[Sosfbay-discuss] Further proof the Bush Administration was worse than we thought...

[Tian Harter]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090710/ap_on_go_co/us_domestic_surveillance


Report: Bush surveillance program was massive

By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer Pamela Hess, Associated Press 
Writer – 2 hrs 59 mins ago

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.
-- 
Tian
http://tian.greens.org
According to The World on NPR the Australian town of Bandanoon in NSW
just became the first political  power structure to ban bottled water.
The guy from Do Something said that all of the towns businesses have
committed to just selling bottles and letting people fill them outside.