Politics > Politics-USA > Absolute Power in Perpetual Wartime --- NSA warrantless wiretapping whistleblowers book
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Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
"can_o_worms" |
| Date: |
09 Mar 2006 11:07:12 PM |
| Object: |
Absolute Power in Perpetual Wartime --- NSA warrantless wiretapping whistleblowers book |
Book Review by James Bovard:
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush
Administration
March 13, 2006 Issue
The American Conservative
http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_03_13/review.html
Watching the Detectives
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush
Administration, by James Risen, Free Press,
256 pages
by James Bovard
James Risen's State of War has opened a Pandora's Box for the Bush
administration that no amount of howling, scowling, or bogus
terrorist-attack warnings will be able to close. Risen's revelations
on pervasive National Security Agency warrantless spying on Americans
shred the final pretenses to legality of the Bush administration. Now
the debate is simply whether, as Bush and his supporters claim, the
president is effectively above the law and the Constitution during a
time of (perpetual) war.
Risen has been a national security reporter for the New York Times for
many years. He was not one of the Times reporters who simply recycled
hokum from the White House Iraq Group. In October 2002, he wrote a
piece shooting down the Bush administration's claims that Mohammad
Atta had met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague, one of the
favorite neocon justifications for attacking Iraq.
Risen had the story on NSA wiretapping before the 2004 election, but
the Times, under pressure from the administration, sat on the piece
for at least 14 months. The paper's timidity may have awarded George
W. Bush a second term as president. After the Times finally published
Risen's story in mid-December, Bush seized upon the exposé to portray
himself as heroically rising above the statute book to protect the
American people. The administration has been boasting about its
"terrorism surveillance program" ever since.
Bush announced that "the NSA program is one that listens to a few
numbers called from the outside of the United States and of known al
Qaeda or affiliate people." Except that the program also listens to
calls from inside the United States to abroad. And, in some cases, it
has wiretapped calls exclusively within the United States. No one
knows how flimsy the standard may be that the administration is using
for associating people with terrorist suspects-consumption of more
than a pound of hummus a week?
Risen revealed that the "NSA is now eavesdropping on as many as five
hundred people at any given time" in the United States. Bush's "secret
presidential order has given the NSA the freedom to peruse ... the
email of millions of Americans." The NSA's program has been christened
the "J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Vacuum Cleaner."
In 1978, responding to scandals involving political spying on
Americans in the name of counterespionage, Congress passed the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The act prohibited wiretapping
of domestic phone calls without a warrant. The special FISA court,
however, sets a much lower standard for securing search warrants than
is required by other federal courts.
The FISA court has approved almost every one of the more than 17,000
search warrant requests the feds have submitted since 1978. Federal
agencies can even submit retroactive requests up to 72 hours after
they begin surveilling someone. The number of FISA-approved wiretaps
has doubled since 2001. Yet the Bush administration whines that FISA
makes the U.S. government a helpless giant against terrorists.
Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales claim that the warrantless
wiretaps are based on Congress's authorization to use military force
against the people who attacked the United States. But if that measure
actually nullified all domestic limits on the president's power, then
Americans have been living under martial law since Sept. 18, 2001,
when Congress passed the resolution. Bush and Gonzales also assert
that the president has inherent power to tap phone calls, thanks to
Article II of the Constitution. This is the same "commander-in-chief
override" that Gonzales invoked after the Abu Ghraib scandal to
justify the Bush administration ignoring the federal Anti-Torture Act.
The Founding Fathers, in the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights,
decreed that government searches must be based on probable cause and
approved by a neutral magistrate. The Bush wiretapping program is
based solely upon the president's edict. Shift supervisors at the
National Security Agency decide which Americans get wiretapped. But a
GS-13 civil servant is not constitutionally on par with a federal
judge.
Risen is soft on Michael Hayden, the former Air Force general who was
NSA chief when the illegal spying began shortly after 9/11. Risen
notes that Hayden "hosted off-the-record dinners for the press at his
home at Fort Meade." He does not recite the menu for the dinners, but
the fare seems to have paid off handsomely. Risen neglects to mention
that Hayden deceived Congress in Oct. 17, 2002 testimony regarding
FISA. Hayden told Congressman Porter Goss-now the Director of Central
Intelligence-that once a person enters the United States, "that person
would have protections as what the law defines as a U.S. person. And I
would have no authorities to pursue it" outside of a court-authorized
wiretap. But the NSA was vigorously pursuing the calls and e-mails of
many people within the United States at that time regardless of the
law.
Perhaps because of his obedience in carrying out warrantless wiretaps,
Hayden was promoted by Bush in 2005 to be the number-two intelligence
official within the federal government. If the NSA wiretap scandal
continues heating up, Bush may be obliged to give Hayden a
presidential Medal of Freedom, as he did to former CIA director George
"Slam Dunk" Tenet.
The subtitle of the book is "The Secret History of the CIA and the
Bush Administration," and Risen provides many insights into the
perversion of that agency's intelligence and analysis in the Bush era.
Before the 2003 invasion, the CIA swayed many Iraqi-Americans to
return to their homeland to pump relatives who were scientists for
information on Saddam's weapons programs. When the bravehearts
returned to the U.S. and reported that the programs had been shut
down, the CIA buried their reports, refusing even to forward the
information to senior Bush policymakers. The CIA did express its
gratitude to Sawsan Alhaddad, a Cleveland doctor who risked her life
to ask her nuclear scientist brother in Baghdad for information, by
giving her an American flag that had purportedly flown over CIA
headquarters.
