Massive spying and criminality by U. S. government

New reports of massive spying, criminality by US government

Reports in the American press on Friday and Saturday reveal massive illegality in the US government and intelligence apparatus. They demonstrate not only routine violations of democratic rights through illegal spying and wiretapping both at home and abroad, but also disregard for legally required reports to Congress.

According to a report Sunday in the New York Times, the CIA kept the House and Senate intelligence committees in the dark for eight years about a “secret counterterrorism program,” on the instructions of then Vice President Richard Cheney. The Times account said that the current CIA Director Leon Panetta, a former Democratic congressman, recently told both the House and Senate intelligence committees about the existence of the program and Cheney’s role in concealing it.

The Los Angeles Times reported Saturday, citing an internal study by five intelligence agency officials, that the electronic surveillance under the Bush administration “went beyond the widely publicized warrantless wiretapping program ... encompassing additional secretive activities that created ‘unprecedented’ spying powers.”

This program, conducted by the National Security Agency and separate from the CIA program, “came to be known in the Bush administration as the ‘President’s Surveillance Program’,” the newspaper said. The study was conducted jointly by the Inspectors General of the Justice Department, Pentagon, CIA, Directorate of National Intelligence and National Security Agency. The unclassified version of the study, released Friday night, blacked out all details of the expanded surveillance program.

As in the case of the CIA program, the office of the vice president played a central role in enforcing secrecy and cover-up of the NSA operation. Cheney’s legal adviser and later chief of staff, David Addington, had to personally approve every government official who was to be “read in” to the program by the NSA. Addington refused to be interviewed by the Inspectors General, as did former CIA director George Tenet, former attorney general John Ashcroft, and John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer tasked with drafting legal guidelines for the secret surveillance.