'Torture Boy' Signals More Spying

[coderman]

i feel like throwing a FOIPA party,

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'Torture Boy' Signals More Spying
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/030206.html

By Robert Parry
March 2, 2006

Correcting misleading testimony to Congress, Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales has signaled that George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance
of Americans went beyond the known eavesdropping on communications to
suspected terrorists overseas.

In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 28, Gonzales
recanted testimony he gave on Feb. 6 when he declared that Bush had
only authorized a narrowly constructed warrantless wiretapping program
by the National Security Agency against Americans in touch with
foreign terror suspects.

Referring to a part of his testimony in which he said Bush had
approved the NSA program "and that is all that he has authorized,"
Gonzales withdrew that language, saying "I did not and could not
address  any other classified intelligence activities." [Washington
Post, March 1, 2006]

The strained wording of Gonzales's letter  and the fact that he
deemed it necessary to correct his testimony  suggest that other
warrantless surveillance programs exist outside the framework of the
NSA program, which began shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror
attacks and was exposed by the New York Times in December 2005.

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the committee's Republican
chairman, didn't put Gonzales under oath at the Feb. 6 hearing, but
false statements to Congress still constitute a potential criminal
offense.

Close Questioning

The dubious testimony came during close questioning by Sen. Patrick
Leahy of Vermont, the committee's ranking Democrat. Leahy pressed
Gonzales on the administration's claim that Congress gave Bush the
power to wiretap without a court warrant when it authorized use of
force against al-Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In his testimony, Gonzales argued that the congressional use-of-force
authorization, combined with the President's Commander-in-Chief power
in the Constitution, permitted Bush to approve a wiretapping program
for communications between Americans and terror suspects operating
outside the United States.

But  in challenging Bush's right to ignore the 1978 Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires a special court to
approve wiretaps  Leahy demanded to know if the administration's
legal interpretation also let Bush conduct other warrantless spying on
Americans, including tapping purely domestic phone calls, mail
openings and "black bag" break-ins into people's homes and offices.

"Under that (administration) logic, is there anything that stops you
from wiretapping without a warrant somebody inside the United States
that you suspect of having al-Qaeda connections?" Leahy asked.

"Clearly, Senator, that is not what's going on here," Gonzales
responded. "The President had authorized a much more narrow program.
We are always, of course, subject to the Fourth Amendment. So the
activities of any kind of surveillance within the United States would,
of course, be subject to the Fourth Amendment," which requires
"probable cause" and a court warrant before the property of Americans
can be searched.

Leahy persisted. "Under your interpretation of this, can you go in and
do mail searches? Can you go into e-mails? Can you open mail? Can you
do black-bag jobs?  Can you go and do that (to) Americans?"

Gonzales responded, "Sir, I've tried to outline for you and the
committee what the President has authorized, and that is all that he
has authorized."

"Did it authorize the opening of first-class mail of U.S. citizens?"
Leahy continued. "That you can answer, yes or no."

Gonzales: "There is all kinds of wild speculation about..."

Leahy: "Did it authorize it?"

Gonzales: "There is all kinds of wild speculation out there about what
the President has authorized and what we're actually doing. And I'm
not going to get into a discussion, Senator."

Recanted Testimony

Three weeks later, by recanting the statement about "that is all that
he (Bush) has authorized" in the context of Leahy's line of
questioning, Gonzales appears to be acknowledging that some of Leahy's
concerns are valid, that there are other components to Bush's
warrantless surveillance operations beyond the NSA program.

Given the fact that the Bush administration and its media allies have
openly challenged the loyalty of Americans who have disagreed with
Bush's policies, it would not be a big jump to suspect that Bush has
authorized spying on citizens, journalists and/or politicians who
have, in his view, undermined his strategy in the War on Terror or the
Iraq War.

Some Republicans publicly have urged Bush to counter these Americans
whom they call "Fifth Columnists" for supposedly sympathizing with or
otherwise helping the enemy.

At the Feb. 6 hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., declared that "I
stand by this President's ability, inherent to being Commander in
Chief, to find out about Fifth Column movements, and I don't think you
need a warrant to do that."

When Graham offered to work with the administration to draft
guidelines for how best to neutralize this alleged threat, Gonzales
smilingly replied, "Senator, the President already said we'd be happy
to listen to your ideas." [See Consortiumnews.com's "Bush's Mysterious
'New Programs'."]

With Bush's elastic use of language and his aggressive interpretation
of his own powers, there would seem to be little that Bush feels he
cannot do.

