Inspectors General Report on Warrantless Wiretaps

A report on the warrantless wiretap program of the Bush administration showed it was of little value:

“Extraordinary and inappropriate” secrecy about a warrantless eavesdropping program undermined its effectiveness as a terrorism-fighting tool, government watchdogs have concluded in the first examination of one of the most contentious episodes of the Bush administration.

A report by inspectors general from five intelligence agencies said the administration’s tight control over who learned of the program also contributed to flawed legal arguments that nearly prompted mass resignations in the Justice Department five years ago.

The program “may have” contributed to successful counterterrorism efforts, some intelligence officials told the investigators. But too few CIA personnel knew of the highly classified program to use it for intelligence work, the report stated, while at the FBI, the program “played a limited role,” with “most . . . leads . . . determined not to have any connection to terrorism.”

The surveillance program, which intercepted domestic communications linked to people with suspected ties to al-Qaeda, was one of the Bush administration’s most secretive and, eventually, controversial intelligence efforts. After the New York Times disclosed its existence in December 2005, the program became a symbol of the administration’s expansive view of executive authority, especially regarding national security…

The release yesterday of the inspectors general’s summary findings renewed questions about the effectiveness of congressional oversight of intelligence activities, after a week of back-and-forth between House members and the CIA over an unrelated classified program that has been squashed by the new administration. The IGs reported that lawmakers received 49 briefings on the surveillance program between October 2001 and January 2007.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said: “The legal analysis under which the program operated for years ‘entailed ignoring an act of Congress, and doing so without full congressional notification.’ No president should be able to operate outside the law.”

This report that the program was conducted without full congressional notification follows a recent report that the CIA concealed their actions from Congress prompting a review of the process for briefing Congress.

Besides concealing information from Congress regarding the warrantless wiretaps, the report also demonstrates secrecy within the executive branch:

For the first few years, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and two senior aides — Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John C. Yoo and intelligence policy lawyer James Baker — were the only Justice Department officials made aware of the initiative, bypassing many of the latter men’s superiors, the unclassified summary reported for the first time.

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