Spy expert James Bamford: Bush's wiretapping is illegal.

By Michael Scherer
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/12/23/bamford/

"James Bamford is not just any reporter when it comes to the NSA. He is the journalist who introduced the agency to the world with his explosive 1982 NSA history, "The Puzzle Palace." With obscure but public information, he bargained his way into the secret core of the U.S. intelligence establishment and revealed the scope of its reach, from its listening posts in the Turkish highlands to its omniscient relay satellites.

While politicians bicker over legal shades of gray, Bamford believes the president clearly broke the law, and he has called for a special prosecutor to investigate. "What you have here is the administration going around the only protection the public has from the NSA, and doing it on their own," Bamford told CNN during a marathon of interviews for MSNBC, NPR, C-SPAN, CBS News and NBC News. "That's how Richard Nixon got in trouble, and one of the reasons he left office."

(snip)

Bamford's outrage stems, in part, from having been misled by agency officials. For years, he says, his contacts at the NSA repeatedly assured him that the agency was strictly following the letter of the law, even after Sept. 11. At the same time, President Bush assured the American people that "nothing has changed."

"I interviewed a lot of people at NSA, including the director a number of times. The impression I always got was they were keeping as far from the edge as they could in terms of what the law is," Bamford says. It was a message he believed and put in his books. "I went out of my way to defend NSA," he says. "I said they were not going back to the bad old days."

Those bad old days, when Nixon spied on his enemies and J. Edgar Hoover ordered illegal break-ins, drew Bamford's attention to the agency in the first place. During the 1960s and '70s, the NSA launched vast spying operations on American citizens over domestic concerns. One program, called Minaret, monitored the communications of Vietnam War protesters like Joan Baez and Jane Fonda. Another program, called Shamrock, monitored American cables sent overseas. After the Watergate scandal, Congress passed the FISA Act and ordered other reforms to end such abuses. "Back then there wasn't a law. The NSA saw itself as alegal -- it was under the law," says Bamford. "Now there is certainly a law. The FISA statute is as absolute as you can get."

(snip)


Over 25 years, Bamford has tracked the dramatic evolution of NSA's technological abilities. He says that such advances both increase the civil liberties danger and the likely pressures to skirt the FISA process. When the FISA warrants were first established, computers were still in their infancy and much of communication was analog. "I could very easily see that they would say that we have a new advance in data mining, and we need to speed up the process, the FISA court is too slow," Bamford says. Still, he won't accept that as an excuse. "There is a law there," he says. "If you just read the law, it's very clear."

The law also has a purpose. Twenty-three years after publishing "Puzzle Palace," Bamford still likes to quote Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, who warned in 1975 of the vast powers of NSA's signal intelligence operation. "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversation, telegrams, it doesn't matter," Church declared then. "There would be no place to hide."

Will Pitt had mentioned this author/investigator when he called in to The Randi Rhodes Show sub, Mike Malloy on 12/21/05. I indeed want to read his research.

It's a good article.

:kick:

Figure out that puzzle.

The professionals in the NSA must be pissed.

this is important information and Bamford definitely knows of which he speaks.

I am interested to read his books.

someone gonna arrest him then?



"The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants. He should be supported or opposed exactly to the degree which is warranted by his good conduct or bad conduct, his efficiency or inefficiency in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the Nation as a whole. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that there should be full liberty to tell the truth about his acts, and this means that it is exactly necessary to blame him when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right. Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public. Nothing but the truth should be spoken about him or any one else. But it is even more important to tell the truth, pleasant or unpleasant, about him than about any one else."

"Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star", 149
May 7, 1918

How do we get a special prosecutor? doesn't it have to be the AG? Who is a Bush toadie? That's the problem, getting these things investigated.