In the newly declassified NSA "Transition 2001" report, it is revealed
that not long after Bush had illegally squatted in the Oval Office, they
had kicked into gear a covert DOMESTIC spying program - a serious violation of
the Constitution.
Normal NSA protocol in the event that the agency inadvertently spied on average Americans was that
they would black out the identities of those individuals or immediately destroy the information. As a matter
of normal operating procedures, while it distributes analysis summaries of its intelligence-gathering to a certain number of senior US officials,
generally the NSA also 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. But according to NSA encryption specialists working during this time, those
normal procedures were not followed. President Bush and other Defense Department
officials ordered a new standard of operating procedures - that the NSA keep a running list of the names
of Americans in its system, and make it readily available to senior
officials within the Bush administration. In essence, President Bush had personally directed
the NSA to conduct a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law. As a result, 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.
EXTENSIVE data-mining activities
began right after Bush was illegally
sworn in following the Supreme Court Selection, thus completely obliterating
the Administration's "it's a different world now" contention that all this
is somehow to protect us from having another 9/11, since CLEARLY it wasn't
protecting us from the first one.
In response to this new policy, in a December 22, 2002, letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella wrote that, "Even conceding that the President in his role as Commander in Chief may generally collect 'signals intelligence' on the enemy abroad, Congress indisputably has authority to regulate electronic surveillance within the United States, as it has done in FISA... The Supreme Court has never upheld warrantless wiretapping within the United States."
All this evidence taken together is irrefutable PROOF that this domestic spying program has NOTHING to do with preventing terrorism, and bunches to do with spying on anyone who doesn't share the Neocon's ideological bent.
Link to the full report in .pdf format:
