From UPI, 12/16/05:
http://www.postchronicle.com/news/security/article_2122037.shtml

Secret Spying Revelations Rock Bush

by Martin Sieff

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16, 2005 -

The news reports Friday that President George W. Bush authorized
electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens without court permission
broke on the president at the worst possible time, when he was pushing
hard to reclaim his credibility with the American public over Iraq,
but getting hammered on torture and other national security issues at
the same time.

Ironically, had the story broken in the months after the
mega-terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, killed 2,800 people, the
president might have been able to shrug it off easily.

The New York Times reported Friday that in 2002 the president
personally authorized the National Security Agency to monitor the
international phone calls and international e-mails of at least
hundreds and probably thousands of people in the United States without
warrants in an effort to track-called "dirty numbers" linked to
al-Qaida.

In another controversial development, the New York Times said it had
the story a year ago but had held off from publishing it then after
appeals from administration officials who said its disclosure would
harm national security.

The White House initially had no comment on the story.

The controversy could hardly have occurred for the president and his
administration at a more sensitive time.

Over the past two weeks, Bush has made a series of forceful,
meticulously prepared speeches trying to avert, acknowledge and defuse
some of the many criticism he has received for his conduct of the Iraq
war.

In them, he tried to make the case to the American public to hang
tough in Iraq and stay the course there until a stable, democratic --
and pro-American -- government is securely established in Baghdad.

The president also timed his speeches to take place in the build-up
period to Iraq's parliamentary elections Thursday.

However, even before the electronic surveillance story appeared, the
president's credibility, far from being decisively restored as his
political strategists hoped, was still teetering in the balance.

For on Wednesday, the same day he gave the most recent of his Iraq
policy speeches at Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center, Bush received a
stunning humiliation -- in some respects, the worst of his five years
in the presidency so far -- from the House of Representatives.

The House overwhelmingly passed a non-binding resolution supporting
Sen. John McCain's Senate measure to outlaw torture by 308 votes to
122.

No less than 107 members of the GOP majority in the House -- a
majority that has been exceptionally disciplined in general and
especially uncritical of anything the White House wanted on any
national security issues -- voted for it.

Combined with the 90-to-nine approval the anti-torture measure had
already received in the Senate, this gave it potential veto-proof
majorities in both houses of Congress.

And so, on Thursday, Bush finally bowed to the inevitable and endorsed
it.

But now, the very day after the president was forced to make a
humiliating U-turn on a major national security issue, the New York
Times revelation supported by a similar story in Friday's Washington
Post, emerged.

And both stories immediately played big around the country and -- even
worse from the administration's point of view -- they over-shadowed
the set-piece story about the Iraqi general election that the White
House had counted on to rally the public behind it again.

Over the past two and half years, as the Sunni Muslim insurgency in
Iraq has slowly but relentlessly expanded in scale and intensity, the
administration has repeatedly been able to play for time and, at least
in the short term, redeem its credibility with the American pubic by
making high-profile, hyped and publicized media happenings of every
set-piece election and constitutional development in Iraq, even though
none of them so far have done anything at all to reduce insurgent
support or levels of activity.

But this new storm over the secret spying procedures looks certain
this time to trump that so-often-played card.

Even worse, coming right after the president was finally forced to
publicly acknowledge in his Iraq speeches that much of the
intelligence on the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction
there was false, he is now for the first time being put in the same
kind of hot seat that eventually grilled President Richard Nixon's
political career to a crisp:

authorizing secret spying and surveillance operations without legal or
constitutional approval.

The two cases in many ways are very different:

Bush ordered the NSA surveillance in 2002 not for narrow, partisan
political gain or to carry out dirty tricks against his political
opponents as Nixon did 30 years earlier but in the interests of
national security after the most bloody and devastating terrorist
attack on the American homeland in national history.

Nevertheless, if there is one issue on national security where
libertarian conservatives tend to join hands with liberal Democrats,
it is personal rights, especially privacy.

It was also striking that the story broke the same day the Senate
voted to end further debate on how much to renew or amend the
hotly-contested Patriot Act.

As a result, Bush now risks facing widespread criticism that he
irresponsibly grabbed and potentially abused powers that were his for
the taking had he only asked for them openly.

And his defense that he did so in the national interest at a time of
severe national crisis would have played well before he authorized the
invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and even in the year that followed.

But instead, it has come out when even half of the president's own
congressional party has openly defied and repudiated him on the
torture issue, after he was forced to acknowledge the falsity of much
of his pre-war intelligence on Iraq, and right after he had for the
first time acknowledged a death toll of at least 30,000 Iraqis killed
also far as a result of the war.

______________________________________________________

And who was head of the NSA when this started back in 2002? Yup. You
guessed it. Kindalseazy Rice.

