Leopold: NSA Destroyed Evidence of Domestic Spying
10 January 2006 NSA Destroyed Evidence of Domestic
Spying
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
From:
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/010506I.shtml
Thursday
05 January 2006
The National Security Agency,
the top-secret spy shop that has been secretly eavesdropping
on Americans under a plan authorized by President Bush four
years ago, destroyed the names of thousands of Americans and
US companies it collected on its own volition following
9/11, because the agency feared it would be taken to task by
lawmakers for conducting unlawful surveillance on United
States citizens without authorization from a court,
according to a little known report published in October 2001
and intelligence officials familiar with the NSA's
operations.
NSA lawyers advised the agency to
immediately destroy the names of thousands of American
citizens and businesses it collected shortly after 9/11 in
its quest to target terrorists in this country. NSA lawyers
told the agency that the surveillance was illegal and that
it could not share the data it collected with the CIA or
other intelligence agencies.
The lawyers said the
surveillance could result in numerous lawsuits from people
identified in the surveillance reports, two former US
officials told the Houston Chronicle in an October 27, 2001,
report, and was illegal despite any terrorist threat that
existed in the days following 9/11.
By law, the NSA
cannot spy on a US citizen, an immigrant lawfully admitted
to this country for permanent residence, or a US
corporation. But, with the permission of a special court, it
can target foreigners inside the United States, including
diplomats.
The revelation raises new questions about
the legality of the NSA's domestic spying initiative,
authorized by President Bush in 2002, which has come under
intense scrutiny by Republicans and Democrats and will
likely lead to Congressional hearings.
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The fact that
the NSA has purged the names of thousands of Americans and
businesses it collected after 9/11 suggests that at the time
there were questions about the constitutionality of the
agency's efforts to combat terrorism by secretly spying on
Americans.
Still, the intelligence destruction angered
CIA and FBI officials as well as staff members of the House
and Senate intelligence committees who feared that leads on
potential terrorists would be permanently lost.
"In
heated discussions with the CIA and congressional staff, NSA
lawyers have turned down requests to preserve the
intelligence because the agency's regulations prohibit the
collection of any information on US citizens," the Chronicle
reported.
The NSA, based in Fort Meade, Maryland,
operates under the Department of Defense. It distributes
analysis summaries of its intelligence-gathering to a
certain number of senior US officials, but it doesn't share
its raw data - transcripts from wiretaps - with anyone. The
raw data is prized by intelligence analysts because it
provides additional context and more leads than the
watered-down summaries.
However, those guidelines
changed after 9/11 also.
The NSA ended up giving its
raw data to then Under Secretary of State for Arms Control
John Bolton on at least 10 different occasions since 9/11.
Bolton, nominated by Bush to be US ambassador to the United
Nations, let slip during his confirmation hearings in April
that he asked the NSA to unmask the identities of the
Americans blacked out in the agency's raw reports, to better
understand the context of the intelligence.
However,
evidence suggests that Bolton used the information for
personal reasons, in direct violation of rules governing the
dissemination of classified intelligence. During one routine
wiretap, the NSA obtained the name of a state department
official whose name had been blacked out when the agency
submitted its report to various federal agencies.
Bolton's chief of staff, Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA
official, revealed during the confirmation hearings that
Bolton had requested that the NSA unmask the unidentified
official. Fleitz said that when Bolton found out his
identity, he congratulated the official, and by doing so he
had violated the NSA's rules by discussing classified
information contained in the wiretap.
It turned out
that Bolton was just one of many government officials who
learned the identities of Americans caught in the NSA
intercepts. The State Department has asked the NSA to unmask
the identities of American citizens 500 times since May
2001.
At the time of the NSA purge in October 2001, US
Rep. Charles F. Bass, R-NH, who served for four years on the
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, suggested
that the NSA routinely skirted the law by eavesdropping on
Americans.
"I think it could be the biggest
information problem that we face," Bass told the Chronicle.
"If somebody is abroad and they even mention the name of an
American citizen, bang, off goes the tap, and no more
information is collected."
But what seemed to be a
blatant violation of the law shortly after 9/11 was
beginning to get a second look a year later, when Bush first
authorized the NSA to spy on Americans, and lawmakers
suggested that domestic spying was all but guaranteed to
avoid terrorist attacks.
Porter Goss, the former
Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee,
said as much in a wide ranging interview with the Miami Herald on June 11, 2002.
"The most critical question of all - how much spying on
Americans do we want," said Goss, now the Director of the
Central Intelligence Agency. "What this comes down to is
domestic surveillance [on individuals and groups], and I
don't know how you do that without spying on Americans. I
can't emphasize enough that that's the hardest
part."
*************
Jason Leopold spent two years covering
California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief
of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year
cultivating sources close to the CIA leak invesigation, and
will be a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.
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