Either the Government is lying in these other
cases, or Mr. McConnell is being used as a stooge
to deflect public attention from illegal
eavesdropping activities (Nixon tried to do this during the Watergate debacle).
There is also this little issue of a couple of
weeks ago the administration passing into law
measures that would make legal those
interceptions which would have been illegal prior
to the law begin passed, and that after the law
was passed the government tired to get it applied
retroactively to the previously illegal bugging.
Why would someone like Mr. McConnell "leak"
classified details that downplays the governments
eavesdropping activities on the tail of
administration going out of thier way to get a
law passed to cover-up their past sins.
Very Curious,
-jma
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/24/washington/24nsa.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
August 24, 2007
Role of Telecom Firms in Wiretaps Is Confirmed
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Aug. 23 — The Bush administration has
confirmed for the first time that American
telecommunications companies played a crucial
role in the National Security AgencyÂ’s domestic
eavesdropping program after asserting for more
than a year that any role played by them was a “state secret.”
The acknowledgment was in an unusual interview
that Mike McConnell, the director of national
intelligence, gave last week to The El Paso Times
in which he disclosed details on classified
intelligence issues that the administration has
long insisted would harm national security if discussed publicly.
Mr. McConnell made the remarks apparently in an
effort to bolster support for the broadened
wiretapping authority that Congress approved this
month, even as Democrats are threatening to
rework the legislation because they say it gives
the executive branch too much power. It is vital,
he said, for Congress to give retroactive legal
immunity to the companies that assisted in the
program to help prevent them from facing
bankruptcy because of lawsuits over it.
“Under the president’s program, the terrorist
surveillance program, the private sector had
assisted us, because if youÂ’re going to get
access, you’ve got to have a partner,” Mr.
McConnell said in the interview, a transcript of
which was posted by The El Paso Times on Wednesday.
AT&T and several other major carriers are being
sued over their reported role in the program,
which permitted eavesdropping without warrants on
the international communications of Americans
suspected of terrorism ties. The administration
has sought to shut down the lawsuits by invoking
the state-secrets privilege, refusing even to
confirm whether the companies helped conduct the wiretaps.
Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, which is heading up the
lawsuit against AT&T, said her group might ask
the appeals court to consider Mr. McConnellÂ’s
comments in deciding whether the state-secrets argument should be thrown out.
“They’ve really undermined their own case,” Ms. Cohn said.
Mr. McConnell said those suits were a driving
force in the administrationÂ’s efforts to include
in this monthÂ’s wiretapping legislation immunity
for telecommunications partners. “If you play out
the suits at the value they’re claimed,” he said,
“it would bankrupt these companies.”
Congress agreed to give immunity to
telecommunications partners in the measure , but
refused to make it retroactive.
Mr. McConnell, who took over as the countryÂ’s top
intelligence official in February, warned that
the public discussion generated by the
Congressional debate over the wiretapping bill
threatened national security because it would
alert terrorists to American surveillance methods.
“Now part of this is a classified world,” he said
in the interview. “The fact we’re doing it this
way means that some Americans are going to die.”.
Asked whether he was saying the news media
coverage and the public debate in Congress meant
that “some Americans are going to die,” he
replied: “That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public.”
Mr. McConnell, though, put new information on the
public record in the interview, on Aug. 14 while
in Texas for a border conference.
Mr. McConnell said, for instance, that the number
of people inside the United States who were
wiretapped through court-approved warrants
totaled “100 or less” but on the “foreign side,
it’s in the thousands.” The Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, which approves national
security wiretaps, told Congress it approved
2,181 eavesdropping warrants last year. The court
and the administration have not been willing to
break out how many Americans were in those orders.
Mr. McConnell did not make clear the time frame
for his estimate, nor was it clear whether he was
referring to the security agencyÂ’s program of
eavesdropping without warrants, which was brought
under the oversight of the intelligence court in
January. Officials in his office refused to clarify what he meant.
Mr. McConnell also offered the administrationÂ’s
first public discussion about a classified series
of rulings by the intelligence court that he said
had restricted the agencyÂ’s ability to collect foreign intelligence.
He said one judge this year gave broad approval
for the agencyÂ’s eavesdropping program. But
another judge, he said, ruled in the spring that
the administration would have to obtain a warrant
for any “foreign to foreign” communications that
passed through an American telecommunications center.
The administration obtained a stay of that ruling
until May 31, he disclosed, but after that date
he intelligence officials had “significantly less
capability” to track foreign communications. The
ruling sent the administration “in the wrong direction,” he added.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which has
petitioned the intelligence court to make public
its secret wiretapping rulings, expressed
frustration on Thursday with the timing of Mr. McConnellÂ’s comments.
“If this ostensibly sensitive information can be
released now, why could it not be released two
months ago, when the public and Congress
desperately needed it?” asked Jameel Jaffer,
director of the groupÂ’s national security project.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on
Government Secrecy for the Federation of American
Scientists, said the interview “was quite
striking because he was disclosing more detail
than has appeared anywhere in the public domain.”
“If we’re to believe that Americans will die from
discussing these things,” Mr. Aftergood said,
“then he is complicit in that. It’s an unseemly
argument. He’s basically saying that democracy is going to kill Americans.”
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Received on Sat Mar 02 2024 - 00:57:19 CST