[CitizensTruth] New evidence of historic abuse

[Walterb306 at cs.com]

All,

Breaking through.  Staffer quoted:

"If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and 
warrantless wiretapping despite the administration's attempts to stonewall, then imagine 
what we don't know," says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is 
familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile 
congressional investigations. 

Full article and link below.

Beverley

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/23/new_churchcomm/print.html


Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power
Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained 
documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could 
rival Watergate. 
By Tim Shorrock

Jul. 23, 2008 | The last several years have brought a parade of dark 
revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of 
intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there 
are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of 
the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is 
stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that 
would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation 
of the 1970s. 

While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a 
detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in 
recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former 
senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included 
aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary 
Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly. 

Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly 
illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United 
States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, 
sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to 
national security. It also includes signs of the NSA's working closely with 
other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as 
well as globally. 

The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks 
between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, 
according to sources involved. (Pelosi's and Conyers' offices both declined to 
comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may 
well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an 
investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in 
the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international 
laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing 
future abuses -- and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush 
officials. 

"If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and 
warrantless wiretapping despite the administration's attempts to stonewall, then imagine 
what we don't know," says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is 
familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile 
congressional investigations. 
"You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse," says 
Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the 
American Civil Liberties Union. "Because the Bush administration has been so 
opaque, we don't know [the extent of] what laws have been violated." 
The parameters for an investigation were outlined in a seven-page memo, 
written after the former member of the Church Committee met for discussions with 
the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and other 
watchdog groups. Key issues to investigate, those involved say, would include the 
National Security Agency's domestic surveillance activities; the Central 
Intelligence Agency's use of extraordinary rendition and torture against terrorist 
suspects; and the U.S. government's extensive use of military assets -- 
including satellites, Pentagon intelligence agencies and U2 surveillance planes -- for 
a vast spying apparatus that could be used against the American people. 

Specifically, the ACLU and other groups want to know how the NSA's use of 
databases and data mining may have meshed with other domestic intelligence 
activities, such as the U.S. government's extensive use of no-fly lists and the 
Treasury Department's list of "specially designated global terrorists" to identify 
potential suspects. As of mid-July, says Steinhardt, the no-fly list includes 
more than 1 million records corresponding to more than 400,000 names. If 
those people really represent terrorist threats, he says, "our cities would be 
ablaze." A deeper investigation into intelligence abuses should focus on how 
these lists feed on each other, Steinhardt says, as well as the government's 
"inexorable trend towards treating everyone as a suspect." 

"It's not just the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program,'" agrees Gregory T. 
Nojeim from the Center for Democracy and Technology, referring to the Bush 
administration's misleading name for the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. "We 
need a broad investigation on the way all the moving parts fit together. It 
seems like we're always looking at little chunks and missing the big picture." 

A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush 
administration's alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic 
surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as "Main 
Core," the database reportedly collects and stores -- without warrants or court 
orders -- the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats 
to national security. 

According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive 
knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently 
contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts 
of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts 
by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official 
described Main Core as "an emergency internal security database system" designed 
for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of 
the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is 
derived from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of 
each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the 
other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community." 
Some of the former U.S. officials interviewed, although they have no direct 
knowledge of the issue, said they believe that Main Core may have been used by 
the NSA to determine who to spy on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. 
Moreover, the NSA's use of the database, they say, may have triggered the now-famous 
March 2004 confrontation between the White House and the Justice Department 
that nearly led Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director William Mueller and 
other top Justice officials to resign en masse. 
The Justice Department officials who objected to the legal basis for the 
surveillance program -- former Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey and Jack 
Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel -- testified before 
Congress last year about the 2004 showdown with the White House. Although they 
refused to discuss the highly classified details behind their concerns, the New 
York Times later reported that they were objecting to a program that "involved 
computer searches through massive electronic databases" containing "records 
of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans." 

According to William Hamilton, a former NSA intelligence officer who left the 
agency in the 1970s, that description sounded a lot like Main Core, which he 
first heard about in detail in 1992. Hamilton, who is the president of Inslaw 
Inc., a computer services firm with many clients in government and the private 
sector, says there are strong indications that the Bush administration's 
domestic surveillance operations use Main Core. 
Hamilton's company Inslaw is widely respected in the law enforcement 
community for creating a program called the Prosecutors' Management Information 
System, or PROMIS. It keeps track of criminal investigations through a powerful 
search engine that can quickly access all stored data components of a case, from 
the name of the initial investigators to the telephone numbers of key suspects. 
PROMIS, also widely used in the insurance industry, can also sort through 
other databases fast, with results showing up almost instantly. "It operates just 
like Google," Hamilton told me in an interview in his Washington office in 
May. 

