Do you really believe that the Bush administration's clearly broad-based domestic spying program, between the Pentagon, FBI and NSA, was really limited to listening in on 500 or so al-Qaida sympathizers chatting away on their cell phones to their handlers in Harare? If you do, stop reading. You've already gone down the rabbit hole. If you have doubts, read on.
The National Security Agency is not supposed to target Americans; when a U.S. citizen's name comes up in an NSA "intercept," the agency routinely minimizes dissemination of the info by masking the name before it distributes the report to other U.S. agencies. But it's now clear the agency disseminates thousands of U.S. names. U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton told a Senate confirmation hearing he had requested that U.S. names be unmasked from NSA intercepts on a handful of occasions; the State Department said he had made 10 such requests since 2001, and that the department as a whole had made 400 similar requests over the same period. But evidence is emerging that NSA regularly supplies uncensored intercepts, including named Americans, to other agencies far more often than even many top intel officials knew.
According to information obtained by NEWSWEEK, since January 2004 NSA received—and fulfilled—between 3,000 and 3, 500 requests from other agencies to supply the names of U.S. citizens and officials (and citizens of other countries that help NSA eavesdrop around the world, including Britain, Canada and Australia) that initially were deleted from raw intercept reports. Sources say the number of names disclosed by NSA to other agencies during this period is more than 10,000. About one third of such disclosures were made to officials at the policymaking level; most of the rest were disclosed to other intel agencies and, perhaps surprisingly, only a small proportion to law-enforcement agencies. Civil libertarians expressed dismay at the numbers. An official familiar with NSA procedures insisted the agency maintains careful logs of all requests for U.S. names and doles out such info only after agency officials are satisfied "that the requester needs the information [and that it's] necessary to understand the foreign intelligence or assess its importance."
—Mark Hosenball
Okay, stop there for a moment, and consider that we now know that the NSA initiated its domestic spying operations on its own, in contravention to the rules in the very Reagan executive order the then head of the agency cited as justification -- and before going to the president.
And now, consider this story from a D.C. independent investigative journalist named Wayne Madsen, which if true, is even more explosive than the NSA spying itself (note, WMR in the piece below stands for "Wanye Madsen Report"):
NSA spied on its own employees, other U.S. intelligence personnel, journalists, and members of Congress
By Wayne Madsen
NSA spied on its own employees, other U.S. intelligence personnel, and their journalist and congressional contacts. WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies -- including the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices. [emphasis added]
The journalist surveillance program, code named "Firstfruits," was part of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. Firstfruits was authorized as part of a DCI "Countering Denial and Deception" program responsible to an entity known as the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC). Since the intelligence community's reorganization, the DCI has been replaced by the Director of National Intelligence headed by John Negroponte and his deputy, former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden.
Firstfruits was a database that contained both the articles and the transcripts of telephone and other communications of particular Washington journalists known to report on sensitive U.S. intelligence activities, particularly those involving NSA. According to NSA sources, the targeted journalists included author James Bamford, the New York Times' James Risen, the Washington Post's Vernon Loeb, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the Washington Times' Bill Gertz, UPI's John C. K. Daly, and this editor [Wayne Madsen], who has written about NSA for The Village Voice, CAQ, Intelligence Online, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
In addition, beginning in 2001 but before the 9-11 attacks, NSA began to target anyone in the U.S. intelligence community who was deemed a "disgruntled employee." According to NSA sources, this surveillance was a violation of United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The surveillance of U.S. intelligence personnel by other intelligence personnel in the United States and abroad was conducted without any warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The targeted U.S. intelligence agency personnel included those who made contact with members of the media, including the journalists targeted by Firstfruits, as well as members of Congress, Inspectors General, and other oversight agencies. Those discovered to have spoken to journalists and oversight personnel were subjected to sudden clearance revocation and termination as "security risks."
In 2001, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rejected a number of FISA wiretap applications from Michael Resnick, the FBI supervisor in charge of counter-terrorism surveillance. The court said that some 75 warrant requests from the FBI were erroneous and that the FBI, under Louis Freeh and Robert Mueller, had misled the court and misused the FISA law on dozens of occasions. In a May 17, 2002 opinion, the presiding FISA Judge, Royce C. Lamberth (a Texan appointed by Ronald Reagan), barred Resnick from ever appearing before the court again. The ruling, released by Lamberth's successor, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelley, stated in extremely strong terms, "In virtually every instance, the government's misstatements and omissions in FISA applications and violations of the Court's orders involved information sharing and unauthorized disseminations to criminal investigators and prosecutors . . . How these misrepresentations occurred remains unexplained to the court."
