The May 13th PBS "Frontline" documents that on 4 October 2001, President George W. Bush signed a secret authorization for the NSA to see the "metadata" (the to-whom, and from-whom) records for all phone calls, and also "a lot of content of phone calls. They're actually recording the voices -- not for all of our calls, but for a lot of U.S. telephone calls."
Titled "United States of Secrets," this documentary reports that only about a half-dozen people were informed of this operation, which was called "the Program." NSA chief Michael Hayden was informed of it, and he supported it. Attorney General John Ashcroft was informed of it, but he opposed it as being illegal, a direct violation of the 4th Amendment, and also possibly of the 1st Amendment. The Justice Department was sidelined from it. President Bush's order was drafted not by the President's lawyer, Alberto Gonzales (though he supported it), but by David Addington, VP Dick Cheney's legal counsel, who was not so much asked whether it was Constitutional, as he was asked to come up with an argument for its being Constitutional, even if only a fig-leaf argument -- which it turned out to be. Cheney actually ran the country, and Bush rubber-stamped whatever came out of Cheney's office.
Within 30 minutes after the President signing the order, Addington placed it into his office safe, and he showed it to very few people, only on a need-to-know basis.
President Bush is shown as saying to the public, "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." And: "It's important for our fellow citizens to understand constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland because we value the Constitution." These statements were simply lies from him, and there was no "court order" for anything in "the Program." For a long time, the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court wasn't even informed about the existence of "the Program." So: it didn't even have FISA Court authorization.
Employees at NSA who balked at breaking the law, and who refused to do what they thought to be wrong, at least unless and until they saw legal authorization for it -- which was not presented to them -- were threatened by their superiors. Some were fired. Others tried to contact reporters, and were then prosecuted. The Bush Administration wrecked their lives, broke up some marriages, and prosecuted one of them all the way into the Obama Administration, which threatened him with prison and then gave up when he was finally financially stripped and his marriage destroyed.
Arthur Sulzberger, the controlling owner of The New York Times, and his editor, Bill Keller, blocked their own reporters, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, from publishing the fact (communicated by the leakers) that Bush's statements that everything was hunky-dory legal were lies. Thus, Bush was able to win re-election against John Kerry in 2004. But, then, Risen got a book contract, and so was able to publish the truth after the 2004 election (which was what principally concerned Bush -- his re-election); and, so, The New York Times finally allowed the truth to be published also in their pages, after the "election," and thus too late for the public to absorb and respond to the fact that they'd been deceived by Bush about this.
The news report was headlined on 16 December 2005, "Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in the United States After 9/11, Officials Say." Online, it was headlined "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts." The responses to this news story (such as were shown there at the print version) were largely from conservatives (people who trusted Bush's honesty), who accused the Times of being a voice of the Democratic Party, though the reality of this situation was more like the exact opposite. The reality was that the Times hid (actively suppressed) this information, for as long as possible.
Furthermore, the story itself misrepresented even some basic facts, in the direction of softening Bush's lies. For example, the opening two sentences of it were: "Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible 'dirty numbers' linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications."
Here is how Frontline reports the actual event, not the NYT's reporting of it: "On October 4th [2001], in a secret signing with Cheney, the president officially authorized 'the program'." The NYT-implied Bush reluctance, of "Months after the Sept. 11 attacks," was a fiction. Cheney immediately, on 9/11, told his people to come up with proposals for whatever they thought needed to be done, and said that he would get it done; and Bush was 100% supportive of that must-do, can-do, will-do, attitude, and of "the Program." Furthermore, the description provided by NYT of the Program understated its scope; and, to refer to "the court-approved warrants ordinarily required" was itself a lie, because those warrants were a legal requirement, which had been legislated shortly after Richard Nixon was booted from the White House for Watergate, and adherence to that law wasn't just "ordinarily required," but it was always adhered to, because NSAers didn't want to go to prison. This documentary makes that fear, of breaking the law, clear. Furthermore, to say that "messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States" were the scope of this "Program," which actually encompassed virtually all telecom traffic of the hundreds of millions of American citizens, would be ludicrous if such a lie could be funny at all. So: the NYT's report was highly sanitized.