Since the late 1980s, Inslaw has been involved in a legal dispute over its 
claim that Justice Department officials in the Reagan administration 
appropriated the PROMIS software. Hamilton claims that Reagan officials gave PROMIS to 
the NSA and the CIA, which then adapted the software -- and its outstanding 
ability to search other databases -- to manage intelligence operations and track 
financial transactions. Over the years, Hamilton has employed prominent lawyers 
to pursue the case, including Elliot Richardson, the former attorney general 
and secretary of defense who died in 1999, and C. Boyden Gray, the former 
White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush. The dispute has never been 
settled. But based on the long-running case, Hamilton says he believes U.S. 
intelligence uses PROMIS as the primary software for searching the Main Core 
database. 

Hamilton was first told about the connection between PROMIS and Main Core in 
the spring of 1992 by a U.S. intelligence official, and again in 1995 by a 
former NSA official. In July 2001, Hamilton says, he discussed his case with 
retired Adm. Dan Murphy, a former military advisor to Elliot Richardson who later 
served under President George H.W. Bush as deputy director of the CIA. Murphy, 
who died shortly after his meeting with Hamilton, did not specifically 
mention Main Core. But he informed Hamilton that the NSA's use of PROMIS involved 
something "so seriously wrong that money alone cannot cure the problem," 
Hamilton told me. He added, "I believe in retrospect that Murphy was alluding to Main 
Core." Hamilton also provided copies of letters that Richardson and Gray sent 
to U.S. intelligence officials and the Justice Department on Inslaw's behalf 
alleging that the NSA and the CIA had appropriated PROMIS for intelligence 
use. 
Hamilton says James B. Comey's congressional testimony in May 2007, in which 
he described a hospitalized John Ashcroft's dramatic standoff with senior Bush 
officials Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card, was another illuminating moment. 
"It was then that we [at Inslaw] started hearing again about the Main Core 
derivative of PROMIS for spying on Americans," he told me. 
Through a former senior Justice Department official with more than 25 years 
of government experience, Salon has learned of a high-level former national 
security official who reportedly has firsthand knowledge of the U.S. government's 
use of Main Core. The official worked as a senior intelligence analyst for a 
large domestic law enforcement agency inside the Bush White House. He would 
not agree to an interview. But according to the former Justice Department 
official, the former intelligence analyst told her that while stationed at the White 
House after the 9/11 attacks, one day he accidentally walked into a 
restricted room and came across a computer system that was logged on to what he r
ecognized to be the Main Core database. When she mentioned the specific name of the 
top-secret system during their conversation, she recalled, "he turned white as 
a sheet." 
An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government 
officials, reported that "8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as 
potentially suspect" and, in the event of a national emergency, "could be 
subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct 
questioning and even detention." 
The alleged use of Main Core by the Bush administration for surveillance, if 
confirmed to be true, would indicate a much deeper level of secretive 
government intrusion into Americans' lives than has been previously known. With 
respect to civil liberties, says the ACLU's Steinhardt, it would be "pretty 
frightening stuff." 

The Inslaw case also points to what may be an extensive role played by the 
NSA in financial spying inside the United States. According to reports over the 
years in the U.S. and foreign press, Inslaw's PROMIS software was embedded 
surreptitiously in systems sold to foreign and global banks as a way to give the 
NSA secret "backdoor" access to the electronic flow of money around the world. 


In May, I interviewed Norman Bailey, a private financial consultant with 
years of government intelligence experience dating from the George W. Bush 
administration back to the Reagan administration. According to Bailey -- who from 
2006 to 2007 headed a special unit within the Office of the Director of National 
Intelligence focused on financial intelligence on Cuba and Venezuela -- the 
NSA has been using its vast powers with signals intelligence to track financial 
transactions around the world since the early 1980s. 

