Ah…credibility, the tragically jealous mistress that she is, has just informed the Bush Administration that their indescretion(s) from early 2001 produced a child. As anti-abortion as this man is, the question now is whether or not he’ll attempt to change course and propose authorizing elimination in the 6th trimester. National security after all, so crucial to our survival, with enemies all around sporting not only more money, but larger militaries as well, it should be obvious to everyone why Bush launched his illegal domestic wiretapping PRIOR TO 9/11. Of course, from the ranch he deemed it necessary to get serious about terrorism. Between bike rides and photo ops, he came up with the idea of somehow turning America into a police state. Bravo! Constitution be damned, we elected a KING in 2000, whether we like it or not!
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.”
Sock it to meeee?!?!
Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | PerspectiveFriday 13 January 2006
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.”
Chris,
Sorry guy but this is old news. Seems this began in the 90’s under that so non-corupt Clinton administration.
Fair is fair … if you want to cruicfy Bush for this you should also take down Clinton. The difference between the two cases? Clinton wire tapped and intercepted emailsfor … well everyone. Bush, from what I read in the article was after terrorists. Iknowyou will probably correct men this as Bush is evil and Clinton is well … I willlet you fill that in with what ever you want. Corruption is something all administrations are familar with especially Clinton … but do not get me started on that.
I am surprised you did not know about this … Oh wait … Sorry I forgot just like the NYT it does not get press unless it is anti Bush. Duhhhh What was I thinking?
The srtoy is here:
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5150
“Unnamed officials” makes me suspicious!
Well, I felt that since it was Slate.com, a very reputable outfit, the last paragraph was reliable. After the NYTimes and their WMD reporting pre-Iraq War, I’m w/ you Paul, it does raise more eyebrows than it might have in the past.
As for Clinton…now, Republicans spent over a 100 million dollars impeaching him over a blowjob. Don’t you think that if his actions were so illegal when it came to wiretapping, the GOP would have jumped all over it?
Think about the 90s, and how much time was eaten up in the newscycle month after month after year after year with Monica Lewinski this and that…if there was ANY blood in the water, those sharks were swarming.
I don’t doubt for a second that if Clinton broke the law with his wiretapping, he’d have been draged over the coals for it. But let me read that link and revisit this.
Read it. My opinion after reading both is Clinton spied on everyone, for no apparent reason. Bush was at least targeting terrorists.
The sensational headline to this post creates an impression evenefore reading it. Like the NYT you have the ability to make more out of a story than is really there.
This link is very damaging to the NYT and borderline treason. Forgive me for calling you and them and anyone else a traitor but I have my reasons. If the shoe fits … well you know the rest.
http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/1184
more here:
http://astuteblogger.blogspot.com/2006/01/has-nytimes-nsa-leak-led-to-surge-in.html
There are more links but you get the point. When the news stops neing the news andbegins trying to influence public debate is abd enough. But thisgoes beyond even that.
it could earn some people jail time. And it should. Treason or not??
Frodo
Frodo: “Clinton wire tapped and intercepted emailsfor … well everyone. Bush, from what I read in the article was after terrorists.”
This is the contention, and we’ll get here eventually. First though, I want to break down the link you provided:
Misquote based on the article he linked to. This one:
Lawmakers “question” whether it could be used to monitor Americans.
Solid reporting, all facts. Congress is checking into whether Echelon is overstepping their authority. No evidence is being presented that they already had, but the posibility is what they’re looking into…whether there are safety measures in places to ensure it doesn’t happen.
Just like I said.
I agree with Barr, but consider for a moment what Republicans are saying about the secrecy of Bush’s programs. This isn’t what they’re saying now!
Here’s where American Thinker twists meaning for his own purposes:
This isn’t a sign of bias. It’s a sign of reporting on fact. Check the polls and the rhetoric from both sides on this issue here…Frodo, would you argue that it’s a necessity to wiretap drug dealers, terrorists and spies?
What the paragraph says is that for the right reasons, few would dispute the program is necessary – as a setup for the point that if it’s used improperly, that’s wrong, and that’s what Congress is looking to make sure of.
So American Thinker mischaracterizes what the Times article was saying. This wasn’t an editorial written by an editor…this was a news piece, reporting on congress checking the executive. There’s no bias here. The program was LEGAL. Congress was looking into whether or not the LEGAL program was engaging in illegal activity, or if the posibility of that happening due to lax procedural, command and control issues.
I’m breaking for a moment, have to get back to parenting…I’ll break down the rest of it when I return.
I’ve read the rest of it, and Echelon is the program in question. It’s legal in that it scans for keywords like ‘bomb’ and segregates those calls for further analysis.
Once it’s in the analyst’s hands, they can mistakenly label someone when a hit is not followed through on appropriately.
Comparing Echelon with Bush’s program is off-base. Under the guise of Echelon, corruption ‘could’ take place.
With Echelon being legal, what we’re after here is ‘illegal wiretaping’. Which equals the targeting of an individual without a warrant. We’re talking apples and oranges here Frodo.
While I’m sure corruption did occur at times concerning Echelon…who, what, where, when and how? What did the Justice Dept. do about it? What did Congress do about it (the full GOP Congress mind you, the one that impeached Clinton over a blowjob)?
