keene, chairman, American Conservative Union
"If the law is not reformed, ordinary Americans' personal information could be swept into all-encompassing federal databases encroaching upon every aspect of their private lives. This is of particular concern to gun owners, whose rights guaranteed under the Second Amendment are currently being infringed upon under the Patriot Act's controversial record search provisions." -- Alan Gottlieb, founder, Second Amendment Foundation
Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances is an organization dedicated to protecting Americans' fundamental freedoms guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment and ensuring that all provisions of the Patriot Act are in line with the Constitution. For more information, visit the Web site at http://www.checksbalances.org.
Prominent Journalists, Nonprofit Groups, Terrorism Experts and Community Advocates Join First Lawsuit to Challenge New NSA Spying Program
NEW YORK – Saying that the Bush administration’s illegal spying on Americans must end, the American Civil Liberties Union today filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against the National Security Agency seeking to stop a secret electronic surveillance program that has been in place since shortly after September 11, 2001.
“President Bush may believe he can authorize spying on Americans without judicial or Congressional approval, but this program is illegal and we intend to put a stop to it,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. “The current surveillance of Americans is a chilling assertion of presidential power that has not been seen since the days of Richard Nixon.”
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a group of prominent journalists, scholars, attorneys, and national nonprofit organizations (including the ACLU) who frequently communicate by phone and e-mail with people in the Middle East. Because of the nature of their calls and e-mails, they believe their communications are being intercepted by the NSA under the spying program. The program is disrupting their ability to talk with sources, locate witnesses, conduct scholarship, and engage in advocacy. The program, which was first disclosed by The New York Times on December 16, has sparked national and international furor and has been condemned by lawmakers across the political spectrum.
In addition to the ACLU, the plaintiffs in today’s case are:
Authors and journalists James Bamford, Christopher Hitchens and Tara McKelvey
Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation and democracy scholar Larry Diamond, a fellow at the Hoover Institution
Nonprofit advocacy groups NACDL, Greenpeace, and Council on American Islamic Relations, who joined the lawsuit on behalf of their staff and membership
"The prohibition against government eavesdropping on American citizens is well-established and crystal clear,” said ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson, who is lead counsel in ACLU v. NSA. “President Bush's claim that he is not bound by the law is simply astounding. Our democratic system depends on the rule of law, and not even the president can issue illegal orders that violate Constitutional principles.”
According to news reports, President Bush signed an order in 2002 allowing the NSA to monitor the telephone and e-mail communications of "hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States" with persons abroad, without a court order as the law requires. Under the program, the NSA is also engaging in wholesale datamining by sifting through millions of calls and e-mails of ordinary Americans.
Journalist James Bamford, a plaintiff and one of the world’s leading experts on U.S. intelligence and the National Security Agency, said that “the spying program removes a necessary firewall that would prevent the kind of government abuse seen during the Watergate scandal.” Bamford was threatened with prosecution in the 1970s as he prepared to disclose unclassified details about illegal NSA spying on Americans in his book, The Puzzle Palace.
In the legal complaint filed, the ACLU said the spying program violates Americans’ rights to free speech and privacy under the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution.
The ACLU also charged that the program violates the Constitution because President Bush exceeded his authority under separation of powers principles. Congress has enacted two statutes, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Title III of the federal criminal code, which are “the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance. . . and the interception of domestic wire, oral, and electronic communications may be conducted.”
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan, seeks a court order declaring that the NSA spying is illegal and ordering its immediate and permanent halt. Attorneys in the case are Beeson, Jameel Jaffer, and Melissa Goodman of the national ACLU Foundation, and Michael Steinberg of the ACLU of Michigan.The lawsuit names as defendants the NSA and Lieutenant General Keith B. Alexander, the current the Director of the NSA.
For more information on the lawsuit, including the legal complaint, fact sheets on the case law and on the NSA spying program, and links to statements from the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, please go to www.aclu.org/nsaspying
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
- Abraham Lincoln
Say "fascism" to anyone you meet, and you will conjure images of coal-scuttle helmets, of Nazi bootheels clicking in terrible unison down Berlin streets during dark days that only a few remaining among the living remember. Each day, members of the generation which heard those heels for themselves go into the ground, taking with them whispered words of warning. I saw it for myself, they whisper before they pass. See this tattooed number? See this scar? It happened. It was real.
Say "fascism" to anyone you meet, and you will be greeted with the boilerplate response of the blithely overconfident: such a thing cannot happen here. This is the United States of America, land of the free and home of the brave. Ours is a nation of laws, of checks and balances, of righteousness and decency. Our laws and traditions stand as a bulwark against the rise of totalitarian madness. It cannot happen here. Thus we are indoctrinated into the school of our own assumed greatness.
"We must disenthrall ourselves," said Abraham Lincoln, and so we must, because it can happen here. It is already happening. All the parroted recitations of grade school civics cannot erase the fact that a new order is rising. Call it "secret fascism" or "smiley-faced fascism." Call it a quiet dictatorship. Call it what you like, but it is here with us in America today, and it is growing.
To be sure, there are no coal-scuttle helmets lined in ranks down our broad avenues, no Tonton Macoute savaging dissidents, no Khmer Rouge slaughtering intellectuals and herding citizens from cities to die by the millions on roads littered with skulls. The core strength of our new fascism is that it speaks softly. It does not present itself in such an obvious way that those who subsist on the dogmas of our greatness can point and say there, there it is, I see it.
This new fascism is not fed only by lies, though to be sure the lies are there in preposterous abundance. This new fascism is fed by myths, our myths, the myths by which we rock ourselves to sleep. This new fascism is in truth an elemental fascism, reborn today by a confluence of events; the diligent work of the few, in combination with the passivity of the many, have brought forth this new order.
The writer Umberto Eco, in a 1995 essay titled "Ur-Fascism," delineated several core elements that have existed in one form or another in every fascist state in history: "Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten, because it does not represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader. Doctrine outstrips reason, and science is always suspect. The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies. Argument is tantamount to treason. Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear. Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of 'the people' in the grand opera that is the state."
Take these one at a time.
"Parliamentary democracy is by definition rotten, because it does not represent the voice of the people, which is that of the sublime leader."
George W. Bush has all but gelded Congress in recent months, attaching so-called "signing statements" to a variety of laws which state that the president may act beyond the laws whenever he so chooses. The United States, fashioned as a republic, has as its voice the congressional body. This is all but finished. To cement his victory over the parliamentary system, Bush has put forth one Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court, a man who believes in the ultimate power of the one leader over the many. The gelded congress does not appear able to keep this man from the high court, thus rendering the balancing branches of government into a satellite system of the Executive.
"Doctrine outstrips reason, and science is always suspect."
The supremacy of religious fundamentalism within and without government carries this banner before all others. What is reason in the face of the zealot's faith? Science has become a watered-down vessel for Intelligent Design, and the incontrovertible truths of empirical data are slapped aside. Spencer Tracy, in the film "Inherit the Wind," bellows the warning here: "Fanaticism and ignorance is forever busy, and needs feeding. And soon, your Honor, with banners flying and with drums beating we'll be marching backward, backward, through the glorious ages of that sixteenth century, when bigots burned the man who dared to bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind."
"The national identity is provided by the nation's enemies."
This has been with us for generations now. Our nation defined ourselves through a comparison to the Nazis, to the Imperial Japanese, and then through decades of comparison to Communism. Terrorism has supplanted all of these, hammered into place on a Tuesday in September by the actions of madmen. We are not them, all is justified in the struggle against them, and so we are defined.
"Argument is tantamount to treason."
All one need do to see this in action is spend some hours with the Fox News channel. Freedom fries. Why do you hate America? You are with us or you are with the terrorists. Watch what you say.
"Perpetually at war, the state must govern with the instruments of fear."
The manipulation of this population by fear has been ham-fisted, to be sure, but has also been cruelly effective. We do not want the evidence to be a mushroom cloud. Weapons of mass destruction and al Qaeda in Iraq. Nuclear designs in Iran. Plastic sheeting and duct tape. Orange alert. Argument becomes tantamount to treason simply because everyone has been made to feel fear at all times. A frightened populace is easily governed, and governs itself; this lesson was well-learned in the duck-and-cover days of the Cold War. Those lessons have been masterfully applied once again. Today, the citizenry polices itself, and the herd moves as one body. Even the surveillance of innocent citizens by the state is brushed off as a necessary evil. Remember: you are being watched.
"Citizens do not act; they play the supporting role of 'the people' in the grand opera that is the state."
Once, we lived by the glorious simplicity of the vote. Casting a ballot was the single most patriotic duty a citizen could perform, an affirmation of all we held dear and true. Today, we live in the nation of the vanishing voter. Power has been so far removed from the people by those with money and influence that most see voting as a waste of time. Add to this the growing control of the implements of voting and vote-counting by partisan corporations, and the rule of We the People is left in ashes.
We must disenthrall ourselves from the idea that our institutions, our traditions, the barriers that protect us from absolute and authoritarian powers, cannot be broken down. They are being dismantled a brick at a time. It is a whispered fascism, not yet marching down your street or pounding upon your door in the dead of night. But it is here, and it is laying deep roots. We must listen beyond the whispered fascism of today to the shouted fascism of tomorrow. We must look beyond the lies and the myths, beyond the dogmas by which we sleep.
WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
Officials describe a flood of email addresses, telephone calls, and names which were sent to the FBI by the NSA. Thousands of such pieces of information were sent a month. Multiply that by the dozens of months the program has been in existence, and the far-reaching scope of Bush's domestic spying becomes frighteningly clear.
While Bush has been telling Americans that the program was "limited" and targeted those with "known" links to Al Qaeda, that simply is not true. The NSA accessed "large amounts of phone and Internet traffic seeking patterns pointing to terrorism suspects." It would then take volumes of information and shovel it over to the FBI, who wasn't told why the person was targeted or how they were connected to terrorism, just that they were suspected of having those ties. It was the FBI then that was sent out blind to the field, following up on thousands of names of American citizens, interviewing them and examining their private lives.
Did such a wide net yield results?
President Bush has characterized the eavesdropping program, which focused on the international communications of some Americans and others in the United States, as a "vital tool" against terrorism; Vice President Dick Cheney has said it has saved "thousands of lives."
But the results of the program looked very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret eavesdropping program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.
"We'd chase a number, find it's a school teacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former FBI official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."
The law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said the program had uncovered no active Qaeda networks inside the United States planning attacks. "There were no imminent plots - not inside the United States," the former F.B.I. official said.
The administration keeps pointing to the arrest of Iyman Faris, the Ohio truck driver who set out to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge, as a successful result of the program. But the administration's claim is dubious. If the government really had wiretapped Faris' phone and discovered he was a terrorist and planning to attack us, then why didn't the government present any of that phone evidence at trial? Could it be because they were afraid it would be inadmissible, or they would have to disclose how they received it?
Here is another disturbing revelation from the article:
Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called.
Do those "other numbers called" include domestic phone calls? If so, that means that the calls were purely domestic. Were those calls intercepted pursuant to Bush's order or pursuant to the law? This is a critical question that needs to be answered.
by arbortender at Daily Kos
Mon Jan 16, 2006 at 11:42:26 PM PDT
What a lineup!
I listened to the show & reported what I heard. In some parts, I paraphrased what struck me as essential. I didn't try to capture Larry's questions; just the guests' answers and ruminations. Hopefully this is the gist of it.
First, Larry grills Alberto Gonzalez, partly on Al Gore's comments earlier today. Next up James Risen, responding in part to AG Gonzalez' statements. Then comes Russel Tice, NSA whistleblower and source for the NY Times Story ringing in with his perspective.
Finally, a round-robin video panel:
Russell Tice joins Senator Orrin Hatch and Senator Dianne Feinstein (both Senators serve on both the Judicial Committee and the Intelligence Committee); David Gergen, former White House advisor under Nixon; and Michael Isikoff, Newsweek investigative reporter.
These are AG Gonzalez' statements:
"We'll have an opportunity to come before the Judiciary Committee..."
"Perhaps in straightforward cases we can get authority quickly, but these are not straightforward cases"
"The President has directed that we make available to him all tools available under the law."
"This is a highly classified program."
"We're talking about communication where one end of the communication is outside the US."
"I don't know why there would be a need for a special counsel. We firmly believe that the president does have the authority."
James Risen, Pulitzer Prize winning National Security writer for the NY Times, and author of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA & the Bush Administration reacts to Gonzalez' comments:
He made the case that they will be making.
The Critics of the admin argue that they have skirted the law to test the limit. He mentioned Aldrich Ames, soviet spy. AG Janet Reno had authorized a warrantless physical search. After Ames, congress closed that loophole.
Vigorous investigative reporting is absolutely critical to a healthy democracy. There were a number of people in government who believed that something illegal was going on. People were deeply troubled about something. He believes the sources who helped them in [the NY Times] story were true American patriots. This was the exact opposite of the Plame case. This was whistleblowers in the government.
He's protecting his source.
The end result was a story that no one has disputed.
It's important to remember, since this is MLK day, that in the 1960's they were using domestic wiretapping, and they used that information to blackmail Corretta Scott King.
In this program now, there's been very little oversight.
We are in a period much like the early cold war period, where we were not certain the extent and scope of the threat we faced. What is the nature & extent of the terrorist threat?
Presidents in the past have written executive orders or opinions that they have the authority to do warrantless searches. That authority has never been exercised before.
The administration's argument as to why keep it secret: "So that the terrorists wouldn't know they were being listened to." That argument is debateable.
On the Risen-Lichtblau NY Times story
"I thought it was a good story, but I didn't think it was going to be this big."
Russell Tice:
"I've kept this under my hat for a long time, but with the NY Times story, I felt that I could come forward."
"I talked to Eric & Jim [Lichtblau & Risen] about the NSA. We talked about technology, but I didn't reveal anything classified."
Senator Orrin Hatch:
There are some very intricate legal questions here and they're going to have to really look at this. He can see where people could be very upset under the law and think that the president might not have acted appropriately. The fact that they passed a FISA law in Congress, that should be very important.
Senator Dianne Feinstein:
Everyone wants any connection to Al Queda or terrorists to be investigated, but she doesn't think he has a plenary power. Senator Daschle said, "No." to adding the last minute section to spy inside the US. She can't understand why the administration didn't use one of the two post-unwarranted-search escape hatches in the FISA law.
The FISA court is secret. Nobody knows. Terrorists don't know. Why not use the FISA court?
Michael Isikoff:
What was told to the congressional leaders was extremely limited. Daschle told him he had received limited briefing by VP Cheney. There will be review, there will be hearings.
David Gergen:
Of course the NSA has to do surveillance. The question is how it's done. There ought to be some checks on how this is done. If the system is inadequate, why didn't Bush go back to congress?
He is suspicious, hearing any administration start talking about unlimited executive powers.
Russell Tice:
Mr. Tice wants to testify before Congress. Most of these programs are very beneficial to our country...but apparently we have very little oversight.
Senator Orrin Hatch:
Of course, some of the hearing sessions will be secret.
Senator Dianne Fienstien:
Al Gore raised a very real point. This isn't the first instance of a kind of arrogance of power. In late 2001 they passed an amendment to the National Security act, that wasn't followed either. Nobody knows how many people, who, how, what numbers, whether there's a database.
It's all in secret, no one knows.
Michael Isikoff:
He doesn't expect that the administration's witnesses will disclose much in public. The Intelligence Committee will meet in secret. AG Gonzlez said the program had been reviewed & approved by lawyers in the Justice Dept. Other opinions of the same attorneys, such as the torture memo, have been subsequently thrown out.
David Gergen:
Americans are legitimately concerned about their security.
As people understand what's at stake here.
Very soon it led to abuses ala Nixon.
Nixon tried to blackmail Coretta Scott King
Power can corrupt unless it's checked.
.
Senator Orrin Hatch:
We're living in an age that's like no other age.
We'll have to face terrorists all our lives.
Should we have some constraints? Yes.
The real issue is, what are we going to do as congress?
Are we going to make sure Americans' rights are protected or are we going to ignore it?
Feinstein:
This crosses party lines. People are concerned. The 4th amendment is involved. This isn't a war against the state. Are we going to have unsupervised, unwarranted, data collection and databases of that information for decades?
Yes, the president should protect us, but he should use the law whenever possible.
Senator Orrin Hatch:
There's an exception in the 4th amendment. The question is, what is reasonable.
Russell Tice:
When this first came out, he was angry. They removed his security clearance for psychological concerns, though NSA had quite recently determined him to be completely normal.
Michael Isikoff:
You don't ultimately know what the standard is they're using, for what triggers the unwarranted searches, so you have no way of knowing if there are abuses.
David Gergen:
He does believe that these hearings will be productive. The administration will be on guard, so there will be fewer incursions. He wonders whether the admin said, "The Hell with FISA.", specifically because they saw an opportunity to expand presidential authority.
I thought some interesting viewpoints were contrasted. Hope that was less painful to read than it was to code.
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Former Vice President Al Gore called on Congress and the public to resist what he called "a gross and excessive power grab" by the Bush administration amid the war on terrorism, declaring that "our Constitution is at risk."
Gore said the use of the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans without a court order shows that President Bush "has been breaking the law repeatedly and persistently."
"A president who breaks the law is a threat to the very structure of our government," he said.
Gore, Bush's Democratic opponent in the bitter 2000 election, spoke to the Liberty Coalition, which calls itself a "transpartisan" group concerned with civil liberty and privacy issues.
Bush has defended his use of the NSA to intercept international communications of people in the United States suspected of having links to terrorist groups, telling reporters the program is legal and necessary to fight terrorism. The president and other top officials argue that Congress gave him the power to act without the approval of a special panel of judges established by Congress under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.
Sen. Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has disputed that assertion.
Gore said lawmakers specifically refused to give Bush that power when they authorized the use of force after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Gore said the wiretaps -- combined with Bush's assertion of the power to hold American citizens indefinitely as "enemy combatants," the authorization of harsh treatment of prisoners and his use of signing statements to declare how he will interpret a law passed by Congress -- have "brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution."
Furious cabinet revolt as Blair gives green light for security services to spy on elected representatives By Francis Elliott, Whitehall Editor Published: 15 January 2006
Tony Blair is preparing to scrap a 40-year ban on tapping MPs' telephones, despite fierce Cabinet opposition, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
He is expected to formally announce to the Commons within weeks that MPs can no longer be sure that the security services and others will not intercept their communications.
Until now, successive administrations have pledged that there should be no tapping "whatsoever" of MPs' phones, and that they would be told if it was necessary to breach the ban.
