Recorded Febrary 12, 2006
REALAUDIO

A major rea­son for George W. Bush’s decline in pub­lic opin­ion polls is the dam­age to his rep­u­ta­tion done by dam­ag­ing dis­clo­sures about his con­duct of the war in Iraq and his pur­suit of Al Qaeda. In this broad­cast, we exam­ine indi­ca­tions that many of these dis­clo­sures have been delib­er­ately leaked in order to retal­i­ate against Bush for hav­ing cir­cum­vented and, in some cases, abused the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity and the mil­i­tary. Rather like the intel­li­gence community’s dis­clo­sures about Nixon that resulted in the Water­gate scan­dal, the rev­e­la­tions con­cern­ing Bush’s national secu­rity malfea­sance and error are doing seri­ous polit­i­cal dam­age to Dubya. In addi­tion to set­ting forth many of these dam­ag­ing dis­clo­sures, the pro­gram notes that one of the most con­tro­ver­sial of Bush’s gaffes—the autho­riza­tion for the NSA to con­duct “war­rant­less” wire­tap­ping of Amer­i­can citizens—is actu­ally “busi­ness as usual” for the NSA. For decades the NSA has suc­cess­fully cir­cum­vented the super­fi­cial sanc­tions against ille­gal wire­tap­ping by hav­ing British intel­li­gence agents do the actual wire­tap­ping at NSA head­quar­ters. Tech­ni­cally, the US cit­i­zens are being wire­tapped by British—not American—intelligence offi­cers. The NSA per­forms a rec­i­p­ro­cal func­tion for the British. It is Mr. Emory’s con­tention that the uproar over the NSA pro­gram (which is lit­er­ally busi­ness as usual for that agency) is, in fact, intended to dam­age Bush. Hence the brouhaha. The broad­cast con­cludes with a look at GOP lynch­pin Grover Norquist’s protests against the NSA spy­ing pro­gram and his role as point man for the Islamist/Muslim Broth­er­hood milieu in the United States. Norquist’s younger brother David is now the chief finan­cial offi­cer for the Depart­ment of Home­land Security.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The national secu­rity establishment’s role in leak­ing the Abu Ghraib atroc­i­ties; the intel­li­gence community’s role in forc­ing inves­ti­ga­tion of the Valerie Plame case; intel­li­gence com­mu­nity dis­clo­sures con­cern­ing a botched attempt at short-circuiting Iran’s nuclear pro­gram that may actu­ally have aided that country’s attempts at devel­op­ing a nuclear weapon; the intel­li­gence community’s leak­ing of the com­pro­mis­ing of every CIA ground asset in Iran and the rolling up of those assets; the intel­li­gence community’s con­tin­u­ing dis­clo­sures con­cern­ing the Bush administration’s delib­er­ate skew­ing of intel­li­gence on Iraq’s WMD’s; a CIA officer’s rev­e­la­tion that the US com­mand knew that Osama bin Laden was at the bat­tle of Tora Bora and failed to deploy US troops along the Afghan/Pakistani bor­der in order to appre­hend him.

1. Intro­duc­ing the cen­tral theme of the pro­gram, the dis­cus­sion opens with the sub­ject of the role of fed­eral intel­li­gence agents in the down­fall of Richard Nixon. Infor­mant “Deep Throat” turns out to have been a top FBI offi­cial, Mark Felt. (Felt claims he acted as he did out of con­cern for the Nixon’s administration’s abuse of the fed­eral intel­li­gence agen­cies, includ­ing FBI.) Unmen­tioned here is the role of the CIA in the deep-sixing of Nixon. There are indi­ca­tions that ele­ments of the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity and the mil­i­tary are respond­ing to Pres­i­dent Bush’s abuses of those insti­tu­tions. The response appears to be tak­ing the form of dam­ag­ing leaks to the media con­cern­ing a num­ber of unsa­vory acts ini­ti­ated by Bush. “In the stan­dard his­tory of Water­gate, it was an intre­pid press, the courts and Con­gress that brought down Pres­i­dent Richard Nixon. But last year’s rev­e­la­tion that Bob Woodward’s leg­endary ‘Deep Throat’ source was in fact the deputy direc­tor of the FBI offers another inter­pre­ta­tion. By Woodward’s own account, Mark Felt was not sim­ply one impor­tant source for the Wash­ing­ton Post’s report­ing. He had access to every facet of the jus­tice department’s Water­gate inves­ti­ga­tion and, angered over what he saw as White House abuse of his beloved FBI, pro­vided the Post with a roadmap to uncover the crimes. Nixon, it seems, was not so para­noid when he claimed that the Wash­ing­ton establishment—the pro­fes­sional bureau­cracy and its supporters—was out to get him. Pres­i­dent George W. Bush has his own estab­lish­ment prob­lem, as reporter James Risen’s new book State of War makes clear. Like Wood­ward before him, Risen has been on the receiv­ing end of leaks from career national secu­rity offi­cials who are deeply unhappy with the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion. Mr. Bush declared war on the bureau­cracy after Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001 and it is fight­ing back.”
(“Echoes of Nixon as the Spooks Take Their Revenge” by Edward Alden; Finan­cial Times; 1/9/2006; p. 15.)

