Bowing To The Police State
By Ray McGovern
05/17/06 "Tom
Paine" -- - Is Congress aiding and abetting the
creation of a police state? Recently, the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., helped to give
the CIA and NSA unprecedented police powers. By inserting a
provision in the FY07 Intelligence Authorization Act, Hoekstra
has undermined the existing statutory limits on involvement in
domestic law enforcement. This comes after revelations in
January of direct NSA involvement with the Baltimore police in
order to "protect" the NSA Headquarters from Quaker protesters.
Add to this, the disquieting news that the White House has been
barraging the CIA with totally improper questions about the
political affiliation of some of its senior intelligence
officers, the ever widening use of polygraph examinations, and
the FBI’s admission that it acquires phone records of broadcast
and print media to investigate leaks at the CIA. I, for one, am
reminded of my service in the police state of the U.S.S.R.,
where there were no First or Fourth Amendments.
Like the proverbial frog in slowly boiling water, we have become
inured to what goes on in the name of national security. Recent
disclosures about increased government surveillance and illegal
activities would be shocking, were it not for the prevailing
outrage-fatigue brought on by a long train of abuses. But the
heads of the civilian, democratically elected institutions that
are supposed to be our bulwark against an encroaching police
state, the ones who stand to lose their own power as well as
their rights and the rights of all citizens, aren’t interested
in reigning in the power of the intelligence establishment. To
the contrary, Rep. Hoekstra and his counterpart at the Senate,
Pat Roberts, R.-Kan., are running the risk of whiplash as they
pivot to look the other way.
James Bamford, one of the best observers of the inner workings
of U.S. intelligence, warned recently that Congress has lost
control of the intelligence community. “You can’t get any
oversight or checks and balances,” he said. “Congress is
protecting the White House, and the White House can do whatever
it wants.”
Consider the following nuggets drawn from Sunday’s Washington
Post article by R. Jeffrey Smith about the firing of senior CIA
analyst Mary McCarthy. Apparently McCarthy learned that at least
one “senior agency official” lied to Congress about agency
policy and practice with regard to torturing detainees during
interrogations.
According to Smith’s article, one internal CIA study completed
in 2004 concluded that CIA interrogation policies and techniques
violated international law. This is said to have come as
something of a shock to agency interrogators who had been led by
the Justice Department to believe that international conventions
against torture did not apply to interrogations of foreigners
outside of the United States. McCarthy reportedly was also
chagrined to learn that the CIA’s general counsel had secured a
secret Justice Department opinion in 2004 authorizing the
creation of a category of “ghost detainees,” prisoners
transported abroad, mostly from Iraq, for secret
interrogation—without notification of the Red Cross, as required
by the Geneva Convention.
No problem, said senior CIA officials. We’ll just lie to the
committee leaders about the torture; they will wink and be
grateful we did. The lying came during discussion of draft
legislation aimed at preventing torture. As deputy inspector
general, McCarthy became aware that CIA officials had misled the
chairmen and ranking members of the congressional “oversight”
committees on multiple occasions. Neither of the committees
seemed interested in taking a serious look at the torture issue.
It will be highly interesting to see what the intrepid chairmen
of the House and Senate intelligence committees do, if anything,
to followup on Smith’s report that “a senior CIA official”
meeting with Senate staff last June lied about the agency’s
interrogation practices. Or that a “senior agency official”
failed to provide a full account of CIA’s policy for treating
detainees at a closed hearing of the House intelligence
committee in Feb. 2005 under questioning by Rep. Jane Harman,
the ranking Democrat. Will Roberts and Hoekstra hold those
agency officials accountable, or will they let the matter
die—like some of the detainees subjected to “enhanced”
interrogation techniques to which the chairmen have so far
turned a blind eye?
Hoekstra is a master at Catch-22. On the one hand Hoekstra
insists that those in intelligence who have information on
illegal or improper behavior report it to his intelligence
committee; then he refuses to let them in the door. Russell
Tice, a former NSA employee, has been trying since last December
to give Hoekstra a first-hand account of illegal activities at
the NSA. He has rebuffed Tice, with the lame explanation that
the NSA will not clear Hoekstra or any of his committee members
for the highly classified programs about which Tice wants to
report. With the door locked to the intelligence committees,
Tice has turned to the Senate Armed Services Committee and said
that he will meet soon with committee staff in closed session to
tell of “probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts” at the NSA
while Gen. Michael Hayden was in charge.
Amid the recent revelations of secret CIA-run prisons abroad,
torture and illegal eavesdropping, Hoekstra has chosen to
express outrage—but not at the prisons, torture or
eavesdropping. Rather, the House Intelligence Committee chairman
is outraged that information on these abuses has found its way
onto the public square. Hoekstra has turned his full attention
to pursuing those who leak such information—never mind that is
the activities disclosed, not the leaks, that are the real
outrage.
The executive branch is “walking all over the Congress at the
moment,” complained Sen. Arlen Specter, R.-Pa., last week to the
Senate Judiciary Committee which he chairs. Unlike Roberts and
Hoekstra, Specter seems genuinely troubled at the president’s
disdain for the separation of powers and particularly his
end-run around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of
1978, which prohibits eavesdropping on American citizens without
a court warrant.
But when Specter meets a stonewall, he caves. He may ask
telephone company CEOs why they surrendered records to the
government, but—illegal eavesdropping or no—Specter will likely
remain a spectator, as Pat Roberts greases the skids for Big
Brother Gen. Michael Hayden, architect and implementer of
eavesdropping on Americans in violation of FISA, to become the
next director of the CIA. Hayden’s disingenuousness in his
testimony before the intelligence committees has been clear, but
the committee chairmen are as much to blame for winking at it.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department has told Rep. Maurice Hinchey,
D.-N.Y., that it is stopping its months-long investigation into
who approved the NSA’s eavesdropping-on-American-citizens
initiative (now euphemistically dubbed “the terrorist
surveillance program”). Justice explained to Hinchey that the
NSA would not grant Justice department investigators the
appropriate security clearances to investigate the NSA program.
Kafka would smirk.
Rep. Hoekstra’s speaks of “vigorous oversight” of the NSA, but
the evidence of that is lacking. Late last year the current head
of the NSA, Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, deliberately misled
House intelligence committee member Rush Holt, D-N.J., on the
eavesdropping program. On Dec. 6, Holt, a former State
Department intelligence specialist, called on Alexander and NSA
lawyers to discuss protecting Americans’ privacy. They all
assured Holt that the agency singled out Americans for
eavesdropping only after warrants had been obtained from the
FISA court. Later that month, when disclosures in The New York
Times made it clear that Alexander had lied to a member of his
committee, Hoekstra merely suggested that Holt write a letter to
Alexander to complain. The inescapable message to Alexander?
Fear not: Hoekstra the fox is watching the hen house.
When the writers of the Constitution envisioned a separation of
powers to ensure checks and balances in our government, they
were relying on the leaders of those branches to fight to
maintain their own power within the system. Fresh from the
struggle against King George, they could not have predicted that
some of our leaders would voluntarily sign away their own rights
to another George who would be king.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of
the Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. He was a CIA
analyst for 27 years and is now on the Steering Group of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
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