America... Spying on Americans

You obviously are referring here to the historic Greek term.

NSA whistleblower asks to testify
I'm always leary of anything by the Moonie Washington Times, but maybe this is true....But, aren't NSA employees required to sign confidentiality agreements just like the CIA? ---BBB

NSA whistleblower asks to testify
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 5, 2006


A former National Security Agency official wants to tell Congress about electronic intelligence programs that he asserts were carried out illegally by the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Russ Tice, a whistleblower who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA.

"I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency and with the Defense Intelligence Agency," Mr. Tice stated in the Dec. 16 letters, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times.

The letters were sent the same day that the New York Times revealed that the NSA was engaged in a clandestine eavesdropping program that bypassed the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. The FISA court issues orders for targeted electronic and other surveillance by the government.

President Bush said Sunday that the NSA spying is "a necessary program" aimed at finding international terrorists by tracking phone numbers linked to al Qaeda.

Mr. Bush said during a visit to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio that al Qaeda is "making phone calls, [and] it makes sense to find out why."

Critics of the eavesdropping program, which gathered and sifted through large amounts of telephone and e-mail to search for clues to terrorists' communications, say the activities might have been illegal because they were carried out without obtaining a FISA court order.

The Justice Department has said the program is legal under presidential powers authorized by Congress in 2001.

Mr. Tice said yesterday that he was not part of the intercept program.

In his Dec. 16 letter, Mr. Tice wrote that his testimony would be given under the provisions of the 1998 Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, which makes it legal for intelligence officials to disclose wrongdoing without being punished.

The activities involved the NSA director, the NSA deputies chief of staff for air and space operations and the secretary of defense, he stated.

"These ... acts were conducted via very highly sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs," Mr. Tice said.

The letters were sent to Sen. Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican, and Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican. Mr. Roberts is chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Mr. Hoekstra is chairman of the House counterpart.

Spokesmen for the NSA and the Senate intelligence committee declined to comment. Spokesmen for the House intelligence committee and the DIA said they were aware of Mr. Tice's letters, but had not seen formal copies of them.

Who is Russell Tice?
In federal job: Blow whistle, get boot
Workers say broken system doesn't protect them from retaliation
By Rebecca Carr
WASHINGTON BUREAU

Sunday, December 11, 2005

WASHINGTON ?- Russell Tice was a senior intelligence analyst at the National Security Agency until he demanded to know in April 2003 what had happened to a report he had filed about a former colleague he suspected of spying for China. Two months later, he found himself checking coolant at the agency's motor pool.

Not only did Tice get demoted from the elite ranks of the intelligence community, but he was also deemed "paranoid" by one of the agency's psychologists, a death sentence in the intelligence field. Just nine months earlier, Tice had been found psychologically sound during a routine evaluation.

Rick McKay
COX WASHINGTON BUREAU

Russell Tice, a former intelligence analyst for the National Security Agency, was fired in May after raising questions about suspicions he'd reported about a colleague while working at another agency.

Tice's case is one of a number of troubling episodes involving government whistle-blowers: federal employees who step forward to expose lapses, failures and fraud.

More than four years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, federal employees working to help prevent another terrorist strike have virtually no legal protection from losing their jobs when they point out graft, incompetence or holes in national security.

That's because the law requires federal employees who work for intelligence-gathering agencies to seek recourse within their own agency, which is usually the very agency on which they are blowing the whistle.

The Defense Intelligence Agency, where Tice worked when he reported his concerns about his co-worker, and the National Security Agency, which he joined in November 2002, won't say whether there was any truth to Tice's allegations. But Tice says he was retaliated against for doing what he thought was his duty: unmasking someone he thought was a spy.

"You do the right thing, and then they take away your security clearance, your job, your life," said Tice, 44, who spent two decades working for federal intelligence agencies before being fired in May. "It's like committing suicide to come forward."

The National Security Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency both declined to comment on Tice's case, citing privacy concerns.

