Today’s New York Times story by Lowell Bergman, Eric Lichtblau, Scott Shane and Don van Natta Jr. — “Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends,” is not the first to question whether the once-secret NSA wiretapping program was effective. On January 4 Mark Hosenball posted a Newsweek web exclusive that asked the same question — illegal or not, did it work?
Hosenball writes,
Did the National Security Agency’s controversial eavesdropping program really help to detect terrorists or avert their plots? Administration officials have suggested to media outlets like The New York Times–which broke the story–that the spying played a role in at least two well-publicized investigations, one in the United Kingdom and one involving a plan to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge.
But before the NSA’s warrantless spying program became public, government spokesmen had previously cited other intelligence and legal tactics as having led to major progress in the same investigations. In the Brooklyn Bridge case, officials indicated that the questioning of a captured Al Qaeda leader had led to investigative breakthroughs in Ohio. In the British case, Justice Department officials told NEWSWEEK a year ago that investigators had made progress by using a controversial provision of the Patriot Act which allows authorities to monitor potentially suspicious activities in public libraries.
In other words, if next week we learn the White House has been getting intelligence from a Ouija board, expect the Bushies to claim the Ouija board helped save the Brooklyn Bridge.
NEWSWEEK reported extensively on these cases when government investigations were coming to fruition. In both instances, officials originally indicated that key investigative developments came from sources other than NSA electronic eavesdropping–then still a closely guarded secret.
And if we’d had that Ouija board before 9/11 — the WTC towers would be standing today.
In the New York Times story linked above, Bergman et al. report that the FBI found the NSA “intelligence” to be a nuisance — “tips” that required a lot of legwork to check out but led to dead ends.
F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained that they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs said intelligence officials turning over the tips “would always say that we had information whose source we can’t share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Qaeda operative.” He said, “I would always wonder, what does ‘suspected’ mean?”
“The information was so thin,” he said, “and the connections were so remote, that they never led to anything, and I never heard any follow-up.”
More critically, Bergman et al. reveal that the NSA did too snoop on communications that were entirely within the United States.
Officials who were briefed on the N.S.A. program said the agency collected much of the data passed on to the F.B.I. as tips by tracing phone numbers in the United States called by suspects overseas, and then by following the domestic numbers to other numbers called. …
… in bureau field offices, the N.S.A. material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more “calls to Pizza Hut,” one official, who supervised field agents, said.
I’m assuming nobody was ordering pizza from Pakistan.
The New York Times article raises several more questions. One, was the NSA program in fact counterproductive because it wasted FBI time and resources playing Trivial Pursuit?
In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.
But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators.
And, of course, we are still arguing over the legality of warrantless snooping on American citizens. One argument from the Right is that the nature of data mining makes warrants too cumbersome. On last night’s Hardball someone with expertise in FISA regulations (transcript not yet available) said that it has always been understood that warrants are not necessary for keyword searches, because they don’t involve people. But once the keyword search identifies a “U.S. person,” then law clearly requires a warrant. Seems to me that the process of applying for a warrant, as time consuming as that might be, would have forced the NSA to distinguish dead ends from genuine risks, thereby saving the FBI considerable time. Sort of the old “measure twice, cut once” principle.
Further, it is obvious the NSA program was not limited, or controlled, as the White House claims. We’re being lied to again. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you …
It’s the craziest thing about this whole Bush administration hoedown. None of their plans WORK. Talk tough and refuse to negotiate with Korea? Now Korea has a small nuclear arsenal. Stage a nation-wide lovefest about Social Security? Tanked. Axis of evil? Made things worse. Drug plan? From what I hear, seniors are about to storm Washington with pitchforks. Katrina? Heck of a job.
And the war, of course.
I honestly think that the folks would be giving the Bush administration a lot more slack if they had won a few, or had been proven right a few more times. As it is, they’ve had to resort to outright lies and threats to keep the hounds at bay. And Al Gore’s speech yesterday exposed their criminal incompetence in words so plain and clear as to command assent.