Gonzales, who was Bush's White House counsel before becoming Attorney
General, is part of a cadre of far-right lawyers who have asserted
virtually unlimited powers for Bush during the indefinite War on
Terror.

Gonzales earned the nickname "Torture Boy" for going along with
ideologues like John Yoo and David Addington in defending
interpretations of Bush's authority that opened the door to torture
and other abuses of U.S. detainees imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq,
Afghanistan and secret CIA jails scattered around the world. [See
Consortiumnews.com's "U.S. Disconnect on Bush's Abuses."]

Legal Resistance

The right-wing lawyers encountered opposition from professional
attorneys at the Justice Department and the Defense Department. The
professionals  the likes of Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith
and U.S. Navy general counsel Alberto Mora  forced the Bush lawyers
into some retreats on the most expansive assertions of executive
power, especially involving torture.

Referring to one of Yoo's opinions that asserted the President's power
to subject Guantanamo inmates to cruel, inhumane and degrading
treatment, Navy general counsel Mora wrote, "The memo espoused an
extreme and virtually unlimited theory of the extent of the
President's Commander-in-Chief authority." [See Mora's 22-page
chronology, as posted by The New Yorker.]

But, one by one, these internal critics were pushed out of the
government. Goldsmith resigned to take a teaching position at Harvard
Law School; Mora quit to take a job as general counsel for Wal-Mart's
international operations. [See Consortiumnews.com's "Another Bush Lie"
on Goldsmith, or The New Yorker's "The Memo" on Mora.]

In the context of Bush's top legal advisers rationalizing Bush's right
to torture prisoners or to jail American citizens without charges, the
likelihood seems high they also would claim for Bush the power to spy
on domestic opponents.

As Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 6, "detention
is far more intrusive than electronic surveillance."

But it's unclear whether the American people will ever learn what
these additional eavesdropping programs were or whom they targeted.
The Bush administration has wrapped its domestic spying program in
layer after layer of secrecy and lies.

In a speech in Buffalo, N.Y., on April 20, 2004, Bush went out of his
way to mislead the American people into a false sense of security
about his respect for Fourth Amendment prohibitions on warrantless
wiretaps.

"By the way, any time you hear the United States government talking
about wiretap, it requires  a wiretap requires a court order," Bush
said. "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about
chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order
before we do so."

At the time of his speech, Bush had been authorizing wiretaps without
getting approval from the FISA court for more than two years. [For
more on Bush's deceptions, see Consortiumnews.com's "Talkin' 'Texan'
Means Lying Big."

Secrecy Charade

The administration's claim about the need for extraordinary secrecy
surrounding the wiretap program is also largely a charade. Al-Qaeda
and other enemy groups have long been aware that the United States has
the capability of electronic eavesdropping and have structured their
operations accordingly.

In the Feb. 6 hearing, Gonzales acknowledged as much under questioning
from Sen. Joe Biden, D-Delaware.

Biden asked, "How has this revelation damaged the program" since the
administration's attack on the disclosure "seems to presuppose that
these very sophisticated al-Qaeda folks didn't think we were
intercepting their phone calls?"

Gonzales responded, "I think, based on my experience, it is true  you
would assume that the enemy is presuming that we are engaged in some
kind of surveillance. But if they're not reminded about it all the
time in the newspapers and in stories, they sometimes forget"  a
response that drew laughter from the citizens in the hearing room.

"You're amazed at some of the communications that exist," Gonzales
continued. "So when you keep sticking it in their face that we're
involved in some kind of surveillance, even if it's unclear in these
stories, it can't help but make a difference, I think."

In other words, Gonzales argued that the reason for the extraordinary
secrecy around the wiretap program is not that the disclosure of its
existence would alert al-Qaeda to a previously unknown U.S. spying
capability, but that newspaper stories might remind them to be a
little more cautious while chatting on the telephone.

Such a slim argument would suggest that the Bush administration has
another motive for trying to intimidate anyone  whether in the press
or in Congress  who wants to investigate the surveillance program.

On Feb. 28, reflecting on Gonzales's earlier testimony, Leahy said the
Attorney General's unresponsive answers led to the conclusion that
Gonzales "has a radically different understanding of the laws than do
many of us  the people's representatives in Congress who wrote the
laws."

As for Gonzales's responses to senators' questions about the program,
Leahy said, "whatever we asked, it was either too relevant or not
relevant enough, and either way, we were getting no answers from the
Attorney General."

A logical suspicion is that the administration is blocking a thorough
examination of the wiretapping program because it might show that Bush
followed the legal advice on his unlimited powers into pervasive
spying of his political enemies.

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Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for
the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy &
Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be
ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com,
as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press &
'Project Truth.'

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