The Defense Department's inspector general issued an unclassified report in September that found "no evidence" to support Tice's claims.

"Even if he turned out to be wrong, he shouldn't have been punished for raising those concerns," said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan watchdog group in Washington. "He should have been rewarded for caring enough to report his suspicions. There is no beauty in being a whistle-blower."

The rest of the civil service doesn't fare much better in a system that was created by Congress more than 25 years ago to protect whistle-blowers from retaliation, government records and interviews with whistle-blowers and government watchdog groups show.

That system, set up to encourage whistle-blowers to step forward, instead works to prevent the disclosure of embarrassing information while meting out revenge against employees who make such claims, whistle-blowers and government watchdog groups say.

"There is no place to go," said Coleen Rowley, a former FBI lawyer who made headlines three years ago when she blew the whistle on how officials in Washington ignored reports from her Minnesota field office in August 2001 about Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen who has since admitted conspiring with al Qaeda in the attacks that came one month after his arrest. Rowley retired last year in frustration and is now running for Congress from Minnesota.

Federal employees who work for the nation's intelligence agencies are especially vulnerable. They typically lose the security clearances that are vital to their jobs when they report misdeeds.

Many are then transferred, like Tice, to places such as a shipping depot, car park or basement filing room where they wait out their time before being officially terminated.

A troubled system

On paper, the system appears to help government employees who point out wrongdoing by offering them a safe haven to make their complaints at the U.S. Office of Special Counsel. But records show that the vast majority of federal employees face a dead end when they go to this office.

Cases that are found to have merit are sent back to the whistle-blower's agency for a full investigation and report. But just a fraction of the cases meet this standard. Of the 1,262 cases processed in 2004 by the Office of Special Counsel, just 2 percent were found to have a "substantial likelihood" of wrongdoing, up from 1 percent in 2003, the office's statistics show.

Catherine Deeds, the public affairs director at the Office of Special Counsel, said as much as 90 percent of cases brought to the office are clearly without merit or are dismissed because the office lacks jurisdiction over the matter.

But the office, by its own admission, has confronted a chronic backlog of cases, prompting watchdog groups to charge that it does not adequately protect whistle-blowers from retaliation.

Between 1997 and 2003, 96 percent of the whistle-blower disclosure cases took an average of more than six months to process. Three-quarters of the time, the office missed a 15-day time limit set by Congress to examine the merits of each case, a March 2004 report by the General Accounting Office found.

Responding to the chronic backlog of cases cited in the GAO report, the Office of Special Counsel's chief, Bush appointee Scott Bloch, said in a May 17, 2005, letter to U.S. Comptroller David Walker that he was aware that the problem "has plagued the agency for several years." He took over the office in January 2004.

The problem could stem from faulty organization, "procedural inefficiencies," a lack of personnel or a combination of those factors, he wrote, adding that the backlogs prevent the office from "dispensing justice."

Bloch himself, however, is under investigation for violating the laws he is supposed to enforce.

A group of staffers at the Office of Special Counsel and watchdog organizations filed a complaint in March with the President's Council on Integrity and Efficiency, an umbrella group of inspectors general and oversight agencies, accusing Bloch of creating a hostile work environment, forcing employees to accept involuntary geographic reassignments, cronyism and prematurely closing hundreds of whistle-blower cases.

The case is under investigation by Patricia Marshall, the inspector general for the Office of Personnel Management at the White House.

Bloch declined to respond to written questions about the investigation, but he did respond in writing to other questions.

Bloch said he has reduced the historic backlog of cases, without sacrificing quality. The agency reduced the overall case backlog by 82 percent to 201 cases last year.

Watchdog groups question whether those cases were hastily closed to make it appear that the office is tackling whistle-blower concerns.

But Bloch said that a bipartisan group of congressional staff counsels and investigators questioned senior office attorneys and reviewed hundreds of random closed case files last spring. They found that the Office of Special Counsel was making strides to address the problems cited in the GAO report, he said.