2. Among the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity leaks that have dam­aged Bush’s pres­i­dency is the dis­clo­sure con­cern­ing Bush’s order to begin wire­tap­ping US cit­i­zens with­out a war­rant. Although this has cost Bush in the polls, it is busi­ness as usual for the NSA, as will be seen at greater length below. So, the ques­tion is—why the pub­lic flap over some­thing that has lit­er­ally been stan­dard oper­at­ing pro­ce­dure for decades? The avail­able evi­dence sug­gests that this “flap” is part of an intel­li­gence com­mu­nity coun­ter­at­tack against Bush’s admin­is­tra­tion. The sur­fac­ing of other sto­ries, such as the tor­ture at Abu Ghraib and the ongo­ing inves­ti­ga­tion into the leak­ing of CIA offi­cer Valerie Plame;s iden­tity, also appears to have come from ele­ments of the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity. “Risen and his New York Times col­league Eric Licht­blau revealed last month that Mr. Bush secretly autho­rized the National Secu­rity Agency to inter­cept tele­phone and e-mail com­mu­ni­ca­tions on US soil, an explo­sive story that has sparked a national debate over pres­i­den­tial pow­ers. The anony­mous sources, who are now the tar­get of a Bush admin­is­tra­tion leak inves­ti­ga­tion, were nearly a dozen cur­rent and for­mer gov­ern­ment offi­cials. They are, like Felt, almost cer­tainly from the orga­ni­za­tions that have felt most under siege by the Bush White House—the CIA, the uni­formed mil­i­tary and the state and jus­tice depart­ments. The pres­i­dent has paid a high price for alien­at­ing those insti­tu­tions. The mis­han­dling of post-invasion Iraq, which has dogged his pres­i­dency ever since, came about largely because state depart­ment experts were excluded from post-war plan­ning. It was an army inves­ti­ga­tion that uncov­ered the Abu Ghraib abuses and mil­i­tary lawyers who have most aggres­sively chal­lenged the administration’s mis­treat­ment of detainees. And a career jus­tice depart­ment official—James Comey, for­mer deputy attor­ney general—appointed Patrick Fitzger­ald, the bull­dog pros­e­cu­tor who indicted vice-president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff on per­jury charges in the CIA leak inves­ti­ga­tion. Mr. Comey also tried, unsuc­cess­fully, to curb the NSA spy­ing pro­gram.” (Idem.)

3. A major impe­tus for the leaks appears to have been the Bush administration’s cor­rup­tion of intelligence-gathering about Iraq’s WMD pro­gram. As is well known, the admin­is­tra­tion rejected intel­li­gence that did not fit in with its agenda of war against Iraq. (For more about this, see—among other programs—FTR#502.) “But the biggest reck­on­ing may come at the hands of the CIA, which has been dec­i­mated by defec­tions dur­ing the Bush years. ‘No other insti­tu­tion failed in its mis­sion as com­pletely dur­ing the Bush years as did the CIA,’ he writes. Instead of defend­ing his pro­fes­sional ana­lysts and agents, Risen argues, for­mer direc­tor George Tenet sought to ingra­ti­ate him­self with the pres­i­dent by pro­vid­ing him with exactly what he wanted—an intel­li­gence pre­text for war with Iraq. The pro­fes­sion­als have fought back, reveal­ing more and more of how the intel­li­gence was manip­u­lated. Using his sources inside the agency, Risen reveals that agency offi­cials actu­ally made seri­ous attempts to get Iraq right. For instance, the agency tracked down some 30 over­seas rel­a­tives of Iraqi sci­en­tists thought to be involved with weapons of mass destruc­tion. The rel­a­tives agreed to go to Iraq and try to have pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions with those sci­en­tists. All came back with the same reports—Saddam Hussein’s WMD pro­grams had been shut down since the end of the first Gulf War. But none of it ever made its way out of the bow­els of the agency. Instead, top admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials chose to believe Iraqi exiles such as the infa­mous ‘Curve­ball’ and his claims of mobile bio-weapons labs cruis­ing the Iraqi desert, despite repeated warn­ings from senior CIA offi­cials that he was almost cer­tainly a fab­ri­ca­tor.” (Idem.)

4. The James Risen book high­lights other rev­e­la­tions by the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity. Some of these are dis­cussed later in the pro­gram. “The book’s other chap­ters are filled with sim­i­lar sto­ries from dis­grun­tled spooks who believe the war on ter­ror­ism has been badly mis­han­dled from the out­set. Such crit­i­cisms will not sur­prise the agency’s many neo-conservative detrac­tors, who see it as too hide­bound by timid­ity and bureau­cratic iner­tia to oper­ate in a war in which the old rule­books no longer apply. Risen acknowl­edges the national secu­rity bureau­cracy is ‘mad­den­ingly slow, lacks cre­ativ­ity and is risk averse.’ But it has, he writes, one great virtue: ‘It tends to weed out really stu­pid or dan­ger­ous ideas, uneth­i­cal and even immoral ideas, ideas that could get peo­ple killed.’” (Idem.)