Some CIA flops are due to the dumbing down of its analyses. The
popularity of cable news networks pressures policy makers to respond
to endless transient crises. Risen points out that some CIA analysts
learned that to get ahead, "they had to master the trick of writing
quick, short reports that would grab the attention of top policy
makers. CIA analysts had become the classified equivalent of
television reporters, rather than college professors. The result was
that fewer analysts were taking the time to go back and challenge
basic assumptions."
State of War provides excellent new insights into how much evidence
the Bush administration and the CIA scorned in building the case to
attack Iraq. Risen notes, "Israeli intelligence played a hidden role
in convincing Wolfowitz that he couldn't trust the CIA, according to a
former senior Pentagon colleague. Israeli intelligence officials
frequently traveled to Washington to brief top American officials, but
CIA analysts were often skeptical of Israeli intelligence reports,
knowing that Mossad had very strong-even transparent-biases about the
Arab World." But nothing could undermine Mossad's credibility for
neoconservatives like Wolfowitz and Feith, determined to believe
anyone and anything that sanctified attacking Saddam.
The most compelling material in this book, however, remains the
exposure of domestic intelligence abuses. The NSA illegal surveillance
uncovered by Risen dwarfs the Patriot Act controversies. Many
Republicans have nonetheless rushed to embrace and defend the Bush
administration's warrantless spying. Bush's comments on his "terrorism
surveillance program" got a standing ovation from GOP congressmen
during his State of the Union address. Republicans are staking their
honor on the Bush administration's honesty-on the assertion that all
the wiretaps were carefully targeted to people linked to al-Qaeda
suspects. This is a reckless wager. If the wiretaps were actually
limited to calls to and from al-Qaeda suspects, it would have been
easy as pie to get FISA warrants.
It is naïve to believe that the feds will behave properly once they
are permitted to violate the law. During J. Edgar Hoover's later
years, the FBI carried out more than 2,000 COINTELPRO operations to
spy on Americans they disliked, using the intelligence gathered to
incite street warfare between violent groups, wreck marriages, portray
innocent people as government informants, sic the IRS on citizens, and
cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, and other
organizations. Even the John Birch Society was secretly targeted by
the feds. If the current rulers are using 1960s standards, practically
any opponent of the Bush administration could be targeted for illegal
surveillance.
What other presidential orders have been issued since 2001 that
explicitly exempt U.S. government agencies from federal law and the
Constitution? Bush has surrounded himself with people who continually
assure him that his power is absolute during wartime. Newsweek
reported that Steven Bradbury, head of the Justice Department's Office
of Legal Counsel, recently informed the Senate Intelligence Committee
that Bush could order killings of suspected terrorists within the U.S.
Considering the administration's dismal record in identifying bona
fide versus bogus terrorists since 9/11, this license to kill could
wreak havoc on the nation's convenience stores and taxi companies.
Some wearisome Washington platitudes creep into State of War. Risen
declares, "Bush does deserve credit for making the spread of democracy
in the Middle East a centerpiece of his agenda for his second term."
But Bush deserves no credit for recycling idealist rhetoric while
perpetuating policies that breed hatred, violence, and chaos across a
large part of the globe. Risen judiciously notes, "It sometimes seems
as if the Bush administration is fighting the birthrate of the entire
Arab world."
Risen's revelations are propelling congressional and media
investigations into the NSA warrantless wiretapping. The actual abuses
will very likely prove to be far more widespread and shocking than
what has been disclosed so far. Perhaps the best epithet for Bush's
civil liberties record is the saying of Lily Tomlin: "No matter how
cynical you become, it's never enough to keep up."
_______________________________________________
James Bovard is author of the just published Attention Deficit
Democracy (St. Martin's/Palgrave) and 8 other books.
March 13, 2006 Issue: The American Conservative
http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_03_13/review.html
--
Just some favorite sites:
http://www.antiwar.com/
http://www.ussliberty.org/
http://www.lewrockwell.com/ips/lobe-arch.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAoe26MaTew&search=fox%20news
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| User: "effty" |
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| Title: Re: Absolute Power in Perpetual Wartime --- NSA warrantless wiretapping whistleblowers book |
10 Mar 2006 01:11:47 AM |
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"can_o_worms" <can_o_worms@bogus.com> wrote in message
news:dh1212lkkiplkmph43rlmtatia5gerleh0@4ax.com...
<...>
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush
Administration, by James Risen, Free Press,
256 pages
by James Bovard
James Risen's State of War has opened a Pandora's Box for the Bush
administration that no amount of howling, scowling, or bogus
terrorist-attack warnings will be able to close. Risen's revelations
on pervasive National Security Agency warrantless spying on Americans
shred the final pretenses to legality of the Bush administration. Now
the debate is simply whether, as Bush and his supporters claim, the
president is effectively above the law and the Constitution during a
time of (perpetual) war.
<...>
It's a really great book. A really, really great book. Perhaps the most
damning thing I've read about the Bush administration.
http://cryptome.org/nsa-program.htm
I found a few large excepts of it here. Buy it, get it from the library,
whatever. Read it. It's a true can of worms!
~e.
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