House Government Reform Committee Chairman Tom Davis, R-Va., wrote Bloch a letter on the same day that Bloch wrote to Walker, praising him for the "seriousness" with which he dealt with the backlogs. Conversely, Rep. Henry Waxman, the ranking Democrat of the committee, said he finds what is going on in the Office of Special Counsel "very disturbing."

Moved to busywork

Beyond addressing the steep hurdles evident at the Office of Special Counsel is a more fundamental issue: providing whistle-blowers adequate protection for finding holes in the federal effort to deter another terrorist attack.

In 9/11's aftermath, it became clear that people within the government had been pushing their superiors to recognize parts of the plot as it unfolded, without success.

It wasn't just Rowley, who as an FBI lawyer in Minneapolis tried unsuccessfully to flag suspicious flight training that Moussaoui took in Minnesota in the summer of 2001.

Bogdan Dzakovic, a former senior security tester for the Federal Aviation Administration, warned that hijacking was likely.

Dzakovic's team found it could penetrate security about 90 percent of the time in covert tests at airports around the country. He warned his superiors that a "disastrous hijacking" was inevitable. Dzakovic said he was told not to write up his findings or retest airports that flunked the security tests in some cases.

In October 2001, one month after the terrorist attacks, Dzakovic filed a whistle-blower complaint with the Office of Special Counsel, which ordered an investigation. The inquiry supported his claims.

Rather than praise Dzakovic for his findings, however, the Transportation Security Administration took away all of his job duties in February 2002. He found himself punching holes in training manuals. When the Office of Special Counsel protested, Dzakovic was given a new assignment answering phones in a local operations center during the graveyard shift.

In August 2003, he was transferred to the Department of Homeland Security, where his duties consisted of updating a phone book. TSA officials declined to comment on Dzakovic's case, citing privacy concerns.

"I'm grateful that I still have a job, because you are essentially blacklisted as a whistle-blower, and it would be next to impossible for me to get another job and make as much as I am making now," said Dzakovic, 51, who makes just over $100,000 per year. "But I'm doing idiot work for the most part."

Had Dzakovic been in the intelligence community, he wouldn't have been allowed to go to the Office of Special Counsel. Federal workers in the intelligence community can appeal only to officials within their agency.

Is it getting worse?

Whistle-blowers whose cases are turned down by the Office of Special Counsel can appeal to the Merit Systems Protection Board.

But the three-member board rarely sides with whistle-blowers, the board's records for the past five years show.

Of the 30 appeals the board heard this year, just two were sent back to an administrative judge in the board's regional office to be reviewed again.

Beth Slavet, former chairwoman of the Merit Systems Protection Board, said the whistle-blower system has been broken for a long time, but it seems worse now than in the past.

When Slavet joined the board in August 1995, it sided with whistle-blowers over agencies in about 3 percent of the cases.

During her tenure, the number substantially increased, watchdog groups said.

Slavet would offer a sobering suggestion to whistle-blowers today.

"I would have to advise them not to report the matter, because they can be subject to retaliation in so many different ways, from taking away job duties to being put in a closet to do his work, to criticizing every little thing the whistle-blower does that would pass muster if the work was done by someone else," Slavet said.

Federal employees who are not satisfied with the outcome of their complaints to the merit board can take their cases to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit based in Washington.

But history suggests that they stand virtually no chance of winning there, either.

Since 1994, the court has sided with government agencies in 104 of the 105 decisions where it ruled on the merits of the case, according to the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit watchdog group based in Washington.

Groups such as the Project on Government Oversight are trying to persuade Congress to allow federal employees to bypass the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit and take their cases directly to federal court in their local jurisdiction.

Last summer, Congress passed a provision in the energy bill that allowed employees for the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to go straight to federal court in their region, bypassing the Appeals Court in Washington.

The National Security Whistleblowers Coalition is also pushing Congress to amend the law to protect federal employees who aren't allowed to seek recourse at the Office of Special Counsel and the Merit Systems Protection Board because they work in the intelligence community.