Harry

From UPI, 12/16/05:
http://www.postchronicle.com/news/security/article_2122037.shtml

Secret Spying Revelations Rock Bush

by Martin Sieff

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16, 2005 -

The news reports Friday that President George W. Bush authorized
electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens without court permission
broke on the president at the worst possible time, when he was pushing
hard to reclaim his credibility with the American public over Iraq,
but getting hammered on torture and other national security issues at
the same time.

Ironically, had the story broken in the months after the
mega-terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, killed 2,800 people, the
president might have been able to shrug it off easily.

The New York Times reported Friday that in 2002 the president
personally authorized the National Security Agency to monitor the
international phone calls and international e-mails of at least
hundreds and probably thousands of people in the United States without
warrants in an effort to track-called "dirty numbers" linked to
al-Qaida.

In another controversial development, the New York Times said it had
the story a year ago but had held off from publishing it then after
appeals from administration officials who said its disclosure would
harm national security.

The White House initially had no comment on the story.

The controversy could hardly have occurred for the president and his
administration at a more sensitive time.

Over the past two weeks, Bush has made a series of forceful,
meticulously prepared speeches trying to avert, acknowledge and defuse
some of the many criticism he has received for his conduct of the Iraq
war.

In them, he tried to make the case to the American public to hang
tough in Iraq and stay the course there until a stable, democratic --
and pro-American -- government is securely established in Baghdad.

The president also timed his speeches to take place in the build-up
period to Iraq's parliamentary elections Thursday.

However, even before the electronic surveillance story appeared, the
president's credibility, far from being decisively restored as his
political strategists hoped, was still teetering in the balance.

For on Wednesday, the same day he gave the most recent of his Iraq
policy speeches at Washington's Woodrow Wilson Center, Bush received a
stunning humiliation -- in some respects, the worst of his five years
in the presidency so far -- from the House of Representatives.

The House overwhelmingly passed a non-binding resolution supporting
Sen. John McCain's Senate measure to outlaw torture by 308 votes to
122.

No less than 107 members of the GOP majority in the House -- a
majority that has been exceptionally disciplined in general and
especially uncritical of anything the White House wanted on any
national security issues -- voted for it.

Combined with the 90-to-nine approval the anti-torture measure had
already received in the Senate, this gave it potential veto-proof
majorities in both houses of Congress.

And so, on Thursday, Bush finally bowed to the inevitable and endorsed
it.

But now, the very day after the president was forced to make a
humiliating U-turn on a major national security issue, the New York
Times revelation supported by a similar story in Friday's Washington
Post, emerged.

And both stories immediately played big around the country and -- even
worse from the administration's point of view -- they over-shadowed
the set-piece story about the Iraqi general election that the White
House had counted on to rally the public behind it again.

Over the past two and half years, as the Sunni Muslim insurgency in
Iraq has slowly but relentlessly expanded in scale and intensity, the
administration has repeatedly been able to play for time and, at least
in the short term, redeem its credibility with the American pubic by
making high-profile, hyped and publicized media happenings of every
set-piece election and constitutional development in Iraq, even though
none of them so far have done anything at all to reduce insurgent
support or levels of activity.

But this new storm over the secret spying procedures looks certain
this time to trump that so-often-played card.

Even worse, coming right after the president was finally forced to
publicly acknowledge in his Iraq speeches that much of the
intelligence on the alleged existence of weapons of mass destruction
there was false, he is now for the first time being put in the same
kind of hot seat that eventually grilled President Richard Nixon's
political career to a crisp:

authorizing secret spying and surveillance operations without legal or
constitutional approval.

The two cases in many ways are very different:

Bush ordered the NSA surveillance in 2002 not for narrow, partisan
political gain or to carry out dirty tricks against his political
opponents as Nixon did 30 years earlier but in the interests of
national security after the most bloody and devastating terrorist
attack on the American homeland in national history.

Nevertheless, if there is one issue on national security where
libertarian conservatives tend to join hands with liberal Democrats,
it is personal rights, especially privacy.

It was also striking that the story broke the same day the Senate
voted to end further debate on how much to renew or amend the
hotly-contested Patriot Act.

As a result, Bush now risks facing widespread criticism that he
irresponsibly grabbed and potentially abused powers that were his for
the taking had he only asked for them openly.

And his defense that he did so in the national interest at a time of
severe national crisis would have played well before he authorized the
invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and even in the year that followed.

But instead, it has come out when even half of the president's own
congressional party has openly defied and repudiated him on the
torture issue, after he was forced to acknowledge the falsity of much
of his pre-war intelligence on Iraq, and right after he had for the
first time acknowledged a death toll of at least 30,000 Iraqis killed
also far as a result of the war.

______________________________________________________

And who was head of the NSA when this started back in 2002? Yup. You
guessed it. Kindalseazy Rice.

And who was head of the NSA when this started back in 2002? Yup. You
guessed it. Kindalseazy Rice.