In Bush’s case, we know that he purposely disregarded the warrant process. What did Clinton DO to break the law in terms of his intelligence programs? Because Bush actually did break the law.
Right now the discussion isn’t whether he broke the law or not, that’s settled. It’s whether the law is moot, or too cumbersome to be followed. Comparing this situation with the existance of Echelon is intellectually dishonest in my opinion. Especially considering the fact that Echelon is most likely still up and well under Bush.
Fine put him in jail … idiots … I do not get it. He is trying to protect us and it did protect us but you do not want to see it. All you see is Bush is eveil bad whatever. I am gald he one and your guy lost and I feel safer because of it idoiots all of you. Do you know what you are trying to do? Do you really?
FRODO – I’ve got a piece in the finishing stages right now that deals with exactally why the warantless eavesdropping is bad for us. In a nutshell it has to do with the question:
“You’ve caught the guy, now what?”
An American citizen brought in and detained based on information that was obtained without a warrant is not going to be convicted in any court within the US Justice system.
My beef is with Bush setting up a roadblock that he himself will have to overcome later on down the line. By neglecting to obtain a warrant, when the government detains one of these people, who SHOULD be convicted and sent to prison, they’ll walk.
As an American citizen, if I break the law and get caught, I’ll be punished. For a crime as disgusting as ploting or carrying out a terrorist masacre – or – even aiding those who do, I want assurances that JUSTICE will be done.
Justice is not done if a single person caught red handed is allowed to walk.
Padilla is a perfect example – – – they can’t convict the guy. Why? Because the information the received in order to catch him was gathered illegally.
It’s not me, or the Democrats…I could give a shit if the President authorizes wiretaps if he feels it’s necessary. I jumped the gun on the ‘pre-9/11’ post, and have to get better at policing myself.
The ‘but our civil rights…whaaaa’ crowd annoys me just as much as they do you. This isn’t about ideals, it’s about BUSINESS.
And if we catch someone and can’t put them away, then something is wrong. It’s not the US Justice system at fault in this case, it’s the people who screwed every prosecutor who has to now reinvent the wheel everytime the government wants to put one of these guys on trial.
They said the Geneva Conventions were ‘quaint’, and international suspects we’ve caught have subsequently been let loose because of the diplomatic problems caused by how they were treated while in our custody. The Padilla case is impossible to prosecute appropriately due to this.
Now they say WARRANTS are ‘quaint’ as well?!?!?!
WHY? It’s the system you have, not the system you might want sometime in the future. You have to carry these things out in a way that ensures that in the end, those who belong in jail, end up there. Once you eliminate STEP ONE in the process, it makes the Justice System your enemy, when they should be natural allies.
It’s not the judge’s fault that we didn’t get a warrant. That was on the criminal investigators. Bush can authorize warrantless eavesdropping…fine, but what then? How do you put these people away?
Frodo, I’m just looking at this Padilla thing, and the way scraping the Geneva Convention statutes backfired on us…there’s no reason for doing this. 72 hours is a LONG time!
And how many lives have been saved? Do we even know? Is it not woirth it? Idiots all of you.
How many lives have been saved?
You’re missing the issue entirely Frodo. You’re looking at it politically. While 100 different forms of rhetoric does the job here ‘politically’, none of that makes a difference in a courtroom.
We can have our political beliefs, but in the end, the objective is to convict these people, not beat them in a debate!
I am all for fighting terrorists and I favor taking the struggle to them and not sitting back and letting them bring it here again ; however,I cherish my liberty too much to trust the government to always do the right thing. We must be wary of those who would circumvent our rights whomever they may be.
You’re missing the issue entirely Frodo. You’re looking at it politically. While 100 different forms of rhetoric does the job here ‘politically’, none of that makes a difference in a courtroom.
And I think you are missing the issue entire, Chris. In times of war we need to secure the nation from attack. The courts are irrelevant to terrorists while Islam is trying to destroy us. The one overriding issue is to prevent attacks on U.S. soil and if a terrorist has to sit in Cuba for a few decades but doesn’t get convicted, I’m fine with that.
An American citizen will not sit in Guantanamo for two decades Right. They’ll petition the court and be granted a hearing, and eventually the court will order the government to either charge or release the individual. Remember John Walker? He was tried and convicted. Now, if there’s an example of an American caught fighting for the enemy more clear-cut than his case, I haven’t seen it.
To be honest, I wouldn’t care that much about Walker spending his life without a charge in Guantanamo either, but to pretend that it’s possible to do that to a US citizen is misguided logically.
We must concern ourselves with the law when it comes to dealing with Americans committing treasonous crimes during this crucial period of our history. The law is not our enemy. Now, I know there’s a conservative movement to change the way our Justice system does business, but in the meantime we’ve got to work with the laws we have, not the laws we’d like to have sometime in the future.
but in the meantime we’ve got to work with the laws we have, not the laws we’d like to have sometime in the future.
We are, no one is going to be tried with evidence garnered via means that violate the ammendments. Sure, we may not get a lot of fancy, high profile convictions but we’ll stop a lot of attacks and that is fine by me.
If I had a choice between a great solid convition or stopping the attack, I’ll go with stoppin gthe attack every time.