Flashback: How Cheney Used the NSA for Domestic Spying Prior to 9/11

The Public Record:

Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, said Friday George W. Bush “broke the law” by “personally authorizing the warrantless surveillance program.”

As this is old news since the public knew the Bush and Cheney broke the law in authorizing the warrantless surveillance program and mislead the public and Congress. This is not a shock.

This article that I dug up from Jason Leopold back in 2006 titled, "How Cheney Used the NSA for Domestic Spying Prior to 9/11" tells more of the real story to how the NSA was used for domestic spying prior to the terrorist attacks and most likely in the early stages when Bush took office in his first term.

Here is an excerpt:

The sources, who requested anonymity because they were instructed not to talk about NSA activities but who hope they can testify before Congress about the domestic spying, said that in December 2000, the NSA completed a report for the incoming administration titled "Transition 2001," which explained, among other things, how the NSA would improve its intelligence gathering capabilities by hiring additional personnel.

Moreover, in a warning to the incoming administration, the agency said that in its quest to compete on a technological level with terrorists who have access to state-of-the-art equipment, some American citizens would get caught up in the NSA's surveillance activities. However, in those instances, the identities of the Americans who made telephone calls overseas would be "minimized," one former NSA official said, in order to conceal the identity of the American citizen picked up on a wiretap.

"What we're supposed to do is delete the name of the person," said the former NSA official, who worked as an encryption specialist.

The former official said that even during the Clinton administration, the NSA would inadvertently obtain the identities of Americans citizens in its wiretaps as a result of certain keywords, like bomb or jihad, NSA computers are programmed to identify. When the NSA prepares its reports and transcripts of the conversations, the names of Americans are supposed to be immediately destroyed.

By law, the NSA is prohibited from spying on a United States citizen, a US corporation or an immigrant who is in this country on permanent residence. With permission from a special court, the NSA can eavesdrop on diplomats and foreigners inside the US.

"If, in the course of surveillance, NSA analysts learn that it involves a US citizen or company, they are dumping that information right then and there," an unnamed official told the Boston Globe in a story published October 27, 2001.

But after Bush was sworn in as president, the way the NSA normally handled those issues started to change dramatically. Vice President Cheney, as Bob Woodward noted in his book Plan of Attack, was tapped by Bush in the summer of 2001 to be more of a presence at intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA.

And here is another nugget:

Requesting that the NSA reveal the identity of Americans caught in wiretaps is legal as long as it serves the purpose of understanding the context of the intelligence information.

But the sources said that on dozens of occasions Cheney would, upon learning the identity of the individual, instruct the NSA to continue monitoring specific Americans caught in the wiretaps if he thought more information would be revealed, which crossed the line into illegal territory.

Cheney advised President Bush of what had turned up in the raw NSA reports, said one former White House official who worked on counterterrorism related issues.

"What's really disturbing is that some of those people the vice president was curious about were people who worked at the White House or the State Department," one former counterterrorism official said. "There was a real feeling of paranoia that permeated from the vice president's office and I don't think it had anything to do with the threat of terrorism. I can't say what was contained in those taps that piqued his interest. I just don't know."