Cheney Says Eavesdropping Program Might Have Prevented 9/11

What it means to John Kerry, Wesley Clark, and Bill Clinton if Bush wiretapped CNN's Christiane Amanpour

by John in DC - 1/04/2006 03:23:00 PM

As reported below, NBC's Andrea Mitchell - based on some information she clearly hasn't yet made public - is asking if Bush specifically wiretapped CNN's Christiane Amanpour. The fact that the question was asked so publicly and so specifically means that Mitchell knows something.

Why would Bush do this? Because, as I reported a few weeks ago, journalists have some of the best contacts out there and it's not unusual for journalists to talk to both sides of the story, or in this case, the good guys and the "evil doers." What a better, if not illegal, way to find the terrorists and their associates?

But before you say "yeah, go for it," consider the implications of tapping Christiane Amanpour's phones:

1. Such a wiretap would likely include her home, office, and cell phones, and email correspondence, at the very least.

2. That means anyone Christiane has conversed with in the past four years, at least by phone or email, could have had their conversation taped by the US government.

3. That also means that anyone who uses any of Christiane's telephones or computers (work or home) could also have had their conversation bugged.

4. This includes Christiane's husband, former Clinton administration senior official Jamie Rubin, who was spokesman for the State Department.

5. Jamie Rubin was also chief foreign policy adviser to General Wesley Clark's presidential campaign, and then worked as a senior national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign.

6. Did Jamie Rubin ever use his home phone, his wife's work phone, his wife's cell phone, her home computer or her work computer to communicate with John Kerry or Wesley Clark? If so, those conversations would have been bugged if Bush was tapping Amanpour.

7. Did Jamie Rubin ever in the past four years communicate with any elected officials in Washington, DC - any Senators or members of the US House? Any senior members of the Democratic party?

8. Has Rubin spoken with Bill Clinton, his former boss, in the past 4 years?

Now you understand how potentially broad a violation of privacy the Bush doctrine on illegal domestic spying really is. Everyone who's anyone is a degree or two of separation away from a terrorist.

Did Bush wiretap CNN's Christiane Amanpour?

by John in DC - 1/04/2006 02:09:00 PM

FURTHER UPDATE: NBC has now deleted the paragraphs of the interview dealing with Amanpour. Very very interesting.

UPDATE: Read our follow-on to this story here.

From NBC News:

New York Times reporter James Risen first broke the story two weeks ago that the National Security Agency began spying on domestic communications soon after 9/11. In a new book out Tuesday, "State of War," he says it was a lot bigger than that. Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell sat down with Risen to talk about the NSA, and the run-up to the war in Iraq....

Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?

Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that

Mitchell: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?

Risen: No, no I hadn't heard that.

White House Told NSA Briefings Broke Law

By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
1 hour, 2 minutes ago

The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee told President Bush Wednesday that the White House broke the law by withholding information from the full congressional oversight committees about a new domestic surveillance program.

In a letter to Bush, Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., said the National Security Act requires the heads of the various intelligence agencies to keep the entire House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States."

Only in the case of a highly classified covert action can the president choose to inform a narrower group of Congress members about his decision, Harman said. That action is defined in the law as an operation to influence political, economic or military conditions of another country.

"The NSA program does not qualify as a 'covert action,'" Harman wrote.

Bush and his senior national security aides have said that appropriate members of Congress were briefed more than a dozen times about the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance operations, which Bush first approved the month after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The highly classified sessions are known to include the "Gang of Eight," which is made up of the top Republican and Democrat in the House and Senate and on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees.

"We believe that Congress was briefed appropriately," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Wednesday in response to Harman's letter.

Responding in writing to Harman, House Intelligence Chairman Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich., said Harman had never previously raised concerns about the number of people briefed on the program.

"In the past, you have been fully supportive of this program and the practice by which we have overseen it," he wrote. "I find your position now completely incongruent."

Many details about the scope of electronic surveillance program remain unknown. However, Bush and his aides have asserted the monitoring — without court warrants — is narrowly targeted to eavesdrop on calls and e-mails of people who are inside the United States and suspected of communicating with al-Qaida or its affiliates.

Vice President Dick Cheney said Wednesday that the program helped to prevent possible terrorist attacks against the American people: "This program is critical to the national security of United States."

Democrats who have been briefed on the program have raised serious concerns about its legality, but not called for its immediate halt. Republicans and Democrats alike have called for hearings this year.

Spying, CNN and the Kerry campaign: Is there a there there?

It gets curiouser and curiouser.