But that convention - known as the Wilson Doctrine, after Harold Wilson, the prime minister who introduced it - is to be abandoned in an expansion of MI5 powers following the London bombings.
MPs should be treated in the same way as other citizens and will be given the same safeguards against wrongful tapping, the Prime Minister will say.
The decision provoked a furious row in the Cabinet just before Christmas, when the Secretary of State for Defence, John Reid, voiced his opposition.
His outburst surprised other ministers, since he is seen as one of Mr Blair's closest allies and not known for his support for civil liberties.
"Reid demanded to know why on earth we were going down this route," said one government colleague. "It was all the more surprising since you would have thought the MoD is one of the departments most in favour of increased surveillance powers."
A Downing Street spokesman last night said: "The recommendation has been received and will be considered in due course." Mr Blair was last night put on notice that any attempt to tap MPs' phones would be bitterly opposed in the Commons. Andrew Mackinlay, Labour MP for Thurrock, said it was a "hallmark of a civilised country" that its state did not spy on elected representatives.
"This goes to the heart of what is to have a free Parliament not some privilege enjoyed by MPs. Constituents, pressure groups and other organisations need to know for sure that they are talking to their elected representatives in complete confidence."
He is to press for the Commons' Committee on Standards and Privileges to urgently investigate the Downing Street plans to ditch the convention.
Professor Peter Hennessy, the Whitehall and constitutional expert, also called on MPs to question Mr Blair's intentions. "It seems pretty odd to me that they should be doing this," he said.
There has been a marked expansion of surveillance in Britain since 1997. New technology and new laws mean that Britons are among the most spied-on citizens on earth.
Sweeping new powers to snoop on emails, texts and other communications were included in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, while satellite technology offers multiple new surveillance opportunities for the secret state.
Mr Blair has confirmed at least three timesthat his government observed the Wilson Doctrine, most recently in 2003 when it became clear that MI5 had been bugging Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams, who has not taken his seat and so is not formally an MP.
Tony Blair is preparing to scrap a 40-year ban on tapping MPs' telephones, despite fierce Cabinet opposition, The Independent on Sunday can reveal.
He is expected to formally announce to the Commons within weeks that MPs can no longer be sure that the security services and others will not intercept their communications.
Until now, successive administrations have pledged that there should be no tapping "whatsoever" of MPs' phones, and that they would be told if it was necessary to breach the ban.
But that convention - known as the Wilson Doctrine, after Harold Wilson, the prime minister who introduced it - is to be abandoned in an expansion of MI5 powers following the London bombings.
MPs should be treated in the same way as other citizens and will be given the same safeguards against wrongful tapping, the Prime Minister will say.
The decision provoked a furious row in the Cabinet just before Christmas, when the Secretary of State for Defence, John Reid, voiced his opposition.
His outburst surprised other ministers, since he is seen as one of Mr Blair's closest allies and not known for his support for civil liberties.
"Reid demanded to know why on earth we were going down this route," said one government colleague. "It was all the more surprising since you would have thought the MoD is one of the departments most in favour of increased surveillance powers."
A Downing Street spokesman last night said: "The recommendation has been received and will be considered in due course." Mr Blair was last night put on notice that any attempt to tap MPs' phones would be bitterly opposed in the Commons. Andrew Mackinlay, Labour MP for Thurrock, said it was a "hallmark of a civilised country" that its state did not spy on elected representatives.
"This goes to the heart of what is to have a free Parliament not some privilege enjoyed by MPs. Constituents, pressure groups and other organisations need to know for sure that they are talking to their elected representatives in complete confidence."
He is to press for the Commons' Committee on Standards and Privileges to urgently investigate the Downing Street plans to ditch the convention.
Professor Peter Hennessy, the Whitehall and constitutional expert, also called on MPs to question Mr Blair's intentions. "It seems pretty odd to me that they should be doing this," he said.
There has been a marked expansion of surveillance in Britain since 1997. New technology and new laws mean that Britons are among the most spied-on citizens on earth.
Sweeping new powers to snoop on emails, texts and other communications were included in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, while satellite technology offers multiple new surveillance opportunities for the secret state.
Mr Blair has confirmed at least three timesthat his government observed the Wilson Doctrine, most recently in 2003 when it became clear that MI5 had been bugging Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams, who has not taken his seat and so is not formally an MP.
New Zogby Poll Shows Majority of Americans Support Impeaching Bush for Wiretapping
By a margin of 52% to 43%, Americans want Congress to consider impeaching President Bush if he wiretapped American citizens without a judge's approval, according to a new poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, a grassroots coalition that supports a Congressional investigation of President Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003.
The poll was conducted by Zogby International, the highly-regarded non-partisan polling company. The poll interviewed 1,216 U.S. adults from January 9-12.
The poll found that 52% agreed with the statement:
"If President Bush wiretapped American citizens without the approval of a judge, do you agree or disagree that Congress should consider holding him accountable through impeachment."
43% disagreed, and 6% said they didn't know or declined to answer. The poll has a +/- 2.9% margin of error.
"The American people are not buying Bush's outrageous claim that he has the power to wiretap American citizens without a warrant. Americans believe terrorism can be fought without turning our own government into Big Brother," said AfterDowningStreet.org
co-founder Bob Fertik.
Recently White House spokesman Scott McClellan cited a Rasmussen poll that found 64% believe the NSA "should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects." Of course, that is exactly what Congress authorized when it created the FISA courts to issue special expedited secret warrants for terrorism suspects. But Bush defied the FISA law and authorized warrantless wiretaps of Americans, which has outraged Americans to the point that a majority believe Congress should consider Bush's impeachment.
"Bush admits he ordered illegal warantless wiretapping, but says it began in response to 9/11 and was limited to a small number of calls to or from Al Qaeda," Fertik said. "But recent reports suggest wiretapping affected a much larger number of Americans, and a report in Friday's Truthout says the wiretapping began before 9/11."
"The upcoming Senate hearings on White House wiretapping could be as dramatic as the Watergate hearings in 1973. A majority of Americans have already believe Congress should look into grounds for impeachment, yet we have only seen the tip of the iceberg in the Corporate Media. If Bush ordered warrantless wiretapping long before the terrorist attack on 9/11, then Americans will realize that George Bush came into office determined to shred the Constitution and take away our rights," Fertik said.
Impeachment Supported by Majorities of Many Groups
Responses to the Zogby poll varied by political party affiliation: 66% of Democrats favored impeachment, as did 59% of Independents, and even 23% of Republicans. By ideology, impeachment was supported by Progressives (90%), Libertarians (71%), Liberals (65%), and Moderates (58%), but not by Conservatives (33%) or Very Conservatives (28%).
Responses also varied by age, sex, race, and religion. 74% of those 18-29 favored impeachment, 47% of those 31-49, 49% of those 50-64, and 40% of those over 65. 55% of women favored impeachment, compared to 49% of men. Among African Americans, 75% favored impeachment, as did 56% of Hispanics and 47% of whites. Majorities of Catholics, Jews, and Others favored impeachment, while 44% of Protestants and 38% of Born Again Christians did so.
Majorities favored impeachment in every region: the East (54%), South (53%) and West (52%), and Central states (50%). In large cities, 56% support impeachment; in small cities, 58%; in suburbs, 46%; in rural areas, 46%.
Support for Clinton Impeachment Was Much Lower
In August and September of 1998, 16 major polls asked about impeaching President Clinton (http://democrats.com/clinton-impeachment-polls). Only 36% supported hearings to consider impeachment, and only 26% supported actual impeachment and removal. Even so, the impeachment debate dominated the news for months, and the Republican Congress impeached Clinton despite overwhelming public opposition.
Passion for Impeachment is Major Unreported Story
The strong support for impeachment found in this poll is especially surprising because the views of impeachment supporters are entirely absent from the broadcast and print media, and can only be found on the Internet and in street protests. The lack of coverage of impeachment support is due in part to the fact that not a single Democrat in Congress has called for impeachment, despite considerable grassroots activism by groups like Democrats.com (
http://democrats.com/impeach).
The passion of impeachment supporters is directly responsible for the four polls commissioned by After Downing Street. After the Zogby poll in June, activists led by Democrats.com urged all of the major polling organizations to include an impeachment question in their upcoming polls. But none of the polling organizations were willing to do so for free, so on September 30, AfterDowningStreet.org posted a request for donations to fund paid polls (http://afterdowningstreet.org/polling). People responded with small donations (on average $27) which quickly added up to over $10,000. After Downing Street has spent a portion of that money on the Ipsos Poll and the two Zogby Polls.
Footnotes:
1. AfterDowningStreet.org is a rapidly growing coalition of veterans' groups, peace groups, and political activist groups that was created on May 26, 2005, following the publication of the Downing Street Memo in London's Sunday Times on May 1. The coalition is urging Congress to begin a formal investigation into whether President Bush committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war.
2. The Ipsos Public Affairs poll and the new Zogby poll results cited above refer to surveys of U.S. adults. The June 2005 Zogby results are from a survey of likely voters. The new Zogby poll produced results for both adults and likely voters:
1/06 Zogby: Adults and
Likely Voters
11/05 Zogby: Adults and Likely Voters.
10/05 Ipsos: Adults and definitions of regions.
6/05 Zogby: Likely Voters.
The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document.
The NSA's vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups.
In its "Transition 2001" report, the NSA said that the ever-changing world of global communication means that "American communication and targeted adversary communication will coexist."