5. Much of the pro­gram con­sists of analy­sis of the rec­i­p­ro­cal arrange­ment between ele­ments of US intel­li­gence and British intel­li­gence to ille­gally wire­tap each other’s cit­i­zens. With the ille­gal wire­tap­ping of British and US cit­i­zens being done by oper­a­tives of the other country’s intel­li­gence agen­cies, both coun­tries can claim that they do not ille­gally wire­tap their own cit­i­zens. The infor­ma­tion is turned over to the agen­cies by their oppo­site num­bers. The NSA is the pri­mary Amer­i­can agency wire­tap­ping British cit­i­zens and the GCHQ does the bulk of the wire­tap­ping of the Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. As will be seen below, much of the ille­gal wire­tap­ping in the US is con­ducted against Jews, a prac­tice that owes much of its gen­e­sis to J. Edgar Hoover. “Accord­ing to sev­eral of the ‘old spies’ who worked in Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Intel­li­gence, the NSA head­quar­ters is also the chief British espi­onage base in the United States. The pres­ence of British wire­tap­pers at the key­boards of Amer­i­can eaves­drop­ping com­put­ers is a closely guarded secret, one that very few peo­ple in the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity have been aware of, but it is true. An Amer­i­can his­to­rian, David Kahn, first stum­bled onto a cor­ner of the British con­nec­tion in 1966, while writ­ing his book The Code­break­ers. One indi­ca­tion of just how sen­si­tive this infor­ma­tion is con­sid­ered on both sides of the Atlantic is the fact that Kahn’s pub­lish­ers in New York and Lon­don were put under enor­mous pres­sure to cen­sor a great deal of the book. In the main, Kahn sim­ply revealed the exis­tence of the liai­son rela­tion­ship, but when he wrote that the NSA and its British equiv­a­lent, the Gov­ern­ment Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Head­quar­ters, ‘exchange per­son­nel on a tem­po­rary basis,’ he had come too close to reveal­ing the truth.”
(The Secret War Against the Jews: How West­ern Espi­onage Betrayed the Jew­ish Peo­ple; John Lof­tus and Mark Aarons; Copy­right 1994 [SC]; St. Martin’s Press; ISBN 0–312-15648–0; p. 189.)

6. Authors Lof­tus and Aarons set forth the oper­a­tional par­a­digm for the wire­tap­ping: “The U.S. gov­ern­ment told Kahn to hide the exis­tence of British elec­tronic spies from the Amer­i­can pub­lic. Kahn even­tu­ally agreed to delete a few of the most sen­si­tive para­graphs describ­ing the exchange of codes, tech­niques, and per­son­nel with the British gov­ern­ment. His innocu­ous few sen­tences threat­ened to dis­close a larger truth. By the 1960s the ‘tem­po­rary’ British per­son­nel at Fort Meade had become a per­ma­nent fix­ture. The British enjoyed con­tin­ued access to the great­est lis­ten­ing post in the world. The NSA is a giant vac­uum cleaner. It sucks in every form of elec­tronic infor­ma­tion, from tele­phone calls to telegrams, across the United States. The pres­ence of British per­son­nel is essen­tial for the Amer­i­can wire­tap­pers to claim plau­si­ble deni­a­bil­ity. Here is how the game is played. The British liai­son offi­cer at Fort Meade types the tar­get list of ‘sus­pects’ into the Amer­i­can com­puter. The NSA com­puter sorts through its wire­taps and gives the British offi­cer the record­ing of any Amer­i­can cit­i­zen he wants. Since it is tech­ni­cally a British tar­get of sur­veil­lance, no Amer­i­can search war­rant is nec­es­sary. The British offi­cer then sim­ply hands the results over to his Amer­i­can liai­son offi­cer. [Empha­sis added.]” (Ibid.; pp. 189–190.)