Whistle-blower protection laws have "degenerated into an efficient machine that enforces secrecy through rubber-stamping retaliation," said Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project.

"The law has become the best reason for employees to look the other way and remain silent observers."

NYT: Difference Between Plame & NSA Spying Leaks
NYT Editorial Explains Difference Between Plame and NSA Spying Leaks
By E&P Staff
Published: January 03, 2006 10:30 PM ET

Declaring, "this seems a good moment to try to clear away the fog around this issue," a New York Times editorial for Wednesday attempted to describe the difference between radically different types of leaks.

Two of the newspaper's high-profile reporters, Judith Miller (who recently resigned) and James Risen, have been at the center of two very serious current leak probes.

"A democratic society cannot long survive if whistle-blowers are criminally punished for revealing what those in power don't want the public to know -- especially if it's unethical, illegal or unconstitutional behavior by top officials," the newspaper declares. "Reporters need to be able to protect these sources, regardless of whether the sources are motivated by policy disputes or nagging consciences."

The editorial then examines the Plame/CIA leak, citing "a world of difference between that case and a current one in which the administration is trying to find the sources of a New York Times report that President Bush secretly authorized spying on American citizens without warrants. The spying report was a classic attempt to give the public information it deserves to have. The Valerie Wilson case began with a cynical effort by the administration to deflect public attention from hyped prewar intelligence on Iraq. ...

"When the government does not want the public to know what it is doing, it often cites national security as the reason for secrecy. The nation's safety is obviously a most serious issue, but that very fact has caused this administration and many others to use it as a catchall for any matter it wants to keep secret, even if the underlying reason for the secrecy is to prevent embarrassment to the White House. The White House has yet to show that national security was harmed by the report on electronic spying, which did not reveal the existence of such surveillance -- only how it was being done in a way that seems outside the law."

Concluding by mentioning a third leak probe, regarding The Washington Post's revelations about secret prison camps for terror suspects, the Times observes, "Illegal spying and torture need to be investigated, not whistle-blowers and newspapers."

Re: NSA whistleblower asks to testify


Let be assuage your concern over the veracity of the story: It was earlier covered by The Democratic Underground.com.

Must be gospel, huh?

Re: NYT: Difference Between Plame & NSA Spying Leaks


I find it interesting that libbies fear an unchecked Executive Branch warrantlessly listening in on the conversations of suspected terrorists, but has no concerns with these leaks. On the one hand, they seem to think the government is incapable to determining whether a search is actually of an agent of a foreign power without oversight, yet seem to have no problem on the New York Times making the sole decision on whether a particular leak or leaker should be disclosed or not in the interests of national security.

On that note, an interesting Op-Ed piece..

http://jewishworldreview.com/michelle/malkin010406.php3

"Hello, 2006. The New York Times kicked off the new year by refusing to answer its own ombudsman's questions about the timing of the newspapers anonymous illegal leak-dependent National Security Agency monitoring story. Long live transparency and accountability.


Meanwhile, Times reporter James Risen launched his anonymous illegal leak-dependent book, State of War, with a self-congratulatory appearance on NBCs Today Show. Risen's leakers, he told Couric, were the opposite of the Valerie Plame case leakers because his people came forward "for the best reasons." How do we know that's true? Because Risen says it is. So there.


Risen then patted himself and his bosses on the back for their "great public service" in publishing the story (never too soon to go Pulitzer Prize-begging) and heaped more praise on his anonymous sources as "truly American patriots." Risen also told Couric that many of his law-breaking sources "came to us because they thought you have to follow the rules and you have to follow the law." Uh-huh. "

Did NSA wiretap Christane Amanpour?
Wednesday, January 04, 2006

NBC changes official transcript of Andrea Mitchell interview, deletes reference to Bush possibly wiretapping CNN's Christane Amanpour

Well this is getting interesting. NBC just delete two paragraphs from its Andrea Mitchell interview, the paragraphs that talked about whether Bush was wiretapping ace CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour (kudos to Atrios for spotting this).