This documentary also reports Barack Obama's lies. It shows candidate, Senator, Obama promising, "No more secrecy. That's a commitment that I make to you as president!" And, "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom. That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens." And, "No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. That's not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists." And, then, finally: "BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States: The laws that are written will be more open to the public. No more secrecy. That's the commitment I make to you as president!" (And he now was President.) All of those promises, from Obama, were also lies.
Furthermore, this documentary makes clear that both Bush and Obama have consistently tried to imprison whistleblowers, within the NSA and elsewhere, who attempted to get word out about this rampant law-breaking by the federal government. Edward Snowden was just the last of a long line of those. At one point, practically the entire top rung of the U.S. Justice Department were preparing to resign over this matter. NSA Senior Executive Thomas Drake was fired over it, prosecuted with the threat of life imprisonment, and then, when Obama ultimately couldn't find anything serious to charge him with, just stripped financially to pay his legal expenses. And, of course, Obama still wants to kill Edward Snowden for exposing this "Program."
However, this documentary is itself largely a cover-up. It presents "the Program" as being a response to 9/11, but actually the desire and intention to do it began almost as soon as George W. Bush entered the White House.
On October 11th of 2007, wired.com bannered "NSA Domestic Surveillance Began 7 Months Before 9/11, Convicted Qwest CEO Claims," and Ryan Singel reported that Joseph Nacchio, the CEO of the phone company Qwest, claimed in court documents that he had been sentenced to prison because he had decided in February 2001, just a month after George W. Bush entered the White House, that he could not authorize his company to participate in warrantless wiretaps of Americans because such wiretaps would be illegal.
Nacchio's April 2007 statement to the court was just now being released by the court, and said that he "respectfully renews his objection to the Court's rulings excluding testimony surrounding his February 27, 2001 meeting at Ft. Meade with representatives from the National Security Agency (NSA) as violative of his constitutional right to mount a defense. Although Mr. Nacchio is allowed to tell the jury that he and James Payne [Qwest's government liaison] went into that meeting expecting to talk about the 'Groundbreaker' project," a multi-billion-dollar NSA telecom contract (it didn't yet have the name "the Project"), and that he "came out of the meeting with optimism about the prospect for 2001 revenue from NSA, the Court has prohibited Mr. Nacchio from eliciting testimony regarding what also occurred at that meeting. [REDACTED, but presumably referring to demands by NSA for Qwest to permit federal snooping on Americans without court warrants.]
The Court has also refused to allow Mr. Nacchio to demonstrate that the agency retaliated for this refusal by denying the Groundbreaker and perhaps other work to Qwest." In other words, Mr. Nacchio was alleging that this huge federal contract had been denied to Qwest because Qwest had refused to participate in Bush's illegal warrantless snooping on phone and e-mail communications of Americans. This is before 9/11. In 2001, Nacchio sold some of his Qwest stock shares, and the Bush Administration charged him with insider trading, because Qwest's share-price declined after that sale. "Nacchio unsuccessfully attempted to defend himself by arguing that he actually expected Qwest's 2001 earnings to be higher because of secret NSA contracts, which, he contends, were denied by the NSA after he declined in a February 27, 2001 meeting to give the NSA customer calling records."
The court refused to allow Nacchio to present to the jury any information regarding the NSA's demands that Nacchio had turned down. Consequently, according to Nacchio's lawyer, he was convicted and received a 6-year prison sentence. Two days later, on October 13th, the Washington Post bannered "Former CEO Says U.S. Punished Phone Firm," and reported: "A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate" in Bush's NSA surveillance against Americans.
"Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week." That would have placed it probably back in February 2001.
If Nacchio's allegations were true, then Bush was already organizing the illegal wiretapping against Americans months before 9/11 even occurred, and Nacchio's prosecution was retaliation against his non-cooperation with Bush's illegal NSA program.
-Eric Zuesse
Click here for full article. And if you pass on reading this catch the second part of "The United States Of Secrets' this Tue. May 20th, 2014 on PBS Frontline.