As we noted Wednesday, AMERICAblog's John Aravosis noticed an odd moment in Andrea Mitchell's interview this week with New York Times reporter James Risen: While interviewing Risen about his new book and revelations that George W. Bush authorized warrantless spying on American citizens, Mitchell asked Risen if he had any information suggesting that CNN's international correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, "might have been eavesdropped upon." Risen said he didn't. But as Aravosis surmised, the question certainly suggested that Mitchell did.

Right about the time Aravosis' theory started floating through the blogosphere, somebody deleted Mitchell's question and Risen's answer from the transcript posted on MSNBC's Web site. We said we'd like to hear an explanation, and TVNewser actually went to the trouble of getting one. "Unfortunately this transcript was released prematurely," reads a statement TVNewser says it got from NBC. "It was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting, and it was not broadcast on 'NBC Nightly News' nor on any other NBC News program. We removed that section of the transcript so that we may further continue our inquiry."

Assuming the statement is legitimate, that sure seems to us like a long way of saying, "Yeah, we're looking into the possibility that the Bush administration was eavesdropping on Christiane Amanpour."

Now, it's probably time for a deep breath and some patience here. What we've got here is some reading between the lines, and it's about a question, not an answer. But as we said yesterday, if the answer is ultimately answered in the affirmative -- that is, if the Bush administration has indeed been listening in on Amanpour's phone -- the implications are enormous. We don't much like the idea that the government might be listening in on the conversations of a reporter. And Amanpour isn't just any reporter: She is married to Jamie Rubin, a State Department spokesman under Bill Clinton and a foreign policy advisor to John Kerry's presidential campaign. If the Bush administration was listening in on Amanpour's phone, was it listening when she talked with her husband? Was it listening when he might have used her phone himself?

Again, what we've got here are hints about a question. We're a long way from an answer. But when you start circumventing Congress and the courts and begin to spy on Americans in a way that you insist you aren't, you invite questions like these. And along the way, you invite people to think about the last time some people who worked for a president tried to spy on the opposition.

-- Tim Grieve

The Gray Lady in shadow
Could publication of the domestic-spying story lead to indictment of the New York Times?

BY HARVEY SILVERGLATE
Issue Date: January 6 - 12, 2006

Fearful that his presidency could be swept into the same historical dustbin as Richard Nixon’s, an unrepentant President George W. Bush seems intent on prosecuting the sources who leaked to the New York Times the details of his administration’s warrantless domestic spying. But does Bush have the chutzpah to go after the Times itself?

A variety of federal statutes, from the Espionage Act on down, give Bush ample means to prosecute the Times reporters who got the scoop, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, as well as the staff editors who facilitated publication. Even Executive Editor Bill Keller and Publisher Arthur "Pinch" Sulzberger Jr., could become targets — a startling possibility, just the threat of which would serve as a deterrent to the entire Fourth Estate.

Legal means are one thing, but political will is another. If Bush goes after the Times, he could spark a conflagration potentially more destructive to a free press — or to his administration — than Nixon’s 1971 Pentagon Papers machinations, which included efforts to stop publication of the classified study of the Vietnam War, the aborted prosecution of leaker Daniel Ellsberg, and the intention to prosecute newspapers (and their employees) that ran the document. All backfired on Nixon.

Many believe that the Times performed an incalculably valuable service when it reported last month on a top-secret National Security Agency program — almost certainly unlawful — involving presidentially (but not court-) approved electronic surveillance of message traffic between people in this country and locations abroad. The leak investigation by the Department of Justice (DOJ) has begun. What has received virtually no attention is that the Times and its reporters, editors, and publisher are at serious risk of indictment by a vengeful White House concerned not so much with disclosure of national secrets as with revelation of its own reckless conduct.

TARGETING THE TIMES

The Times’ December 16 front-page exposé made headlines around the world. The warrantless eavesdropping the newspaper uncovered is an almost certain violation of Americans’ privacy rights and is very likely a crime. Diverting questions about the highly suspect program, the administration repeatedly makes the absurd claim that this disclosure has tipped off the terrorists that their electronic communications are being monitored. In truth, it’s been well-known for decades by the terrorists and just about anyone else with even glancing knowledge of intelligence-gathering that such surveillance is done lawfully with an order issued by a top-secret national-security court that rarely turns down a government request. That the surveillance under Bush is done unlawfully hardly will change the terrorists’ communications practices.

The DOJ announced on December 30 that it has opened a criminal-leak investigation. The announcement was greeted with only muted criticism from media and civil-liberties circles, perhaps because it looked like nothing more than a replay of the still-ongoing Valerie Plame–outing fiasco. Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU, and Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, welcomed an investigation but suggested that the object should be the warrantless surveillance program, not those within the government who leaked it. Neither seemed to sense the threat to yet another target: the newspaper that published the story.