Here's what the NBC "official" transcript used to say (I copied this text from NBC's own page only 2 hours ago):

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that

Mitchell: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?

Risen: No, no I hadn't heard that. Here's what it says now:

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that

Mitchell: You are very, very tough on the CIA and the administration in general in both the war on terror and the run up to the war and the war itself Â? the post-war operation. Let's talk about the war on terror. Why do you think they missed so many signals and what do you think caused the CIA to have this sort of break down as you describe it?

Risen: I think that, you know, to me, the greater break down was really on Iraq. It's very difficult to have known ahead of time about these 19 hijackers. They were, you know, probably lucky that they got through and they did something that no one really assumed anybody would ever do. And I think that made 9/11 a lot like Pearl Harbor. That even when you see all the clues in front of you that it's very difficult to put it together.

Since when is NBC in the business of deleting entire paragraphs from their official transcripts? What's going on here?
---------------------------------------------------

Wednesday, January 04, 2006

What it means to John Kerry, Wesley Clark, and Bill Clinton if Bush wiretapped CNN's Christiane Amanpour

As reported below, NBC's Andrea Mitchell - based on some information she clearly hasn't yet made public - is asking if Bush specifically wiretapped CNN's Christiane Amanpour. The fact that the question was asked so publicly and so specifically means that Mitchell knows something.

Why would Bush do this? Because, as I reported a few weeks ago, journalists have some of the best contacts out there and it's not unusual for journalists to talk to both sides of the story, or in this case, the good guys and the "evil doers." What a better, if not illegal, way to find the terrorists and their associates?

But before you say "yeah, go for it," consider the implications of tapping Christiane Amanpour's phones:

1. Such a wiretap would likely include her home, office, and cell phones, and email correspondence, at the very least.

2. That means anyone Christiane has conversed with in the past four years, at least by phone or email, could have had their conversation taped by the US government.

3. That also means that anyone who uses any of Christiane's telephones or computers (work or home) could also have had their conversation bugged.

4. This includes Christiane's husband, former Clinton administration senior official Jamie Rubin, who was spokesman for the State Department.

5. Jamie Rubin was also chief foreign policy adviser to General Wesley Clark's presidential campaign, and then worked as a senior national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign.

6. Did Jamie Rubin ever use his home phone, his wife's work phone, his wife's cell phone, her home computer or her work computer to communicate with John Kerry or Wesley Clark? If so, those conversations would have been bugged if Bush was tapping Amanpour.

7. Did Jamie Rubin ever in the past four years communicate with any elected officials in Washington, DC - any Senators or members of the US House? Any senior members of the Democratic party?

8. Has Rubin spoken with Bill Clinton, his former boss, in the past 4 years?

Now you understand how potentially broad a violation of privacy the Bush doctrine on illegal domestic spying really is. Everyone who's anyone is a degree or two of separation away from a terrorist.

Risen Publishes Wiretap Book But Times Beats Him
Risen Publishes Wiretap Book But Times Beats Him
By Gabriel Sherman, Sheelah Kolhatkar
New York Observer

On Tuesday, Jan. 3, New York Times reporter James Risen's book, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, arrived in bookstores.

Usually when a reporter's book hits the shelves, it's an occasion to congratulate him for his coverage, and his paper for printing the stories on which the book is based.

This book, which appears to end a multi-week race between The Times and Simon & Schuster's Free Press to get juicy national-security scoops into print, is different.

It's the capstone for public criticism of The Times' decision to sit for more than a year on Mr. Risen's biggest scoop: the news that the National Security Agency has been conducting warrantless domestic espionage through wiretaps, which the paper finally published in the first of a series of stories on Dec. 16.

What's more, the book raises the question of how much of Mr. Risen's material?-about W.M.D., for instance?-was in The Times' hands but kept out of print until the arrival of State of War.

