Report: Bush Surveillance Program Was Massive
…The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.
Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the "President’s Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the "mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile."
The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials refused to be questioned. They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney.
According to the report, Addington could personally decide who in the administration was "read into" — allowed access to — the classified program. The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged by the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants effort. The administration admitted in 2005 that it had allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed through U.S. cables without seeking court orders…
What "Other Intelligence Activities" that "did not have any connection to terrorism" are they talking [or not talking] about?
I think it’s pretty likely that it was a massive sweep operation — “data mining.”
Remember Adm. Poindexter and his “Total Information Awareness Program” that created such a furor when word got out that he had to resign and the program was scrapped?
This was in 2002 and it was ended by Congress in 2003. But here’s a transcript from Nov. 2002 of Rumsfeld talking about it.
http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2002/11/dod111802.html
It’s full of his “oh, my goodness gracious” blather. But he does say one thing that I think is pretty significant.
He was talking about the furor raised when the “Office of Strategic Influence” was announced. I’m not sure what that was, but here’s the thing. What he says is that they’re exploring lots of things, and people get excited and think the sky’s falling, and everybody should just relax. They’ve consulted legal experts of all political persuasions.
Here’s the quote: And then there was the office of strategic influence. You may recall that. And “oh my goodness gracious isn’t that terrible, Henny Penny the sky is going to fall.” I went down that next day and said fine, if you want to savage this thing fine I’ll give you the corpse. There’s the name. You can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have.
What he’s saying is: we’ll just change the name and keep doing what has to be done.
Indeed !!!
Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Saturday, July 11, 2009 — 4:53 PM ET
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Cheney Is Linked to C.I.A. Concealment of Terror Program