[Infowarrior] - Report: Bush surveillance program was massive

[Richard Forno]

Report: Bush surveillance program was massive
By PAMELA HESS
The Associated Press
Friday, July 10, 2009 7:45 PM

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/10/AR2009071002470_pf.html
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.

© 2009 The Associated Press