National Journal, via Think Progress, reports on the next show to drop. This time it will happen behind closed doors as former NSA officer Russell Tice briefs staffers of Sen. John Warner’s (R-VA) Armed Services Committee.
A former intelligence officer for the National Security Agency said Thursday he plans to tell Senate staffers next week that unlawful activity occurred at the agency under the supervision of Gen. Michael Hayden beyond what has been publicly reported, while hinting that it might have involved the illegal use of space-based satellites and systems to spy on U.S. citizens. …
[Tice] said he plans to tell the committee staffers the NSA conducted illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of U.S. citizens while he was there with the knowledge of Hayden. … “I think the people I talk to next week are going to be shocked when I tell them what I have to tell them. It’s pretty hard to believe,” Tice said. “I hope that they’ll clean up the abuses and have some oversight into these programs, which doesn’t exist right now.” …
Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts this week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. “It’s an angle that you haven’t heard about yet,” he said. … He would not discuss with a reporter the details of his allegations, saying doing so would compromise classified information and put him at risk of going to jail. He said he “will not confirm or deny” if his allegations involve the illegal use of space systems and satellites.
Tice was fired from NSA after he was forced to undergo a psychological examination. More on this below the flip:
From CBS NewsBlog:
When Tice was fired last May, Rebecca Carr of Cox News service tried to connect the dots. “The National Security Agency fired a high level intelligence official just days after he publicly urged Congress to pass stronger protections for federal whistleblowers facing retaliation,” she wrote. It wasn’t a clear cut case of whistleblower retaliation, however, as “Tice has been at the odds with the agency since he reported suspicions that a female co-worker at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), was a spy for the People’s Republic of China.”
(I guess so: “In June, 2003, the agency suspended his security clearances and ordered him to maintain the agency’s vehicles by pumping gas and cleaning them. Last month, they ordered him to unload furniture at its warehouses.”)
This is where it gets weird – or weirder, anyway: The NSA ordered Tice to undergo an unscheduled psychological evaluation. There, a “Defense Department psychologist concluded that Tice suffered from psychotic paranoia.” Tice later wrote that he “did this even though he admitted that I did not show any of the normal indications of someone suffering from paranoia.” (There have been documented cases where government whistleblowers or troublemakers have been intimidated or persecuted through forced psychological testing.)
James Risen, the Times reporter who broke the spy story, has been making the media rounds lauding his sources – including, it follows, Tice. He told Katie Couric:
Well, you know, I think this was the most classic whistleblower case I’ve ever seen where people–you know, in–in a lot of stories people have mixed motives for why they talk to reporters. Some–some people–in some stories there’s a turf battle, and they’re losing out in the turf battle, or whatever. In this case–I’ve been a reporter for about 25 years, this was the purest case of a whistle–of–of whistleblowers coming forward, people who truly believed that there was something wrong going on in the government, and they were motivated, I believe, by the purest of reasons.
I can’t claim to be an expert in this field, but I do believe the intelligence agencies have set procedures that they use to discredit disgruntled employees that decide to leak damaging information (to their Inspector General, or the wrong supervisor, or Congress, or the press). Having them undergo a psychological evaluation and then declaring them unfit is probably one of those procedures. Accusing them of mismanagement of funds seems to be another popular trick. In any case, Tice is going to be telling Senate staffers some shocking stories that he says “are pretty hard to believe”.
The Republicans around Sen. Warner have a decision to make. If they assess Tice to be credible, they need to decide how many more shocking, hard to believe violations of our civil rights they are willing to gloss over. They need to decide if Michael Hayden deserves to become DCI, or whether his nomination was really the Bush administration’s plea to be finally put of their misery and removed from office.
John Warner has more integrity than your average Republican in Washington. I hope he doesn’t sweep this under the rug or make apologies for it, or, worst of all, call Tice crazy. I don’t think Tice is lying.
It will be interesting to see if CheneyCo. moves to prevent Tice from meeting with the Armed Services Committee. I have a feeling they have too much on their plate right now to keep things under control.
