Wow - this is a huge story, and I'm surprised it hasn't gotten any major attention from the dKos community yet. Despite having the Patriot Act, that wasn't enough for this administration, who ordered the National Security Agency
to spy in America:
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.
It's bad enough that the Patriot Act passed with next-to-no resistance shortly after 9/11 (save for our man, Russ Feingold), but this? Since when did NSA become the MI-5 of America?
Reading on, we find that some people who worked on this project questioned the legality of it:
Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the legality of the program. But nothing came of his inquiry. "People just looked the other way because they didn't want to know what was going on," he said.
A senior government official recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation. "My first reaction was, ‘We're doing what?' " he said. While he said he eventually felt that adequate safeguards were put in place, he added that questions about the program's legitimacy were understandable.
[snip]
Several senior government officials say that when the special operation first began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president. (thanks to Simplify for pointing this out)
In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.
A somewhat convenient time to temporarily shelve the program, wouldn't you say? You can draw your own conclusions about that.
But what really burns me more is the lack of initiative that the NYTimes took with this story:
The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.
The fact that the NYTimes chickened out on a story about Bush possibly using a wire during the debates last year really rankled me, but this is about our right to privacy. The public has a right to know. Clearly, the Times was comfortable with the information they had a year ago that they were going to press, but the White House basically got them to sit on the story for a year.
What else could the Bush administration be hiding from us on this matter? I have a feeling that the Patriot Act is only the surface...
[Update]: WaPo, which basically wrote an article about the Times' article (I find it mildly humorous that a newspaper is reporting on another newspaper), includes some commentary which indicates that this may have constituted a criminal act:
Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies at George Washington University, said the secret order may amount to the president authorizing criminal activity.
The law governing clandestine surveillance in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, prohibits conducting electronic surveillance not authorized by statute. Government agents can try to avoid prosecution if they can show they were "engaged in the course of his official duties and the electronic surveillance was authorized by and conducted pursuant to a search warrant or court order of a court of competent jurisdiction," according to the law.
"This is as shocking a revelation as we have ever seen from the Bush administration," said Martin, who has been sharply critical of the administration's surveillance and detention policies. "It is, I believe, the first time a president has authorized government agencies to violate a specific criminal prohibition and eavesdrop on Americans." (emphasis mine)
[Update #2]: Bush refused to answer questions related to NSA in his interview with Jim Lehrer that will be aired tonight:
Bush said in an interview that "we do not discuss ongoing intelligence operations to protect the country. And the reason why is that there's an enemy that lurks, that would like to know exactly what we're trying to do to stop them.
"I will make this point," Bush said. "That whatever I do to protect the American people — and I have an obligation to do so — that we will uphold the law, and decisions made are made understanding we have an obligation to protect the civil liberties of the American people."
The president spoke in an interview to be aired Friday evening on "The Newshour with Jim Lehrer."
Bush played down the importance of the eavesdropping story. "It's not the main story of the day," Bush told Lehrer. "The main story of the day is the Iraqi elections" for parliament which took place on Thursday.
Perhaps I'm making an improper inference, but by saying that he will not discuss "ongoing intelligence operations", didn't Bush implicitly admit that the NSA is indeed conducting domestic spying operations?