7. The ille­gal Amer­i­can wire­tap­ping of British cit­i­zens fol­lows a sim­i­lar pat­tern: “Of course, the Amer­i­cans pro­vide the same ser­vice to the British in return. All inter­na­tional and domes­tic tele­phone calls in Great Britain are run through the NSA’s sta­tion in the British Gov­ern­ment Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Head­quar­ters (GCHQ) at Men­with Hill, which allows the Amer­i­can liai­son offi­cer to spy on any British cit­i­zen with­out a war­rant. Accord­ing to our sources, this duplic­i­tous, rec­i­p­ro­cal arrange­ment dis­guises the most mas­sive, and ille­gal, domes­tic espi­onage appa­ra­tus in the world. Not even the Sovi­ets could touch the U.K.-U.S. inter­cept tech­nol­ogy. Through this cha­rade, the intel­li­gence ser­vices of each coun­try can claim that they are not tar­get­ing their own cit­i­zens. The tar­get­ing is done by an autho­rized for­eign agent, the intel­li­gence liai­son res­i­dent in Britain or the United States. Thus, in 1977, dur­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion by the House Gov­ern­ment Oper­a­tions Com­mit­tee, Admi­ral Inman could claim, with a straight face, that ‘there are no U.S. Cit­i­zens now tar­geted by the NSA in the United States or abroad, none.’ Since the tar­get­ing was done not by NSA but by employ­ees of British GCHQ, he was telling the lit­eral truth. Still, the con­gres­sional staff knew enough at the time to char­ac­ter­ize Inman’s state­ment in an unpub­lished report as ‘mis­lead­ing.’” (Ibid.; p. 190.)

8. “Whether Inman had per­sonal knowl­edge of the British wire­tap­ping may never be resolved. None of our sources claims to be present on any occa­sion when Admi­ral Inman met with the British liai­son offi­cers. It should be noted, how­ever, that before Inman started his career with Naval Intel­li­gence, he was assigned as an aide to Lon­don. The British con­nec­tion may explain not only Inman’s mete­oric rise to become the youngest direc­tor of the NSA, but also why Pres­i­dent Rea­gan later selected him to be– come William Casey’s deputy at the CIA. The move sur­prised many who knew of Inman’s rep­u­ta­tion as a reformer and do-gooder. In fact, it was Admi­ral Inman who pulled the plug on the NSA’s infa­mous ‘Task Force 157’ while he was at CIA. It is entirely pos­si­ble that Inman may have been an inno­cent man, whose pub­lic rep­u­ta­tion for integrity was used for win­dow dress­ing. Inman’s sup­port­ers in the NSA, of whom he has many, sug­gest that the blame for the British wire­tap con­nec­tion rests entirely with the FBI and that the NSA’s job was only to carry out a tar­get­ing pol­icy insti­tuted by J. Edgar Hoover. That begs the ques­tion of whether Inman knew about the British tar­get­ing when he gave his mis­lead­ing state­ment to Con­gress.” (Idem.)

9. “Whether Inman had per­sonal knowl­edge of the ori­gins or extent of British domes­tic espi­onage or not, the ‘old spies,’ sev­eral of whom served at Fort Meade, say that his denial of domes­tic tar­get­ing by the NSA is all ‘seman­tic bull­shit.’ It is well known, even among low-ranking NSA employ­ees, that the for­eign liai­son offi­cers exchange all the tar­get­ing infor­ma­tion any­way, includ­ing the names on the British tar­get lists. Admi­ral Inman did not pro­vide that infor­ma­tion to Con­gress, although it was clearly rel­e­vant to its inquiries. Accord­ing to a for­mer spe­cial agent of the FBI, the you-spy-on-mine, I’ll-spy-on-yours deal has been extended to the other West­ern part­ners, par­tic­u­larly Canada and Aus­tralia. The British, with the help of sophis­ti­cated NSA com­put­ers, can bug just about any­one any­where. The elec­tronic search for sub­ver­sives con­tin­ues, par­tic­u­larly in the United States. The NSA con­ceded pre­cisely that point when the U.S. Jus­tice Depart­ment inves­ti­gated its wire­tap­ping of Amer­i­can pro­test­ers dur­ing the Viet­nam War. The NSA assured the Jus­tice Depart­ment that the infor­ma­tion was acquired only inci­den­tally as part of a British GCHQ col­lec­tion pro­gram. The ‘inci­den­tal’ British excep­tion has become the rule. As dis­cussed later in this chap­ter, ille­gal elec­tronic sur­veil­lance, par­tic­u­larly against Amer­i­can Jews, con­tin­ued past the McCarthy era, all through the Cold War, and past the col­lapse of the Soviet Union. In mod­ern times, com­mer­cial inter­ests in the Mid­dle East rather than secu­rity con­sid­er­a­tions have been the dri­ving force behind the domes­tic bug­ging.” (Ibid.; pp. 190–191.)

