Still No Kitty Litter In Sight
More information on the TIA post below from an unnamed source talking to CNN: Former U.S. official: Gonzales ‘splitting hairs’ in testimony
WASHINGTON (CNN) — A dispute within the Bush administration in 2004 over a secret surveillance program centered on data mining, not eavesdropping, a former government official told CNN Sunday.
The distinction, first reported by the New York Times Sunday, is critical because it will likely be at the heart of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ defense against allegations by Democrats that he committed perjury in sworn Senate testimony about the controversy.
Gonzales testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee last week there was no domestic surveillance — something President Bush reiterated to the nation in late 2005.
At that time, the president acknowledged the National Security Agency had been conducting eavesdropping without warrants, but stopped short of acknowledging searches through databases of information picked up by the surveillance. The president has still not acknowledged the details of these kinds of searches.
So they went out and hoovered up all this information, but they didn’t look at it, or they won’t admit they looked at it because is was illegal to hoover it up in the first place, but they didn’t really violate any other laws, or something like that.
They need the guy at the circus who follows the elephant parades to stand by in the committee rooms when these people testify.
2 comments
It’s so amazing when you crack open this incestuously inturned neocon cabal and find out how hard they have worked to persuade each other that they are doing these illegal acts for the good of their … country… cabal. That the end result will make them triumphant and all-powerful. That all will be forgiven when they make America into their own image.
And all we see is pasty white sweaty kids hiding under a blanket and swearing blood oaths…
I guess they think it’s not illegal if someone else happens to give them a database, someone like the phone company, because they didn’t collect it personally.
I read that Hayden claims that NSA didn’t do it, which I read as the people in the NSA building using NSA equipment, weren’t not actually transfered to NSA administrative control when they were doing it. This means their salaries were coming from somebody else’s budget.