Piecing Together the NSA Story

One of the things to keep in mind about the NSA domestic spying scandal is the difficulty of piecing together the story from different officials. I suspect, from what I'm reading, that probably less than a dozen people in the Bush Administration know what the NSA spying programs (note the plural) are all about, and that number might be closer to a half dozen. From what I can surmise, the NSA programs are highly comparmentalized; this means official 1 knows about components A and B, official 2 knows about components C and D, official 3 might know about components E and F, and so on with some midlevel officials having overlapping knowledge of the components. This makes it difficult to know how extensive these programs are and how thoroughly illegal. NSA officials are not the type of people to break their silence unless there are things going on that are truly beyond the pale.

Justin Rood of TPMMuckraker has a post reviewing some of what we know at this point:

...looking at stories over the last year or so by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the latest entry from USA Today (plus a bit of my own research), I get the following picture:

After the 9/11 attacks, the federal government assembled a cross-departmental effort to comb the United States for possible terrorist activity. Using massive databases and largely untested analytical techniques, the NSA generated thousands of false "leads" which were passed to the FBI. There, agents issued thousands of secret warrants for personal information, and spent thousands of man-hours chasing the results -- which were negligible. And you and I paid for it.

There are two key things to keep in mind when all the information around the NSA domestic spying scandal starts to get confusing (Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is apparently counting on that confusion). First, the programs are generating thousands of tips (some have said thousands of tips a day) that are being given to the FBI and that are going absolutely nowhere. This is a paranoid, Cheney-style, fishing expedition.

Second, when the Senate was considering John Bolton for UN ambassador, some questions came up about NSA intercepts of other administration figures that Bolton may have illegally used in an effort to undermine other members of the Bush Administration during some turf battles. The Senate demanded information from the White House about the NSA intercepts but that information was never provided and John Bolton was never confirmed by the Senate. John Bolton is a recess appointee which is extremely rare for such an important position (and it should be noted that his term will be up next January where once again he will be subjected to a confirmation process). If Bolton used the NSA intercepts in his turf battles, this is evidence of using NSA intercepts for political purposes. That the Senate queries were never answered speaks volumes. And it's not the only evidence that the NSA and the Pentagon are using domestic intelligence for political purposes.

The refusal of Congress to investigate or hold Bush accountable cannot go on without continuing to do considerable damage to our democracy.