After the Justice Department appealed the FISC decision, the FISA Review court met for the first time in its history. The three-member review court, composed of Ralph Guy of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Edward Leavy of the 9th Circuit, and Laurence Silberman [of the Robb-Silberman Commission on 911 "intelligence failures"] of the D.C. Circuit, overturned the FISC decision on the Bush administration's wiretap requests.
Based on recent disclosures that the Bush administration has been using the NSA to conduct illegal surveillance of U.S. citizens, it is now becoming apparent what vexed the FISC to the point that it rejected, in an unprecedented manner, numerous wiretap requests and sanctioned Resnick.
Note that Risen, along with fellow Timesman Eric Lichtblau, is one of the journos who first blew the lid off the NSA spy scandal, and Hersh has bedeviled the administration from day one. If Risen was been under surveillance, it's possible the administration already has a good idea who leaked the NSA story to him for his belated NYT story and more importantly, his book.
In that case, regarding who the administration will now target in its investigation of the spy scandal leak? The obvious place to begin would be Risen, and the righties are clearly hoping Bush investigators at Alberto Gonzalez's Justice Department will use the Judy Miller precedent to jail him (nice spelling out of the differences betweent the two cases here and here). And since only a small universe of people in and out of the administration were read into the program, the pool of "suspects" is small, including those NSA agents ordered to carry out the wiretaps. So where to go next if you're the administration? Consider Madsen's front pager from his web-site yesterday:
January 3, 2006 -- Recent revelations that it was then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey who said that Bush's use of NSA to target U.S. persons by going around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) was illegal and refused to approve the wiretaps point to a high level Bush administration official or officials being involved with the "leak" of the so-called classified surveillance program.
Comey is an old friend and New York federal prosecutor colleague of Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor in the illegal leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's name and cover company to the media. It was Comey who recommended Fitzgerald for his special prosecutor job and placed a protective firewall between him and the political leadership of the Justice Department.
There is some speculation about whether Comey was one of the whistleblowers for the NSA surveillance story. If the Bush administration decides to go after Comey that will put them at loggerheads with Fitzgerald, resulting in a showdown within the Justice Department between career prosecutor and political hacks like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Comey is now a Senior Vice President and General Counsel for Lockheed Martin. That would place him in a potentially tenuous position since Lockheed Martin is a top Pentagon and intelligence agency contractor and neocons are rife in both the Defense Department and the intelligence community.
Recent word from NSA is that long time employees of the agency are livid that its signals intelligence has been misused by the neo-cons for political purposes. The bottom line: expect more leaks.
CNN's national security correspondent David Ensor is reporting that the "leak" of the wiretap program is very serious according to his intelligence sources. However, the Bush administration asked the New York Times over a year ago to sit on the story about the surveillance "program," meaning the Bush White House knew there was a leak for at least a year but waited until the publication of the New York Times story to begin a criminal probe. This is an indication that the criminal probe is as much a political misuse of government assets as is the NSA surveillance.
NSA sources report that the head of security for the agency is actively investigating possible leakers at the Fort Meade headquarters, continuing a witch hunt and purge that began prior to 911. The head of NSA security is Kemp Ensor. It is not known if the two Ensors are related.
Madsen has been around for awhile, and his previous targets have included Karl Rove and what he calls Bush's "Christian blood cult." But while he's definitely no friend of the Bushies, Madsen is no kook. He's a former Naval officer who once worked for the NSA. He also is or was a senior fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), described as "a non-partisan privacy public advocacy group in Washington, DC." and with whom he has advised members of Congress on security matters. As a freelance investigative journalist (and columnist), he obviously has sources. We'll see if his allegations begin to filter out into the MSM...
The administration has clearly known for over a year about Risen and Lichtblau's knowledge of the NSA program -- the NY Times told them about it -- but they waited until now to pursue this supposedly dire and important investigation into the leak. Why? And why, for the umpteenth time, did they go around the FISA court? Was there something even they knew was shady about their requests, like, perhaps, the targets included American journalists and members of Congress? None of this is proven of course, but then, nothing is known about whom the administration wiretapped. The information is supposedly so sensitive it can't be revealed. We are supposed to trust President Bush, that he is telling the truth when he says the targets were all "communicating with the enemy."
Well, I don't trust him. At this point, why would anyone?
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%>
Tell a friend
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'This is the content of the message.
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%>
"[T]he practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.' Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 84, August, 1788
