Bush refuses to answer questions about spying on Americans....

LOL. You mean bashing Z10 is the best defense of Bush's policies you reactionaries have, right? Why am I not surprised.

 

It's not hard to expect. Negative minds think alike.

 

NSA Whistleblower Alleges Illegal Spying
Former Employee Admits to Being a New York Times Source
By BRIAN ROSS

Jan 10, 2006 — - Russell Tice, a longtime insider at the National Security Agency, is now a whistleblower the agency would like to keep quiet.

For 20 years, Tice worked in the shadows as he helped the United States spy on other people's conversations around the world.

Watch the full report on Nightline at 11:35 p.m. ET.

"I specialized in what's called special access programs," Tice said of his job. "We called them 'black world' programs and operations."

But now, Tice tells ABC News that some of those secret "black world" operations run by the NSA were operated in ways that he believes violated the law. He is prepared to tell Congress all he knows about the alleged wrongdoing in these programs run by the Defense Department and the National Security Agency in the post-9/11 efforts to go after terrorists.

"The mentality was we need to get these guys, and we're going to do whatever it takes to get them," he said.

Tracking Calls

Tice says the technology exists to track and sort through every domestic and international phone call as they are switched through centers, such as one in New York, and to search for key words or phrases that a terrorist might use.

"If you picked the word 'jihad' out of a conversation," Tice said, "the technology exists that you focus in on that conversation, and you pull it out of the system for processing."

According to Tice, intelligence analysts use the information to develop graphs that resemble spiderwebs linking one suspect's phone number to hundreds or even thousands more.

Tice Admits Being a New York Times Source

President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.

But Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.

"That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum," Tice said.

The same day The New York Times broke the story of the NSA eavesdropping without warrants, Tice surfaced as a whistleblower in the agency. He told ABC News that he was a source for the Times' reporters. But Tice maintains that his conscience is clear.

"As far as I'm concerned, as long as I don't say anything that's classified, I'm not worried," he said. "We need to clean up the intelligence community. We've had abuses, and they need to be addressed."

The NSA revoked Tice's security clearance in May of last year based on what it called psychological concerns and later dismissed him. Tice calls that bunk and says that's the way the NSA deals with troublemakers and whistleblowers. Today the NSA said it had "no information to provide."

 

Wrong. He's the one who bashed me for pages on end. Once I proved his false accusations wrong, our posts were deleted shortly after posting protecting his credibility. The thread I started providing said evidence was also closed by the same moderator. I'm sorry you missed them. The PM's I received made me realize this has been going on for sometime. I know I'm far from alone in this situation. Oh well. Nobody is going to change anyone's mind on this political thread. It shouldn't have to come to personal attacks though. Good trading to everyone.

 

Bush to visit ultra-secret NSA headquarters

Friday, January 20, 2006; Posted: 1:23 p.m. EST (18:23 GMT)



WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration is opening a campaign to push back against criticism of its domestic spying program, ahead of congressional hearings into whether President Bush has the legal authority to eavesdrop on Americans.

President Bush will visit the ultra-secret National Security Agency on Wednesday, underscoring his claim that he has the constitutional authority to let intelligence officials listen in on international phone calls of Americans with suspected ties to terrorists.

"We are stepping up our efforts to educate the American people," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said about Bush's trip to the NSA, based at Fort Meade in Maryland.

"This is a critical tool that helps us save lives and prevent attacks," he said. "It is limited and targeted to al Qaeda communications, with the focus being on detection and prevention."

On Monday, deputy national intelligence director Mike Hayden, who headed the National Security Agency when the program began in October 2001, will speak on the issue a the National Press Club.

On Tuesday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is delivering a speech on the program in Washington.

Gonzales plans to testify publicly about the secret program at a Senate hearing set to begin February 6.

Gonzales said he reached an agreement with Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to answer questions about the legal basis -- but not the operations -- of the NSA's warrantless eavesdropping on telephone conversations between suspected terrorists and people in the United States.

Gonzales this week sent congressional leaders a 42-page legal defense of warrantless eavesdropping, expanding on arguments that he and other administration officials have been making since the program was first disclosed last month.

The memo argues that Bush has authority to order the warrantless wiretapping under the Constitution and the post-September 11 congressional resolution granting him broad power to fight terrorism.

Vice President Dick Cheney, who was to meet with congressional leaders at the White House on Friday to discuss the issue, defended the program on Thursday in New York in a speech to the conservative Manhattan Institute. He stressed that the program was limited and conducted in a way that safeguards civil liberties.