"Make no mistake, NSA can and will perform its missions consistent with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws," the document says.
However, it adds that "senior leadership must understand that the NSA's mission will demand a 'powerful, permanent presence' on global telecommunications networks that host both 'protected' communications of Americans and the communications of adversaries the agency wants to target."
What had long been understood to be protocol in the event that the NSA spied on average Americans was that the agency would black out the identities of those individuals or immediately destroy the information.
But according to people who worked at the NSA as encryption specialists during this time, that's not what happened. On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law.
James Risen, author of the book State of War and credited with first breaking the story about the NSA's domestic surveillance operations, said President Bush personally authorized a change in the agency's long-standing policies shortly after he was sworn in in 2001.
"The president personally and directly authorized new operations, like the NSA's domestic surveillance program, that almost certainly would never have been approved under normal circumstances and that raised serious legal or political questions," Risen wrote in the book. "Because of the fevered climate created throughout the government by the president and his senior advisers, Bush sent signals of what he wanted done, without explicit presidential orders" and "the most ambitious got the message."
The NSA's domestic surveillance activities that began in early 2001 reached a boiling point shortly after 9/11, when senior administration officials and top intelligence officials asked the NSA to share that data with other intelligence officials who worked for the FBI and the CIA to hunt down terrorists that might be in the United States. However the NSA, on advice from its lawyers, destroyed the records, fearing the agency could be subjected to lawsuits by American citizens identified in the agency's raw intelligence reports.
The declassified report says that the "Director of the National Security Agency is obligated by law to keep Congress fully and currently formed of intelligence activities." But that didn't happen. When news of the NSA's clandestine domestic spying operation, which President Bush said he had authorized in 2002, was uncovered last month by the New York Times, Democratic and Republican members of Congress appeared outraged, claiming that they were never informed of the covert surveillance operation. It's unclear whether the executive order signed by Bush removes the NSA Director from his duty to brief members of Congress about the agency's intelligence gathering programs.
Eavesdropping on Americans required intelligence officials to obtain a surveillance warrant from a special court and show probable cause that the person they wanted to monitor was communicating with suspected terrorists overseas. But Bush said that the process for obtaining such warrants under the 1978 Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act was, at times, "cumbersome."
In a December 22, letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella wrote that the "President determined it was necessary following September 11 to create an early warning detection system. FISA could not have provided the speed and agility required for the early warning detection system."
However, what remains murky about that line of reasoning is that after 9/11, former Attorney General John Ashcroft undertook a full-fledged lobbying campaign to loosen the rules and the laws governing FISA to make it easier for the intelligence community to obtain warrants for wiretaps to spy on Americans who might have ties to terrorists. Since the legislative change, more than 4,000 surveillance warrants have been approved by the FISA court, leading many to wonder why Bush selectively chose to bypass the court for what he said were a select number of individuals.
More than a dozen legal scholars dispute Moschella's legal analysis, saying in a letter just sent to Congress that the White House failed to identify "any plausible legal authority for such surveillance."
"The program appears on its face to violate existing law," wrote the scholars of constitutional law, some of whom worked in various senior capacities in Republican and Democratic administrations, in an extraordinary letter to Congress that laid out, point by point, why the president is unauthorized to permit the NSA to spy on Americans and how he broke the law by approving it.
"Even conceding that the President in his role as Commander in Chief may generally collect 'signals intelligence' on the enemy abroad, Congress indisputably has authority to regulate electronic surveillance within the United States, as it has done in FISA," the letter states. "Where Congress has so regulated, the President can act in contravention of statute only if his authority is exclusive, that is, not subject to the check of statutory regulation. The DOJ letter pointedly does not make that extraordinary claim. The Supreme Court has never upheld warrantless wiretapping within the United States."
Additionally, "if the administration felt that FISA was insufficient, the proper course was to seek legislative amendment, as it did with other aspects of FISA in the Patriot Act, and as Congress expressly contemplated when it enacted the wartime wiretap provision in FISA," the letter continues. "One of the crucial features of a constitutional democracy is that it is always open to the President - or anyone else - to seek to change the law. But it is also beyond dispute that, in such a democracy, the President cannot simply violate criminal laws behind closed doors because he deems them obsolete or impracticable."
Jeffrey Smith, the former General Counsel for the CIA under the Clinton administration, also weighed in on the controversy Wednesday. Smith said he wants to testify at hearings that Bush overstepped his authority and broke the law. His own legal opinion on the spy program was included in a 14-page letter to the House Select Committee on Intelligence that said that President Bush does not have the legal authority to order the NSA to spy on American citizens, aides to Congressman John Conyers said Wednesday evening.
"It is not credible that the 2001 authorization to use force provides authority for the president to ignore the requirements of FISA," Smith wrote, adding that if President Bush's executive order authorizing a covert domestic surveillance operation is upheld as legal "it would be a dramatic expansion of presidential authority affecting the rights of our fellow citizens that undermines the checks and balances of our system, which lie at the very heart of the Constitution."
Still, one thing that appears to be indisputable is that the NSA surveillance began well before 9/11 and months before President Bush claims Congress gave him the power to use military force against terrorist threats, which Bush says is why he believed he had the legal right to bypass the judicial process.
According to the online magazine Slate, an unnamed official in the telecom industry said NSA's "efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a 'data-mining' operation, which might eventually cull 'millions' of individual calls and e-mails."
Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.
Part of the problem is that Bush won't reveal date of secret order. However, officials say US warrantless spying on Americans occurred before Bush "authorized" a secret program, perhaps under 1981 Reagan Executive Order. As stated in the Wash. Post on 1/4/06:
"Even before the White House formally authorized a secret program to spy on U.S. citizens without obtaining warrants, such eavesdropping was occurring and some of the information was being shared with the FBI, declassified correspondence and interviews with congressional and intelligence officials indicate."
This article cites senior administration official as saying the secret NSA program was authorized in October 2001. So, if warrantless spying on Americans occurred before Bush's order in October 2001, we are getting very close to prior to 9/11.
William Arkin noted that in the Spring 2001 (or prior to 9/11), NSA changed its method from gathering massive data to analyze to a method of hunting even more information to determine what should be collected.
This new method could have obtained warrantless information about Americans. So, perhaps Bush's secret order for the NSA spy plan at issue was partially designed to retroactively validate what NSA was doing prior to 9/11?
Who came on board as NSA Director in Mar 1999, and then promptly caused much uproar and disruption at the agency, according to this May 2005 Wayne Madsen report.
Hayden would have been the one who "lobbied Bush" to ignore 4th Amendment rules iby putting together that "Transition 2001" document.
I wonder what Michael Hayden's connections to Cheney/Rummy might be. Is there a crony connection here?
Michael Hayden
Michael Hayden, director of the National Security Agency has mislead Congress. He told a committee investigating the 9/11 attacks that any surveillance of persons in the United States was done consistent with FISA. From Hayden's 10/17/05 testimony:
GOSS: OK, my second question, then. General Hayden, you said something about bin Laden coming across the bridge, hypothetical, of course. But I take that to mean that if bin Laden did come there would be capabilities that we have that we can use elsewhere in the world that we cannot use in the United States of America. Is that correct?
HAYDEN: Not so much capabilities, but how agilely we could apply those capabilities. The person inside the United States becomes a U.S. person under the definition provided by the FISA Act.
GOSS: Well, lets go again, I don't want to get into details. I'm aware of the public nature of this meeting. But let's just suppose this sniper [in the United States] is somebody we wanted to catch very badly. Could we apply all our technologies and all our capabilities and all our know how against that person? Or would that person be considered to have protection as an American citizen?
HAYDEN: That person would have protections as what the law defines as a U.S. person. And I would have no authorities to pursue it.
Actually, Hayden was pursuing U.S. persons at the direction of the President outside of the FISA statute. Extended transcript:
8. So, to the first question: What did NSA know prior to September 11th? Sadly, NSA had no SIGINT suggesting that al-Qa'ida was specifically targeting New York and Washington, D.C., or even that it was planning an attack on U.S. soil. Indeed, NSA had no knowledge before September 11th that any of the attackers were in the United States. 9. I have briefed the committees on one area where our performance in retrospect could have been better. Ms. Hill referred to this in her September 20, 2002 testimony: "Unbeknownst to the CIA, another arm of the intelligence community, the NSA, had information associating Nawaf al-Hazmi with the Bin Laden network. NSA did not immediately disseminate that information, although it was in NSA's database." This was not some culturally based "failure to share."
OKAY. So If NSA/Bush was doing warrantless secret spying on people inside the US from early 2001 onward, and they were not spying on any of the Many well-known Al Qaeda people from the many watchlists who were inside the US during the first half of the year, of whom the hair-on-fire people like Richard Clarke, FBI Counter terror chief John O'Neill, and [pre-geldered] George Tenet, were running around and worried about greatly during the spring-summer 2001, then exactly who were the NSA-Bushies warrantlessly spying upon in pre-911 2001?
Remember the White House stonewalled on NSA intercepts during the Bolton confirmation hearings. I don't remember if there was anything clear about the timing of the intercepts Bolton got. Could it be that what the White House was trying to cover up was not only who they were spying on but also when? For that matter, the US Citizen names on the Bolton intercepts might very well disprove the administration claim that they only spied on people with al Quaida connections.
The National Security Agency used law enforcement agencies, including the Baltimore Police Department, to track members of a city anti-war group as they prepared for protests outside the sprawling Fort Meade facility, internal NSA documents show.