Those who don’t see the danger in the DOJ probe of the leaks underestimate how far zealous federal prosecutors can carry such an investigation. Prosecutors’ enormous discretionary latitude, derived from the extraordinary range of narrow, broad, and in some instances dangerously vague criminal statutes that control the disclosure of supposed national-security secrets, renders any such investigation dangerous to a free press.

Forget for a moment the fate of leakers who could be subject to prosecution for anything from disseminating stolen government property to mail and wire fraud, espionage, or even to the capital crime of treason. Instead, consider the lot of the paper that had the courage to spotlight the administration’s potentially criminal conduct: it now faces the prospect of criminal indictment. (When asked directly if the investigation extended to the publication of the information, a DOJ official remarked broadly to reporters that he could not comment on any aspect of the investigation.)

There is little reason to suppose that the administration would refrain from indicting the newspaper, its reporters, and its higher-ups unless the political downside was too substantial. Indeed, with undoubted additional deep and dark secrets not yet exposed, one assumes that the administration would like to go beyond terrorizing leakers and reach those who report leaks to the public. Historical and legal precedent that suggests the legal viability of such a prosecution has gone largely unnoticed in the public arena — though not likely at the DOJ.

That precedent comes from the Nixon administration, which contemplated indicting the three newspapers that published excerpts from The Pentagon Papers in the waning years of the Vietnam War — namely the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Washington Post — along with some of the individuals involved. Indeed, when the Supreme Court in 1971 turned down the Nixon DOJ’s request for an injunction against publication, there were three justices (Burger, Harlan, and Blackmun) who thought the court should have prevented publication altogether, and three (White, Stewart, and, again, Blackmun) who went out of their way to suggest that the DOJ consider indicting the newspapers after publication. The Nixon administration’s failure to prevent publication, warned justices White, Stewart, and (agreeing in his separate opinion) Blackmun, "does not measure its constitutional entitlement to a conviction for criminal publication." In other words, although the First Amendment might prevent a prior restraint on publication, this did not mean that publishing was legal or that the publishers could escape criminal prosecution.

The White-Stewart opinion, approved by Blackmun, proceeded to list numerous statutes arguably rendering such publication criminal, including the Espionage Act and a plethora of laws prohibiting communication of documents relating to the national defense, as well as the "willful publication" of any classified information concerning "communication intelligence activities" of the United States. Two justices (Burger and Harlan) did not specifically address the question of post-publication criminal prosecution of the newspapers, but their endorsement of the idea can be inferred from the fact that they approved of an injunction against publication in the first place.

So let’s not kid ourselves: five of the nine justices would have approved of criminal prosecution of the newspapers in the Pentagon Papers case, even though a majority would not authorize a pre-publication injunction. Therefore, this often-touted victory for freedom of the press was in fact quite limited and foreshadowed a battle of monumental proportions.

NIXON UNBOUND

In his authoritative 1972 book, The Papers and the Papers, Sanford J. Ungar concluded that the main reason Nixon and Attorney General John N. Mitchell did not prosecute media targets was because by that time the Watergate scandal had broken. (Disclosure: I represented Ungar during the Pentagon Papers episode.) Nixon was on his way to impeachment or resignation while Mitchell was on his way to indictment and federal prison. Later, Whitney North Seymour, the moderate Republican US attorney for New York at the time of the Pentagon Papers imbroglio, wrote in his autobiography that the DOJ sent emissaries to enlist the cooperation of Seymour’s office in securing an indictment of the newspapers and of individual employees, but that Seymour responded "Not in this District." Soon thereafter, Watergate came to the rescue.

But it is not far-fetched to assume that the current administration — just as obsessed with secrecy as Nixon’s and equally determined to cover up its derelictions and crimes, and with few if any voices of moderation the likes of Seymour’s — will pick up the cudgel the Nixon team abandoned.

Such an indictment could be brought in short order. It would be unnecessary for the DOJ to complete the leak investigation before indicting media defendants, since the mere publication of the story would be the alleged crime regardless of the identity of the leakers. Nor would the Times’ publisher, editors, and reporters be able to claim ignorance of the top-secret nature of the information published: surely the president and his aides made that very clear at a meeting held with Keller and Sulzberger in the Oval Office last year. Besides, the Times’ voluntary postponement of publication for a year prior to that meeting could readily be spun as indicating knowledge that harm to national interests was possible.

