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Little Big Brother And His Presidential Surveillance Program

On Friday, in an attempt to bury the news yet again, the Inspector General’s office released a report that President George W. Bush authorized the largest effort to spy on American citizens in US history. What is more, President Bush did so without the authorization of the Attorney General, who was then John Ashcroft, and instead relied upon the authority of White House Council Alberto Gonzales. Let us start with the fact that according to the IG’s report, this spying program was of little or not value. It did not in any way garner any kind of actionable and useful intelligence on terrorist plots, and did not make the United States any safer. Given that, this program was a colossal waste of money, time, and effort.

President Bush, in the wake of 9/11, pushed for the authorization of a Presidential Surveillance Program (PSP). The PSP went far beyond the warrantless wiretaps that President Bush had already put into place, and may have involved spying on people for political gain under the guise of national security. Many of the details were withheld by the IG’s who did the inspections because the “information was too sensitive” for general release. This program was created via an executive order. That, in and of itself indicates a need for Congressional oversight with regards to certain executive orders. What is more, many of the program’s details were known only to those without any direct accountability to Congress such as John Aschcroft. AG Ashcroft had refused to sign the authorization for the PSP even though Bush’s legal team tried to ambush him on his sickbed in order to trick him into signing.

Adding to the level of disturbing when it comes to this story, five senior members of the Bush Administration refused to accept questions concerning this program. Besides Ashcroft, former Bush lawyer John Yoo, former CIA director George Tenet, Bush’s Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and Cheney aid David Addington. However, enough information was available through people below these men to gain a large understanding of what was going on in this secret surveillance program. The FBI defended the program stating how any lead, no matter how slim that it produced would certainly justify the program’s existence. Indeed, for some reason the FBI needs to spy on journalists such as Seymore Hersch in order to catch terrorists, and that came out almost nine months ago.

Many Al-Qaida terrorist cells either use code to communicate, or rely upon that old tried and true method of using obscure dialects to communicate their messages between each other. Typically, they use a combination of both. This is not a method of coding that is unknown to the United States. During World War II, rather than use conventional codes, the United States Military employed a group of Navaho speakers to translate and communicate orders between units. These Code Talkers were highly successful. The most common form of communication between Al-Qaida members seeking to avoid detection is Farsi or some dialect there of. Farsi is a very difficult language to learn, and there are only a few Farsi speakers in either the US or British Intel community. In truth, most Intel gathering does not involve large numbers of highly interesting if suspect gadgets or having a lovely woman on your arm at the end of a mission. A lot of Intel gathering is done by people who sit in front of a computer or at a desk and sift through communications in order to find out if there is anything worth while there in.

In 2001, the Bush Administration fired roughly half the Farsi translators working within the nineteen American Intel divisions because they were a “security risk”. They were either gay or lesbian.

The problem has rarely ever been the capacity to find information, but rather the ability to properly analyze and understand what information comes in. According to one former Congressional aid and National Security expert, the ability to gather information has never been the problem given that we are more than capable of intercepting information without a problem, and do not have many of the restrictions outside the country that we do within. Rather, what is lacking is the expertise to understand what is and is not important from what is intercepted, and to translate that information once it is obtained.

The Bush Administration made the problem of interpretation and analysis of information that much more difficult by expelling from the ranks of America’s intelligence services many qualified people because they were openly gay or lesbian, and thus opening up the Intel services to greater risk by driving those who were not known deep into the closet where they could be blackmailed by those seeking a way into the services. While this has stopped under President Obama, the loss of some within the military under Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell may have hurt the ability to translate needed intelligence.