The target of the clandestine surveillance was the Baltimore Pledge of Resistance, a group loosely affiliated with the local chapter of the American Friends Service Committee, whose members include many veteran city peace activists with a history of nonviolent civil disobedience.
Under various names, the activists have staged protests at the NSA campus off the Baltimore-Washington Parkway every year since 1996.
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, members of the group say, their protests have come under increasing scrutiny by federal and local law enforcement officials working on behalf of the NSA.
An internal NSA e-mail, posted on two Internet sites this week, shows how operatives with the "Baltimore Intel Unit" provided a minute-by-minute account of Pledge of Resistances' preparations for a July 3, 2004, protest at Fort Meade. An attorney for the demonstrators said he obtained the document through the discovery process from NSA.
"****UPDATE: 11:55 HRS. S/A V------- ADVISED THE PROTESTORS LEFT 4600 YORK ROAD EN ROUTE TO THE NSA CAMPUS ... S/A V----- REPORTED FIVE OR SIX PEOPLE IN A BLUE VAN WITH BLACK BALLOONS, ANTI-WAR SIGNS AND A POSSIBLE HELIUM TANK," reported an internal NSA e-mail.
Later, those shadowing the peace group reported on their arrival at the NSA's Fort Meade headquarters.
"****UPDATE: 1300 HRS. THE SOC WAS ADVISED THE PROTESTORS WERE PROCEEDING TO THE AIRPLANE MEMORIAL WITH THREE HELIUM BALLOONS ATTACHED TO A BANNER THAT STATED "THOSE WHO EXCHANGE FREEDOM FOR SECURITY DESERVE IT, NEITHER WILL ULTIMATELY LOSE BOTH," the NSA's somewhat garbled account of the event reported.
(Angus Reid Global Scan) – Many adults in the United States reject permitting their federal administration to intercept domestic communications, according to a poll by CBS News. 68 per cent of respondents say they would not be willing to allow government agencies to monitor the telephone calls and e-mails of ordinary Americans on a regular basis.
On Dec. 19, U.S. president George W. Bush defended a secret domestic electronic surveillance program that includes the wiretapping of the telephone calls and e-mails of Americans suspected of having terrorist ties. The president’s remarks came in response to media reports that, since 2002, Bush has authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to operate this program without any judicial oversight.
Bush said the program is a vital tool in the war on terror and added that "the fact that we’re discussing this (…) is helping the enemy." The president also referred to the disclosure of the program’s existence to the media a "shameful act." 53 per cent of respondents believe giving the federal government more authority to use wiretaps would violate constitutional rights.
On Jan. 11, Bush said he would have no problem if an investigation on the program deals only with specific matters. "There will be a lot of hearings and talk about that, but that’s good for democracy—just so long as the hearings, as they explore whether or not I have the prerogative to make the decision I made doesn’t tell the enemy what we’re doing," said Bush. "See, that’s the danger."
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour. A 27-year veteran of the CIA’s analysis ranks, he is now on the steering group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
James Risen’s State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, may hold bigger secrets than the disclosure that President George W. Bush authorized warrantless eavesdropping on Americans.
Risen’s book also confirms the most damning element of the British Cabinet Office memos popularly called the “Downing Street memos;” namely, that “the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.” The result is that it is no longer credible to maintain that the failures in the Iraqi intelligence were the product of a broken intelligence community. The Bush administration deliberately fabricated the case against Iraq, lying to Congress and the American people along the way.
Risen, a senior reporter for The New York Times, reports that British Prime Minister Tony Blair had an urgent need in the summer of 2002 to get the equivalent of a “second opinion” regarding Bush’s plans for war in Iraq—insight independent of his own telephone conversations with the president and independent of what Blair was hearing from his own foreign office.
During his April 2002 visit to Crawford, Blair had gone out on a limb in pledging to support war on Iraq. The following months saw him getting nervous. So he chose what intelligence parlance calls a “back channel,” and sent the chief of British intelligence, Richard Dearlove, to Washington to sound out his counterpart: the garrulous CIA director George Tenet, who he knew to be very close to the president.
The highly revealing Downing Street memo contained the minutes of Dearlove's briefing of Blair and his top advisers upon his return from Washington on July 23. But what the memo left unanswered was the question of who gave Dearlove the confidence to say this to his prime minister:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on Friday he will testify in a Senate hearing to give the administration's legal justification for a secret domestic eavesdropping operation approved by
President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks.
News last month of the covert domestic spying program sparked an outcry by Democrats and Republicans, with many lawmakers and rights groups questioning whether it violates the U.S. Constitution.
"One of my responsibilities as attorney general is to explain some of what the administration is doing and the reasons for, the rationale for, what the administration is doing," Gonzales told reporters.
"The president has confirmed the existence of a highly classified program," he said, referring to the domestic eavesdropping program conducted by the National Security Agency. "Many parts of the program still remain classified."
Gonzales said he had agreed with Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, to testify in hearings on the domestic spying program.
Former CIA general counsel Jeff Smith has issued a memo to the House Intelligence Committee concluding that Authority for Use of Military Force did not give President George W. Bush the right to order domestic wiretaps without a court order.
In the memo, Smith discusses court precedent, as well as civil liberties outlined in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Smith further concludes that Bush's secondary argument, that he has authority under the constitution to order such wiretaps, is "seriously undermined" by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which allows for similar surveillance only with a warrant. He further characterizes a president's constitutional power while acting against an existing statute as being at its "lowest ebb".
I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return. Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), investigating the National Security Agency, 1975.
On January 1, the president—enraged at The New York Times' unruly exercise of the First Amendment to disclose his no-longer-secret authorization of warrant-less surveillance and data mining by the National Security Agency—accused the Times of causing "great harm" to national security.
In the same speech, to wounded troops at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Bush again insisted that "this is a limited program to prevent attacks on the United States of America, and I repeat— limited. . . . The NSA program is one that listens to a few numbers called from outside the United States of known Al Qaeda or affiliated people."
There is no way that Bush doesn't know that this is wholly untrue, because he insists that he himself repeatedly reviews what the NSA is accomplishing. Nonetheless, in the January 2 Times—which may soon be hauled into a Justice Department criminal investigation of the dread leak—there is this question for the president:
"Officials say that the NSA has conducted . . . data-mining operations on vast volumes of communications within the United States to identify terror suspects. To accomplish this, the agency had reached agreements with major American telecommunications companies to gain access to some of the country's biggest 'switches' carrying phone and e-mail traffic in and out of the country." (Emphasis added.)
The president's hollow self-justifications have, however, valuably drawn attention to the great harm that the NSA has been doing to the constitutional liberties of Americans for many years before he gave the ultra-covert agency even more license to subvert the Fourth Amendment in 2002. In the January 2, 2006, Washington Post, Ruth Marcus, going back over the records of Frank Church's Senate investigating committee, noted that the NSA, created by President Harry Truman in 1952, "had for years—unbeknownst to Congress—been using a 'watch list' of U.S. citizens and organizations in sorting through the foreign communications it intercepted. In addition, for three decades, from 1945 to 1975, telegraph companies had been turning over to the NSA copies of most telegrams sent from the United States to foreign countries.
...“Now, I – look, I understand people’s concerns about government eavesdropping,” Mr. Bush has said. “And I share those concerns, as well. So obviously I had to make the difficult decision between balancing civil liberties and, on a limited basis – and I mean limited basis – try to find out the intention of the enemy.”
Support for those who disagree with the president’s actions came recently from an unlikely source – former CIA general counsel Jeffrey H. Smith – in the form of a legal analysis requested by the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Jane Harman of California.
Although recognizing the president’s assertion that his power as commander in chief justifies warrantless surveillance, Smith called that case “weak” in light of FISA. Smith also wrote that the Congressional resolution authorizing military force against those who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks “does not, in my view, justify warrantless electronic surveillance of United States persons in the United States,” as the Bush Administration has also claimed.
“The president was correct in concluding that many of our laws were not adequate to deal with this new threat,” the onetime CIA lawyer concluded. “He was wrong, however, to conclude that he is therefore free to follow the laws he agrees with and ignore those with which he disagrees.”
Nonetheless, the president remains undeterred, as evidenced by his recent assertion that he has the right as commander in chief to violate the McCain amendment to legislation he had just signed, which banned torture and degrading treatment of detainees. But if the president is permitted to break laws on torture or wiretapping, then there is nothing to prevent him from breaking any law he wishes – in the name of security, of course. He effectively is placed above the rule of law entirely. And as “State of Fear” chillingly details, such sovereign immunity is nothing less than a recipe for dictatorship.
Is this then to be our life during wartime – a war that might never end? Is the threat to our security becoming so great that we need to suspend the democratic rule of law? And if so, where will it end? If the lessons of Peru’s “State of Fear” continue to go unheeded, we may all soon be living in the “United States of Fear.”
President Bush acknowledged Wednesday that congressional hearings into his domestic spying program were inevitable, but he said they would be "good for democracy" as long as they did not "tell the enemy what we're doing."
Even as he delivered a lengthy defense of the program, Bush stepped back from the seemingly strong opposition he expressed last month to a public investigation of his decision to allow the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on communications between people in the United States, including U.S. citizens, and those in other countries in suspected terrorism cases.
He said Wednesday that in approving the program, he had to balance civil liberties against the need to find out, "on a limited basis," what potential terrorists were plotting.