An observation: I recently passed through a police checkpoint(safety check) blockade where innocent citizens are stopped and compelled to produce their papers(drivers license and insurance verification). Once through this interruption in my busy daily life I stopped by a store and mentioned this to the people there. One lady looked at me with a happy looking demeanor, blared out a self-righteous "I have nothing to hide" and scoffed when I said I was tired and wanted to go home. She assumed that anyone "blowing the whistle" on the police must be warning others in case they have something to hide. It never occurred to her I was warning them so they would not have to stop and be needlessly detained for 15 or 20 minutes or have their intelligence insulted by the ever encroaching methods of an un-necessary rising police state. I did not follow up with this woman as I was tired and trying to get home but any time I have followed up with reactions of this type they almost always turn out to be products of religious right churches or rightwing ideologues that have no problem with police "safetychecks", warrantless invasions of privacy, police drones or the NSA. The Bush administration was made up of these ideologues and supported by them. This kind of mentality is born out of the religious right and one of Bush's appointees Attorney General of the United States John Ashcroft often concurred with them on many contentious rightwing issues relevant to national security but on the issue of NSA mass spying the Attorney General disagreed. He opposed mass surveillance and would not approve it. He was a deeply religious man and not just a church attendee for rightwing religio/political purposes. He had some metal to oppose those in his religious right in-group and if you know the religious right mentality you know that is not an easy thing. I like to think it was his closer walk with God that gave him that metal and I also know that he is still in the midst of that journey to make the right choices.
I believe if people truly walk close to God and not use Him only as a political or social prop they will attain the wisdom and courage to conceive good government and resist the efficiency of fascist policy.
The inclination toward fascist policy has existed with the rightwing for sometime. In the past they have often expressed the desire to amend parts of the Bill Of Rights and 9-11 gave them that opportunity. The chilling aspect of this Frontline expose', beyond the treatment of those that tried to expose NSA mass surveillance in the beginning, is the evidence that the Bush administration was making preparations to expand NSA spying even before 9-11 which of course would be consistent with the impetus of their rightwing ideology that had always desired to alter the Bill Of Rights and narrow the rights to privacy in order to impinge day to day criminal activity. As for President Obama up until Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA he had written off on it's mass surveillance but only after public opinion began to turn around following Snowden's expose' has Obama begun to oppose mass surveillance and so it should be asked of Obama, is mass surveillance ok if kept from the public? On one level Obama would have been better served to have stood his ground but on another he is called to serve the will of the people which of course conveniently aligns with political expediency.
The people are the winners here for now but as for Bush and particularly Obama, damage control is a long row to hoe and all for the sake of capitulating to the opportunities of an emerging corporatocracy.
Titled "United States of Secrets," this documentary reports that only about a half-dozen people were informed of this operation, which was called "the Program." NSA chief Michael Hayden was informed of it, and he supported it. Attorney General John Ashcroft was informed of it, but he opposed it as being illegal, a direct violation of the 4th Amendment, and also possibly of the 1st Amendment. The Justice Department was sidelined from it. President Bush's order was drafted not by the President's lawyer, Alberto Gonzales (though he supported it), but by David Addington, VP Dick Cheney's legal counsel, who was not so much asked whether it was Constitutional, as he was asked to come up with an argument for its being Constitutional, even if only a fig-leaf argument -- which it turned out to be. Cheney actually ran the country, and Bush rubber-stamped whatever came out of Cheney's office.
Within 30 minutes after the President signing the order, Addington placed it into his office safe, and he showed it to very few people, only on a need-to-know basis.
President Bush is shown as saying to the public, "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." And: "It's important for our fellow citizens to understand constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland because we value the Constitution." These statements were simply lies from him, and there was no "court order" for anything in "the Program." For a long time, the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) Court wasn't even informed about the existence of "the Program." So: it didn't even have FISA Court authorization.
Employees at NSA who balked at breaking the law, and who refused to do what they thought to be wrong, at least unless and until they saw legal authorization for it -- which was not presented to them -- were threatened by their superiors. Some were fired. Others tried to contact reporters, and were then prosecuted. The Bush Administration wrecked their lives, broke up some marriages, and prosecuted one of them all the way into the Obama Administration, which threatened him with prison and then gave up when he was finally financially stripped and his marriage destroyed.
Arthur Sulzberger, the controlling owner of The New York Times, and his editor, Bill Keller, blocked their own reporters, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, from publishing the fact (communicated by the leakers) that Bush's statements that everything was hunky-dory legal were lies. Thus, Bush was able to win re-election against John Kerry in 2004. But, then, Risen got a book contract, and so was able to publish the truth after the 2004 election (which was what principally concerned Bush -- his re-election); and, so, The New York Times finally allowed the truth to be published also in their pages, after the "election," and thus too late for the public to absorb and respond to the fact that they'd been deceived by Bush about this.
