Hayden admits Bush political leaders trumped up WMD Intel

The main focus on today's confirmation hearings for Gen. Michael Hayden as Director of Central Intelligence have ostensibly been on the various and sundry NSA Scandals which have recently emerged, but Thinkprogress points out one section of his testimony which apparently cuts the Bush Admin to the quick on pre-Iraq War WMD claims.

Ever since AG Gonzales hinted during his Senate testimony that Bush may indeed have spied on domestic calls, the NSA have been an explosion waiting to go off. But Hayden's testimony today shows that the fuse has been quite a bit longer than previously foreseen.

Transcript:

Sen. LEVIN: Secretary of Defense for Policy, Mr. Feith, established an intelligence analysis, so within his policy office at the Defense Department. While the intelligence community was consistently dubious about links between Iraq and al Qaeda, Mr. Feith produced an alternative analysis asserting that there was a strong connection. Were you comfortable with Mr. Feith's office approach to intelligence analysis?

HAYDEN: No, sir, I wasn't. I wasn't aware of a lot of the activity going on, you know, when it was contemporaneous with running up to the war. No, sir, I wasn't comfortable.

Further commentary by Thinkprogress

What Hayden makes clear is that, despite Bush's assertion that the pre-war intelligence process "broke down," the false intelligence about Iraq's connection to al Qaeda was intentionally fabricated by political leaders, not intelligence analysts. Feith, Wolfowitz, and others in the Pentagon set up a stovepipe "to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership" to make the case for war. Hayden and other intelligence experts got steamrolled when it mattered most.

As has been repeatedly noted it was not a case where intelligence analyst had to be "intimidated" into changing their view -- people like Feith were running their own independent intelligence operation through the Defense Intelligence Agency and portions of the State Department. These people were intent to find the evidence they wanted and use each an every scrap they located - no matter how dubious it might have been - to promote the story that Iraq was an imminent threat.

This yet again shows why Sen. Pat Roberts has been delaying the Phase II portion of the WMD/intelligence investigation for over two years. It's why both the Robb-Silberman Commission and previous Senate investigations were prohibited from asking this very question -- the Administration already knows the answer.

Whether the various and sundries Special Access NSA programs currently underway are legal or not remain a hot topic. AT&T's attorney argues that they received a Special Letter from the Attorney General which legally authorized their cooperation in lieu of a Warrant. This is quite interesting since it appears the NSA refused to do exactly the same thing for QWEST when they asked for it.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. Attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events

This diary here points out how the NSA actually already had a more effective and much more responsible Clinton era program in place prior to 9/11, but that program was shutdown by -- General Michael Hayden.

As reported by the Baltimore Sun

WASHINGTON // The National Security Agency developed a pilot program in the late 1990s that would have enabled it to gather and analyze massive amounts of communications data without running afoul of privacy laws. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, it shelved the project -- not because it failed to work -- but because of bureaucratic infighting and a sudden White House expansion of the agency's surveillance powers, according to several intelligence officials.

The program the NSA rejected, called ThinThread, was developed to handle greater volumes of information, partly in expectation of threats surrounding the millennium celebrations. Sources say it bundled together four cutting-edge surveillance tools. ThinThread would have:

* Used more sophisticated methods of sorting through massive phone and e-mail data to identify suspect communications.

* Identified U.S. Phone numbers and other communications data and encrypted them to ensure caller privacy.

* Employed an automated auditing system to monitor how analysts handled the information, in order to prevent misuse and improve efficiency.

* Analyzed the data to identify relationships between callers and chronicle their contacts. Only when evidence of a potential threat had been developed would analysts be able to request decryption of the records.

An agency spokesman declined to discuss NSA operations.

Feel free to send any wingnut acquaintances you have this Baltimore Sun story whenever they claim - "We can't abide by the strict letter of the law and fight al Qaeda at the same time" or "Clinton did nothing to fight terrorism".

It may be very well that Hayden was "uncomfortable" with this decision just as he was with the actions of Feith et al in the pre-Iraq War run-up - but being a good little soldier, he did what he was ordered to do by his superiors (i.e. Cheney and Bush) He may be fairly candid now during his confirmation hearings, but he's also made it quite clear that he will do whatever it is that the Commander-in-Chief requires of him.

