Gen. Hayden a lier?

especially if it can be demonstrated that he knew the correct answer beforehand and chose not to respond (or to respond as he had).

And, it's 'liar'...qwerty kbds are great, no?

that President Clinton was impeached because he lied about an affair with an intern.  And while cheating on Mrs. Clinton with a young woman can be construed as reprehensible, it did not break the law.  It is the "lie" that broke him.

Mr. Bush's actions do break the law, over and over again, and while Mr. Gonzalez in the Justice Dept might be taking a page from the Clinton "playbook" by painstakingly parsing his legal interpretations, if one reads the statutes it is kind of hard to worm a hole through it.

One can also argue, I suppose that Mr. Bush's many references to "legally" obtained wiretaps over the last two years could put him in the same sort of Clintonesqu legal jeapordy as well.

The war on terror is nothing more than a cold war inspired public relations gambit to otherwise cover a mad grab for presidential power.  And while, maybe, perhaps, just maybe, there might be a technocrat or two or who "really" believes in this crap, the rest do not, and otherwise have been quite cynically and strategically plied on the sympathy and fear of American citizens to put in place a very clear agenda of political and ideological ideas that have absolutely nothing to do with ending terrorism.  If the folks in power really DID care, there would be a solution on the ground in Israel and Palestine today instead of the "shocked, shocked, shocked" expressions on the faces of the Neo-cons today because Hamas won.  Really, get a grip.  We are in a fight for our republic now.  And if folks don't begin to see this all for the crisis it truly is then we'll all just see you later in the torture halls.  I'll add that this may seem like hyperbole, but I've got to tell you, American citizens have already been commandered off our streets in the name of fighting terrorism, and while they may have hailed from places middle eastern, the truth is that it will come to Mr. & Ms. Apple Pie next unless this is stopped now.

The Power-Madness of King George

Is Bush turning America into an elective dictatorship?

By Jacob Weisberg

Posted Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2006

It's tempting to dismiss the debate about the National Security Agency spying on Americans as a technical conflict about procedural rights. President Bush believes he has the legal authority to order electronic snooping without asking anyone's permission. Civil libertarians and privacy-fretters think Bush needs a warrant from the special court created to authorize wiretapping in cases of national security. But in practice, the so-called FISA court that issues such warrants functions as a virtual rubber stamp for the executive branch anyhow, so what's the great difference in the end?

Would that so little were at stake. In fact, the Senate hearings on NSA domestic espionage set to begin next month will confront fundamental questions about the balance of power within our system. Even if one assumes that every unknown instance of warrant-less spying by the NSA were justified on security grounds, the arguments issuing from the White House threaten the concept of checks and balances as it has been understood in America for the last 218 years. Simply put, Bush and his lawyers contend that the president's national security powers are unlimited. And since the war on terror is currently scheduled to run indefinitely, the executive supremacy they're asserting won't be a temporary condition.

This extremity of Bush's position emerges most clearly in a 42-page document issued by the Department of Justice last week. As Andrew Cohen, a CBS legal analyst, wrote in an online commentary, "The first time you read the 'White Paper,' you feel like it is describing a foreign country guided by an unfamiliar constitution." To develop this observation a bit further, the nation implied by the document would be an elective dictatorship, governed not by three counterpoised branches of government but by a secretive, possibly benign, awesomely powerful king.

Continue Article  

Former NSA Director Hayden Lied To Congress And Broke The Law

[Our guest blogger, Morton Halperin, was Director of Policy Planning Staff at the State Department and served on the National Security Council under President Clinton. He also served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Johnson.]

The Bush administration has pulled out all the stops in attempting to defend the NSA's warrantless domestic spying program. After speeches by President Bush and Attorney General Gonzales, Deputy Director of National Intelligence and former NSA Director General Michael Hayden took another crack at the defense in a speech on Monday. He's not exactly the ideal choice to restore the administration's credibility.

As Think Progress documented back in December, Hayden misled Congress. In his 10/17/02 testimony, he told a committee investigating the 9/11 attacks that any surveillance of persons in the United States was done consistent with FISA.

At the time of his statements, Hayden was fully aware of the presidential order to conduct warrantless domestic spying issued the previous year. But Hayden didn't feel as though he needed to share that with Congress. Apparently, Hayden believed that he had been legally authorized to conduct the surveillance, but told Congress that he had no authority to do exactly what he was doing. The Fraud and False Statements statute (18 U.S.C. 1001) make Hayden's misleading statements to Congress illegal.