10. Much of the ille­gal sur­veil­lance against Jews stems from the British and Amer­i­can con­cern over oil, which is con­trolled largely by Arabs. Although the US is offi­cially sup­port­ive of Israel, in fact the US/British spy­ing appa­ra­tus spies on behalf of the Arabs. As men­tioned above, J. Edgar Hoover had much to do with the gen­e­sis of ille­gal sur­veil­lance of Amer­i­can Jews. “Where oil is con­cerned, the British and Amer­i­can wire­tap­pers use their anti-Jewish intel­li­gence as an under-the-table bar­gain­ing chip to appease the Arabs. Pub­licly, our nations are allied with Israel. Pri­vately, we give secret intel­li­gence to Israel’s ene­mies in time of war. As we dis­cuss in Chap­ter 12, on the Lib­erty inci­dent, Con­gress does not have a clue how the British-American wire­tap war works. For that mat­ter, U.S. super­vi­sion of Amer­i­can wire­tap­ping has been min­i­mal. Dur­ing the 1975 Sen­ate (Church Com­mit­tee) inves­ti­ga­tions, the NSA was forced to con­cede that ‘there is not any statute that pro­hibits . . . inter­cep­tion of domes­tic com­mu­ni­ca­tions.’ In short, the wire­tap­pers were out­side the reach of any exist­ing law. Tech­nol­ogy had out­stripped the legal pro­tec­tions of pri­vacy. While insist­ing that its efforts were mainly directed at over­seas com­mu­ni­ca­tions, the NSA also admit­ted that it was ‘tech­ni­cally pos­si­ble’ to mon­i­tor domes­tic con­ver­sa­tions within the United States, ‘if some per­son with mal­in­tent desired to do so.’ Some per­son like J. Edgar Hoover, for exam­ple. Hoover was one of the biggest cus­tomers of wire­tap infor­ma­tion from its incep­tion. In fact, the FBI made no bones about its right to lis­ten in to domes­tic con­ver­sa­tions with­out a war­rant. It wasn’t until a 1975 court case that the FBI was finally told that they had no legal right to wire­tap indi­vid­u­als or orga­ni­za­tions with­out a war­rant, unless there was a proven ‘agency rela­tion­ship’ with a for­eign power. In fact, until the stricter 1975 stan­dards, the FBI could wire­tap or place sur­veil­lance on any Jew who gave money to any Jew­ish orga­ni­za­tion that sup­ported Israel. Here is an exam­ple of the type of innocu­ous infor­ma­tion that was for­warded to the FBI as a result of their obses­sive sur­veil­lance of Amer­i­can Jews: EMMA LAZARUS FOUNDATION OF JEWISH WOMENS CLUBS AMONG LARGER DONORS CONTRIBUTING $500 DURING A FUND RAISING DINNER HELD BY THE EMERGENCY CIVIL LIBERTIES COMMITTEE . . . [ON] DEC 15 1962 AT THE AMERICANA HOTEL NYC IN CELEBRATION OF THE 171ST ANNIVERSARY OF THE BILL OF RIGHTS. Appar­ently, Jews who cel­e­brated the Bill of Rights were con­sid­ered poten­tial, if not actual, sub­ver­sives. That remains FBI pol­icy to this day. The FBI refused to accept the restric­tions from an adverse 1975 court rul­ing and leaked its view to the media in a 1977 memo. The FBI still defended its right to spy on per­sons who ‘might’ be sup­port­ers of a for­eign power, or even any­one in the coun­try who ‘might’ be influ­enced by a for­eign power.” (Ibid.; pp. 191–192.)

11. In 1978, the For­eign Intel­li­gence Sur­veil­lance Act was passed by Con­gress. It is this statute that is vio­lated by the Bush order to the NSA to ille­gally wire­tap Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. “In light of the triv­ial intel­li­gence haul from most of the sur­veil­lance, it was lit­tle won­der that over the years, Hoover had gone to great lengths to keep his sur­veil­lance of Amer­i­can Jews a secret, par­tic­u­larly from the Kennedy admin­is­tra­tion. Attor­ney Gen­eral Bobby Kennedy made almost no effort to hide his desire to force Hoover out, and rumors spread that a Jew might actu­ally step into his august shoes. Hoover and many in the upper ech­e­lons of the Bureau were absolutely out­raged, and before long an ulti­mately suc­cess­ful cam­paign was under way to save the mas­ter wire­tap­per of U.S. intel­li­gence. The elec­tronic sur­veil­lance of Jews picked up dur­ing the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion but qui­eted down a bit after Water­gate. In 1978 Con­gress finally passed the For­eign Intel­li­gence Sur­veil­lance (FIS) Act, a fee­ble attempt to stamp out some of the worst excesses of domes­tic espi­onage. In another bit of lawyerly leg­erde­main, the FIS act was restricted only to tar­get­ing by Amer­i­can agen­cies, leav­ing the British liai­son offi­cer with a major loop­hole. The restric­tive lan­guage added to the FIS act left unchanged the arrange­ment under which the British wire­tapped Amer­i­can sus­pects and then passed on the infor­ma­tion to the NSA. Inman, it should be noted, was not in the NSA dur­ing 1975–76 when the lan­guage of the British loop­hole was con­trived, although he was its direc­tor in 1978 when the act finally became law. To this day Con­gress does not real­ize that the British liai­son offi­cers at the NSA are still free to use Amer­i­can equip­ment to spy on Amer­i­can cit­i­zens. And, in fact, they are doing just that. Con­gress has been kept in the dark delib­er­ately. This is a fact, not a mat­ter of con­jec­ture or a con­clu­sion based on anony­mous sources.” (Ibid.; p. 192.)