>From 1982 to 1984, Bailey ran a top-secret program for President Reagan's 

National Security Council, called "Follow the Money," that used NSA signals 
intelligence to track loans from Western banks to the Soviet Union and its allies. 
PROMIS, he told me, was "the principal software element" used by the NSA and 
the Treasury Department then in their electronic surveillance programs tracking 
financial flows to the Soviet bloc, organized crime and terrorist groups. His 
admission is the first public acknowledgement by a former U.S. intelligence 
official that the NSA used the PROMIS software. 
According to Bailey, the Reagan program marked a significant shift in 
resources from human spying to electronic surveillance, as a way to track money flows 
to suspected criminals and American enemies. "That was the beginning of the 
whole process," he said. 
After 9/11, this capability was instantly seen within the U.S. government as 
a critical tool in the war on terror -- and apparently was deployed by the 
Bush administration inside the United States, in cases involving alleged 
terrorist supporters. One such case was that of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation in 
Oregon, which was accused of having terrorist ties after the NSA, at the 
request of the Treasury Department, eavesdropped on the phone calls of Al-Haramain 
officials and their American lawyers. The charges against Al-Haramain were 
based primarily on secret evidence that the Bush administration refused to 
disclose in legal proceedings; Al-Haramain's lawyers argued in a lawsuit that was a 
violation of the defendants' due process rights. 

According to Bailey, the NSA also likely would have used its technological 
capabilities to track the charity's financial activity. "The vast majority of 
financial movements of any significance take place electronically, so intercepts 
have become an extremely important element" in intelligence, he explained. 
"If the government suspects that a particular Muslim charitable organization is 
engaged in collecting funds to funnel to terrorists, the NSA would be asked to 
follow the money going into and out of the bank accounts of that charity." 
(The now-defunct Al-Haramain Foundation, although affiliated with a Saudi 
Arabian-based global charity, was founded and based in Ashland, Ore.) 

The use of a powerful database and extensive watch lists, Bailey said, would 
make the NSA's job much easier. "The biggest problems with intercepts, quite 
frankly, is that the volumes of data, daily or even by the hour, are gigantic," 
he said. "Unless you have a very precise idea of what it is you're looking 
for, the NSA people or their counterparts [overseas] will just throw up their 
hands and say 'forget it.'" Regarding domestic surveillance, Bailey said there's 
a "whole gray area where the initiation of the transaction was in the United 
States and the final destination was outside, or vice versa. That's something 
for the lawyers to figure out." 

Bailey's information on the evolution of the Reagan intelligence program 
appears to corroborate and clarify an article published in March in the Wall 
Street Journal, which reported that the NSA was conducting domestic surveillance 
using "an ad-hoc collection of so-called 'black programs' whose existence is 
undisclosed." Some of these programs began "years before the 9/11 attacks but 
have since been given greater reach." Among them, the article said, are a joint 
NSA-Treasury database on financial transactions that dates back "about 15 
years" to 1993. That's not quite right, Bailey clarified: "It started in the early 
'80s, at least 10 years before." 
Main Core may be the contemporary incarnation of a government watch list 
system that was part of a highly classified "Continuity of Government" program 
created by the Reagan administration to keep the U.S. government functioning in 
the event of a nuclear attack. Under a 1982 presidential directive, the 
outbreak of war could trigger the proclamation of martial law nationwide, giving the 
military the authority to use its domestic database to round up citizens and 
residents considered to be threats to national security. The emergency measures 
for domestic security were to be carried out by the Federal Emergency 
Management Agency (FEMA) and the Army. 
In the late 1980s, reports about a domestic database linked to FEMA and the 
Continuity of Government program began to appear in the press. For example, in 
1986 the Austin American-Statesman uncovered evidence of a large database that 
authorities were proposing to use to intern Latino dissidents and refugees 
during a national emergency that might follow a potential U.S. invasion of 
Nicaragua. During the Iran-Contra congressional hearings in 1987, questions to 
Reagan aide Oliver North about the database were ruled out of order by the 
committee chairman, Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye, because of the "highly sensitive 
and classified" nature of FEMA's domestic security operations. 

In September 2001, according to "The Rise of the Vulcans," a 2004 book on 
Bush's war cabinet by James Mann, a contemporary version of the Continuity of 
Government program was put into play in the hours after the 9/11 terrorist 
attacks, when Vice President Cheney and senior members of Congress were dispersed to 
"undisclosed locations" to maintain government functions. It was during this 
emergency period, Hamilton and other former government officials believe, that 
President Bush may have authorized the NSA to begin actively using the Main 
Core database for domestic surveillance. One indicator they cite is a statement 
by Bush in December 2005, after the New York Times had revealed the NSA's 
warrantless wiretapping, in which he made a rare reference to the emergency 
program: The Justice Department's legal reviews of the NSA activity, Bush said, 
were based on "fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to the 
continuity of our government." 