The news report was headlined on 16 December 2005, "Bush Secretly Lifted Some Limits on Spying in the United States After 9/11, Officials Say." Online, it was headlined "Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts." The responses to this news story (such as were shown there at the print version) were largely from conservatives (people who trusted Bush's honesty), who accused the Times of being a voice of the Democratic Party, though the reality of this situation was more like the exact opposite. The reality was that the Times hid (actively suppressed) this information, for as long as possible.
Furthermore, the story itself misrepresented even some basic facts, in the direction of softening Bush's lies. For example, the opening two sentences of it were: "Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials. Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible 'dirty numbers' linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications."
Here is how Frontline reports the actual event, not the NYT's reporting of it: "On October 4th [2001], in a secret signing with Cheney, the president officially authorized 'the program'." The NYT-implied Bush reluctance, of "Months after the Sept. 11 attacks," was a fiction. Cheney immediately, on 9/11, told his people to come up with proposals for whatever they thought needed to be done, and said that he would get it done; and Bush was 100% supportive of that must-do, can-do, will-do, attitude, and of "the Program." Furthermore, the description provided by NYT of the Program understated its scope; and, to refer to "the court-approved warrants ordinarily required" was itself a lie, because those warrants were a legal requirement, which had been legislated shortly after Richard Nixon was booted from the White House for Watergate, and adherence to that law wasn't just "ordinarily required," but it was always adhered to, because NSAers didn't want to go to prison. This documentary makes that fear, of breaking the law, clear. Furthermore, to say that "messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States" were the scope of this "Program," which actually encompassed virtually all telecom traffic of the hundreds of millions of American citizens, would be ludicrous if such a lie could be funny at all. So: the NYT's report was highly sanitized.
This documentary also reports Barack Obama's lies. It shows candidate, Senator, Obama promising, "No more secrecy. That's a commitment that I make to you as president!" And, "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom. That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens." And, "No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient. That is not who we are. That's not what is necessary to defeat the terrorists." And, then, finally: "BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States: The laws that are written will be more open to the public. No more secrecy. That's the commitment I make to you as president!" (And he now was President.) All of those promises, from Obama, were also lies.
Furthermore, this documentary makes clear that both Bush and Obama have consistently tried to imprison whistleblowers, within the NSA and elsewhere, who attempted to get word out about this rampant law-breaking by the federal government. Edward Snowden was just the last of a long line of those. At one point, practically the entire top rung of the U.S. Justice Department were preparing to resign over this matter. NSA Senior Executive Thomas Drake was fired over it, prosecuted with the threat of life imprisonment, and then, when Obama ultimately couldn't find anything serious to charge him with, just stripped financially to pay his legal expenses. And, of course, Obama still wants to kill Edward Snowden for exposing this "Program."
However, this documentary is itself largely a cover-up. It presents "the Program" as being a response to 9/11, but actually the desire and intention to do it began almost as soon as George W. Bush entered the White House.
On October 11th of 2007, wired.com bannered "NSA Domestic Surveillance Began 7 Months Before 9/11, Convicted Qwest CEO Claims," and Ryan Singel reported that Joseph Nacchio, the CEO of the phone company Qwest, claimed in court documents that he had been sentenced to prison because he had decided in February 2001, just a month after George W. Bush entered the White House, that he could not authorize his company to participate in warrantless wiretaps of Americans because such wiretaps would be illegal.
Nacchio's April 2007 statement to the court was just now being released by the court, and said that he "respectfully renews his objection to the Court's rulings excluding testimony surrounding his February 27, 2001 meeting at Ft. Meade with representatives from the National Security Agency (NSA) as violative of his constitutional right to mount a defense. Although Mr. Nacchio is allowed to tell the jury that he and James Payne [Qwest's government liaison] went into that meeting expecting to talk about the 'Groundbreaker' project," a multi-billion-dollar NSA telecom contract (it didn't yet have the name "the Project"), and that he "came out of the meeting with optimism about the prospect for 2001 revenue from NSA, the Court has prohibited Mr. Nacchio from eliciting testimony regarding what also occurred at that meeting. [REDACTED, but presumably referring to demands by NSA for Qwest to permit federal snooping on Americans without court warrants.]
