Review skeptical of Bush snooping program’s effectiveness
Published: July 11, 2009
Updated 4 months ago
Sen. Leahy calls for inquiry; Sen. Feingold slams ‘blatantly illegal and unconstitutional’ abuses
A US government probe has concluded that a secret wiretap program launched after the September 11, 2001 attacks had a “limited role” in preventing fresh strikes.
The report found that most intelligence officials “had difficulty citing specific instances” when the National Security Agency’s covert wiretapping in the country contributed to successes against terrorists.
Many senior intelligence community officials, the document said, believed that the program “filled a gap in intelligence collection” thought to exist.
The warrantless spying, referenced by the review as the “President’s Surveillance Program,” was kept under careful lock with only certain officials being “read in” to the program. For a time, even members of the FISA court were kept out of the loop, and only three Department of Justice lawyers were aware of it, the report says.
Though numerous top Bush administration officials agreed to be interviewed by the inspectors general, former Attorney General John Ashcroft and former CIA Director George Tenet declined.
The report was compiled by the inspectors general of five government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Departments of Defense and Justice.
It admitted that FBI agents, CIA analysts and officers and other officials “had difficulty evaluating the precise contribution” of the program “to counterterrorism efforts because it was most often viewed as one source among many available analytic and intelligence-gathering tools.”
While the program obtained information that “had value in some counterterrorism investigations, it generally played a limited role in the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s overall counterterrorism efforts,” the report concluded.
Former President George W. Bush had authorized the program and was reauthorizing it every 45 days.
The CIA and other intelligence organizations also viewed the program, which allowed eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of Americans, as a useful tool.
But even they could not link it directly to counterterrorism successes, the report said.
Officials at the CIA also stated that much of the reporting received thanks to the electronic surveillance program authorized by Bush “was vague or without context.”
The report said the secrecy surrounding the program may have limited its effectiveness.
So few rank-and- file officers were informed about the program at the Central Intelligence Agency that the agency often did not make full use of the leads the wiretapping generated, according to the report.
The inspectors general concluded that the use by the intelligence community of information collected under the program “should be carefully monitored.”
Democrat Patrick Leahy, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement that the conclusions of this review should help shed more light on these rule-of-law issues that the previous administration avoided for a long time.
“This report underscores why we should move forward with a nonpartisan commission of inquiry,” Leahy said. “Without a thorough, independent review of decisions that run counter to our laws and treaties, we cannot ensure that these same mistakes are not repeated. Such a commission must have bipartisan support to be able to truly get to the bottom of these issues with objectivity and credibility.”
Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), in a prepared statement on Saturday, said the report challenges Bush administration arguments that “stopping the program would have had catastrophic results.”
“This report leaves no doubt that the warrantless wiretapping program was blatantly illegal and an unconstitutional assertion of executive power,” he said. “I once again call on the Obama administration and its Justice Department to withdraw the flawed legal memoranda that justified the program and that remain in effect today.”
With AFP.
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None of this could have been done without the help of America’s greatest Coward and Traitor Ex NSA/CIA Boss Mikie H. Please see James Bamford’s book and TV Documentary “the Shadow Factory” and “the Spy Factory” for Details. Peace.
“What Bamford fails to mention, is that Israeli and US intelligence groups have a long history of mutual cooperation.”
NOT based on mutual co-operation, based on psychosis and brainwashing!!!!
All of this is LIES, total lies! Israel sank and KILLED the USS Liberty many years ago & has been caught numerous times attempting to assassinate whistle blowers.
Israeli, the Zionist Neocon Order has been caught CONTINUALLY lying about the Gulf of Tonkin, claiming it was a MISTAKE!
It WASN’T, they thanks to their servants in the USA covered it up!
The only history between these two entities is a history of blackmail, hate, sabotage and antisemitism between the Israeli military and American Zionists who HATE I repeat HATE each other!!!!
This is the most UNHEALTHY relationship ever seen…..Most people have said on the record, we shouldn’t have been close allies with ISRAEL ever since they destroyed our US Naval vessels of the coast of EGYPT!!!!!
Turkey was part of the cover up!! LOOK IT UP, ITS ON THE WEB
Wolfowitz, Jay Bybee and other Zionists are the only reason that this TREASON in the NSA has been going on for years & the only reason we remained “the closest of allies” this is total COVER UP!!!!
whatreallyhappened . com
Israel after SINKING the USS liberty, went from a “great homeland for the chosen people” to a horrifying, TERRORIST state which kills people everywhere!!! Don’t buy their version of history!!!
These people our allies, NEVER!!! They have been no ally for over a decade, not to US, certainly not to the jews & christians a majority of which DID NOT even see the USS Liberty event!!!!
And here we are missing the point again. It was ILLEGAL. Do we really need to ask whether or not it was effective, other than to gain unnecessary popular support for prosecutions?
And not only illegal, the entire premise of why they engaged in this illegal activity is a lie. It had nothing to do with “national security” and everything to do with gaining blackmail material to control and keep members of Congress and others from revealing any and all illegal activity by the bush regime.
The “national security” excuse simply does not hold water considering they could have easily obtained warrants to do this legally; instead they chose to do it illegally (obviously because they knew the court would never go along with warrants to spy on members of Congress and other American citizens).