This is not to say that prosecution would be a cakewalk for the DOJ. Although it easily could obtain an indictment, getting a conviction is another story. The media defendants would doubtless be represented by top-flight lawyers — this time, however, by criminal-defense lawyers skilled at convincing ordinary people, rather than First Amendment counsel arguing nice legal points to judges as was the case in the Pentagon Papers conflict as well as in the disastrously unsuccessful Plame "reporter’s privilege" battle. In addition, the case likely would be tried in either New York or Washington, DC, where prosecutors would be confronted with those cities’ famously skeptical and independent — even ornery — jurors, who would be required to agree unanimously in order to convict.

Defense lawyers would doubtless argue, probably effectively, that their clients performed a public service by exposing official wrongdoing at the highest levels of government. Bush would, in effect, be placed on trial, along with the New York Times. One can imagine defense counsel quoting Thomas Jefferson that "between a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I would surely choose the latter." It would be one helluva fight — the fight that we never got to see between Nixon and the media.

-------
Harvey Silverglate, a lawyer and frequent "Freedom Watch" contributor, represented several parties in the Pentagon Papers litigation. Samuel A. Abady and Dustin Lewis assisted in the preparation of this piece.

Report: Whistle-blower to Testify Against NSA
Former Employee Alleges Illegal Intelligence Programs Were Conducted

Jan. 5, 2006 — - A whistle-blower who was fired from the National Security Agency last year says he wants to testify about electronic intelligence programs that he claims the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency conducted illegally, The Washington Times reported.

In Dec. 16 letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees, which would investigate the activities, Russ Tice said he would testify about top-secret Special Access Programs that were wrongly carried out by the agencies. Copies of the letters were obtained by the newspaper.

"I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency and with the Defense Intelligence Agency," Tice stated.

Tice told the newspaper that he was not part of the intercept program. He said in the letter that he would provide his testimony under the shield of the 1998 Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act.


'Highly Sensitive Intelligence'
Tice alleges that the activities involved the NSA director, the NSA deputies chief of staff for air and space operations, and the secretary of defense, The Washington Times reported.

"These ... acts were conducted via very highly sensitive intelligence programs and operations known as Special Access Programs," Tice said.

Tice sent the letters to Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Mich. Roberts chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and Hoekstra chairs the House intelligence committee.

Spokesmen for the NSA and the Senate intelligence committee declined comment to The Washington Times. Spokesmen for the House intelligence committee and the DIA said they were aware of the letters but had not seen formal copies of them, the paper reported.

The letters coincided with a report in The New York Times that the NSA used a clandestine eavesdropping program that bypassed the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, which issues orders for such surveillance by the government.

Though critics contend the program might have been illegal without approval under FISA, President Bush has steadfastly defended the practice, saying Sunday that the NSA spying is "a necessary program" used to find international terrorists by tracking phone numbers linked to al Qaeda, The Washington Times reported. The Justice Department has said the program is legal under presidential powers guidelines approved by Congress.

Tinker, Tailor, Miner, Spy
Why the NSA's snooping is unprecedented in scale and scope.

By Shane Harris and Tim Naftali
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2006, at 6:30 AM ET

Fifty years ago, officers from the Signal Security Agency, the predecessor to the National Security Agency, visited an executive from International Telephone and Telegraph and asked for copies of all foreign government cables carried by the company. The request was a direct violation of a 1934 law that banned the interception of domestic communications, but Attorney General Tom Clark backed it. Initially reluctant, ITT relented when told that its competitor, Western Union, had already agreed to supply this information. As James Bamford relates in his book The Puzzle Palace, the government told ITT it "would not desire to be the only non-cooperative company on the project." Codenamed Shamrock, the effort to collect cables sent through U.S.-controlled telegraph lines ultimately involved all the American telecom giants of the era, captured private as well as government cables, and lasted nearly 30 years. Like other illegal Cold War domestic snooping programs —such as the FBI's wiretaps without warrants and the CIA's mail-opening operations—it collapsed under the weight of public reaction to the abuses of executive power revealed by Vietnam and Watergate.

Today's generation of telecom leaders is similarly involved in the current controversy over spying by the NSA. The New York Times reported in December that since 9/11, leading telecommunications companies "have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists." Citing current and former government and corporate officials, the Times reported that the companies have granted the NSA access to their all-important switches, the hubs through which colossal volumes of voice calls and data transmissions move every second. A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a "data-mining" operation, which might eventually cull "millions" of individual calls and e-mails.

