SALON

Friday, Jul 10, 2009 7:10 PM UTC

Report: Bush’s surveillance program larger than previously thought

The previous administration's surveillance was even more extensive than we'd known, and DOJ didn't like it

By

Topics: FISA, Terrorism, War Room,

Report: Bush's surveillance program larger than previously thought

When Congress passed its amendments to our surveillance laws a year ago, part of the compromise — much-criticized among liberals — required the inspectors general of a number of federal agencies to review the warrantless wiretapping programs. Now, a year later, the report is complete, and has been partially declassified.

Though we can’t get anything like a complete picture because so much is still classified, the report says that the program exceeded the warrantless wiretapping we already knew about. The IGs use the term “President’s Surveillance Program” to encompass the full monitoring effort.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder has a good run-down of key nuggets from the report. Most notably, at the urging of Vice President Cheney, President Bush recertified the program without the consent of the Department of Justice, outraging Deputy Attorney General James Comey. In fact, for two years, no one in the DOJ who ranked below deputy attorney general even knew about the program, with one exception: John Yoo, who was somewhat mysteriously tasked with writing legal opinions in defense of the operation. (Indeed, Ambinder says, it’s not even clear that then-Attorney General John Ashcroft knew that Yoo was providing the department’s legal opinions on the program.)

The surveillance operation appears to have been quite large, because random sampling was used, rather than case-by-case examination, to make sure that it was monitoring appropriately suspicious targets. Senior intelligence officials were unsure whether the surveillance had led to any arrests, but the IGs seem to believe it did.

President Obama probably isn’t thrilled that the compromise, for which he caught so much flak, hasn’t put the issue to bed. Judging by his performance thus far on sensitive constitutional and national security issues, we can probably expect him to try to avoid getting too involved in the impact of this report, though it may affect some terrorism prosecutions.

Continue Reading Close

Gabriel Winant is a graduate student in American history at Yale. More Gabriel Winant.

Next Article

Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

What To Read Awards: Top 10 Books of 2012 slide show

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10
  • 10. "The Guardians" by Sarah Manguso: "Though Sarah Manguso’s 'The Guardians' is specifically about losing a dear friend to suicide, she pries open her intelligent heart to describe our strange, sad modern lives. I think about the small resonating moments of Manguso’s narrative every day." -- M. Rebekah Otto, The Rumpus

  • 9. "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter: "'Beautiful Ruins' leads my list because it's set on the coast of Italy in 1962 and Richard Burton makes an entirely convincing cameo appearance. What more could you want?" -- Maureen Corrigan, NPR's "Fresh Air"

  • 8. "Arcadia" by Lauren Groff: "'Arcadia' captures our painful nostalgia for an idyllic past we never really had." -- Ron Charles, Washington Post

  • 7. "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn: "When a young wife disappears on the morning of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband becomes the automatic suspect in this compulsively readable thriller, which is as rich with sardonic humor and social satire as it is unexpected plot twists." -- Marjorie Kehe, Christian Science Monitor

  • 6. "How Should a Person Be" by Sheila Heti: "There was a reason this book was so talked about, and it’s because Heti has tapped into something great." -- Jason Diamond, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

  • 4. TIE "NW" by Zadie Smith and "Far From the Tree" by Andrew Solomon: "Zadie Smith’s 'NW' is going to enter the canon for the sheer audacity of the book’s project." -- Roxane Gay, New York Times "'Far From the Tree' by Andrew Solomon is, to my mind, a life-changing book, one that's capable of overturning long-standing ideas of identity, family and love." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 3. "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" by Ben Fountain: "'Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk' says a lot about where we are today," says Marjorie Kehe of the Christian Science Monitor. "Pretty much the whole point of that novel," adds Time's Lev Grossman.

  • 2. "Bring Up the Bodies" by Hilary Mantel: "Even more accomplished than the preceding novel in this sequence, 'Wolf Hall,' Mantel's new installment in the fictionalized life of Thomas Cromwell -- master secretary and chief fixer to Henry VIII -- is a high-wire act, a feat of novelistic derring-do." -- Laura Miller, Salon

  • 1. "Behind the Beautiful Forevers" by Katherine Boo: "Like the most remarkable literary nonfiction, it reads with the bite of a novel and opens up a corner of the world that most of us know absolutely nothing about. It stuck with me all year." -- Eric Banks, president of the National Book Critics Circle

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 10

Related Videos

More Related Stories

Comments

 23 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( profile | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

From Around the Web

Recommendations