How many surveillance programs has Bush authorized? No one knows, but in a desperate effort to save Attorney General Gonzales from perjury charges and/or impeachment the administration, in a letter from Mike McConnell, Bush’s Director of National Intelligence to Senator Arlen Specter, is now admitting to a “series of secret surveillance activities” pursuant to an executive order issued by Bush. These apparently include “activities” that are not part of the so-called “Terrorist Surveillance Program” that James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the New York Times first disclosed in their report dated December 16, 2005, which referred to Bush’s authorization for warrantless wiretapping by the NSA in violation of FISA. From the front page of today’s Washington Post:
The Bush administration’s chief intelligence official said yesterday that President Bush authorized a series of secret surveillance activities under a single executive order in late 2001. […]
The disclosure by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, appears to be the first time that the administration has publicly acknowledged that Bush’s order included undisclosed activities beyond the warrantless surveillance of e-mails and phone calls that Bush confirmed in December 2005.
In a letter to Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), McConnell wrote that the executive order following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks included “a number of . . . intelligence activities” and that a name routinely used by the administration — the Terrorist Surveillance Program — applied only to “one particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more.”
“This is the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed publicly, because it is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has been officially acknowledged,” McConnell said.
What these other “activities” which have not been officially acknowledged may be is an open question. However, we know that the Pentagon and the FBI have conducted surveillance of, and maintained databases on, various anti-war and other political activists. We also know that the Bush administration has developed the capability to conduct massive “data mining” operations which could be used to collect personal information about ordinary US citizens from emails, blogs, financial institutions’ databases, etc. We know that various telecommunications companies have allowed the government to install equipment to monitor communications routed through those companies’ networks. Furthermore, as lukery points out in his timely diary today entitled “Sibel Edmonds, Russ Tice, and the illegal spying that congress has NO idea about” (which I recommend you read) we know from the limited testimony of former NSA employee Russell Tice that some of these programs are so secret Congress may never have been briefed about them, and indeed President Bush may not even know the full extent of what he approved:
(cont.)
Tice: I can’t say how an intelligence agency uses [the information collected by these programs], because that would be classified. Then the FBI would have shackles and cuffs waiting on me real soon, so I have to be careful what I say. But we can talk about the technologies and we can use hypotheticals and we can use wiggle words. […]
We’re finding out that NSA conducted surveillance on U.S. citizens. And FISA could have been used but wasn’t, was sidestepped. No one even made the attempt to see if they had a problem they could have fixed through FISA.
That would lead one to ask the question: “Why did they omit the FISA court?”
I would think one reason that is possible is that perhaps a system already existed that you could do this with, and all you had to do is change the venue. And if that’s the case, and this system was a broad brush system, a vacuum cleaner that just sucks things up, this huge systematic approach to monitoring these calls, processing them, and filtering them—then ultimately a machine does 98.8 percent of your work. What you come out with from a haystack is a shoebox full of straw. Once you have that, you have people that can look at it. […]
I’m not going to tell you or anyone in the press anything that’s classified, especially about these programs. Because for the most part they’re extremely beneficial to the security of our citizens, programs that are worth their salt. The problem is that you can have abuses within that system, and there’s no oversight.
No oversight. Hasn’t that been the problem with the Bush/Cheney regime from day one? And September 11th was their golden opportunity to take whatever action they felt was warranted in terms of reducing the civil rights of American citizens, while shielding the loss of that privacy under the twin banners of “national security” and the “War on Terror.” And with no oversight from a compliant Congress (indeed, a Congress that was likely unaware of the full extent of this government surveillance), the chances that these programs were abused is almost a certainty. For what government program hasn’t been abused by the Bush administration?
Whether to promote the fortunes of the Republican Party, to promote the administration’s political agenda, to cover up the administration’s misdeeds and failures, or to benefit companies and individuals who had contributed financially to Republicans, almost every government agency, at one time or another has been corrupted. There is no reason to believe that these super-secret, deeply “black” intelligence activities have not been abused in one fashion or another by this most corrupt of presidential administrations. The only real questions regarding these “intelligence programs” are how massive was the abuse, how many lives were damaged, and how many people have had their rights violated? For what else could we expect from President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their loyal minions but dishonesty and illegality?
Kate Martin, executive director of the Center for National Security Studies, said the new disclosures show that Gonzales and other administration officials have “repeatedly misled the Congress and the American public” about the extent of NSA surveillance efforts.
“They have repeatedly tried to give the false impression that the surveillance was narrow and justified,” Martin said. “Why did it take accusations of perjury before the DNI disclosed that there is indeed other, presumably broader and more questionable, surveillance?”
Why, indeed.
