By Pamela Hess - Associated Press Writer
July 10, 2009
WASHINGTON – The Bush administration built an unprecedented
surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information
far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged,
a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning
the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details
on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.
The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented
collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under
an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after
the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Just what those activities involved remains classified, but
the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret
programs must be "carefully monitored."
The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size
and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They
particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney
general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His
boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March
2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond
wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two
and a half years, the report says.
Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known
as the "President's Surveillance Program" did not
have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI
agents told the authors that the "mere possibility of
the leads producing useful information made investigating the
leads worthwhile."
The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside
and outside the government, but five former Bush administration
officials refused to be questioned. They were Ashcroft, Yoo,
former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief
of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former
Vice President Dick Cheney.
According to the report, Addington could personally decide
who in the administration was "read into" — allowed
access to — the classified program.
The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged
by the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants
effort. The administration admitted in 2005 that it had allowed
the National Security Agency to intercept international communications
that passed through U.S. cables without seeking court orders.
Although the report documents Bush administration policies,
its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration
if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.
Bush brought the warrantless wiretapping program under the
authority of a secret court in 2006, and Congress authorized
most of the intercepts in a 2008 electronic surveillance law.
The fate of the remaining and still classified aspects of the
wider surveillance program is not clear from the report.
The report's revelations came the same day that House Democrats
said that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ordered one eight-year-old
classified program shut down after learning lawmakers had never
been apprised of its existence.
The IG report said that President Bush signed off on both
the warrantless wiretapping and other top-secret operations
shortly after Sept. 11 in a single presidential authorization.
All the programs were periodically reauthorized, but except
for the acknowledged wiretapping, they "remain highly
classified."
The report says it's unclear how much valuable intelligence
the program has yielded.
The report, mandated by Congress last year, was delivered
to lawmakers Friday.
Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., told The Associated Press she
was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs
beyond the warrantless wiretapping.
Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse
reference to other classified programs in an August 2007 letter
to Congress. But Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales
two years earlier if the government was conducting any other
undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it.
"He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" she said
Friday.
Robert Bork Jr., Gonzales' spokesman, said, "It has clearly
been determined that he did not intend to mislead anyone."
In the wake of the new report, Senate Judiciary Committee
Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, renewed his call Friday
for a formal nonpartisan inquiry into the government's information-gathering
programs.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden — the primary architect
of the program_ told the report's authors that the surveillance
was "extremely valuable" in preventing further al-Qaida
attacks. Hayden said the operations amounted to an "early
warning system" allowing top officials to make critical
judgments and carefully allocate national security resources
to counter threats.
Information gathered by the secret program played a limited
role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts, according
to the report. Very few CIA analysts even knew about the program
and therefore were unable to fully exploit it in their counterrorism
work, the report said.
The report questioned the legal advice used by Bush to set
up the program, pinpointing omissions and questionable legal
memos written by Yoo, in the Justice Department's Office of
Legal Counsel. The Justice Department withdrew the memos years
ago.
The report says Yoo's analysis approving the program ignored
a law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct
electronic surveillance during wartime, and did so without
fully notifying Congress. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos
later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying
the program.
Yoo insisted that the president's wiretapping program had
only to comply with Fourth Amendment protections against search
and seizure — but the report said Yoo ignored the Federal
Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had previously overseen
federal national security surveillance.
"The notion that basically one person at the Justice
Department, John Yoo, and Hayden and the vice president's office
were running a program around the laws that Congress passed,
including a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, is mind
boggling," Harman said.
House Democrats are pressing for legislation that would expand
congressional access to secret intelligence briefings, but
the White House has threatened to veto it.
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