12. Note how sen­si­tive the NSA/GCHQ liai­son is: “In the early 1980s, dur­ing the Rea­gan admin­is­tra­tion, one of the authors of this book sub­mit­ted to the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity a draft of a man­u­script that briefly described the wire­tap shell game and men­tioned that the secrecy pro­vi­sions con­cern­ing British liai­son rela­tion­ships with the NSA have escaped con­gres­sional knowl­edge. The result was an uproar. The intel­li­gence com­mu­nity insisted that all pas­sages explain­ing the British wire­tap pro­gram had to be cen­sored and pro­vided a list of spe­cific dele­tions. Even the sim­ple men­tion of the exis­tence of a secret agree­ment of which Con­gress was unaware was banned as clas­si­fied infor­ma­tion. In 1985, when the author was called to tes­tify about Nazis work­ing for U.S. intel­li­gence before a con­gres­sional sub­com­mit­tee, he asked per­mis­sion to dis­cuss cer­tain items per­tain­ing to elec­tronic sur­veil­lance in exec­u­tive ses­sion. Per­mis­sion was denied. So much for con­gres­sional over­sight.” (Ibid.; p. 193.)

13. Note also how the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion lifted the pro­hi­bi­tion on writ­ing about the NSA/GCHQ liai­son. This should pro­vide some per­spec­tive for those who claim that there’s no dif­fer­ence between the Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats. “Shortly after the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion took office, the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity with­drew its pre­vi­ous objec­tions to pub­li­ca­tion. In fact, many of the pieces of the jig­saw already had passed into the pub­lic domain. In 1982 James Bam­ford pub­lished his sem­i­nal his­tory of the NSA, The Puz­zle Palace, which dis­closed some of the main points of the NSA-GCHQ liai­son. The National Archives had been given dozens of declas­si­fied FBI doc­u­ments cit­ing British intel­li­gence as the source of its infor­ma­tion on Jews in the United States. And finally, in 1991, a pair of British authors con­firmed a por­tion of the espi­onage on Amer­i­can Jews: ‘Some­time in 1945 or 1946 a spe­cial unit, even more secret than the rest of the code-breaking agency, was set up to mon­i­tor the activ­i­ties of Israeli agents and their sym­pa­thiz­ers in the U.S. and else­where. The men who ran this orga­ni­za­tion held the view that because of the use made by the Israelis of sym­pa­thiz­ers from the Jew­ish com­mu­nity, no Jew, how­ever appar­ently loyal a U.S. cit­i­zen, should be per­mit­ted to work in the spe­cial unit or even be told of its exis­tence. All reports from the unit car­ried the code name ‘Gold,’ sig­ni­fy­ing that they were not to be shown to any­one of Jew­ish ori­gin. ‘We had them cold,’ recalls one for­mer intel­li­gence offi­cial who was cleared to see the Gold reports. ‘We knew who was ship­ping the arms, who was pay­ing for them, who was being paid in this coun­try, every ille­gal thing that was going on in this coun­try. Because of pol­i­tics, very lit­tle was ever done with [this intel­li­gence]. But so far as I know the [National Secu­rity Agency] still has a group like that, buried some­where deep. It does indeed. Its nick­name is the ‘Jew room.’ Inside the National Secu­rity Agency is an intel­li­gence cen­ter from which all Amer­i­can Jews are banned, regard­less of their proven loy­alty or devo­tion to coun­try, just as the U.S. Navy banned Jews from elec­tronic sur­veil­lance ships, such as the USS Lib­erty. The ‘Jew room’ is where the United States and Britain spy on Israel and on any­one who sup­ports Israel. Its name is a mis­nomer, as the intel­li­gence cen­ter has more than one room in more than one agency. As we shall see in the fol­low­ing chap­ters, it is, and has been, the heart of the secret war against the Jews. . . .” (Ibid.; pp. 193–194.)

14. Among the leaks dis­cussed in the afore­men­tioned James Risen book is the story of a bun­gled attempt at sab­o­tag­ing the Iran­ian nuclear pro­gram. This gaffe may have actu­ally accel­er­ated the Iran­ian nuclear research. “In a clumsy effort to sab­o­tage Iran’s nuclear pro­gram, the CIA in 2004 inten­tion­ally handed Tehran some top-secret bomb designs laced with a hid­den flaw that U.S. offi­cials hoped would doom any weapon made from them, accord­ing to a new book about the U.S. intel­li­gence agency. But the Ira­ni­ans were tipped to the scheme by the Russ­ian defec­tor hired by the CIA to deliver the plans and may have gleaned sci­en­tific infor­ma­tion use­ful for design­ing a bomb, writes New York Times reporter James Risen in State of War: The Secret His­tory of the CIA and the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion. The clan­des­tine CIA effort was just one of many alleged intel­li­gence fail­ures dur­ing the Bush admin­is­tra­tion accord­ing to the book.”
(“CIA Gave Iran Bomb Plans, Book Says” by Josh Meyer; Los Ange­les Times; 1/4/2006; p. A3.)

