Promoted from the diaries by Steven D, with some minor editing.
The story about Russ Tice is a little more complicated than has previously been reported.
First, the established story so far:
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.
Be on the lookout for more “Swift Boating”…
This is cross-posted from my blog, Flogging the Simian
Peace