At a briefing held by House Democrats on Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union called the program an illegal operation.

'Not imperial power'
"The executive power of our country is not an imperial power," Caroline Fredrickson, the director of the ACLU legislative office in Washington, told Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee.

"The president has demonstrated a dangerous disregard for our Constitution and our laws with his authorization for this illegal program," she said.

Fredrickson spoke to Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. The ACLU filed suit against the NSA on Jan. 17 on behalf of journalists, nonprofit groups, terrorism experts and community advocates. The suit alleges that the NSA program violates the First and Fourth amendments and the separation of power.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

 

Excerpt from CNN

"Bush wasn't the only official to stand by the program Monday. In Washington, Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, the former NSA chief when Bush first authorized the surveillance program after September 11, 2001, staunchly came to its defense.

"Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9/11 al Qaeda operatives in the United States, and we would have identified them as such," said Hayden, who now is principal deputy director of national intelligence."

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/01/23/nsa.strategy/index.html

 

January 29, 2006
Editorial
Spies, Lies and Wiretaps

A bit over a week ago, President Bush and his men promised to provide the legal, constitutional and moral justifications for the sort of warrantless spying on Americans that has been illegal for nearly 30 years. Instead, we got the familiar mix of political spin, clumsy historical misinformation, contemptuous dismissals of civil liberties concerns, cynical attempts to paint dissents as anti-American and pro-terrorist, and a couple of big, dangerous lies.

The first was that the domestic spying program is carefully aimed only at people who are actively working with Al Qaeda, when actually it has violated the rights of countless innocent Americans. And the second was that the Bush team could have prevented the 9/11 attacks if only they had thought of eavesdropping without a warrant.
•

Sept. 11 could have been prevented. This is breathtakingly cynical. The nation's guardians did not miss the 9/11 plot because it takes a few hours to get a warrant to eavesdrop on phone calls and e-mail messages. They missed the plot because they were not looking. The same officials who now say 9/11 could have been prevented said at the time that no one could possibly have foreseen the attacks. We keep hoping that Mr. Bush will finally lay down the bloody banner of 9/11, but Karl Rove, who emerged from hiding recently to talk about domestic spying, made it clear that will not happen — because the White House thinks it can make Democrats look as though they do not want to defend America. "President Bush believes if Al Qaeda is calling somebody in America, it is in our national security interest to know who they're calling and why," he told Republican officials. "Some important Democrats clearly disagree."

Mr. Rove knows perfectly well that no Democrat has ever said any such thing — and that nothing prevented American intelligence from listening to a call from Al Qaeda to the United States, or a call from the United States to Al Qaeda, before Sept. 11, 2001, or since. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act simply required the government to obey the Constitution in doing so. And FISA was amended after 9/11 to make the job much easier.

Only bad guys are spied on. Bush officials have said the surveillance is tightly focused only on contacts between people in this country and Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed it saved thousands of lives by preventing attacks. But reporting in this paper has shown that the National Security Agency swept up vast quantities of e-mail messages and telephone calls and used computer searches to generate thousands of leads. F.B.I. officials said virtually all of these led to dead ends or to innocent Americans. The biggest fish the administration has claimed so far has been a crackpot who wanted to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch — a case that F.B.I. officials said was not connected to the spying operation anyway.

The spying is legal. The secret program violates the law as currently written. It's that simple. In fact, FISA was enacted in 1978 to avoid just this sort of abuse. It said that the government could not spy on Americans by reading their mail (or now their e-mail) or listening to their telephone conversations without obtaining a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The court has approved tens of thousands of warrants over the years and rejected a handful.

As amended after 9/11, the law says the government needs probable cause, the constitutional gold standard, to believe the subject of the surveillance works for a foreign power or a terrorist group, or is a lone-wolf terrorist. The attorney general can authorize electronic snooping on his own for 72 hours and seek a warrant later. But that was not good enough for Mr. Bush, who lowered the standard for spying on Americans from "probable cause" to "reasonable belief" and then cast aside the bedrock democratic principle of judicial review.

Just trust us. Mr. Bush made himself the judge of the proper balance between national security and Americans' rights, between the law and presidential power. He wants Americans to accept, on faith, that he is doing it right. But even if the United States had a government based on the good character of elected officials rather than law, Mr. Bush would not have earned that kind of trust. The domestic spying program is part of a well-established pattern: when Mr. Bush doesn't like the rules, he just changes them, as he has done for the detention and treatment of prisoners and has threatened to do in other areas, like the confirmation of his judicial nominees. He has consistently shown a lack of regard for privacy, civil liberties and judicial due process in claiming his sweeping powers. The founders of our country created the system of checks and balances to avert just this sort of imperial arrogance.

