Bombshells, Now With More Explosions

Turns out that bombshell dropped by CIA Director Leon Panetta about the Bush warrantless wiretapping program and then reloaded into the bomb-launching device by House Democrats this morning has been re-reloaded into a larger bomb-launching device with significantly more range by the Washington Post. From Saturday's edition:

"Extraordinary and inappropriate" secrecy about a warrantless eavesdropping program undermined its effectiveness as a terrorism-fighting tool, government watchdogs have concluded in the first examination of one of the most contentious episodes of the Bush administration.

A report by inspectors general from five intelligence agencies said the administration's tight control over who learned of the program also contributed to flawed legal arguments that nearly prompted mass resignations in the Justice Department five years ago.

For the first few years of the program's operation, only three Justice Department lawyers were aware of the highly classified initiative, and intelligence analysts whose "scary memos" helped certify the program initially were kept in the dark by supervisors who sometimes ordered up more data to prepare a "compelling case," the watchdog report said.

So...three lawyers knew. Three. Out of the entire Justice Department. And they of course said "Yeah, this is legal, whatever" and then Americans were wiretapped for several years. That's good. Gets worse. Much worse.

Significant elements of the initiative are still unclear. But an unclassified version of the inspectors general's report for the first time offers new details about its origins and its advocates.

The clandestine program was born in the days after Sept. 11, 2001, when then-CIA Director George J. Tenet asked the National Security Agency's chief, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, "what he might do with more authority," the report said. A short while later, Bush signed a single document paving the way for the plan.

For the first few years, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and two senior aides -- Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John C. Yoo and intelligence policy lawyer James Baker -- were the only Justice Department officials made aware of the initiative, bypassing many of the latter men's superiors, the unclassified summary reported for the first time.

One former department lawyer, Jay S. Bybee, told investigators that he was Yoo's supervisor, but that he was never read into the program and "could shed no further light" on how Yoo came to be the point man on memos that blessed its legality. By following this route, investigators say, the memos avoided a rigorous peer-review process.

The White House determined access to the program, a former Bush official said. The report said that Yoo prepared hypothetical documents in September and early October 2001 before writing a formal memo in November, after Bush had already authorized the initiative.

Yeah, let's back that train right the hell on up there. Bush authorized this garbage with no legal authority and no oversight, then had select people in the DoJ (John Yoo, Jim Baker, and AG Ashcroft) craft the legal authority Bush would need later as the world's crappiest fig leaf. Then moutains of data were collected on Americans without their knowledge or consent for several years.

Monstrous. Absolutely without equivocation there, monstrous.

In that memo, Yoo concluded that existing surveillance law could not "restrict the president's ability to engage in warrantless searches that protect the national security," and that "unless Congress made a clear statement . . . that it sought to restrict presidential authority to conduct warrantless searches in the national security area -- which it has not -- then the statute must be construed to avoid such a reading," according to the report.

In other words, Yoo's logic is "unless Congress has passed a law strictly forbidding something, the President can do anything he damn well pleases", like, say, collect mountains of data on Americans for several years.

But when that analysis reached higher-level officials in the Justice Department by late 2003 and early 2004, lawyers were troubled by the conclusions. They grew convinced that the plan may have run afoul of the law and ignored key Supreme Court rulings on the subject of executive-branch power.

And yet that was still years before the NY Times revealed the existance of the warrantless wiretapping. It took the rest of the Justice Department and the intelligence agency heads a couple years to find out. They did...nothing. Oh, and then they apparently lied to Congress about it too. This led to the now famous scene at Ashcroft's hospital bedside:

The inspectors general report alleged that Yoo "did not accurately describe the scope" of other intelligence activities in what was known as the President's Surveillance Program, presenting "a serious impediment to recertification of the program." Traditionally, in reviews by the Office of Legal Counsel, lawyers rely on a description of classified programs from the agencies that carry them out, the former Bush official said.

Disputes prompted a series of meetings in March 2004, including lobbying by the White House, to try to persuade the Justice Department to temporarily continue the surveillance while any legal problems with it were being fixed. On March 9, 2004, intelligence officials and Vice President Richard B. Cheney met to discuss the issue without inviting Justice Department leaders.

Cheney suggested that Bush "may have to reauthorize without [the] blessing of DOJ," according to previously unreported notes taken by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III. Mueller told investigators he would have had a problem with that approach and raised the prospect that the bureau would have withdrawn from the program.

The resignation threats came the next day, after a dramatic visit by then-White House chief of staff Andrew H. Card Jr. and then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales to the hospital bedside of an ailing Ashcroft. Gonzales told the inspectors general that Bush instructed him to go to the hospital to obtain Ashcroft's signature on a document that would green-light continuation of the program.

Seems to me the last real piece of resistance to not investigating the warrantless wiretapping program just died. The Washington Independent has the AG report posted. As Spencer Ackerman notes, he was right on the money when he surmised that Bush had authorized two surveillance programs, the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" the Bushies talked about from 2006 on, and the real one, the "President's Other Activities".

I'm pretty sure those "other activites" are going to get somebody's ass fried. It's time to ask the truly uncomfortable questions here: What did President Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Jim Baker, Andy Card, Robert Mueller and John Yoo know, and when did they know it?

Ahh, but remember, Congress voted to retroactively legalize all this bullshit with the FISA bill in 2008...including the affirmative votes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton.

The circle is now complete. Smintheus at unbossed.com has much more.