The Court has also refused to allow Mr. Nacchio to demonstrate that the agency retaliated for this refusal by denying the Groundbreaker and perhaps other work to Qwest." In other words, Mr. Nacchio was alleging that this huge federal contract had been denied to Qwest because Qwest had refused to participate in Bush's illegal warrantless snooping on phone and e-mail communications of Americans. This is before 9/11. In 2001, Nacchio sold some of his Qwest stock shares, and the Bush Administration charged him with insider trading, because Qwest's share-price declined after that sale. "Nacchio unsuccessfully attempted to defend himself by arguing that he actually expected Qwest's 2001 earnings to be higher because of secret NSA contracts, which, he contends, were denied by the NSA after he declined in a February 27, 2001 meeting to give the NSA customer calling records."
The court refused to allow Nacchio to present to the jury any information regarding the NSA's demands that Nacchio had turned down. Consequently, according to Nacchio's lawyer, he was convicted and received a 6-year prison sentence. Two days later, on October 13th, the Washington Post bannered "Former CEO Says U.S. Punished Phone Firm," and reported: "A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate" in Bush's NSA surveillance against Americans.
"Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week." That would have placed it probably back in February 2001.
If Nacchio's allegations were true, then Bush was already organizing the illegal wiretapping against Americans months before 9/11 even occurred, and Nacchio's prosecution was retaliation against his non-cooperation with Bush's illegal NSA program.
-Eric Zuesse
Click here for full article. And if you pass on reading this catch the second part of "The United States Of Secrets' this Tue. May 20th, 2014 on PBS Frontline.
An observation: I recently passed through a police checkpoint(safety check) blockade where innocent citizens are stopped and compelled to produce their papers(drivers license and insurance verification). Once through this interruption in my busy daily life I stopped by a store and mentioned this to the people there. One lady looked at me with a happy looking demeanor, blared out a self-righteous "I have nothing to hide" and scoffed when I said I was tired and wanted to go home. She assumed that anyone "blowing the whistle" on the police must be warning others in case they have something to hide. It never occurred to her I was warning them so they would not have to stop and be needlessly detained for 15 or 20 minutes or have their intelligence insulted by the ever encroaching methods of an un-necessary rising police state. I did not follow up with this woman as I was tired and trying to get home but any time I have followed up with reactions of this type they almost always turn out to be products of religious right churches or rightwing ideologues that have no problem with police "safetychecks", warrantless invasions of privacy, police drones or the NSA. The Bush administration was made up of these ideologues and supported by them. This kind of mentality is born out of the religious right and one of Bush's appointees Attorney General of the United States John Ashcroft often concurred with them on many contentious rightwing issues relevant to national security but on the issue of NSA mass spying the Attorney General disagreed. He opposed mass surveillance and would not approve it. He was a deeply religious man and not just a church attendee for rightwing religio/political purposes. He had some metal to oppose those in his religious right in-group and if you know the religious right mentality you know that is not an easy thing. I like to think it was his closer walk with God that gave him that metal and I also know that he is still in the midst of that journey to make the right choices.
I believe if people truly walk close to God and not use Him only as a political or social prop they will attain the wisdom and courage to conceive good government and resist the efficiency of fascist policy.
The inclination toward fascist policy has existed with the rightwing for sometime. In the past they have often expressed the desire to amend parts of the Bill Of Rights and 9-11 gave them that opportunity. The chilling aspect of this Frontline expose', beyond the treatment of those that tried to expose NSA mass surveillance in the beginning, is the evidence that the Bush administration was making preparations to expand NSA spying even before 9-11 which of course would be consistent with the impetus of their rightwing ideology that had always desired to alter the Bill Of Rights and narrow the rights to privacy in order to impinge day to day criminal activity. As for President Obama up until Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA he had written off on it's mass surveillance but only after public opinion began to turn around following Snowden's expose' has Obama begun to oppose mass surveillance and so it should be asked of Obama, is mass surveillance ok if kept from the public? On one level Obama would have been better served to have stood his ground but on another he is called to serve the will of the people which of course conveniently aligns with political expediency.
The people are the winners here for now but as for Bush and particularly Obama, damage control is a long row to hoe and all for the sake of capitulating to the opportunities of an emerging corporatocracy.
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