The rules needed to be changed. In 2002, a Republican senator — Mike DeWine of Ohio — introduced a bill that would have done just that, by lowering the standard for issuing a warrant from probable cause to "reasonable suspicion" for a "non-United States person." But the Justice Department opposed it, saying the change raised "both significant legal and practical issues" and may have been unconstitutional. Now, the president and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are telling Americans that reasonable suspicion is a perfectly fine standard for spying on Americans as well as non-Americans — and they are the sole judges of what is reasonable.

So why oppose the DeWine bill? Perhaps because Mr. Bush had already secretly lowered the standard of proof — and dispensed with judges and warrants — for Americans and non-Americans alike, and did not want anyone to know.

War changes everything. Mr. Bush says Congress gave him the authority to do anything he wanted when it authorized the invasion of Afghanistan. There is simply nothing in the record to support this ridiculous argument.

The administration also says that the vote was the start of a war against terrorism and that the spying operation is what Mr. Cheney calls a "wartime measure." That just doesn't hold up. The Constitution does suggest expanded presidential powers in a time of war. But the men who wrote it had in mind wars with a beginning and an end. The war Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney keep trying to sell to Americans goes on forever and excuses everything.

Other presidents did it. Mr. Gonzales, who had the incredible bad taste to begin his defense of the spying operation by talking of those who plunged to their deaths from the flaming twin towers, claimed historic precedent for a president to authorize warrantless surveillance. He mentioned George Washington, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These precedents have no bearing on the current situation, and Mr. Gonzales's timeline conveniently ended with F.D.R., rather than including Richard Nixon, whose surveillance of antiwar groups and other political opponents inspired FISA in the first place. Like Mr. Nixon, Mr. Bush is waging an unpopular war, and his administration has abused its powers against antiwar groups and even those that are just anti-Republican.
•

The Senate Judiciary Committee is about to start hearings on the domestic spying. Congress has failed, tragically, on several occasions in the last five years to rein in Mr. Bush and restore the checks and balances that are the genius of American constitutional democracy. It is critical that it not betray the public once again on this score.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/o...&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print

 

Karl Rove wants the American public to believe only one political party disagrees with Bush’s warrantless domestic spying program. But this morning on ABC’s This Week, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) said the program was illegal:

HAGEL: I don’t believe, from what I’ve heard, but I’m going to give the administration an opportunity to explain it, that he has the authority now to do what he’s doing. Now, maybe he can convince me otherwise, but that’s OK.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But not yet.

HAGEL: Not yet. But that’s OK. If he needs more authority, he just can’t unilaterally decide that that 1978 law is out of date and he will be the guardian of America and he will violate that law. He needs to come back, work with us, work with the courts if he has to, and we will do what we need to do to protect the civil liberties of this country and the national security of this country.

Hagel joins other prominent conservatives — including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) — who have questioned the legal basis of Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance program.

 

Palace Revolt

They were loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees. They fought a quiet battle to rein in the president's power in the war on terror. And they paid a price for it. A NEWSWEEK investigation.

By Daniel Klaidman, Stuart Taylor Jr. and Evan Thomas
Newsweek

Feb. 6, 2006 issue - James Comey, a lanky, 6-foot-8 former prosecutor who looks a little like Jimmy Stewart, resigned as deputy attorney general in the summer of 2005. The press and public hardly noticed. Comey's farewell speech, delivered in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, contained all the predictable, if heartfelt, appreciations. But mixed in among the platitudes was an unusual passage. Comey thanked "people who came to my office, or my home, or called my cell phone late at night, to quietly tell me when I was about to make a mistake; they were the people committed to getting it right—and to doing the right thing—whatever the price. These people," said Comey, "know who they are. Some of them did pay a price for their commitment to right, but they wouldn't have it any other way."

One of those people—a former assistant attorney general named Jack Goldsmith—was absent from the festivities and did not, for many months, hear Comey's grateful praise. In the summer of 2004, Goldsmith, 43, had left his post in George W. Bush's Washington to become a professor at Harvard Law School. Stocky, rumpled, genial, though possessing an enormous intellect, Goldsmith is known for his lack of pretense; he rarely talks about his time in government. In liberal Cambridge, Mass., he was at first snubbed in the community and mocked as an atrocity-abetting war criminal by his more knee-jerk colleagues. ICY WELCOME FOR NEW LAW PROF, headlined The Harvard Crimson.