People go to jail for much less. They broke the law. It is time and this needs to see a public hanging as Voltaire mentioned in his works. It helps to keep the troops in alignment.
Raw Story does a disservice to its readers and its own investigative reporting to not point out that two of the primary whistleblowers have stated that the Bush Administration’s illegal wiretapping started PRIOR TO 9/11!
GOD why is it so damn difficult to report this in context? I mean I expect it from the AP, the AFP, FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, NPR, et al.
Here is an excerpt from just one article, easily located with a quick google search. Does Raw Story need some help?
June 30 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court.
The allegation is part of a court filing adding AT&T, the nation’s largest telephone company, as a defendant in a breach of privacy case filed earlier this month on behalf of Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. customers. The suit alleges that the three carriers, the NSA and President George W. Bush violated the Telecommunications Act of 1934 and the U.S. Constitution, and seeks money damages.
“The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,” plaintiff’s lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. “This undermines that assertion.”
Taps ‘needed’ before 9/11 to eliminate leaks & whistleblowers…
FISA bypassed
Then Obama votes for telecom immunity
Many were put in railroad cars without water, no room to sit until they died..This happened on our republican watch..
“…For a time, even members of the FISA court were kept out of the loop….” Is there any stronger way of saying “ILLEGAL” when the very court ASSIGNED to issue the warrants is “LEFT OUT OF THE LOOP”?????
That’s what the hangman should say when he fastens the noose around former King George’s privileged neck: “You’re in the loop on this one, boss.”
an opinion,
Proven mathematical verification will show that mining models if attempted, generated leads which tagged “innocents”/”false postiives” into buckets of suspects. There would be no avoiding this.
How the suspect databases were used, monitoried or filtered along with a related critical eye on the means of obtaining the massive data feeding into the programs will ultimately not justify the “well intentioned” end.
Or another way to state the case is that neither math nor a review of “leather hitting the street” will provide shelter for the proponents of the tools and costs for trying to predict such a small probability event such as a terrorist attack or subjective subversive activity.
Data mining goes on in public and private 24/7/365. When a mathematically inept model is used, good guys become bad guys without a trial to prove their guilt.
Oh bullshit! It has no fucking role what-so-ever!
The FISA court was one of the most liberal (not politically, but in terms of access for investigators) in history!
There was NEVER, EVER ANY LEGITIMATE REASON TO BYPASS THEM. They approved warrants wholesale! The numbers are something like 19,000 to 8 in favor of the government getting their wiretap granted! They COULD EVEN WIRETAP ON DEMAND, WITH NO WARRANT, AND JUST RETURN LATER TO REQUEST ONE!
But the rubes are supposed to believe that destroying the 4th amendment was a ZOMG!! VITAL part of ZOMG!! NATIONAL SECURITY! in the same way that TSA goons who feel you up at the airport and guardsmen with unloaded rifles were holding back the Muslim hordes waiting to turn your peaceful saturday night into some sort of”Red Dawn” scenario.
Anyone who believe this helped, at all, is either uninformed or stupid. Sadly, there’s no cure for stupid..
Soviet Zionists rule the NSA attacking & trying to kill whistle blowers!
whatreallyhappened . com / motherofallscandals . html
We have Criminals in our govt. thinking the little people are they only ones that have to follow the law..We will have to clean up our own govt..
I said many times I have nothing against jews or minorities….
I just absolutely despise Zionist scudbucket psychopaths, and the NSA is over run with this trash!
Zionist Jews & Zionist Christians/Germans have been freaking spying on all of the USA for Israel & other regimes since 2001, if not right before that began because the Israelis have been BLACKMAILING our entire country & doing things so insane Cheney & the whole lot of them should be thrown in a DUNGEON & WATERBOARDED TOMORROW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
whatreallyhappened . com / motherofallscandals . html
Wake UP, Wake UP and read the SHADOW FACTORY….Israel has really been involved for a fact!!!! Spying on EVERYONE, even Jews and attacking people as antisemites and worse…..LYING about all of this using OUR MEDIA which is controlled by the industrial disease!!!!!
books. slashdot. org/ article. pl? sid=09/03/09/1338254
“What Bamford does is show that many of the founders of these companies are graduates of programs from the Israeli military”
If that is accurate and Israel is such a “great friend”, why are they spying on & attacking people & authorizing torture programs directly through the neocons?!?!? ISRAEL IS ENGAGED IN ILLEGAL ESPIONAGE…. OBAMA MUST ORDER THE NSA PROGRAM TO BE SUSPENDED!!!!!
How many times has Israel been caught spying on us? And they’re supposed to be our allies? How many people would ever again trust someone they invited into their home as a friend, who then turns around and gets caught stealing from them? And when you read Israeli news about matters regarding their people being caught spying on the US, they think it’s no big deal and accuse us of being anti-Israel for having the temerity to prosecute and imprison their spies!! It’s insane. And the comments section on these types of articles is most revealing about what many Israelis really think of we Americans.
They’re not our friends, and certainly not to be trusted. They display many of what I think of as passive-aggressive tendencies on a fairly regular basis when dealing with others.