Scarborough suggests the Bush administration was never 'on the alert for liberal groups'

Commenting on the DHS report about right-wing extremism, Joe Scarborough asked, "what if Dick Cheney had told Tom Ridge, when he was the head of the Department of Homeland Security, to be on the alert for liberal groups."



Scarborough thinks that if the Bush administration had targeted left-wing groups for surveillance, a furor would have arisen at MSNBC, the New York Times, and the rest of what he presumably thinks of as The Liberal Media.

But what Scarborough either forgets or never knew, or simply chooses to ignore, is that the Bush Administration did target left-wing groups with its massive domestic surveillance and security apparatus.

[h/t Glenn Greenwald]

December 20, 2005

F.B.I. Watched Activist Groups, New Files Show

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 - Counterterrorism agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have conducted numerous surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations that involved, at least indirectly, groups active in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty and poverty relief, newly disclosed agency records show.

F.B.I. officials said Monday that their investigators had no interest in monitoring political or social activities and that any investigations that touched on advocacy groups were driven by evidence of criminal or violent activity at public protests and in other settings.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, John Ashcroft, who was then attorney general, loosened restrictions on the F.B.I.'s investigative powers, giving the bureau greater ability to visit and monitor Web sites, mosques and other public entities in developing terrorism leads. The bureau has used that authority to investigate not only groups with suspected ties to foreign terrorists, but also protest groups suspected of having links to violent or disruptive activities.

But the documents, coming after the Bush administration's confirmation that President Bush had authorized some spying without warrants in fighting terrorism, prompted charges from civil rights advocates that the government had improperly blurred the line between terrorism and acts of civil disobedience and lawful protest.

One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a "Vegan Community Project." Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's "semi-communistic ideology." A third indicates the bureau's interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

The documents, provided to The New York Times over the past week, came as part of a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. For more than a year, the A.C.L.U. has been seeking access to information in F.B.I. files on about 150 protest and social groups that it says may have been improperly monitored.

The F.B.I. had previously turned over a small number of documents on antiwar groups, showing the agency's interest in investigating possible anarchist or violent links in connection with antiwar protests and demonstrations in advance of the 2004 political conventions. And earlier this month, the A.C.L.U.'s Colorado chapter released similar documents involving, among other things, people protesting logging practices at a lumber industry gathering in 2002.

The latest batch of documents, parts of which the A.C.L.U. plans to release publicly on Tuesday, totals more than 2,300 pages and centers on references in internal files to a handful of groups, including PETA, the environmental group Greenpeace and the Catholic Workers group, which promotes antipoverty efforts and social causes.

The Bush administration targeted for surveillance vegans, logging protesters, PETA, and Catholic Workers, all under the pretense of anti-terrorism.

Yet, the round-the-clock outrage that Scarborough fantasizes about never materialized.

And now, right wingers are afraid that the surveillance state they cheered on for eight years is being turned against them.

This is why it is a bad idea to surrender your civil liberties to the government when people you like are in power. Eventually, people you don't like will be in power.

But for some reason, people need to keep learning the same lesson over and over and over again.

The Bush administration's domestic wiretapping program was against the law

It does not matter who knew about it.

Informing congress about illegal activity does not render the activity legal.

Because nobody would have guessed that such power would be abused

The Bush administration has been using its vast surveillance powers to monitor, record, and share the private conversations of Americans who are suspected of absolutely nothing.

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia.

"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

Another intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk, 39, said he and his fellow intercept operators listened into hundreds of Americans picked up using phones in Baghdad's Green Zone from late 2003 to November 2007.

"Calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses, sometimes their girlfriends, sometimes one phone call following another," said Faulk.

[...]

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.


"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.

Phone sex.

For this, the U.S. Congress gave George W. Bush the power to violate the privacy of American citizens for any reason, or for no reason, without being accountable to anybody.

Think about that the next time you're on the phone with your spouse or your child or your lawyer or your doctor.

FBI confirms more privacy violations

What a surprise.

FBI Director Robert Mueller says an upcoming Justice Department report will show the bureau improperly used national security letters to obtain personal data on Americans during terror and spy investigations.

Mueller says the report focuses on national security letters issued only in 2006 — a year before the FBI enacted sweeping new reforms to prevent future lapses.

But don't expect House Democrats to take from this the lesson that the government needs more, rather than less, surveillance oversight. They're too busy worrying that Bush will call them "weak" if they fail to roll over and give him immunity for the crimes he has committed.

Wiretaps shut down over unpaid bills

This certainly undercuts the "patriotism" argument in favor of telecom immunity, no?

Telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals because of the bureau's repeated failures to pay phone bills on time.

A Justice Department audit released Thursday blamed the lost connections on the FBI's lax oversight of money used in undercover investigations. Poor supervision of the program also allowed one agent to steal $25,000, the audit said.

In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation ''was halted due to untimely payment,'' the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government's most sensitive and secretive criminal investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.

''We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence,'' according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine.

The telecoms wave the flag in our faces to obscure the ugly truth about warrantless wiretaps, but apparently legal surveillance gets shut down over dollars and cents.

"Patriotic corporate citizens"? I think not.

_{photo © Michael Jastremski for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike}

Democrats caving on surveillance. Again.

How can this be happening?

The Senate appears poised to hand the White House another victory with a measure that would make permanent an expansion of government spy powers and shield phone companies from liability for assisting government eavesdropping.

With floor consideration scheduled to start today, Democrats are split on how to cut back on the administration's surveillance powers. The only option that appears to have sufficient backing is a bipartisan measure the White House has blessed. Opponents of the White House-backed bill are increasingly predicting a White House win.

If the White House prevails this week, it will be the latest example of President Bush's ability to outmaneuver his opponents in Congress, especially on controversial matters of national security, despite his weakened public support.

This is insane.

How can these people believe there will be no negative consequences from giving the Executive branch unchecked authority to spy on American citizens? How can they think this president, or any other, will be immune from the temptation to abuse such power?

With the exception of noble Chris Dodd, where are our Democratic presidential candidates on this? Why won't they step up and lead?