Hayden's fate lies with the tale of another spymaster, Nixon-era CIA Director Richard Helms.

Testifying under oath before a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1973, Richard Helms claimed that CIA was not involved in attempts to overthrow Salvador Allende of Chile:

    SEN. SYMINGTON: Did you try in the Central Intelligence agency to overthrow the government of Chile?

    MR. HELMS: No, sir.

    SEN. SYMINGTON: Did you have any money passed to the opponents of Allende?

    MR. HELMS: No, sir.

By the time Helms was called to testify again, CIA activities in Chile had become public knowledge. In 1977, Richard Helms pleaded no contest to charges of lying to Congress and served a suspended sentence.

Four years passed between Richard Helms' false testimony before Congress and his guilty plea. Hayden's congressional lying occurred in 2002. It's now four years later. Time to fess up, General.

- Morton H. Halperin and Michael Fuchs

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/01/26/hayden-broke-law/

That's gotta hurt. Ouch.

Link and video!

extensive speech on "the program" and his specific answer to how he came to conclude this was legal:

http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/01/hayden012306.pdf

QUESTION: Hi, General. I'm Leigh Ann Caldwell with Pacifica Radio. You said that you used your top counsel in the planning process to tell you if this was legal and appropriate back in 2001. What exactly did your counsel tell you that it was within guidelines and within the law, constitutional law?

GEN. HAYDEN: I think my counsel, if he were here, would be whispering something about privileged lawyer-client language.

I can tell you in general, all right? And we talked about this in a bit more detail. They came back rather emphatically -- I did it to three, and I did it to three separately and serially so it wasn't a group answer. And all three came back saying that they believed this was lawful; that it was a lawful order that had been authorized by the president, that it was within his authorities to authorize this activity.

...

QUESTION: Okay. But you can't say what laws --

GEN. HAYDEN: The arguments that they use?

QUESTION: Yeah.

GEN. HAYDEN: No, they don't -- these guys are expert on the FISA Act. They're expert on something called USSID 18, which is kind of our library of instructions of how to conduct SIGINT and protect privacy. They're also really expert on the Constitution, and they're really expert on the Fourth Amendment. And so when I talked to them, I mean, I said there was an air of sufficiency with what I'd been given, but this was personal, and these are men that I had worked with. These are men who had said, no, you can't do that; no, we advise against doing that. In previous events, you know, the proceeding two-and-ahalf- three years, I had been director, and so you know, they weren't freebies. They just didn't hand out hall passes for anything that might have been operationally effective or some things the agency might have wanted to do. They were hard. They were tough.

And so on a personal basis to me, when the three of them came back and said it's good to go, it meant a lot to me, and it meant a lot to the agency too, because as I said, the agency had to implement this, and the agency does everything -- everything -- with a lawyer looking over their shoulder. We know -- we know what this is. This is electronic surveillance for a foreign intelligence purpose. We know what the Constitution says, and so it's done very, very carefully. And I was very heartened that I got that response from the senior legal team we have.

So, what lies of omission or what guilty knowledge do think the General committed or had?

P.S.  Sorry about the spelling, but if you hang around here long enough you will easily see that spelling is a particular weak point for me, especially in quick posts that I don't spellcheck.

I've located the General's remarks - here.

In them, the only stuff that I can see that's pertinent is this:

and this:

Where's the bit where he's assuring the joint committee that all collection then being undertaken was under FISA?

hearing:

http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/hearings/911hearing-trans-oct17.htm

As I see it, there are only two exchanges that relate to this issue, and I think Think Progress deeply misrepresents the General's responses

GOSS: OK. Shouldn't that be job one? And shouldn't the leaders be listening?

OK, my second question, then. General Hayden, you said something about bin Laden coming across the bridge, hypothetical, of course. But I take that to mean that if bin Laden did come there would be capabilities that we have that we can use elsewhere in the world that we cannot use in the United States of America. Is that correct?

HAYDEN: Not so much capabilities, but how agilely we could apply those capabilities. The person inside the United States becomes a U.S. person under the definition provided by the FISA act.

GOSS: Special protections, according to your testimony.

HAYDEN: Special protections then apply. It is -- there are procedural steps that one can identify such a person as the agent of a foreign power. But one's got to go through those procedural steps.

Now, take that metaphor and apply it to somebody without the persona of Osama bin Laden and you can see the challenge of trying to cover people inside U.S. borders, even if they will us harm.