They had no idea. Goldsmith was actually the opposite of what his detractors imagined. For nine months, from October 2003 to June 2004, he had been the central figure in a secret but intense rebellion of a small coterie of Bush administration lawyers. Their insurrection, described to NEWSWEEK by current and former administration officials who did not wish to be identified discussing confidential deliberations, is one of the most significant and intriguing untold stories of the war on terror.

These Justice Department lawyers, backed by their intrepid boss Comey, had stood up to the hard-liners, centered in the office of the vice president, who wanted to give the president virtually unlimited powers in the war on terror. Demanding that the White House stop using what they saw as farfetched rationales for riding rough-shod over the law and the Constitution, Goldsmith and the others fought to bring government spying and interrogation methods within the law. They did so at their peril; ostracized, some were denied promotions, while others left for more comfortable climes in private law firms and academia. Some went so far as to line up private lawyers in 2004, anticipating that the president's eavesdropping program would draw scrutiny from Congress, if not prosecutors. These government attorneys did not always succeed, but their efforts went a long way toward vindicating the principle of a nation of laws and not men.

The rebels were not whistle-blowers in the traditional sense. They did not want—indeed avoided—publicity. (Goldsmith confirmed public facts about himself but otherwise declined to comment. Comey also declined to comment.) They were not downtrodden career civil servants. Rather, they were conservative political appointees who had been friends and close colleagues of some of the true believers they were fighting against. They did not see the struggle in terms of black and white but in shades of gray—as painfully close calls with unavoidable pitfalls. They worried deeply about whether their principles might put Americans at home and abroad at risk. Their story has been obscured behind legalisms and the veil of secrecy over the White House. But it is a quietly dramatic profile in courage. (For its part the White House denies any internal strife. "The proposition of internal division in our fight against terrorism isn't based in fact," says Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Vice President Dick Cheney. "This administration is united in its commitment to protect Americans, defeat terrorism and grow democracy.")

Full story here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11079547/site/newsweek/

 

Specter Believes Spy Program Violates Law

By HOPE YEN, Associated Press Writer 24 minutes ago

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' explanations so far for the Bush administration's failure to obtain warrants for its domestic surveillance program are "strained" and "unrealistic," the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman said Sunday.

Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), whose committee has scheduled hearings Monday on the National Security Agency program, said he believes the administration violated a 1978 law specifically calling for a secretive court to consider and approve such monitoring.

Specter, R-Pa., said he might consider subpoenas for administration documents that would detail its legal justification for the program.

"The president could've taken this there and lay it on the line," Specter said, citing the special court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

"That court has an outstanding record of not leaking. They would be pre-eminently well-qualified to evaluate this program and say it's OK or not OK," Specter told NBC's "Meet the Press."

Under the NSA program put in place after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the government has eavesdropped, without seeking warrants, on international phone calls and e-mails of people within the United States who are deemed to be a terrorism risk.

The administration has defended Bush's decision to bypass the FISA law, saying it is too cumbersome to deal with in a post-Sept. 11 world of heightened security threats. It also said Bush had authority as commander in chief and under a 2001 congressional resolution authorizing force in the fight against terrorism.

"The president's authority to take military action — including the use of communications intelligence targeted at the enemy — does not come merely from his constitutional powers. It comes directly from Congress as well," in that post-Sept. 11 resolution, according to Gonzales' prepared testimony for the hearing. The Associated Press on Saturday obtained a copy of his scheduled remarks.

Specter was skeptical.

"I think that contention is very strained and unrealistic. The authorization for use of force never mentions electronic surveillance," Specter said.

In response to written questions submitted to him by Specter before the hearing, Gonzales gives an explanation why the administration bypassed the FISA court: "The delay inherent in the FISA process is incompatible with the narrow purpose of this early warning system."

Specter, however, said that response "was not entirely responsive. ... His answer wasn't really clear." The senator said there is no reason why the administration could not have consulted with the spy court or Congress, who could have changed the law if it was too cumbersome.

But Gen. Michael Hayden, the No. 2 intelligence official in the government, said the FISA process "doesn't give us the speed and agility to do what this program is designed to do."

The program's intent is to "detect and prevent attacks. This is not about long-term surveillance to gather reams of intelligence against a stable and a fixed target," Hayden said on "Fox News Sunday."

Specter's committee has asked the administration to Justice Department documents detailing the legal justification for the NSA program.

Asked about the possibility the committee might subpoena the administration for the material, Specter said he first wanted to hear from Gonzales.

"If we come to it and need it, I'll be open about it," Specter said. He added, "If the necessity arises, I won't be timid."