A pure "Yes, man" through and through - just like (General) Colin Powell who permanently shredded his own credibility for all time with his command performance before the UN in 2002.

Let us recall just another reason why Qwest was reluctant to participate in this program:

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information -- known as "product" in intelligence circles, -- with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

This naturally explains the thousands of bogus leads that the FBI was complaining about in January.

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency, which was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic, that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. Some FBI officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

So we have the scenario that prior to the Iraq War the Bush Administration threw out good intelligence (such as Joe Wilson's) in favor of bad intelligence, a fact that has also been confirmed by 27 Year CIA vet Ray McGovern, former Colin Powell Chief of Staff Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, State Dept Intelligence Analyst Greg Theilman, former Pentagon Special Plans Aid Lt. Col Karen Kwaitkowski, former European CIA chief Tyler Drumheller and former CIA intelligence Officer Paul Pillar.

This is a clear and obvious pattern of behavior on their part and there no reasonable indication that it's going to end anytime soon. These issues (poor WMD intel and the avoidance of FISA) are linked by the same dangerous extralegal pathology.

In his response to the Hayden hearings so far, Christy at Firedoglake points to comments by Bruce Fein which seem to bear repeating.

The Bush Administration is doing everything it can to prevent any of the illegally collected data and information from being used in any courtroom context, because they do not want to have to face the consequences of a constitutional challenge to their failure to obtain a lawful warrant. Think about that for a moment -- Bruce Fein is no liberal, he is a very conservative Reagan Republican, having worked in the DoJ as Deputy Attorney General in the Reagan Administration.

And he is saying, out loud, that the Bush White House is avoiding constitutional scrutiny because they know -- they KNOW -- they will be shown to be what they are. Lawbreakers.

They realize that everything they've done to skirt the law and bypass judicial scrutiny would present them with a massive fruits of the poison tree catastrophe in a court of law. If the NSA is sharing it's data with the FBI - and we know damn well they are - they can not present that evidence in court, or even acknowledge that they used illegally gathered evidence to target a specific individual without that case being tossed out of the court on it's ear.

This road only leads one direction.

They simply aren't going to take these cases to court, except for "show trials" like Moussuaoui. They're going to use the FBI to do surveillance - then if they decide on a whim that the situation is serious enough, perform a rendition followed by indefinite detention of that subject - even if they happen to be an American Citizen - to the secret military gulag of their worst nightmare for a little bit of the ole' waterboarding. Without judicial review. Without trial. Without appeal. Without oversight. Without hope.

This is not a hypothetical, there are strong indications that it's already been happening -- and if it did, the last thing that would happen would be a paper trail.

The likelihood of them doing this to the "right" person is about as strong as the possibility that we're going to finally find those mobile labs "North, South, East and West somewhat of Tikrit and Baghdad" almost three years after the fact.

They invaded the Wrong Fucking Country for Christ sake... you think they're really going to care if they capture the wrong terrorist suspects?

The sad part is that this is pretty much common knowledge at this point -- and the resulting outrage (outside of highly Democratic circles) is practically nonexistent. This is how the Wingnut Brigade fights terrorism - no holds barred and wiping their ass with the Constitution as they storm through, Jackboots akimbo.

What and who are they going to mistake for an imminent threat next?

And how many more innocent people will suffer for it while the real terrorist laugh at our continued ineptitude?

[Update: Even short of my admittedly worst case scenario of unchecked renditions of American Citizens above, there is also the very real danger of thousands of FBI Files that have been generated from this practice. Remember when the Clinton White House inadvertently gained access to a several hundred FBI files due to a Secret Service Screwup? (They had used an out of date White House Access List) Magnify that situation by the order of thousands! Filegate: dogged the Clinton's for years with allegations that they planned to use these files against their political rivals - well guess whose got the files now, and just who are their rivals? That's right kiddies - Quakers, Peace-Mongers, Greenpeace, War Protestors, Journalist, Congress, and y'know - US!)

Vyan