Thread: Report: Bush surveillance program was massive

Report: Bush surveillance program was massive

By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer Pamela Hess, Associated Press Writer – Fri Jul 10, 7:45 pm ET
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.

The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored."

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.

Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.

Bush started the warrantless wiretapping program under the authority of a secret court in 2006, and Congress authorized most of the intercepts in a 2008 electronic surveillance law. The fate of the remaining and still classified aspects of the wider surveillance program is not clear from the report.

The report's revelations came the same day that House Democrats said that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ordered one eight-year-old classified program shut down after learning lawmakers had never been apprised of its existence.

The IG report said that President Bush signed off on both the warrantless wiretapping and other top-secret operations shortly after Sept. 11 in a single presidential authorization. All the programs were periodically reauthorized, but except for the acknowledged wiretapping, they "remain highly classified."

The report says it's unclear how much valuable intelligence the program has yielded.

The report, mandated by Congress last year, was delivered to lawmakers Friday.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Ca., told The Associated Press she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping.

Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse reference to other classified programs during an August 2007 letter to Congress. But Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales two years earlier if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it.

"He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" she said Friday.

Robert Bork Jr., Gonzales' spokesman, said, "It has clearly been determined that he did not intend to mislead anyone."

In the wake of the new report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, renewed his call Friday for a formal nonpartisan inquiry into the government's information-gathering programs.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden — the primary architect of the program_ told the report's authors that the surveillance was "extremely valuable" in preventing further al-Qaida attacks. Hayden said the operations amounted to an "early warning system" allowing top officials to make critical judgments and carefully allocate national security resources to counter threats.

Information gathered by the secret program played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts, according to the report. Very few CIA analysts even knew about the program and therefore were unable to fully exploit it in their counterrorism work, the report said.

The report questioned the legal advice used by Bush to set up the program, pinpointing omissions and questionable legal memos written by Yoo, in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The Justice Department withdrew the memos years ago.

The report says Yoo's analysis approving the program ignored a law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime, and did so without fully notifying Congress. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying the program.

Yoo insisted that the president's wiretapping program had only to comply with Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure — but the report said Yoo ignored the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had previously overseen federal national security surveillance.

"The notion that basically one person at the Justice Department, John Yoo, and Hayden and the vice president's office were running a program around the laws that Congress passed, including a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, is mind boggling," Harman said.

House Democrats are pressing for legislation that would expand congressional access to secret intelligence briefings, but the White House has threatened to veto it.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090710/...c_surveillance

good

Report: CIA had plan to kill al-Qaida

2 hrs 3 mins ago
WASHINGTON – The Wall Street Journal reports that the CIA program concealed from Congress was a secret plan to kill or capture al-Qaida operatives.

Former intelligence officials tell the Journal that the plan, which was ordered halted by agency Director Leon Panetta, was an attempt to carry out a 2001 presidential finding authorized by President George W. Bush.

Citing anonymous sources, the newspaper reported Monday that the CIA spent money on planning and maybe some training, but it never became fully operational. The plan was highly classified and the CIA has refused to comment on it.

The program remained so secret that no members of Congress were told about it, allegedly on orders of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Democrat Dianne Feinstein of California, the head of the intelligence committee, suggests the Bush administration broke the law by concealing the program from Congress.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_cia_se...xrA3JlbGF0ZWQ-

Bush administration broke the law by concealing the program from Congress.

Not surprising at all to me.

Liz Cheney refuses to discuss veep's role in CIA

1 hr 25 mins ago
WASHINGTON – Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter Liz said Tuesday she doesn't believe her father did anything wrong in connection with a secret CIA operation that officials have said was designed to capture and kill al-Qaida figures.

At the same time, Liz Cheney accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats of seeking to politicize lingering arguments over how the Bush administration conducted the war against terrorism in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Asked directly on MSNBC whether her father directed the CIA not to keep Congress fully informed about the secret program, Cheney said, "This is a classified program and he doesn't talk about classified programs."

An official with direct knowledge of the program had said earlier that CIA Director Leon Panetta, according to notes he'd been given in the early months of the program, Cheney had told the CIA not to inform Congress of the specifics of the effort. Panetta canceled the program on June 23. Officials have said the program was aimed at going after officials of the terrorist network individually rather than through air attacks in an effort to limit civilian casualties.

Liz Cheney, a former principal deputy secretary of state for Mideast affairs during George W. Bush's presidency, is helping her father write his memoirs. She aggressively defended him in Tuesday's nationally broadcast interview while declining to say point-blank whether he had violated any law or rule.

The closest she came was in declaring, "There's no evidence of that."

Cheney said she didn't think Democrats were "up to handling national security" and that she thought they were trying to cover themselves on classified they agreed to support "when it was politically expedient."

"I think it does a disservice" to former CIA directors and to the intelligence community "to politicize this issue," said Cheney. She also criticized the Obama administration amid reports that Attorney General Eric Holder is considering naming a prosecutor to pursue people involved in counterterrorism programs, like harsh interrogation, that have now come under fire.

Cheney noted that President Barack Obama himself had said he wasn't interested in conducting such an investigation or in bringing such prosecutions, indicating he wanted to focus on the future, not the past.

"The nation has been kept safe for eight years," Cheney said. She said the continuing agitation by congressional Democrats for investigations of officials involved in such classified programs over the past few years "weakens our ability to be able to win this war."