GOSS: Well, lets -- again, I don't want to get into details. I'm aware of the public nature of this meeting. But let's just suppose this sniper is somebody we wanted to catch very badly. Could we apply all our technologies and all our capabilities and all our know how against that person? Or would that person be considered to have protection as an American citizen?

HAYDEN: That person would have protections as what the law defines as a U.S. person. And I would have no authorities to pursue it.

GOSS: So the answer is that person has some protections just by being in the United States of America. And if that act were actually taking place overseas, we would be able to bring more to bear to deal with it.

HAYDEN: Absolutely.

GOSS: That's a fair statement?

HAYDEN: Yes, sir, that's right.

GOSS: Thank you. I'm not sure everybody in this country understands just how many safeguards we have for American liberties. And I think it's very important to underscore that. There is a price for it. And we are trying to find the balance and what that price is. I appreciate your answer to the question, General.

The General's statement is true.  The NYT stories have repeatedly stated that purely domestic communications still require a FISA warrant, so by crossing into the US, an agent of a foreign power can call their US contacts in the US and the FBI or NSA have to get a FISA warrant to listen in.

BEREUTER: I think that's a good accommodation, but it does seem to me that there are cases where the requirements for the Homeland Security, certainly the priorities on them, might be different than they are for the Central Intelligence Agency or the Department of Defense or the FBI. And I would hope that maybe the Senate will do what the House failed to do and give them a seat at the tasking table when it comes to foreign, I emphasize "foreign" intelligence collection. In fact, I offered that to our Rules Committee to make an order.

I'd like to turn to you, General Hayden. And I recognize what you had to say on pages 9 and 10 of your testimony which relates to your predecessor in the '70s and the message he got here from that Congress at that time, but we've learned that NSA apparently for policy reasons, decided not to target international communications of individual foreign persons in the U.S. say intentionally, even though it would have been possible, it appears, to obtain approval under FISA for such collections.

Why did the NSA adopt that policy, General?

HAYDEN: No, no, we do get FISAs, but you're right. There are several classes, I'll use the word targets in which we will pursue a FISA and there are others in which we would turn that over to the FBI.

A couple of reasons. One is as you've eluded to before. The history of the agency suggests it needs to exercise great care in what it does within the United States of America. Beyond that though, no matter who would get the warrant in collection, and in this case, NSA or FBI, you would create a seam between two organizations. If we were to get the FISA, the warranted collection for a protected person inside the United States, we would close the seam between our information, gained from SIGINT internally and the information we would get externally through our normal processes. That seam would be very tight. But, the seam would be quite wide between the SIGINT information being gained about that individual and the other information that would be gained by the FBI through all their other tools.

You have to make a call and I think in generally, the call is, except the scene between what I'll call domestically derived and SIGINT and SIGINT derived from overseas, so as to put all the information you're getting about this person inside the United States into one basket under an FBI rubric so that all the tools being used to gain information about this target...

BEREUTER: Including your assets?

HAYDEN: And then, when asked by the FBI, and this is commonplace, the FBI would ask us for technical support, but the action would be carried out under their authorities.

BEREUTER: Thank you.

This exchange re-enforces the impression left by the 4th NYT article that the NSA is very careful about what it passes on to the FBI so as to ensure they do not provided information (such as names associated with a phone number) that would require a court order for the FBI to obtain.

I see nothing here to support the idea that Gen. Hayden "lied to Congress".

Note: Nancy Pelosi was one of the members of the pannel, and she was also one of the original "gang of 8" briefed on the NSA program from the begining, so if she thought the General was being misleading, she could have made an issue of it, but there is no indication that she ever did.

eventually, even such unconstitutional acts as his warrantless wiretaps, and Boosh's entire "unitary executive" construct, when dinned into the public consciousness day after day, serves to muddle an already confused electorate, one who has been fed the noxious stew of "war on terror" propaganda for the past 4 years, and who remains ever-willing to concede "security" over constitutional guarantees to the WH.  What are you willing to wager that round mid-summer, the public will yet again be treated to stories in the media about "terrorist Internet chatter", "credible but non-specific terror threats", and the inevitable blast of DEFCON ORANGE alerts, all delivered in a suitable fear package by the usual suspects.  As totalitarian states have learned, manipulating the masses by State-directed propaganda, intimidation of "off-message" media coverage, and commission of  lawless acts in the name of "national security" are trivially simple in execution, they just require willing handmaidens to clothe them in legitimacy.  And, if only one thing that we have learned in the past 5 years, it is that willing handmaidens of authoritarianism are readily available.