The Times' becalmed post-Judy Miller positioning notwithstanding, it's hard to imagine the paper's explanation for its W.M.D. bungle?-which was largely attributed to Ms. Miller's bad sources?-holding water if reporting from Mr. Risen was coming in at the same time that tended to contradict her accounts.

Certainly, his reporting on W.M.D. as it appears in State of War does just that.

Call him the Anti-Woodward: Though the Washington Post reporter made famous in the Watergate scandal received information about Plamegate, he kept it from his editors. But Mr. Risen, according to several sources at The Times, couldn't get his material into the paper fast enough. It's impossible to tell what material Mr. Risen had on W.M.D. while working the national-security beat in 2002 and 2003. Either way, however, the material he has gathered for this book, while keeping his reporting position at The Times, is some stunning stuff.

Indeed, as The Times began to roll out the wiretap stories in anticipation of the publication of this book, there appeared to be a frantic parallel motion on the part of Simon & Schuster and Free Press to get Mr. Risen's book into bookstores.

On Dec. 16, the day that the first of Mr. Risen's (and co-reporter Eric Lichtblau's) wiretap stories appeared in The Times, the publisher announced a Jan. 16 publication date and promised in a press release that as "[e]xplosive and disturbing as this story is … it is just the tip of the iceberg, and only one chapter," of Mr. Risen's book.

In fact, these stories emerge in the book's most sensational chapter, called "The Program." But by Dec. 28, The Times had printed several other installments of the wiretap story, including a report that there was a vast data-mining operation underway at the N.S.A.?-some of which are included in the book.

Free Press again moved the publication date forward, to Jan. 3. The date was moved a third time, to Jan. 5, last weekend to prevent possible distribution problems, according to the publisher. In the meantime, Mr. Risen began an intense media push, appearing on the Today show on the morning of Jan. 3, with appearances planned for the NBC Nightly News that evening and the CBS Early Show the next day.

"We had concerns. It was originally moved up to Jan. 3 because the Times story had broken and there was large book-seller and media demand," said Free Press publicist Carisa Hays, adding that the initial print run is going to be 250,000 copies. "Our phone was ringing off the hook."

However, Ms. Hays was insistent that The Times' publication of Mr. Risen's explosive wiretap reporting had no influence over the book's publication date: "It had nothing to do with The New York Times," she said. "We waited until the book was ready and then we published it."

CONTINUE FOR THE COMPLETE ARTICLE:

http://www.observer.com/articlearchive2006/20060109_gabriel_sherman_pageone_offtherec.asp

Secret Surveillance May Have Occurred before Authorization
Secret Surveillance May Have Occurred before Authorization
By Dafna Linzer
The Washington Post
Wednesday 04 January 2006

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.

On Oct. 1, 2001, three weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who was running the National Security Agency at the time, told the House intelligence committee that the agency was broadening its surveillance authorities, according to a newly released letter sent to him that month by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.). Pelosi, the ranking Democrat on the committee, raised concerns in the letter, which was declassified with several redactions and made public yesterday by her staff.

"I am concerned whether and to what extent the National Security Agency has received specific presidential authorization for the operations you are conducting," Pelosi wrote on Oct. 11, 2001. The substance of Hayden's response one week later, on Oct. 17, 2001, was redacted.

The secret NSA program, developed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on Washington and New York as a way to find any hidden al Qaeda operatives still in the United States, was authorized in October 2001, a senior administration official said.

The president and senior aides have publicly discussed various aspects of the program, but neither the White House, the NSA nor the office of the director of national intelligence would say what day the president authorized it. Don Weber, an NSA spokesman, said in an e-mail yesterday that it would be inappropriate to "discuss details which could potentially cause harm to the safety of our nation."

Pelosi's letter suggested that she and others on the committee first heard about expanded work by the NSA on Oct. 1, 2001, when Hayden briefed them on NSA activities.