She also said that if the American people had been given a chance to express themselves, she thinks "they would say yes" to keeping them secret.

"People had different perspectives about when Congress needed to be briefed," she said. " ... I think we've got to go back to, how have we been so successful in protecting against attacks to the homeland?"

"I was not in every meeting that my father had. I was not in most meetings that my father had," she said, when asked repeatedly to say whether he had been involved in concealing information from Congress.

"He doesn't comment on classified programs," Cheney said, "and obviously I am not going to comment on classified programs in his behalf."


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090714/...ia_concealment

She also said that if the American people had been given a chance to express themselves, she thinks "they would say yes" to keeping them secret.

Depends on which side of the fence your on & if it were legal or not.
She need not try & think for the American people IMO!

Some secrets just need to be kept

By DOUGLAS MACKINNON | 7/16/09 5:11 AM EDT

Unfortunately for those Americans who want our elected officials to do all within their power to protect us from terrorism, the labels “national security” and “top secret” are increasingly becoming partisan fodder.


In fact, our national security and intelligence world has been turned so upside down that, depending upon the ideology and motivation of the leaker and the paper that reports the “top secret” information, one can actually win a Pulitzer Prize.


It is through that twisted lens that we now observe the escalating food fight between the Central Intelligence Agency (with the support of some Republicans) and certain congressional Democrats (with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union and other “civil liberties” groups). The latest issue is a “secret” CIA directive from 2001 — as in right after the horrific terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 — which granted the agency blanket authority to attempt to kill or capture Al Qaeda operatives.


Pardon me, but isn’t that exactly what we wanted — and want — our intelligence and special ops folks to be doing?


The controversy here is that the directive might have been kept from Congress since 2001 at the request of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Toward that contentious point, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “If the intelligence committees had been briefed, they could have watched the program.” Watched? Or leaked?


Be it Congress, the White House or even family and friends, people like to tell “secrets.” Some like to bestow secret information in the belief that it empowers them. Some, for money. Others, because it will politically damage the other party.


When I worked at the Pentagon in a joint command, those facts of life were well-understood. It was precisely because of that basic flaw of human nature that it was logically mandated that the fewer people who had access to “top secret” information, the better it was for the nation.


This latest revelation — on top of “secret” CIA prisons (leaked to the media) and “harsh” interrogation techniques — has some Democrats in Congress demanding that Congress be given greater oversight of the CIA and our “national secrets.” While, publicly, the Obama White House is pushing back against the idea, privately, they may be willing to embrace more intrusion on CIA turf as signaled by Attorney General Eric Holder’s desire to name a criminal prosecutor to decide if U.S. interrogators “tortured” enemy combatants.


That debatable decision aside, the more we expose our top secret information and intelligence techniques to terrorists for partisan reasons, the greater the threat is to all of us.


Today is Sept. 10, 2001, all over again. What will tomorrow morning bring?


Douglas MacKinnon is a former Pentagon and White House official and was press secretary to former Sen. Bob Dole.


Unfortunately for those Americans who want our elected officials to do all within their power to protect us from terrorism, the labels “national security” and “top secret” are increasingly becoming partisan fodder.


In fact, our national security and intelligence world has been turned so upside down that, depending upon the ideology and motivation of the leaker and the paper that reports the “top secret” information, one can actually win a Pulitzer Prize.


It is through that twisted lens that we now observe the escalating food fight between the Central Intelligence Agency (with the support of some Republicans) and certain congressional Democrats (with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union and other “civil liberties” groups). The latest issue is a “secret” CIA directive from 2001 — as in right after the horrific terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 — which granted the agency blanket authority to attempt to kill or capture Al Qaeda operatives.


Pardon me, but isn’t that exactly what we wanted — and want — our intelligence and special ops folks to be doing?


The controversy here is that the directive might have been kept from Congress since 2001 at the request of former Vice President Dick Cheney. Toward that contentious point, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “If the intelligence committees had been briefed, they could have watched the program.” Watched? Or leaked?


Be it Congress, the White House or even family and friends, people like to tell “secrets.” Some like to bestow secret information in the belief that it empowers them. Some, for money. Others, because it will politically damage the other party.


When I worked at the Pentagon in a joint command, those facts of life were well-understood. It was precisely because of that basic flaw of human nature that it was logically mandated that the fewer people who had access to “top secret” information, the better it was for the nation.


This latest revelation — on top of “secret” CIA prisons (leaked to the media) and “harsh” interrogation techniques — has some Democrats in Congress demanding that Congress be given greater oversight of the CIA and our “national secrets.” While, publicly, the Obama White House is pushing back against the idea, privately, they may be willing to embrace more intrusion on CIA turf as signaled by Attorney General Eric Holder’s desire to name a criminal prosecutor to decide if U.S. interrogators “tortured” enemy combatants.


That debatable decision aside, the more we expose our top secret information and intelligence techniques to terrorists for partisan reasons, the greater the threat is to all of us.


Today is Sept. 10, 2001, all over again. What will tomorrow morning bring?


Douglas MacKinnon is a former Pentagon and White House official and was press secretary to former Sen. Bob Dole.



Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories...#ixzz0LQkQjVWK

Originally Posted by tngirl

I guess she must speak for me. There is a lot of stuff that the public doesn't need to know about. And I believe these type things are some of those things that are best left secret.

Failure To Notify Congress is a Violation of Law.