The big puzzle is why anyone is shocked that President Bush
eavesdropped on Americans. The National Security Agency for
decades has routinely monitored the phone calls and telegrams
of thousands of Americans. The rationale has always been the
same, and Bush said it again in defending his spying, that
it was done to protect Americans from foreign threat or attack.
The named targets in the past have been Muslim extremists,
Communists, peace activists, black radicals, civil rights
leaders, and drug peddlers.
Even before President Harry Truman established the NSA in
a Cold War era directive in 1952, government cryptologists
jumped in the domestic spy hunt with Operation Shamrock. That
was a super secret operation that forced private telegraphic
companies to turn over the telegraphic correspondence of Americans
to the government. The NSA kicked its spy campaign into high
gear in the 1960s. The FBI demanded that the NSA monitor antiwar
activists, civil rights leaders, and drug peddlers. The Senate
Select Committee that investigated government domestic spying
in 1976 pried open a tiny public window into the scope of
NSA spying. But the agency slammed the window shut fast when
it refused to cough up documents to the committee that would
tell more about its surveillance of Americans. The NSA claimed
that disclosure would compromise national security. The few
feeble Congressional attempts over the years to probe NSA
domestic spying have gone nowhere. Even though rumors swirled
that NSA eyes were riveted on more than a few Americans, Congressional
investigators showed no stomach to fight the NSA's entrenched
code of silence.
There was a huge warning sign in 2002 that government agencies
would jump deeper into the domestic spy business. President
Bush scrapped the old 1970s guidelines that banned FBI spying
on domestic organizations. The directive gave the FBI carte
blanche authority to surveil, and plant agents in churches,
mosques, and political groups, and ransack the Internet to
hunt for potential subversives, without the need or requirement
to show probable cause of criminal wrongdoing. The revised
Bush administration spy guidelines, along with the anti-terrorist
provisions of the Patriot Act, also gave local agents even
wider discretion to determine what groups or individuals they
can investigate and what tactics they can use to investigate
them. The FBI wasted little time in flexing its new found
intelligence muscle. It mounted a secret campaign to monitor
and harass Iraq war protestors in Washington D.C. and San
Francisco in October 2003.
Another
sign that government domestic spying was back in full
swing came during Condeleezza Rice's finger point at
the FBI in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission
in 2004. Rice blamed the FBI for allegedly failing to
follow up on its investigation of Al-Qaeda operatives
in the United States U.S. prior to the September 11
terror attacks. That increased the clamor for an independent
domestic spy agency. FBI Director Robert Mueller made
an impassioned plea against a separate agency, and the
reason was simple. Domestic spying was an established
fact that the FBI, and the NSA had long been engaged
in it.
The September 11 terror attacks, and the heat Bush administration
took for its towering intelligence lapses, gave Bush
the excuse to plunge even deeper into domestic spying.
But Bush also recognized that if word got out about
NSA domestic spying, it would ignite a firestorm of
protest. Fortunately it did. Despite Bush's weak, and
self-serving national security excuse that it thwarted
potential terrorist attacks, none of which is verifiable,
the Supreme Court, the NSA's own mandate, and past executive
orders explicitly bar domestic spying without court
authorization. The exception is if there is a grave
and imminent terror threat. That's the shaky legal dodge
that Bush used to justify domestic spying.
Bush, and his defenders, discount the monumental threat
and damage that spying on Americans poses to civil liberties.
But it can't and shouldn't be shrugged off. During the
debate over the creation of a domestic spy agency in
2002, even proponents recognized the potential threat
of such an agency to civil liberties. As a safeguard
they recommended that the agency not have expanded wiretap
and surveillance powers or law enforcement authority,
and that the Senate and House intelligence committees
have strict oversight over its activities.
These supposed fail-safe measures were hardly ironclad
safeguards against abuses, but they understood that
domestic spying is a civil liberties nightmare minefield
that has blown up and wreaked havoc on American's lives
in the past. The FBI is the prime example. During the
1950s and 1960s, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover kicked
FBI domestic spying into high gear. FBI agents compiled
secret dossiers, illegally wiretapped, used undercover
plants, and agent provocateurs, sent poison pen letters,
and staged black bag jobs against black activists and
anti-war groups.
Bush's claim that domestic spying poses no risk to civil
liberties is laughable. Congress should demand that
Bush and the NSA come clean on domestic spying, and
then promptly end it.
Earl
Ofari Hutchinson is a columnist for BlackNews.com,
an author and political analyst.
For media interviews, contact:
Mr. Hutchinson at 323-296-6331 or hutchinsonreport@aol.com
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