It is noteworthy that two key players on Bush's national security team, 
Cheney and his chief of staff, David Addington, have been involved in the 
Continuity of Government program since its inception. Along with Donald Rumsfeld, 
Bush's first secretary of defense, both men took part in simulated drills for the 
program during the 1980s and early 1990s. Addington's role was disclosed in 
"The Dark Side," a book published this month about the Bush administration's war 
on terror by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer. In the book, Mayer calls 
Addington "the father of the [NSA] eavesdropping program," and reports that he was the 
key figure involved in the 2004 dispute between the White House and the 
Justice Department over the legality of the program. That would seem to make him a 
prime witness for a broader investigation. 

Getting a full picture on Bush's intelligence programs, however, will almost 
certainly require any sweeping new investigation to have a scope that would 
inoculate it against charges of partisanship. During one recent discussion on 
Capitol Hill, according to a participant, a senior aide to Speaker Pelosi was 
asked for Pelosi's views on a proposal to expand the investigation to past 
administrations, including those of Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. "The 
question was, how far back in time would we have to go to make this credible?" the 
participant in the meeting recalled. 

That question was answered in the seven-page memo. "The rise of the 
'surveillance state' driven by new technologies and the demands of counter-terrorism 
did not begin with this Administration," the author wrote. Even though he 
acknowledged in interviews with Salon that the scope of abuse under George W. Bush 
would likely be an order of magnitude greater than under preceding presidents, 
he recommended in the memo that any new investigation follow the precedent of 
the Church Committee and investigate the origins of Bush's programs, going as 
far back as the Reagan administration. 

The proposal has emerged in a political climate reminiscent of the Watergate 
era. The Church Committee was formed in 1975 in the wake of media reports 
about illegal spying against American antiwar activists and civil rights leaders, 
CIA assassination squads, and other dubious activities under Nixon and his 
predecessors. Chaired by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, the committee interviewed 
more than 800 officials and held 21 public hearings. As a result of its work, 
Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which 
required warrants and court supervision for domestic wiretaps, and created 
intelligence oversight committees in the House and Senate. 

So far, no lawmaker has openly endorsed a proposal for a new Church 
Committee-style investigation. A spokesman for Pelosi declined to say whether Pelosi 
herself would be in favor of a broader probe into U.S. intelligence. On the 
Senate side, the most logical supporters for a broader probe would be Democratic 
senators such as Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, who 
led the failed fight against the recent Bush-backed changes to FISA. (Both 
Feingold and Leahy's offices declined to comment on a broader intelligence 
inquiry.) 

The Democrats' reticence on such action ultimately may be rooted in 
congressional complicity with the Bush administration's intelligence policies. Many of 
the war on terror programs, including the NSA's warrantless surveillance and 
the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," were cleared with key 
congressional Democrats, including Pelosi, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman 
Rockefeller, and former House Intelligence chairwoman Jane Harman, among others. 

The discussions about a broad investigation were jump-started among civil 
liberties advocates this spring, when it became clear that the Democrats didn't 
have the votes to oppose the Bush-backed bill updating FISA. The new 
legislation could prevent the full story of the NSA surveillance programs from ever 
being uncovered; it included retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies 
that may have violated FISA by collaborating with the NSA on warrantless 
wiretapping. Opponents of Bush's policies were further angered when Democratic 
leaders stripped from their competing FISA bill a provision that would have 
established a national commission to investigate post-9/11 surveillance programs. 

The next president obviously would play a key role in any decision to 
investigate intelligence abuses. Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, is 
running as a champion of Bush's national security policies and would be unlikely to 
embrace an investigation that would, foremost, embarrass his own party. 
(Randy Scheunemann, McCain's spokesman on national security, declined to comment.) 

Some see a brighter prospect in Barack Obama, should he be elected. The plus 
with Obama, says the former Church Committee staffer, is that as a proponent 
of open government, he could order the executive branch to be more cooperative 
with Congress, rolling back the obsessive secrecy and stonewalling of the Bush 
White House. That could open the door to greater congressional scrutiny and 
oversight of the intelligence community, since the legislative branch lacked 
any real teeth under Bush. (Obama's spokesman on national security, Ben Rhodes, 
did not reply to telephone calls and e-mails seeking comment.) 

But even that may be a lofty hope. "It may be the last thing a new president 
would want to do," said a participant in the ongoing discussions. 
Unfortunately, he said, "some people see the Church Committee ideas as a substitute for 
prosecutions that should already have happened." 
-- By Tim Shorrock 





   
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