Hey, why let the NSA have all the fun:
WASHINGTON, March 8 â The Federal Bureau of Investigation found apparent violations of its own wiretapping and other intelligence-gathering procedures more than 100 times in the last two years, and problems appear to have grown more frequent in some crucial respects, a Justice Department report released Wednesday said. […]
The inspector general’s findings come at a time of fierce Congressional debate over the program of wiretapping without warrants that the National Security Agency has conducted. That program, approved by President Bush, is separate from the F.B.I. wiretaps reviewed in the report, and the inspector general’s office concluded that it did not have the jurisdiction to review the legality or operations of the N.S.A. effort.
But, the report disclosed, the Justice Department has opened reviews into two other controversial counterterrorism tactics that the department has widely employed since the Sept. 11 attacks.
In one, the inspector general has begun looking into the F.B.I.’s use of administrative subpoenas, known as national security letters, to demand records and documents without warrants in terror investigations. Some critics maintain that the bureau has abused its subpoena powers to demand records in thousands of cases.
In the other, the Office of Professional Responsibility, a Justice Department unit that reviews ethics charges against department lawyers, has opened inquiries related to the detention of 21 people held as material witnesses in terror investigations.
Well, another not-a-surprise, considering all the stories we have seen over domestic federal spying on anti-war and peace activists. The original NSA story is (as predicted) turning out to be just the tip of the iceberg. The Justice department bureacracy is fighting back against the Bush administration’s police state tactics, just as the Intelligence Community fought back against the Iraq war lies and deceits, and the abuse of the NSA. What will be the result?
Well, you know who I’m rooting for.
Did you see one of the violations was a wiretap that lasted something like 375 days? Yikes! If they didn’t have enough to get a warrant by then, they weren’t getting one at all.
I love John Conyers!!
“The Justice department bureacracy is fighting back against the Bush administration’s police state tactics, just as the Intelligence Community fought back against the Iraq war lies and deceits, and the abuse of the NSA. What will be the result?”
Steven D: Think about what you have written. You said the Justice Department bureacracy is fighting back against the Bush administrations’ “police state tactics”…..etc.
1). The Justice Department is not fighting back. A few people may …not even a “unit” in it’s entirety are perhaps ” fighting back”. So you have exaggerated for sentimental reasons and to make your writing more appealing. Why did you do this?
2). You said the” intelligence community” fought back against lies and deceipt. Why are you spinning this untruth. The intelligence community by all accounts was negligent. And secondly i don’t know who you are referring to. Retired from intelligence agencies people like Larry Johnson and Pat Lang? There are only a small handful of people who have protested, not the entire “intelligence community”. In fact the “intelligence community is currently proposing and promoting an attack on Iran. It has promoted torture in Iraq.
You writing reflects a kind of mesmerization. You have apparently been mystified by something. Find out what it is.
he hasn’t been mesmerized by anything. The intelligence community agreed to go along with Bush’s lies and the Justice Department agreed to write whatever idiotic memos that were needed to make the illegal sound legal. But, as punishment for being asked to do this, and for retribution for being blamed for the resulting catastophes, they have leaked. Like sieves.
When you work for an organization like the NSA or the CIA you agree to take your orders, and to keep quiet about them. You always have the option to retire in disgust, but you don’t have the option of spilling the beans publicly, unless you want to go to jail.
Members within the CIA are the ones leaking about gulags and renditions. Members of The FBI and the military justuce dept. complained about torture.
Taken as a whole, the intelligence community does not want to torture people, they did not advise the President to go into Iraq, they did not claim that Saddam posed a threat, they did not think a war in Iraq would be a cakewalk or pay for itself, they do not want to spy on innocent Americans.
I don’t know why you insist on making comments tha characterize every soldier as a moron and every intelligence officer as a sadist. It’s not the case and it never was.
You are doing just what Steven did. Using a kind of generalized “appeal” to make your point. I find myself doing that at times. I did not say “every soldier and every “intelligence” officer. Just an awful lot, plenty, gobs and gobs. And as a whole the I fell the intelligence community is not intelligent and the Military absolutely pointless.
Off hand, I can think of ONE high profile government official who has resigned publicly in protest of what our U.S. government has done. That has an impact. Maybe there is one, I can’t recall. If you can name one, you cannot name 10. And out of 1=9 people in a government this large that says that the government is acting behaviorally total agreement with the Bush administration. It doesn’t matter what they think if they behave in agreement.
I despise the intelligence community. Absolutely despise them. In whatever country they exist. They are the worst.
And I don’t understand because I thought George Tenet who was head of the CIA said that it was a “slam dunk” that Saddaam had weapons of Mass destruction. So what do you mean they didn’t advise GW to go into Iraq and Sadaam did not pose a threat?
I happen to have a more favoralbe opinion, quite frankly of Sadaam Hussein than I do of George Bush.
Actually, pretty much the entire upper management of the Directorate of Operations of the CIA has resigned. Their protest was to leak to the NYT’s that Cheney is a dangerous lunatic and Porter Goss is his lackey.
But you have to pay attention to the CIA to know anything about its internal dynamics.
I have heard this story about the entire upper management resigning.
Now the question is…Did they resign…or were they asked to leave by the Porter assigned to be Bush’s Butler of the CIA .