"During your appearance before the committee," she wrote, "you indicated that you had been operating since the September 11 attacks with an expansive view of your authorities with respect to the conduct of electronic surveillance." The letter, while redacted in parts concerned with surveillance, made clear that the agency was "forwarding" intercepts and other collected information to the FBI. Two sources familiar with the NSA program said Pelosi was directly referring to information collected without a warrant on U.S. citizens or residents.

An intelligence official close to Hayden said that his appearance on Oct. 1, 2001, before the House committee had been to discuss Executive Order 12333, and not the new NSA program.

The order, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, gave guidance and specific instructions about the intelligence activities that the U.S. government could engage in. It specifically prohibited domestic surveillance for intelligence purposes without a warrant "unless the Attorney General has determined in each case that there is probable cause to believe that the technique is directed against a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power."

The official said that Pelosi's concerns had been answered in writing and again several weeks later during a private briefing.

The NSA program operated in secret until it was made public in news accounts last month. Since then, President Bush and his advisers have defended it as legal and necessary to protect the country against future attacks and have said Congress was repeatedly consulted. But Democrats, some Republicans and constitutional law experts have raised concerns about whether Bush overstepped his constitutional authority and violated privacy laws meant to guard against the government spying on its own citizens without a warrant. The NSA's work, which is normally restricted to eavesdropping overseas, also angered judges on a special court that administers warrants for secret investigations.

New York Times reporter James Risen, who, with a colleague, was the first to write about the NSA program, released a book yesterday that includes details about the program and other intelligence issues facing the Bush administration.

Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, spokeswoman for the CIA, said the book contains inaccuracies about the CIA's work on Iran's nuclear program and Iraq, but she would not provide details.
------------------------------------------------
Staff writer Carol D. Leonnig and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

That Bush is a recepient of money from Abramoff, according to this mornings San Jose Merc, should be enough evidence that this guy can't be trusted with anything.

From the Merc:
President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, ... House Majority Leader Tom Delay...and deLay's temporary successor ....Roy Blunt, joined a lengthening list of politicians whose campaign committees have returned or donated to charities money they received..."

Did the article forget to mention Harry Reid, Charlie Rangel, and Tom Daschle?


(And Reid's not returning the money. :wink: )

http://www.able2know.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=65399&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=1450

"The National Republican Senatorial Committee said Wednesday that 40 of 45 members of the Senate Democrat Caucus have taken money from lobbyist Jack Abramoff, his associates and Indian tribe clients. "
"Among those named by the NRSC as the worst examples of "Democrat hypocrisy" for taking money from Abramoff and his associates are: Sen. Byron Dorgan, (D-N.D.) who received at least $79,300; Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who received at least $45,750; Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who received at least $68,941 and Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), who received at least $6,250. "

Fire them all!

Whether they are republicans or democrats, they should all be impeached for selling their votes for money.

CI's indictment of Bush for simply accepting money from Abramoff isn't warranted. Lots of people got money, some dems included. The real issue here relates to influence peddling (probably McCain deserves special credit for working hard with Dorgan and others to investigate and expose a deep and corrupt network).

But the scandal overwhelmingly involves the Republican machine in Washington.

We need to clean house with all those crooks and unethical bastards.

"But the scandal overwhelmingly involves the Republican machine in Washington. "

Only because they are the party in power. There is no point in bribing the minoority in most cases, since they have less influence.

woiyo, I disagree; anyone involved with Abramoff should be investigated thoroughly and impeached if found to have taken bribes for their votes.

This is one of the few times I have hopes that the Justice Department will do the job expected of them.

Blatham is correct. One of the difficulties in this case is in deliniating the difference between legal contributions and illegal ones; the situation is so muddled that it becomes difficult to tell.

But don't kid yourself; noone is going to get in trouble here for having accepted some contributions from an Indian tribe. It's the corruption and money-grubbing ways of Abramoff and, by extension, the Republican machine he worked for.

There may be a few dems caught up in the net, but I expect at least 8-10 Republicans drummed out of office before the '06 elections, with DeLay, Noe, and Ney being the biggest cases.

Cycloptichorn