Merciless keeps pretty good score of Bushco’s general failures, but I have the sense that the not-at-all-liberal “news” media is voluntarily keeping itself at bay. The truly shocking this about this post, for me, is that diehard lefty muckraker Lowell Bergman is reporting for the NY Times.
Not sure that Bergman or his wife are die hard lefties.
Lowell Bergman, of the “60 Minutes”/Jeffrey Wiegand controversy? I’d call him a diehard lefty, at least to the point where he hasn’t worked much in the mainstream the last several years. I have no information on his wife.
joanr, do you mean that the truly terrible stuff isn’t being reported? If so, I think so too. Worse, I suspect that the msm is completely unaware of the really egregious stuff. In Gore’s speech yesterday, he spoke of a scientist at NASA who was required to keep detailed logs of all his contacts so that the administration could monitor to whom he was speaking.
When my husband heard that, he nearly fell off the couch.
If I’ve misunderstood you, let me know. Lord help me I do love reasoned debate.
If the NSA illegal wiretapping was useless, then Bush’s comment about the leak of that program helping the terraist was just another lie.
Here is another list of Bush’s staggering incompetence from Harvey Wasserman.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/011706O.shtml
Merciless, I suspect we’re in agreement. But I don’t think the msm is uninformed; it has access to much the same info as Al Gore these days, or certainly the same as the blogosphere. They choose not to report on the constant failures of this administraton, or at least not to emphasize them since, lord knows, Nick & Jessica’s breakup is more interesting. (At least to the msm.) For instance, if Bush isn’t talking about Social Security, neither is the msm, and that means that for most American “news” consumers, yet another failed program goes unexamined.
Sunday I watched an “American Experience” on PBS about Martin Luther King, and following JFK’s assassination, Dr. King commented to a colleague that “we are a ten-day nation,” by which he meant no matter how terrible the national trauma, within 10 days the U.S. is back to business as usual. I shivered when I heard that, because it felt like Dr. King must’ve seen 40 years into the future.
I get the sense that the nation is still cutting Bush plenty of slack, because nobody beyond the left blogosphere is taking the time to count up all those failures or insist on accountability for any one of them.
Ever watch Washington Week? Some know a lot and some really for major news groups don’t know wtf is going on.
“I get the sense that the nation is still cutting Bush plenty of slack, because nobody beyond the left blogosphere is taking the time to count up all those failures or insist on accountability for any one of them.”
Well, Al Gore did yesterday. It’s not much, but it’s something. And Patrick Fitzgerald is lurking out there somewhere. Jack Murtha went on 60 Minutes and told the truth about the liars and cowards.
I just can’t believe that we’ve lost. Not yet.
I don’t think it’s staggering incompetence…I think it’s a staggering diversion. Bush is running the FBI in circles chasing rainbows to give credence to the fact that he’s genuinely looking for terrorist that he knows are not there. It’s the same ploy he used with the weapons of mass destruction scam on the military,the military genuinely believed that there were WMD’s, But Bush knew there weren’t any. Bush’s fear inducing rhetoric about nuclear annihilation betrays his claims of sincerity in protecting America. Bush is only protecting his own game,so while sincere agents go chasing non existant terrorists, Bush plucks the information he wants on his political opponents amid the confusion and under the guise of fighting terror. Don’t trust Bush, America..he doesn”t have your best interests at heart.He’s proved himself to be a liar and unworthy of trust.
The real story will come out when it is finally becomes clear that that the real target of administration eavesdropping has been the Kerry campaign. All the terrorist rhetoric is just window dressing to sow confusion. The real story will be further dramatized when it becomes clear that a sizable plurality of American’s don’t care.
Before Kerry became the nominee, they were probably eavesdropping on all the candidates, including Dennis Kucinich. They are probably tapping all the phones of the Democrats in Congress. And, they probably tapped Dan Rather’s telephones. That’s how they respond so quickly. Those are the moral values they all stand by.