Members of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s staff have been in talks to start a new
Church Commission-style investigation of the Bush Administration for yet new details of its illegal National Security Agency domestic spying.
The parameters for an investigation were outlined in a seven-page memo, written after the former member of the Church Committee met for discussions with the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and other watchdog groups. Key issues to investigate, those involved say, would include the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance activities; the Central Intelligence Agency's use of extraordinary rendition and torture against terrorist suspects; and the U.S. government's extensive use of military assets — including satellites, Pentagon intelligence agencies and U2 surveillance planes — for a vast spying apparatus that could be used against the American people.
Specifically, the ACLU and other groups want to know how the NSA's use of databases and data mining may have meshed with other domestic intelligence activities, such as the U.S. government's extensive use of no-fly lists and the Treasury Departmen’'s list of “specially designated global terrorists” to identify potential suspects. As of mid-July, says (Barry) Steinhardt (of the ACLU), the no-fly list includes more than 1 million records corresponding to more than 400,000 names. If those people really represent terrorist threats, he says, “our cities would be ablaze.” A deeper investigation into intelligence abuses should focus on how these lists feed on each other, Steinhardt says, as well as the government's “inexorable trend towards treating everyone as a suspect.”
Chickenshit Note 1: If anything goes forward, it won’t be until after the elections and a new adminstration. Now, Dems, unless they are complete clusterfucks, will expand their Senate control significantly, and should expand their House control at least moderately.
BUT… what if Schmuck Talk Express™ wins the White House? Where does that leave Passive Pelosi™?
Chickenshit Note No. 2: How long has the ACLU been sitting on this? What guarantees can it and the other groups involved offer that Pelosi, et al, will really do something after we get into 2009?
Skeptics’ Note No. 1: Will Democrats limit their investigation to the Bush II years, in spite of this:
A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration's alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s (emphasis added) and known to government insiders as “Main Core,” the database reportedly collects and stores -- without warrants or court orders — the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.
Supposedly, Main Core was behind the threat by AG John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller to resign in 2004.
That said, how much did Clinton use it? Bush I? Reagan?
Page 2 of the story makes clear that the backbone of Main Core goes back to the Reagan Administration.
More confirmation:
Norman Bailey, a private financial consultant with years of government intelligence experience dating from the George W. Bush administration back to the Reagan administration, (saide) the NSA has been using its vast powers with signals intelligence to track financial transactions around the world since the early 1980s.
And, how bad is Main Core? This bad:
An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that “8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect” and, in the event of a national emergency, “could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention.”
Skeptics Note No. 1A: How long has the ACLU been sitting on THIS?
Skeptic’s Note No. 2: How much were the “four,” the leaders of both parties on Congressional intell committees, briefed about any of this? How much had they heard as rumors and how long ago?
Uhh, here’s your answer on that one — at least some Dems have been fairly in the know
FOR 20 YEARS, as
page 3 shows:
During the Iran-Contra congressional hearings in 1987, questions to Reagan aide Oliver North about the database were ruled out of order by the committee chairman, Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye, because of the "highly sensitive and classified" nature of FEMA's domestic security operations.
Now, the answer, on paper at least, to Skeptics’ Note. No. 1 is that the New Church Commission would go back before Bush II.
But, that said, will it go after Members of Congress from either party?
Hey, c’mon, you know better than that. Besides, those Democrats like Passive Pelosi™ and Obama already gave themselves an out. The new FISA bill’s retroactive immunity.
Opponents of Bush's policies were further angered when Democratic leaders stripped from their competing FISA bill a provision that would have established a national commission to investigate post-9/11 surveillance programs.
Meanwhile, nobody in Congress, not even Russ Feingold, is talking. Complicity, perhaps? That’s what Salon suggests. The story also suggests that Obama is unlikely to want to start his adminstration off this way.
