As it turns out, President Bush’s once-clandestine warrantless wiretap progam is pretty much a bust. All of the leads provided by the National Security Agency (NSA) were fed to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and virtually all of them “led to dead ends or innocent Americans.” To make matters worse, the information flow was so daunting that it prevented the FBI from following up on productive leads of its own. So says Lowell Bergman, Eric Lichtblau, Scott Shane, and Don Van Natta Jr. in today’s New York Times.
The Times reports that FBI director Robert S. Mueller III “raised concerns about the legal rationale for a program of eavesdropping without warrants.”
General Michael V. Hayden, who was NSA director when the administration’s warrantless wiretap program began, contradicted the FBI accounts, telling the Times, “I can say unequivocally that we have gotten information through this program that would not otherwise have been available.”
Also in today’s Times, Eric Licthblau reports that the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights both plan to file lawsuits against the Bush administration over the program. Both organizations believe that the domestic surveillance program was used to monitor “defense lawyers, journalists, scholars, political activists, and other Americans with ties to the Middle East,” and seek an immediate end to the warrantless surveillance program.
Both organizations believe that the domestic surveillance program was abused to stifle dissent, similar to the ways in which domestic surveillance was abused in the 1960s and 1970s—abuses that resulted in the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), intended to specifically stop such abuses.
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