Bolton Testimony Revealed Domestic Spying
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report
Monday 02 January 2006
This past spring, an explosive nugget of information slipped out during the confirmation hearings of John Bolton - nominated by President Bush to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations - that in hindsight should have blown the lid off Bush's four-year-old clandestine spy program involving the National Security Agency.
At the hearing in late April, Bolton, a former Under Secretary of State
for Arms Control, told Congress that since 2001 he had asked the NSA on
10 different occasions to reveal to him the identities of American
citizens who were caught in the NSA's raw intelligence reports in what
appears to be a routine circumventing of the rules governing
eavesdropping on the American public.
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 asked the NSA to unmask the identities of American
citizens 500 times since May 2001.
Newsweek revealed earlier this year that the NSA disclosed to senior
White House officials and other policymakers at federal agencies the
names of as many as 10,000 American citizens the agency obtained while
eavesdropping on foreigners. The Americans weren't involved in any sort
of terrorist activity, nor did they pose any sort of threat to national
security, but had simply been named while the NSA was conducting wiretaps.
The "NSA received - and fulfilled - between 3,000 and 3,500 requests
from other agencies to supply the names of U.S. citizens and officials
(and citizens of other countries that help NSA eavesdrop around the
world, including Britain, Canada and Australia) that initially were
deleted from raw intercept reports," Newsweek said in its May 2 issue.
"Sources say the number of names
disclosed by NSA to other agencies during this period is more than
10,000. About one third of such disclosures were made to officials at
the policymaking level; most of the rest were disclosed to other intel
agencies and, perhaps surprisingly, only a small proportion to
law-enforcement agencies."
The NSA has always blacked out the names of American citizens when it
distributes reports about its activities to various governmental
agencies because the NSA, by law, is not supposed to spy on Americans.
If the NSA intercepts the names of Americans in the course of a wiretap,
the agency is supposed to black out the names prior to distributing its
reports to other agencies. The names of American citizens that are
blacked out can be revealed to government officials if they ask for them
in writing and only if they're needed to help the official better
understand the context of the intelligence information they were
included in.
But that didn't appear to be the case with Bolton.
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.
In a letter to Gen. Michael Hayden, then the NSA's outgoing director,
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Intelligence Committee's vice chairman said,
"the NSA memorandum forwarding the requested identity to State
(Intelligence and Research) included the following restriction: 'Request
no further action be taken on this information without prior approval of
NSA.' I have confirmed with the NSA that the phrase 'no further action'
includes sharing the requested identity of U.S. persons with any
individual not authorized by the NSA to receive the identity."
"In addition to being troubled that Mr. Bolton may have shared U.S.
person identity information without required NSA approval," Rockefeller
wrote, "I am concerned that the reason for sharing the information was
not in keeping with Mr. Bolton's requested justification for the
identity in the first place. The identity information was provided to
Mr. Bolton based on the stated reason that he needed to know the
identity in order to better under the foreign intelligence contained in
the NSA report."
Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret
World of Global Eavesdropping, said at the time that he was troubled
that, other than the questions raised by Rockefeller, Congress and the
Senate showed little concern over the NSA's practices "beyond the
specifics involving Bolton."
"If the National Security Agency provides officials with the identities
of Americans on its tapes, what is the use of making secret those names
in the first place?" Keefe wrote in an August 11 op-ed in the New York
Times.
"We now know that this hasn't been the case - the agency has been
listening to Americans' phone calls, just not reporting any names. And
Bolton's experience makes clear that keeping those names confidential
was a formality that high-ranking officials could overcome by picking up
the phone."
Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.
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