Critics have questioned whether it was legal to order a government agency to listen in on the conversations of people in the United States and read their e-mail without court approval.
On December 16, 2005, the New York Times had a riveting page one headline: "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers without the Courts." The article reported that, in 2002, President Bush signed an executive order directing the National Security Agency (NSA) to listen in on overseas phone calls to and from the United States - without approval from any court, even the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court.
After first refusing to discuss the report, President Bush went on the offensive - even threatening those who exposed the program with investigation. (The Times had held the story for more than a year, for reasons yet not fully explained).
It turns out that only eight members of Congress knew of the program. They were told shortly after it began in 2002, and they were, literally, sworn to secrecy. Congress as a whole was neither consulted nor asked to amend FISA to allow the surveillance the President wanted - even though it had overwhelmingly passed the USA Patriot Act after September 11.
In a December 22, 2005 letter to Congress, Assistant Attorney General William Moschella tried to defend Bush's actions to the literally hundreds of members who were left out of the loop. He contended that the legal foundation for the surveillance program derived from Congress's September 18, 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force in Afghanistan (AUMF); the President's inherent powers as Commander-in-Chief during "wartime"; and historical precedent for more liberally interpreting the Fourth Amendment's reasonableness requirement for warrantless searches in "wartime."
The magnitude of the current collection effort is unprecedented and indeed marks a shift in how the NSA spies in the United States. The current program seems to involve a remarkable level of cooperation with private companies and extraordinarily expansive data-mining of questionable legality. Before Bush authorized the NSA to expand its domestic snooping program after 9/11 in the secret executive order, the agency had to stay clear of the "protected communications" of American citizens or resident aliens unless supplied by a judge with a warrant. The program President Bush authorized reportedly allows the NSA to mine huge sets of domestic data for suspicious patterns, regardless of whether the source of the data is an American citizen or resident. The NSA needs the help of private companies to do this because commercial broadband now carries so many communications. In an earlier age, the NSA could pick up the bulk of what it needed by tapping into satellite or microwave transmissions. "Now," as the agency noted in a transition document prepared for the incoming Bush administration in December 2000, "communications are mostly digital, carry billions of bits of data, and contain voice, data and multimedia. They are dynamically routed, globally networked and pass over traditional communications means such as microwave or satellite less and less."
The agency used to search the transmissions it monitors for key words, such as names and phone numbers, which are supplied by other intelligence agencies that want to track certain individuals. But now the NSA appears to be vacuuming up all data, generally without a particular phone line, name, or e-mail address as a target. Reportedly, the agency is analyzing the length of a call, the time it was placed, and the origin and destination of electronic transmissions. Those details would be crucial in mining the data for patterns—according to the officials the Times cited, the goal of the NSA's eavesdropping system.
If you were Christmas shopping on December 19, you may have missed an important press conference. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Deputy Director of National Intelligence Gen. Mike Hayden answered questions about eavesdropping on Americans by the National Security Agency, which Hayden directed from 1999 to 2005, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). More Kabuki dance than press conference, the event was not given much play in the media. However, the implications for privacy-and for our constitutional system of checks and balances-are immense. We do well to explore those implications.
As long as he read from his script, Attorney General Gonzales did just fine with the press on Dec. 19. He conceded that FISA requires a court order to authorize the surveillance the president ordered NSA to undertake. But then he hammered home the administration's "legal analysis;" namely, the twin argument that Congress' post 9/11 authorization of force and the president's power as commander in chief trump the legal constraints of FISA.
Spilling the Beans
When the reporters' questions began, Gonzales faltered and unwittingly got down to the crux of the matter. Asked why the administration decided to flout rather than amend FISA, Gonzales said:
"We have had discussions with Congress...as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible."
So they went ahead with the new eavesdropping program anyway.
Gen. Hayden's remarks were equally intriguing: He conceded that the special program authorized by the president was "more aggressive than would be traditionally available under FISA," but stressed repeatedly that the new program deals only with international calls for short periods of time. In other words, Hayden implied, U.S. citizens are monitored only sometimes-and just a little, so we are dealing with tiny incompatibilities with the FISA law, and, besides, the president has said he has the authority anyway.
FISA Flexible
Hayden and Gonzales both stressed the need for "speed and agility." But, as Lyndon Johnson was fond of saying, "That dog won't hunt." The FISA law contains intentionally flexible provisions designed to provide speed and agility in expediting emergency requests. The law grants the attorney general enormous power and discretion to authorize secret "emergency" electronic surveillance and physical searches for up to 72 hours, before any court order is granted. No court order at all is required if the surveillance is terminated before the 72-hour period ends. The FISA court itself may be the most expensive rubber stamp in government. Between 1978 and 2002, the court approved almost every one of the 15,000 search warrant requests, and it continues to approve 99 percent of requests.
So why did the Bush administration order NSA to skirt the FISA law? Could it be because it was carefully crafted not only to give government wide latitude to move quickly, but also to protect citizens' Fourth Amendment rights to freedom from illegal search and seizure? This remains the $64 question. All the likely answers are deeply troubling.
Is it Simply Power-Grab and Chutzpah? ...
The most cynical and, I fear, the most persuasive answer can be gleaned from Vice President Cheney's recent open assertion-supported, no doubt, by a stack of in-house legal opinions, that in war time the president "needs to have his powers unimpaired." As noted above, on Dec. 19, Gonzalez invoked the "inherent authority under the Constitution" of the commander-in-chief, as well as the equally ludicrous claim that Congress' authorization of war after 9/11 trumps FISA-a claim that even the regime-friendly Washington Post has termed "impossible to believe."
Ludicrous, but not funny. These extreme views are the same ones that underpin the president's decision to flout international and U.S. criminal law by approving practices like torture, until now almost universally banned by civilized societies. The answer may be simple-"imperial hubris," one might call it. And if-as seems to be the case-senior leaders like Colin Powell meekly acquiesce in torture and Gen. Mike Hayden in illegal eavesdropping, shame on them. This would merely show, once again, that absolute power truly does corrupt absolutely-indeed, that even closeness to absolute power can.
Elizabeth Holtzman, The Nation
January 11, 2006 (January 30, 2006 issue)
...But it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)--and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws--that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate.
As a matter of constitutional law, these and other misdeeds constitute grounds for the impeachment of President Bush. A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law--and repeatedly violates the law--thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors, the constitutional standard for impeachment and removal from office. A high crime or misdemeanor is an archaic term that means a serious abuse of power, whether or not it is also a crime, that endangers our constitutional system of government.
The framers of our Constitution feared executive power run amok and provided the remedy of impeachment to protect against it. While impeachment is a last resort, and must never be lightly undertaken (a principle ignored during the proceedings against President Bill Clinton), neither can Congress shirk its responsibility to use that tool to safeguard our democracy. No President can be permitted to commit high crimes and misdemeanors with impunity.
But impeachment and removal from office will not happen unless the American people are convinced of its necessity after a full and fair inquiry into the facts and law is conducted. That inquiry must commence now.
Written by 14 former government officials and scholars of Constitutional Law. The signers - listed in the letter -- include the nation's leading constitutional law scholars, many of them former Justice Department attorneys and presidential advisors, and even a former FBI Director and federal judge. Interested readers may also want to consult several recent Findlaw columns that have addressed the warrantless surveillance issue: John Dean's column compared the Bush program with Nixon's wiretapping; Edward Lazarus's columns discussed the surveillance program, and discussed the powers of the Commander-in-Chief; and Jennifer Van Bergen's column commented on the Administration's invocation of the "Unitary Executive" theory.
We are scholars of constitutional law and former government officials. We write in our individual capacities as citizens concerned by the Bush administration's National Security Agency domestic spying program, as reported in The New York Times, and in particular to respond to the Justice Department's December 22, 2005, letter to the majority and minority leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees setting forth the administration's defense of the program.[1] Although the program's secrecy prevents us from being privy to all of its details, the Justice Department's defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law.
The basic legal question here is not new. In 1978, after an extensive investigation of the privacy violations associated with foreign intelligence surveillance programs, Congress and the President enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Pub. L. 95-511, 92 Stat. 1783. FISA comprehensively regulates electronic surveillance within the United States, striking a careful balance between protecting civil liberties and preserving the "vitally important government purpose" of obtaining valuable intelligence in order to safeguard national security. S. Rep. No. 95-604, pt. 1, at 9 (1977).
With minor exceptions, FISA authorizes electronic surveillance only upon certain specified showings, and only if approved by a court. The statute specifically allows for warrantless wartime domestic electronic surveillance—but only for the first fifteen days of a war. 50 U.S.C. § 1811. It makes criminal any electronic surveillance not authorized by statute, id. § 1809; and it expressly establishes FISA and specified provisions of the federal criminal code (which govern wiretaps for criminal investigation) as the "exclusive means by which electronic surveillance...may be conducted," 18 U.S.C. § 2511(2)(f) (emphasis added).[2]
The Department of Justice concedes that the NSA program was not authorized by any of the above provisions. It maintains, however, that the program did not violate existing law because Congress implicitly authorized the NSA program when it enacted the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against al-Qaeda, Pub. L. No. 107-40, 115 Stat. 224 (2001). But the AUMF cannot reasonably be construed to implicitly authorize warrantless electronic surveillance in the United States during wartime, where Congress has expressly and specifically addressed that precise question in FISA and limited any such warrantless surveillance to the first fifteen days of war.