15. Risen also presents other intel­li­gence fail­ures that were, again, leaked to him by dis­grun­tled mem­bers of the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity. “Risen also cites intel­li­gence gaffes that fueled the Bush administration’s case for war against Sad­dam Hus­sein, spawned a cul­ture of tor­ture through­out the U.S. mil­i­tary and encour­aged the rise of heroin cul­ti­va­tion and traf­fick­ing in post­war Afghanistan. Even before the book’s release Tues­day, its main revelation—that Pres­i­dent Bush autho­rized a secret effort by another intel­li­gence out­fit, the National Secu­rity Agency, to eaves­drop on unsus­pect­ing Amer­i­cans with­out court-approved warrants—had cre­ated a storm of con­tro­versy when it was reported last month in the New York Times in an arti­cle co-authored by Risen. In the book, Risen says he based his accounts on inter­views with dozens of intel­li­gence offi­cials who, while unnamed, had proved reli­able in the past. . . . The New York Times delayed for a year pub­li­ca­tion of its arti­cle on the NSA’s domes­tic spy­ing, in part because of per­sonal requests from the pres­i­dent. Crit­ics have ques­tioned whether the paper could have pub­lished the infor­ma­tion before last year’s pres­i­den­tial elec­tion if it had decided against a delay. News­pa­per offi­cials have refused to com­ment on rea­sons for the delay or on the exact tim­ing. . . .” (Idem.)

16. Yet another intel­li­gence fail­ure described by Risen con­cerns the “blow­ing” of the cover of CIA oper­a­tives in Iran. “ . . . Accord­ing to the book, the CIA effort to sab­o­tage Iran’s nuclear effort came on the heels of another mas­sive intel­li­gence fail­ure, in which a CIA offi­cer mis­tak­enly sent an Iran­ian agent a trove of infor­ma­tion that could help iden­tify nearly every one of the spy agency’s under­cover oper­a­tives in Iran. The Iran­ian was a dou­ble agent, who turned over the data to Iran­ian author­i­ties. They used it to dis­man­tle the CIA’s spy net­work inside the coun­try and arrest or pos­si­bly kill and unknown num­ber of U.S. agents, the book said.” (Idem.)

17. C.I.A. vet­eran Paul R. Pil­lar is another of the dis­grun­tled intel­li­gence offi­cers to come for­ward with dam­ag­ing leaks about the Bush admin­is­tra­tions dis­tor­tions con­cern­ing intel­li­gence esti­mates of Iraqi WMD pro­grams. “A C.I.A. vet­eran who over­saw intel­li­gence assess­ments about the Mid­dle East from 2000 to 2005 on Fri­day accused the Bush admin­is­tra­tion of ignor­ing or dis­tort­ing the pre­war evi­dence on a broad range off issues related to Iraq in its effort to jus­tify the Amer­i­can inva­sion of 2003. The views of Paul R. Pil­lar, who retired in Octo­ber as national intel­li­gence offi­cer for the Near East and South Asia, echoed pre­vi­ous crit­i­cism from Democ­rats and from some admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials, includ­ing Richard A. Clarke, the for­mer White House coun­tert­er­ror­ism czar, and Paul H. O’Neill, the for­mer trea­sury sec­re­tary. But Mr. Pil­lar is the first high-level C.I.A. insider to speak out by name on the use of pre­war intel­li­gence. His arti­cle for the March-April issue of For­eign Affairs, which charges the admin­is­tra­tion with the selec­tive use of intel­li­gence about Iraq’s uncon­ven­tional weapons and the chances of post­war chaos in Iraq, was posted on the journal’s Web site after it was reported in The Wash­ing­ton Post. . . .”
(“Ex-C.I.A. Offi­cial Says Iraq Data Was Dis­torted” by Scott Shane; The New York Times; 2/11/2006.)

18. In addi­tion to the leaks men­tioned above, CIA offi­cer Gary Berntsen has writ­ten of the fail­ure of the US mil­i­tary com­mand to cap­ture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora. This became an issue in the 2004 pres­i­den­tial cam­paign when John Kerry accused the Bush admin­is­tra­tion of fail­ing to deploy enough US troops at the Pakistani/Afghan bor­der in order to trap bin Laden. Gen­eral Tommy Franks denied that there was any con­crete intel­li­gence that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. Accord­ing to Berntsen, Franks was lying. “US mil­i­tary com­man­ders were told that Osama bin Laden was hid­ing in the moun­tain­ous Tora Bora region of Afghanistan in early Decem­ber of 2001 but failed to send troops to block his escape, accord­ing to a new account by the CIA offi­cer who ran the agency’s oper­a­tions in the coun­try. Gary Berntsen, a CIA vet­eran who handed a para­mil­i­tary team called ‘Jaw­breaker’ dur­ing the Afghan war, said in a book pub­lished last week that one of his Arabic-speaking oper­a­tives found a radio on a dead al-Qaeda fighter dur­ing the Tora Bora bat­tle and heard the ter­ror­ist leader try to rally his troops. ‘After the Spec­tre [gun­ship air­craft] cleared the area, Bilal heard a voice he rec­og­nized from dozens of tape record­ings,’ Mr. Berntsen wrote, using a pseu­do­nym for an Arab-American for­mer Marine who was part of the CIA team. ‘It was Osama bin Laden telling his troops to keep fight­ing.’”
(“Ex-CIA Agent Says US Missed bin Laden in Afghan Bat­tle” by Peter Spiegel; Finan­cial Times; 1/4/2006; p. 2.)