Like the pressure applied to ITT a half-century ago, our source says the government was insistent, arguing that his competitors had already shown their patriotism by signing on. The NSA would not comment on the issue, saying that, "We do not discuss details of actual or alleged operational issues."

The magnitude of the current collection effort is unprecedented and indeed marks a shift in how the NSA spies in the United States. The current program seems to involve a remarkable level of cooperation with private companies and extraordinarily expansive data-mining of questionable legality. Before Bush authorized the NSA to expand its domestic snooping program after 9/11 in the secret executive order, the agency had to stay clear of the "protected communications" of American citizens or resident aliens unless supplied by a judge with a warrant. The program President Bush authorized reportedly allows the NSA to mine huge sets of domestic data for suspicious patterns, regardless of whether the source of the data is an American citizen or resident. The NSA needs the help of private companies to do this because commercial broadband now carries so many communications. In an earlier age, the NSA could pick up the bulk of what it needed by tapping into satellite or microwave transmissions. "Now," as the agency noted in a transition document prepared for the incoming Bush administration in December 2000, "communications are mostly digital, carry billions of bits of data, and contain voice, data and multimedia. They are dynamically routed, globally networked and pass over traditional communications means such as microwave or satellite less and less."

The agency used to search the transmissions it monitors for key words, such as names and phone numbers, which are supplied by other intelligence agencies that want to track certain individuals. But now the NSA appears to be vacuuming up all data, generally without a particular phone line, name, or e-mail address as a target. Reportedly, the agency is analyzing the length of a call, the time it was placed, and the origin and destination of electronic transmissions. Those details would be crucial in mining the data for patterns—according to the officials the Times cited, the goal of the NSA's eavesdropping system.

Pattern-based searches are most useful when run against huge sets of data. Many calls and messages must be analyzed to determine which ones are benign and which deserve more attention. With large data sets, pattern-based searching can create more nuanced pictures of the connections among people, places, and messages. Deputy Director of National Intelligence Michael Hayden, who until this year was the NSA director, recently hinted that the NSA's eavesdropping program is not just looking for transmissions from specific individuals. It has a "subtly softer trigger" that initiates monitoring without exactly knowing in advance what specific transmissions to look for. Presumably, this trigger is a suspicious pattern. But officials have not actually described any triggers, raising the question of whether the NSA has been authorized to go on such fishing expeditions.

The government experimented with large-scale pattern-based searches under the auspices of the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness program in 2002. The aim was to sift though government intelligence data, and also privately held information, for telltale signs of the planning of a terrorist attack. TIA was ridiculed as Orwellian. But at least the program tried to create new technologies to protect personal information. Adm. John Poindexter, TIA's creator, believed in the potential intelligence benefits of data-mining broadband communications, but he was also well aware of the potential for excess. "We need a much more systematic approach" to data-mining and privacy protection, Poindexter said at a 2002 conference in Anaheim, Calif., sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Poindexter envisioned a "privacy appliance," a device that would strip any identifiers from the information—such as names or addresses—so that government miners could see only patterns. Then if there was reason to believe that the information belonged to a group that was planning an attack, the government could seek a warrant and disable the privacy control for that specific data. TIA funded research on a privacy appliance at the Palo Alto Research Center, a subsidiary of Xerox Corp. "The idea is that this device, cryptographically protected to prevent tampering, would ensure that no one could abuse private information without an immutable digital record of their misdeeds," according to a 2003 government report to Congress about TIA. "The details of the operation of the appliance would be available to the public."

The NSA's domestic eavesdropping program, however, appears to have none of these safeguards. When Congress killed TIA's funding in 2003, it effectively ended research into privacy-protection technology. According to former officials associated with TIA, after the program was canceled, elements of it were transferred into the classified intelligence budget. But these did not include research on privacy protection.

In January, Congress plans to hold hearings into the legality of the Bush administration's eavesdropping program. Lawmakers will want to know why, if the NSA cannot do its job while remaining within the legal bounds established in the 1970s, the Bush administration did not address that problem in the context of the Patriot Act. Congress might also ask why in the rush to begin data-mining, the NSA has abandoned the privacy controls planned for the TIA. As Adm. Poindexter himself noted in his resignation letter from the program in 2003, "it would be no good to solve the security problem and give up the privacy and civil liberties that make our country great."

-------
Shane Harris, a staff correspondent for National Journal, writes on intelligence and homeland security. Tim Naftali, the director of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs, is the author of Blind Spot: the Secret History of American Counterterrorism.

    NSA Destroyed Evidence of Domestic Spying
    By Jason Leopold
    t r u t h o u t | Report

    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.

    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."