The DOJ also invokes the President's inherent constitutional authority as Commander in Chief to collect "signals intelligence" targeted at the enemy, and maintains that construing FISA to prohibit the President's actions would raise constitutional questions. But even conceding that the President in his role as Commander in Chief may generally collect "signals intelligence" on the enemy abroad, Congress indisputably has authority to regulate electronic surveillance within the United States, as it has done in FISA. Where Congress has so regulated, the President can act in contravention of statute only if his authority is exclusive, that is, not subject to the check of statutory regulation. The DOJ letter pointedly does not make that extraordinary claim.
Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the NSA, alleges secret operations were conducted in ways that he believes violated the law. (ABC News) January 11 - 2006
By BRIAN ROSS
Jan 10, 2006--Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet.
For 20 years, Tice worked in the shadows as he helped the United States spy on other people's conversations around the world.
"I specialized in what's called special access programs," Tice said of his job. "We called them 'black world' programs and operations."
But now, Tice tells ABC News that some of those secret "black world" operations run by the NSA were operated in ways that he believes violated the law. He is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the NSA in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.
"The mentality was we need to get these guys, and we're going to do whatever it takes to get them," he said.
Tracking Calls
Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use.
"If you picked the word 'jihad' out of a conversation," Tice said, "the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing."
According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect's phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.
Tice Admits Being a Source for The New York Times
President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.
But Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.
"That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said.
The same day The New York Times broke the story of the NSA eavesdropping without warrants, Tice surfaced as a whistleblower in the agency. He told ABC News that he was a source for the Times' reporters. But Tice maintains that his conscience is clear.
"As far as I'm concerned, as long as I don't say anything that's classified, I'm not worried," he said. "We need to clean up the intelligence community. We've had abuses, and they need to be addressed."
The NSA revoked Tice's security clearance in May of last year based on what it called psychological concerns and later dismissed him. Tice calls that bunk and says that's the way the NSA deals with troublemakers and whistleblowers. Today the NSA said it had "no information to provide."
ABC News' Vic Walter and Avni Patel contributed to this report.
I got a phone call last night from a friend wondering why this story from ABC News wasn't getting more play. It reads in part:
President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.
But [longtime National Security Agency insider Russell] Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.
"That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said.
The same day The New York Times broke the story of the NSA eavesdropping without warrants, Tice surfaced as a whistleblower in the agency. He told ABC News that he was a source for the Times' reporters.
Tice was let go from the NSA last year. ABC News writes that he "is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the NSA in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists."
Parts of this story has been around for a little while – On Jan. 5, The Washington Times noted that Tice wanted to testify before Congress, based on letters written by Tice from Dec. 16th, the same day the New York Times broke the spy story. But questions about Russell Tice's credibility are now taking center stage, as is so often the case in these kinds of stories.
When Tice was fired last May, Rebecca Carr of Cox News service tried to connect the dots. "The National Security Agency fired a high level intelligence official just days after he publicly urged Congress to pass stronger protections for federal whistleblowers facing retaliation," she wrote. It wasn't a clear cut case of whistleblower retaliation, however, as "Tice has been at the odds with the agency since he reported suspicions that a female co-worker at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was a spy for the People's Republic of China."
(I guess so: "In June, 2003, the agency suspended his security clearances and ordered him to maintain the agency's vehicles by pumping gas and cleaning them. Last month, they ordered him to unload furniture at its warehouses.")
This is where it gets weird – or weirder, anyway: The NSA ordered Tice to undergo an unscheduled psychological evaluation. There, a "Defense Department psychologist concluded that Tice suffered from psychotic paranoia." Tice later wrote that he "did this even though he admitted that I did not show any of the normal indications of someone suffering from paranoia." (There have been documented cases where government whistleblowers or troublemakers have been intimidated or persecuted through forced psychological testing.)
James Risen, the Times reporter who broke the spy story, has been making the media rounds lauding his sources – including, it follows, Tice. He told Katie Couric:
Well, you know, I think this was the most classic whistleblower case I've ever seen where people--you know, in--in a lot of stories people have mixed motives for why they talk to reporters. Some--some people--in some stories there's a turf battle, and they're losing out in the turf battle, or whatever. In this case--I've been a reporter for about 25 years, this was the purest case of a whistle--of--of whistleblowers coming forward, people who truly believed that there was something wrong going on in the government, and they were motivated, I believe, by the purest of reasons.
In light of all this, conservative bloggers are taking shots at Tice and Risen's story. Noting that "Russ Tice is a former NSA employee who was dismissed when a psychiatric evaluation found him to be mentally unbalanced," Stephen Spruiell of National Review Online excerpts an earlier post in which he wrote, "If Tice turns out to be one of the NY Times' anonymous sources for its NSA stories, didn't the Times readers deserve to know that its information came from a potentially unbalanced ex-employee with an ax to grind?"
Last night, ABC led its evening newscast with an interview with Tice from Brian Ross. "Three times ABC championed the man as a “whistleblower,” never once suggesting less pure motives, and Ross didn’t raise any questions about damage the leak may have caused," wrote Brent Baker at Newsbusters.
Expect Tice's credibility to become an issue in the coming months – even Kos writes "I don't know if the guy is credible, but Congress needs to give the guy a listen." Risen had a number of sources for his piece beyond Tice, but it's likely that those who disagree with his conclusions and the criticisms of the government stemming from the Times story will go hard after him. Here's a possible preview of what to expect, from Blackfive: "Russell Tice is a disloyal swine who should have kept quiet and remembered that the New York Times is not a government agency and certainly not the place to report your concerns about a classified program helping us avoid more terrorist attacks in the US."
A former employee of the National Security Agency has admitted to being a source for The New York Times' recent stories on the government's secret domestic spying program and he told ABC News on Tuesday that some of the eavesdropping
undertaken by the organization may have been illegal.
The news broke on the same day that the NSA's inspector general announced that he is opening an investigation into the organization's actions, which were repeatedly authorized by President Bush (see "Bush Gave U.S. Agency Authorization To Spy On Americans").
Twenty-year NSA veteran Russell Tice told ABC News that the secret spying operations by the organization were carried out in a manner he believes is illegal, and that he's willing to tell Congress everything he knows. Tice, who said he worked in the Special Access--or "black world"--Programs and Operations unit, explained that following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the Defense Department and NSA dramatically ramped up efforts to thwart terrorism.
"The mentality was, 'We need to get these guys, and we're going to do whatever it takes to get them,' " Tice told ABC. Though President Bush has defended his orders allowing the NSA to eavesdrop on the e-mails and phone conversations from what he described as a small number of Americans with known ties to al Qaeda without obtaining proper warrants, Tice said the number of Americans who might have been subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if analysts used the full range of the secret program. "That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted or placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said.
This is just too rich. John C. Yoo, professor of law and architect of Bush's torture AND wiretapping justifications, wrote an article in "Inquiries," a publication of Hanover College (Indiana) that was obviously penned before the wiretapping story broke. In it, he explains why the Patriot Act is constitutional BECAUSE IT REQUIRES COMPLIANCE WITH FISA. Read below for more.
In "The Patriot Act Is Constitutional", Inquiries, Volume 6, Number 2, The Center for Free Inquiry, Hanover College, Hanover, Indiana, (http://cfi.hanover.edu) he wrote the following (heavily excerpted):
It is true that our nation has a system of secret courts, which use secret evidence presented in closed, classified hearings before federal judges to grant secret warrants. ...
FISA created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), made up of federal trial judges drawn from around the country, which may issue warrants to conduct a search for foreign intelligence information. ...
FISA requires a standard of proof for a warrant that is generally lower than that required for a normal criminal warrant. ... In the FISA context, the government need only show that the target is an agent of a foreign power, even if there is no evidence at the time that the target is breaking the law. ...
FISA is the primary method by which the U.S. government conducts surveillance and searches of domestic targets suspected of involvement in international terrorism. No court has ever found FISA to be unconstitutional.
I have to stop here for a second in wonder- not only is this utter B.S., but he knows it, since he wrote the justification for surveillance OUTSIDE of FISA. Okay, back to the article.
While the Patriot Act builds upon FISA, it creates no revolutionary change in the basic framework that has operated since 1978. ...
The Acts most controversial provisions adapt FISA to the modern challenges posed by al-Qaeda-style terrorism. ...
Much of the Patriot Act contains common-sense adjustment that modernize existing laws like FISA to meet this new threat. ... The Patriot Act enabled FISA warrants to allow for continuing surveillance of a terrorist target even if the terrorist suspect switches communication devices and methods. ...
The Patriot Act changed the warrant standard from "primary purpose" to "significant purpose" in order to eliminate the wall of separation between foreign threats and domestic crimes, and to allow law enforcement to be used as a weapon against terrorism. Civil libertarians would have us believe that this allows intelligence agents to roam freely through the country. Nothing could be further from the truth Under the law as it existed both before and after the Patriot Act, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is forbidden from carrying out intelligence activities within the United States. That Patriot Act did nothing to change that. The Patriot Act represents a modest retrenchment from an overcautious interpretation of FISA, but nothing like the practice of executing warrantless searches without judicial supervision, as occurred before 1978.
Yes, John C. Yoo really did write this. Fun, huh? Notice the sleight of hand, where he says 'civil libertarians are worried about intelligence agents, but then talks only about the CIA, leaving out the NSA, which he knew at the time was doing exactly that. But of course, the money quote is the part about the NOT permitting warrantless searches, like before 1978. Okay, on with the show.