19. Berntsen’s request for the deploy­ment of an Army Ranger bat­tal­ion was denied. “Later, on the same cap­tured radio, ‘Bilal’ and a sec­ond CIA agent, another Amer­i­can of Mid­dle East­ern ori­gin, reported hear­ing Mr. bin Laden apol­o­giz­ing for get­ting his men trapped in the moun­tains and killed in large num­bers by Amer­i­can bomb­ing Mr. Berntsen wrote. The book, titled Jaw­breaker, was heav­ily edited by CIA cen­sors. Mr. Berntsen also wrote that on the rec­om­men­da­tion of a for­mer spe­cial forces offi­cer who was part of his team as a CIA con­trac­tor, he made a for­mal request for 800 US army Rangers to be deployed along the Pak­istan bor­der to pre­vent Mr. bin Laden’s escape, a request that was never granted. . . . .” (Idem.)

20. Among the crit­ics of the NSA spy­ing pro­gram is GOP big­wig Grover Norquist. As we saw in—among other programs—FTR#’s 435, 454, 467, 515, Norquist has served as a lob­by­ist and front man for the Islam­o­fas­cist milieu impli­cated in 9/11. His Islamic Insti­tute is a Mus­lim Broth­er­hood beach­head in the Repub­li­can Party. One can­not help but won­der if Norquist’s dis­taste for the NSA spy­ing pro­gram is rooted in fear that his col­lab­o­ra­tion with the ter­ror­ist milieu impli­cated in 9/11 might be revealed to a greater extent than it already has been. “Larry Dia­mond, a Demo­c­rat and a Hoover Insti­tu­tion senior fel­low, went to Bagh­dad in 2004 as a con­sul­tant for the U.S.-run Coali­tion Pro­vi­sional Author­ity, believ­ing strongly in the Bush administration’s goal of build­ing a democ­racy there. While crit­i­cal of many aspects of the Iraq war, he has, he says, whole­heart­edly sup­ported Pres­i­dent Bush’s aggres­sive approach to the war on ter­ror. Grover Norquist is one of the most influ­en­tial con­ser­v­a­tive Repub­li­cans in Wash­ing­ton. His weekly ‘Wednes­day Meet­ing’ at his L Street office is a must for con­ser­v­a­tive strate­gists, and he has been called the ‘man­ag­ing direc­tor of the hard-core right’ by the lib­eral Nation mag­a­zine. Per­haps the country’s lead­ing anti-tax enthu­si­ast, he is, like Dia­mond, a hawk in the war on ter­ror. Despite com­ing from oppo­site ends of the polit­i­cal spec­trum, they agree on one other major issue, that the Bush administration’s pro­gram of domes­tic eaves­drop­ping by the National Secu­rity Agency with­out obtain­ing court war­rants has less to do with the war on ter­ror than with threats to the nation’s civil lib­er­ties. . . .”
(“Polit­i­cal Oppo­sites Aligned Against Bush Wire­taps” by James Stern­gold; San Fran­cisco Chron­i­cle; 1/26/2006; p. A1.)

21. The pro­gram con­cludes by high­light­ing the appoint­ment of Norquist’s younger brother David to be the chief finan­cial offi­cer of the Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity. Hav­ing the younger brother of the point man for the Islamists in Amer­ica in charge of DHS finances is unlikely to make the coun­try safer. With DHS chief Michael Chertoff hav­ing been the attor­ney for appar­ent Al Qaeda financier Dr. Magdy el-Amir, the appoint­ment of David Norquist to head DHS finances bodes poorly for the country’s future. (For more about Chertoff, his role in cov­er­ing up the ter­ror­ist money trail and his rela­tion­ship with Dr. Magdy el-Amir, see—among other programs—FTR#’s 462, 464, 495, 500.) “ . . . With a tip of the War Room hel­met to Josh Mar­shall, we note word that the pres­i­dent plans to name David L. Norquist as the new CFO for DHS. As UPI reports, Norquist is the younger brother of Grover Norquist, the anti­tax cru­sader who would like to see the fed­eral gov­ern­ment shrunk down so small you could drown it in a bath­tub, just as soon as he and Abramoff are done prof­it­ing from it. . . .”
(“The ‘Best Per­son’ He Could Find?” by Tim Grieve; Salon.com; 1/19/2006.)