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http://feeds.mediamatters.org/~r/mediamatters/latest/~3/291990382/200805160008 http://mediamatters.org/items/200805160008 On
the May 14 edition of NBC's Today,
during an interview with former CIA agent Michael Sheehan about his new book, Crush the Cell: How to Defeat
Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves (Crown,
May 2008), host Matt Lauer said, "You say we've got to use more
undercover agents, informants, wiretapping, email surveillance, the works. The
sound you just heard, Michael, is the far left, grabbing for their remote
controls, 'cause they say, you're going to do this, you're
going to trample civil liberties." In fact, despite Lauer's
suggestion that it is only "the far left" that is concerned about
"trample[d] civil liberties," Americans across the political
spectrum have denounced the Bush administration for alleged violations of civil
liberties, including conservatives such as former congressman (and current
Libertarian Party presidential candidate) Bob Barr, former
Reagan administration associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein, other
members of the conservative
American Freedom Agenda, and members of the libertarian Cato Institute.
In
addition, Lauer did not challenge Sheehan's assertion that the wiretapping and
investigative authorities
of the CIA, FBI, and NYPD have not "been abused over the last seven
years." Sheehan stated: "What you need is good oversight involved.
You need oversight within the agencies; you need congressional oversight;
oversight from the press -- and make sure that when we give our CIA or FBI or
NYPD the authority to do wiretaps or do investigations, that they're not
going to abuse it. I
don't think it has been abused over the last seven years." Lauer
did not point to any of the reports of abuses of authority by the Department of
Justice inspector general or to the reports of
dissent from within the administration regarding the warrantless domestic surveillance program run
by the National Security Agency (NSA).
As Media Matters for America has noted, in a March 2007 report, the Justice Department inspector general (IG) found many
"instances of illegal or improper use of national security letters
[NSLs]" by the FBI between 2003 and 2005. NSLs, the report explains,
"are written directives to provide information" and "are
issued by the FBI directly to third parties such as telephone companies,
financial institutions, Internet service providers and consumer credit
agencies, without judicial review." The IG's report stated that its
investigation "found that the FBI used NSLs in violation of applicable NSL
statutes, Attorney General Guidelines, and internal FBI policies" and
identified multiple ways that
the FBI had done so.
Further,
the report also found that the FBI acquired information in some cases without
obtaining grand jury warrants or even issuing NSLs. As The
Washington Post reported in a March 9, 2007, article:
The inspector general's report
discloses that on 739 occasions, the FBI obtained telephone toll or subscriber
records without first having a required national security letter or grand jury
subpoena, according to an unclassified version. Instead, the report says, the
FBI used a tactic called "exigent letters" that claimed there were
emergencies that warranted getting the information immediately. Many times, no
such emergencies existed, the inspector general found.
"On over 700 occasions the FBI obtained telephone
billing records or subscriber information from three telephone companies
without first issuing national security letters or grand jury subpoenas,"
the report says. It notes that many times the FBI supervisors who approved such
requests did not even have the legal authority to sign national security
letters.
The
IG report stated that the
FBI's use of such "exigent letters" "circumvented the
ECPA [Electronic Communications Privacy Act] NSL statute and violated the
Attorney General's Guidelines for FBI National Security Investigations
and Foreign Intelligence Collection (NSI Guidelines) and internal FBI
policy."
Lauer
also could have pointed to reports of dissent within the Bush administration
over the legality of the NSA's domestic surveillance activities. In their
December 16, 2005, New York Times
article on NSA
"eavesdropping," Times
reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen wrote:
"Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity
because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters
for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality
and oversight."
In a
March 30 Times article adapted
from his book, Bush's
Law: The Remaking of American Justice (Pantheon, April 2008), Lichtblau wrote:
In one previously undisclosed episode, [then-]Deputy
Attorney General Larry Thompson refused to sign off on any of the secret
wiretapping requests that grew out of the program because of the secrecy and
legal uncertainties surrounding it, the officials said. With the veil of
secrecy around the program, Mr. Thompson was not given access to details of the
N.S.A. operation, and he was so uncomfortable with the idea of approving this
new breed of wiretap applications that he had a top adviser write a memorandum
assessing the legal ramifications. The adviser warned him not to sign the
warrant applications because it was unclear where the wiretaps were coming
from.
In
addition, as Media Matters documented, Lichtblau and Risen reported on another instance of dissent over the NSA program in
a January 1, 2006, Times article. Lichtblau and Risen noted that in March 2004,
then-Deputy Attorney General James Comey was serving as acting attorney general
while then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was in the hospital. Lichtblau
and Risen reported that Comey objected strenuously to the
continuation of the NSA program,
prompting Andrew H. Card Jr., then
the White House chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, White House counsel at the time, to visit Ashcroft's hospital
room to obtain Department of Justice approval for "aspects of the National Security
Agency's domestic surveillance program." At a May 15, 2007, Senate
Judiciary Committee hearing, Comey testified that
after the hospital meeting, the
program under discussion at the hospital "was reauthorized
without us and without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as
to its legality." He also said of the attempt to get Ashcroft to sign off
on the program: "I was very upset. I was angry. I thought I just
witnessed an effort to take advantage of a very sick man, who did not have the
powers of the attorney general because they had been transferred to me."
Concerns
over the legality of the domestic surveillance program also reportedly extended
to members of the judiciary. Lichtblau reported in a January 10, 2006, Times article that
"the Justice Department held an unusual closed-door briefing Monday for
judges on a secret foreign-intelligence court in response to concerns about
President Bush's decision to allow domestic eavesdropping without warrants."
He added that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly,
the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), "raised
objections in 2004 to aspects of the program and instructed for a time that no
material obtained by the N.S.A. without warrants could be presented to the
court in warrant applications." In addition, according to media reports, Judge James Robertson
resigned from the FISC
in December 2005 in protest of the NSA's eavesdropping program.
From
the May 14 edition of NBC's Today:
LAUER: The third point -- and this is really the crux
of your book here -- is that: "Only spying works." And when you
talk about spying, let me just go through some of the things you call for --
demand. You say we've got to use more
undercover agents, informants, wiretapping, email surveillance, the works. The
sound you just heard, Michael, is the far left, grabbing for their remote
controls, 'cause they say, you're going to do this, you're
going to trample civil liberties.
SHEEHAN: Well, I hope not, and actually, I believe
very firmly you can do both. What you need is
good oversight involved. You need oversight within the agencies; you need
congressional oversight; oversight from the press -- and make sure that when we
give our CIA or FBI or NYPD the authority to do wiretaps or do investigations,
that they're not going to abuse it.
I don't think it has been
abused over the last seven years. And even when President
Bush pushed the NSA wiretapping thing, I think as people began to understand
what he was doing, they became -- they understood it more. It's just the
way he went about it. I think if we have a little bit more dialogue between the
executive branch and the Congress with the American people, we can get through
that.
LAUER: And it takes us to the title of you book, which
is Crush the Cell, and your
thought here is, once you see a cell forming, you break it up before that gang
has a chance to dream big.  |
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