In fact, Section 215 [FISA] offers more protection than was previously afforded under the old law. ... Section 215, unlike grand juries, requires prior review of the demand by a federal judge. The Patriot Act actually raises the procedural protections when the government demands such information.
I did not see this anywhere else, probably because this is a small-scale publication received primarily by alumni (I'm not one, but I work with a bunch). It seems rather explosive to me, given that the bad guys have been trotting Yoo out as their constitutional scholar to justify warrantless surveillance, that he wrote a rather long article claiming exactly the opposite.
The president has been cavalier about the profound issues embedded in his radical makeover of America. Perhaps he doesn’t understand them. As the controversy grew over the warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens by the National Security Agency, Mr. Bush, apparently annoyed, said at a press conference, “The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy.”
Well, Mr. President, one of the great things about democracy American style is that important national issues are always subject to a robust national discussion. And few things are more important than making sure that a president with a demonstrated tendency to abuse the powers of his office is not allowed to lay the foundation for the systematic surveillance of the American people.
For a president - any president - to O.K. eavesdropping on U.S. citizens on American soil without a warrant is an abomination. First, it’s illegal - and for very good reasons. Spying on the populace is a giant step toward totalitarianism. In the worst-case scenario, it’s the nightmare of Soviet-style surveillance.
Related to that is the all-important matter of the separation of powers, which is the absolutely crucial cornerstone of our form of government - our bulwark against tyranny. An elaborate system of checks and balances (you need a warrant from a court to wiretap, for example) prevents the concentration of too much power in any one branch, or any one person. Get rid of the checks and balances and you’ve gotten rid of the United States as we’ve known it.
If President Bush wants to spy on Americans, let him follow the law and get a warrant. He’s the president, not the king. The president cannot simply do as he pleases. Richard Nixon unleashed the dogs of domestic surveillance in the 1970’s, and that played a major role in the constitutional crisis that traumatized the nation and led to the collapse of his presidency.
Nixon was out of control, so Congress and the courts stepped in. Threatened with impeachment, he resigned his office and left town. Checks and balances.
President Bush argues that the enemies of the United States are so evil and so devious that he is justified in throwing off the legal constraints that might have bound previous presidents - including such important constraints as the ban on warrantless eavesdropping contained in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
If a president thinks a law should be changed, he can go to the American people via Congress and seek such a change. This president gave the back of his hand to FISA, deciding in secret to ignore it.
In doing that, Mr. Bush essentially declared that the checks and balances do not apply to him, that he is above the law, that he knows better than the likes of Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton et al.
In doing that, he aligned himself instead with Richard Nixon, who had his own notion of the separation of powers. That notion was best expressed in Nixon’s chilling comment:
“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
Not since Watergate has the question of presidential power been as salient as it is today. The recent revelation that President George W. Bush ordered secret wiretaps in the United States without judicial approval has set off the latest round of arguments over what the president can and cannot do in the name of his office. Over the past few years, the war on terror has led to the use of executive orders to authorize renditions and the detention of enemy combatants without trial - for which the Bush administration has been called to account by our European allies. The treatment of detainees has also given rise to concerns in Congress about the prerogatives of the chief executive: both houses recently voted to limit the president's authority to employ C.I.A. or other executive agents to engage in cruel and inhumane interrogations. The limits of presidential power will almost surely be a major topic of discussion during Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, which are scheduled to begin this week.
The stakes of the debate could hardly be higher: nothing is more basic to the operation of a constitutional government than the way it allocates power. Yet in an important sense, the debate is already long over. By historical standards, even the Bush administration's critics subscribe to the idea of a pre-eminent president. Administrative agencies at the president's command are widely understood to be responsible for everything from disaster relief to drug approval to imposing clean-air standards; and the president can unleash shock and awe on his own initiative. Such "presidentialism" seems completely normal to most Americans, since it is the only arrangement most of us have ever known.
For better or worse, though, this is not the system envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. The framers meant for the legislative branch to be the most important actor in the federal government: Congress was to make the laws and the president was empowered only to execute them. The very essence of a republic was that it would be governed through a deliberative legislature, composed carefully to reflect both popular will and elite limits on that will. The framers would no sooner have been governed by a democratically elected president than by a king who got his job through royal succession.
The transformation of the United States from a traditional republic to a democratic nation run in large measure by a single executive took a couple of hundred years. Constitutional evolution, like its counterpart in the natural world, has occurred sometimes gradually and sometimes in catastrophic jolts, like those brought about by war or economic crisis. The process has not been entirely linear: presidential power grabs have often been followed by a Congressional backlash, as in the wake of Richard Nixon's presidency. But the overall winner has unquestionably been the president, who has reached heights of power that the framers would scarcely have imagined. The modern presidency, as expressed in the policies of the administration of George W. Bush, provides the strongest piece of evidence that we are governed by a fundamentally different Constitution from that of the framers. While any constitution must evolve over time to meet new circumstances and challenges, there is reason to think that, when it comes to presidential power over national security, the latest developments have gone too far.
The rise of the presidency began with the Louisiana Purchase, which in 1803 doubled the landmass of the United States. History taught the framers that, just as Rome changed from republic to empire with conquest of new lands, territorial acquisition would lead to the centralization of political power. Sure enough, Thomas Jefferson's decision to buy the territory without seeking a constitutional amendment or advance Congressional approval amounted to a huge expansion of presidential authority. Jefferson entered office as a skeptic of the national government's power and even privately suggested that the purchase was unconstitutional. In overcoming his own republican instincts and arranging the purchase secretly, he demonstrated how the office of the presidency would come to serve its own interests, swaying the men holding it to strengthen not simply their own authority but also that of the institution itself.
Three decades later, Andrew Jackson's presidency marked another leap forward in presidential power. His contribution was his claim to represent the country, in its entirety, more directly and democratically than the congeries of local politicians who made up Congress. This rhetorical stance, coupled with the expansion of voting rights to white men without property, gave him the political muscle to veto the national bank and stand up to Congress in the name of the common men who had voted for him.
By the middle of the 19th century, with the admission to the Union of Florida, Texas and California, the United States became a continental empire. Such an empire called for an "imperial presidency," as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. suggested in his classic 1973 book of the same name. With the onset of the Civil War, the threat to the nascent empire led Abraham Lincoln to govern without Congress and to suspend access to the courts. When in 1898 William McKinley conquered the Philippines and chose to rule it, the imperial metaphor became still more apt: the United States had become, for the first time, the proprietor of whole nations whose peoples would never vote in its elections and whose governors reported directly to the president.
All Things Considered, December 23, 2005 · A newly released set of documents from Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito's years at the Justice Department contains his recommendations that top executive branch officials have full immunity when they order domestic wiretaps in violation of the law. Other documents among the 700 pages reveal a restrictive position on racial discrimination.
Daschle Says Congress Did Not Approve U.S. Wiretaps
All Things Considered, December 23, 2005 · The White House says Congress granted it authority to wiretap in the United States without a warrant. Not so, says a Washington Post op-ed written by former Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.
Deciphering the NSA's New Wiretapping Motivations
Morning Edition, December 30, 2005 · Ever since The New York Times revealed that a National Security Agency program was wiretapping U.S. citizens on an order from the president, experts around the country have been working to determine exactly what the secret program was.
The primary mystery is why the government would need to go around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Timothy Naftali, an expert in the history of intelligence and spying, searched the public record on the NSA for clues.
This morning, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) added his name to the growing list of conservatives who have expressed disapproval of Bush’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program, further undermining the right-wing spin that the only critics of the program are liberals. On ABC’s This Week:
STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you confident that the administration has acted lawfully in this case?
BROWNBACK: I think we need to hold hearings on it and we’re going to. Both in the intelligence committee, there will be closed hearings and then the judiciary committee will have open hearings.
I think we need to look at this case and this issue. I am troubled by what the basis for the grounds that the administration says that they did these on, the legal basis, and I think we need to look at that far more broadly and understand it a great deal.
I think this is something that bears looking into and us to be able to establish a policy within constitutional frameworks of what a president can or cannot do.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You don’t think the 9/11 resolution gave the president the authority for this program?
BROWNBACK: It didn’t, in my vote. I voted for that resolution. That was a week after 9/11. There was nothing you were going to do to stop us from going to war in Afghanistan, but there was no discussion in anything that I was around that that gave the president a broad surveillance authority with that resolution.
This undeniable reality leaves us with only one logical conclusion: Bush's secret spy program is designed for activities not covered by FISA's copious security blanket. It is now apparent that these activities include using the vast powers of federal, state and local governments to spy on the Bush Administration's perceived political "enemies" – a vast group, given that the Bushist definition of an "enemy" is anyone who opposes any of their policies. (The Bushists don't have "opponents," in the traditional sense – honorable rivals in the give and take and compromises of ordinary politics ; like all radical extremists, they have only "enemies" who must be "destroyed.")
journalistic – will, in the end, countenance this high crime, just as they have countenanced the horrific crimes of mass murder and international aggression in Iraq. Bush has called the Establishment's bluff – and whether this was an act of cool cunning by a high-riding tyrant or, as 
The nation's electronic intelligence agency warned President Bush in 2001 that monitoring U.S. adversaries would require a "permanent presence" on networks that also carry Americans' messages that are protected from government eavesdropping.
by Ari Shapiro 
