Senator John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV (D-WV), Vice Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence:

VICE CHAIRMAN ROCKEFELLER REACTS TO REPORTS OF NSA INTERCEPT PROGRAM IN UNITED STATES


–Senator Releases His ’03 Letter to White House Raising Questions About White House Actions and Need for Congressional Oversight– 

For the last few days, I have witnessed the President, the Vice President, the Secretary of State, and the Attorney General repeatedly misrepresent the facts. 


“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.  …. Read all at the Senator’s site.


Rockefeller’s 2003 letter to Vice President Cheney:

His handwritten letter is there from July 17, 2003. (At democrats.org via Crooks & Liars)


Writes Crooks & Liars‘ John Amato: “He [Rockefeller] took the time to say he was keeping it stored in a secure space. Why did he write that? Did he think he would be sleeping with the fishes?”

Murray Waas shares former minority leader Tom Daschle’s reaction (“the White House lied”):

The former Senate Majority and Minority leader, Tom Daschle, says tonight in a statement that the White House “omitted key details” from him related to the NSA interception program, directly contradicting statements by President Bush that Congress was fully informed. Expect the congressional notification issue to get major play in tomorrow’s newspapers, and in coming days, as other members begin to more publicly discuss what they were and were not told.


For now, here is the full text of Daschle’s statement tonight: … Read more at Murray Waas’s blog, Whatever Already.

Current minority leader Harry Reid has joined a bi-partisan call for investigation.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he intends to hold hearings.

“They talk about constitutional authority,” Specter said. “There are limits as to what the president can do.”


Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., also called for an investigation, and House Democratic leaders asked House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., to create a bipartisan panel to do the same.

National Security Archive Update, December 19, 2005:

Archive Electronic Briefing Book Informs Current
Debate Over NSA Eavesdropping on U.S. Citizens


In the wake of revelations that the Bush administration authorized the warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens in 2002, the National Security Archive today reposted its “National Security Agency Declassified” electronic briefing book, first published in January 2000 and updated as recently as this year.


President Bush’s recent admission that he authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on U.S. persons without obtaining a warrant has focused the nation’s attention on the authorities and regulations governing this sensitive issue. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) specifically prohibits domestic surveillance by the NSA, the nation’s largest intelligence agency, unless it gets permission to do so from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.


Specific guidance for adhering to FISA policies is spelled out in United States Signals Intelligence Directive 18, the most recent known version of which was issued by the NSA director in July 1993. The directive “prescribes policies and procedures and assigns responsibilities to ensure that the missions and functions of the United States SIGINT System (USSS) are conducted in a manner that safeguards the constitutional rights of U.S. persons.”


Also included in “The National Security Agency Declassified” are warnings given by the NSA to the incoming Bush administration in January 2001 that the Information Age required rethinking the policies and authorities that kept the NSA in compliance with the Constitution’s 4th Amendment prohibition on “unreasonable searches and seizures” without warrant and “probable cause.”


Read all at the National Security Archives.

Listen to PRI/NPR’s “To The Point” program today, “Civil Liberties, National Security and Domestic Surveillance”:

Democrats–and some Republicans–have called for investigation of whether the White House is violating the law and encroaching on civil liberties, but President Bush said today he’ll continue to authorize wiretaps on some Americans without asking for court orders from FISA, the court established by the Foreign Intelligence Security Act. The President insists he’s justified by the law, Congress, the Constitution and the demands of national security. Are civil rights being compromised? Did President Clinton do the same thing? We look at the legal and political disputes that have disrupted the last days of the Congressional session. LISTEN


Guest: DAVID COLE, Professor of Law at Georgetown University and legal affairs correspondent for the liberal publication, The Nation; volunteer staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and co-author of Terrorism and the Constitution: Sacrificing Civil Liberties in the Name of National Security

Digby on the Gonzales Press Conference Today and the “Efficiency Expert”:

Atrios and First-Draft have posts up highlighting one of the most egregious explanations for the NSA spying from this morning’s briefing by Gonzales and NSA chief General Hayden: they didn’t ask congress for permission because they were told by “certain” congressmen that they couldn’t get it passed.

Gonzales:…We’ve had discussions with members of Congress, certain members of Congress, about whether or not we could get an amendment to FISA, and we were advised that that was not likely to be — that was not something we could likely get, certainly not without jeopardizing the existence of the program, and therefore, killing the program. And that — and so a decision was made that because we felt that the authorities were there, that we should continue moving forward with this program.

That’s not Brownie It’s not even Karl Rove. That’s the Attorney General of the United States talking.

But there’s more: … Read the rest at Digby’s Hullabaloo blog.


Do read all of Digby’s post so that this last sentence — “If I were one of those ‘shift supervisors’ (especially if I was one who had worried about John Kerry becoming president) I’d get myself a lawyer.” — makes sense.


Digby makes another great point:

The NY Times withheld certain tchnical information about this program in their story last week because of alleged national security concerns. Now that the president has admitted to authorizing it and he and his flunkies have been babbling incoherently about “moving fast” and “long term monitoring” I think it’s now imperative that they tell the public the whole story.


Yes. NYT, come out with it. Now. Just once, think of your readers and fellow citizens, instead of the power brokers.


And with Daschle, Reid and Rockefeller all saying that the White House did not explain the program to them, and a bi-partisan call for an investigation, there’s hope.