I don’t doubt that many would be very unhappy about having a new boss who was intent on changing things dramatically. That’s just not the same as resigning in public protest. It’s not the same when someone resigns because the new boss doesn’t appreciate them like the old boss and gives them a new assignment they feel is beneath them.
It doesn’t matter who they name to head the CIA. When the new guy comes in with big ideas about changing everything….people quit, resign, get fired. That’s an old story.It happens everywhere in every job enviornment. I am not impressed.
I don’t see any ‘morality” coming out of these agencies. The whole point of the CIA is to act outside of morality. Thats the liscence given to them…that’s their purpose…to act on the fringes domestically and outside the bounds of the law of and in other countries
Furthermore, George Tenet has quietly refuted that he ever told Bush the case for WMD was a slam-dunk, and Woodward is just an Orwellian scriptwriter at this point.
And Tenet is the one that put the dogs on Cheney for the Plame thing.
And Tenet resigned.
And Powell and Armitage resigned. And their chief-of-staff has called Cheney a vampire.
Brent Scowcroft has called him a vampire. Poppy Bush has wanted Cheney to resign for several years.
Cheney is a very powerful and very dangerous man, but he is not liked and most of the old guard republicans consider him to be delusional and insane, as well as vicious and incompetent.
The problem is that Rummy is equally nuts and equally dangerous.
As for your hatred of intelligence officers, it is true that spies do nasty things for a living as they are the first to admit. However, it is the leadership giving the orders that determines whether their jobs are worthwhile or deeply immoral. Too often, they have been used for bad reasons. But I still detect a distinctly Republican flavor to that tendency.
I think JFK was ready to disband the CIA after the Bay of Pigs. I think it may have got him killed. But even then that was a certain faction within the Agency.
I think the Agency has been irrationally anti-communist, and used that as cover to exert a kind of soft imperialism. And I think they were fully on board for that mission. I know they are not on board for the mission they have now. Or at least they weren’t until all their best officers resigned.
They did resign. But I said “publicly in protest”. The point being… I am resigning because I disagree with the policies of the administration. They resigned, saying they were moving on and then made crticisms. That’s completely different.
Some have resigned and then later said they disagreed, but Powell has done nothing and wants to keep his aide Wilkerson quiet. Wilkersson is making a lot of noise, but he is not high profile in my opinion, not nationally known. He’s also terribly conservative.
Tenet, is all over the map. I bet he did say words to the effect that it was a slam dunk. He’s an awful person. Ugly man inside and out. I saw him before congress, he had nothing but contempt for the people questioning him and laughed in their face essientially like they were so beneath him. I thought that was really shocking.
You said: “As for your hatred of intelligence officers, it is true that spies do nasty things for a living as they are the first to admit. However, it is the leadership giving the orders that determines whether their jobs are worthwhile or deeply immoral. Too often, they have been used for bad reasons. But I still detect a distinctly Republican flavor to that tendency.”
I said I hate intelligence agencies whatever country, not officers…that’s too specific. Anyway, Carter did a lot of horrible things in Central and South America, then Reagen, then Bush. You cannot excuse people because they are given orders to do things.
I believe ‘intelligence agencies” are simply put …the institutionalization of paranoia. I am sorry….the world is NOT a dangerous place. The agencies imagine danger where there is none….(Example BIG EXAMPLE..IRAQ). This is in part the historical work of frenzied paranoia, first getting rid of democratically elected officials in Iran Iraq, replacing them with dictators, then replacing them inadvertently , perversely and delusionally with fundamentalist regimes. This is largely the historical work of the intelligence agencies.
Sorry. They are on the whole worthless. They create choas and misery and are a representation of the state of human madness
Hey I thought this article was about the Feebs, an agency I loathe and despise more than any other in the community. Which is in complete contrast to how I feel about some of their agents, who are amongst my nation’s smartest, hard-working and honest government employees.
It’s the culture of the Agency itself which is at fault here, and the entire thing needs disbanded and re-formed under completely different guidelines and policies.
Just do this: think of “FBI scandal” and many, many examples will come to mind. And if you do a little digging, even more will pop up. Keystone Kops only with frightening powers.
Pax
…Congressional debate over the program of wiretapping without warrants…
This is an obfuscation and doesn’t really address what’s at stake here.
We’we all heard the purported justification from BushCo for not adhering to law – in this case FISA; that the president has inherent powers to collect intelligence in a time of war. Problem is, the only way of getting around FISA (wich by statute is the exclusive means of collecting intelligence) is if the AUMF somehow implicitly repealed FISA. (This is the argumentation in one of the recently released emails.)
I have no legal expertise myself and IANAL, but it seems to me the real debate ought to be: If it is accepted that the AUMF implicitly repealed FISA then which acts of Congress did the AUMF NOT repeal?
That is, accepting the argument that the AUMF implicitly repealed FISA, isn’t that the same as accepting that the AUMF was the inauguration of dictatorship?
Any lawyers out there?
You don’t need to be a lawyer to smell the administration’s legal justifications are a load of bullcrap.
Maybe I don’t. But I would prefer that real lawyers brought forth the question I pondered above, and got the mainstream debate to be about that.
Glenn Greenwald at his blog is all over this story. He’s a first amendment rights attorney practicing in New York, Here’s the LINK to his blog. He has covered the legal issues far more thoroughly than anyone else I know.