Clinton Never Ordered Warrentless Wiretaps

[Nbadan]

Former President Clinton said Thursday that he never ordered wiretaps of American citizens without obtaining a court order, as President Bush has acknowledged he has done.

Clinton, in an interview broadcast Thursday on the ABC News program ''Nightline,'' said his administration either received court approval before authorizing a wiretap or went to court within three days after to get permission, as required by law.

St. Louis Tribune

When asked if the president should have cons utional authority to order domestic surveillance without a warrant during wartime — a controversy President Bush currently faces — Clinton said it is "a decision the Supreme Court would have to resolve."

"My at ude was that once the Congress had spoken on it and given us the tools that we needed, we used it," he said. "We used the law. We either went there and asked for the approval or, if there was an emergency and we had to do it beforehand, then we filed within three days afterward and gave them a chance to second guess it, because I thought it was a good — I think in the country you always have to try to balance these things out, so that's what we did."...

Now you know why the Alito nomination is so important to the NeoCons.

[xrayzebra]

St. Louis Tribune

When asked if the president should have cons utional authority to order domestic surveillance without a warrant during wartime — a controversy President Bush currently faces — Clinton said it is "a decision the Supreme Court would have to resolve."

"My at ude was that once the Congress had spoken on it and given us the tools that we needed, we used it," he said. "We used the law. We either went there and asked for the approval or, if there was an emergency and we had to do it beforehand, then we filed within three days afterward and gave them a chance to second guess it, because I thought it was a good — I think in the country you always have to try to balance these things out, so that's what we did."...

Now you know why the Alito nomination is so important to the NeoCons.

Did he mention that he authorized a warrantless search of private
residence? And we all know Clinton never lies, don't we.

[Oh, Gee!!]

Actually it was government housing

[xrayzebra]

Actually it was government housing

A man's castle is a man's castle. What I say!

Does that mean that Clinton broke the law then, when he got a blow job
in a government building. Might call it misuse of government property.
I don't think the Presidents office was meant to be used as a cat house.
Although he was conducting government business on one occasion if
I remember correctly.

[boutons_]

Alito is clearly favors ins utions against individuals.

May all of your red-staters be ed over by an ins ution empowered to you over by Alito's swing votes.

[xrayzebra]

Alito is clearly favors ins utions against individuals.

May all of your red-staters be ed over by an ins ution empowered to you over by Alito's swing votes.

I know boutons, here is just another example of how the Repugs are taking
over everything. Isn't it just sad. I wished we still had the Dimm-o-craps
in there. They were so fair and even handed. It is that the keep voting
and getting their representatives elected. That cheating if I ever saw it,
now isn't it. There ought to be a law against Republicans voting.

[Yonivore]

“If you made a phone call today or sent an e-mail to a friend, there’s a good chance what you said or wrote was captured and screened by the country’s largest intelligence agency.”

No, that isn't a teaser for an upcoming "60 Minutes," those words were aired on February 27, 2000 to describe the National Security Agency and an electronic surveillance program called Echelon whose mission, according to Kroft,...

“...is to eavesdrop on enemies of the state: foreign countries, terrorist groups and drug cartels. But in the process, Echelon’s computers capture virtually every electronic conversation around the world.”

Echelon was, or is, an electronic eavesdropping program conducted by the United States and a few select allies such as the United Kingdom. At that time, the New York Times called the surveillance “a necessity.”

Tellingly, the existence of the program was confirmed not by the New York Times or the Washington Post or by any other American media outlet – these were the Clinton years, after all - but, by an Australian government official in a statement made to an Australian television news show.

The Times actually defended the existence of Echelon when it reported on the program following the Australians’ revelations.

“Few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers and terrorists….”

And the Times article quoted an N.S.A. official in assuring readers

“...that all Agency activities are conducted in accordance with the highest cons utional, legal and ethical standards.”

Of course, that was on May 27, 1999 and Bill Clinton, not George W. Bush, was president.

Even so, the article did admit that

“...many are concerned that the system could be abused to collect economic and political information.”

Despite the Times’ reluctance to emphasize those concerns, one of the sources used in their article, Patrick Poole, a lecturer in government and economics at Bannock Burn College in Franklin, Tenn., had already concluded in a study cited by the Times story that the program had been abused in both ways.

“ECHELON is also being used for purposes well outside its original mission. The regular discovery of domestic surveillance targeted at American civilians for reasons of ‘unpopular’ political affiliation or for no probable cause at all… What was once designed to target a select list of communist countries and terrorist states is now indiscriminately directed against virtually every citizen in the world."

The Times article also referenced a European Union report on Echelon. The report was conducted after E.U. members became concerned that their citizens’ rights may have been violated. One of the revelations of that study was that the N.S.A. used partner countries’ intelligence agencies to routinely cir vent legal restrictions against domestic spying.

“For example, [author Nicky] Hager has described how New Zealand officials were instructed to remove the names of identifiable UKUSA citizens or companies from their reports, inserting instead words such as ‘a Canadian citizen’ or ‘a US company’. British Comint [Communications intelligence] staff have described following similar procedures in respect of US citizens following the introduction of legislation to limit NSA’s domestic intelligence activities in 1978.”

Further, the E.U. report concluded that intelligence agencies did not feel particularly constrained by legal restrictions requiring search warrants.

“Comint agencies conduct broad international communications ‘trawling’ activities, and operate under general warrants. Such operations do not require or even suppose that the parties they intercept are criminals.”

The current controversy follows a Times report that, since 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies are eavesdropping at any time on up to 500 people in the U.S. suspected of conducting international communications with terrorists. Under Echelon, the Clinton administration was spying on just about everyone.

“The US National Security Agency (NSA) has created a global spy system, codename ECHELON, which captures and analyzes virtually every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world."

According to an April, 2000 article in PC World magazine, experts who studied Echelon concluded that...

“Project Echelon’s equipment can process 1 million message inputs every 30 minutes.”

In the February, 2000 60 Minutes story, former spy Mike Frost made clear that Echelon monitored practically every conversation – no matter how seemingly innocent – during the Clinton years.

Mike Frost: “A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a-a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, ‘Oh, Danny really bombed last night,’ just like that. The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation w-was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist.”

Steve Kroft: “This is not urban legend you’re talking about. This actually happened?”

Mike Frost: “Factual. Absolutely fact. No legend here.”

Even as the Times defended Echelon as “a necessity” in 1999, evidence already existed that electronic surveillance had previously been misused by the Clinton Administration for political purposes. Intelligence officials told Insight Magazine in 1997 that a 1993 conference of Asian and Pacific world leaders hosted by Clinton in Seattle had been spied on by U.S. intelligence agencies. Further, the magazine reported that information obtained by the spying had been passed on to big Democrat corporate donors to use against their compe ors. The Insight story added that the mis-use of the surveillance for political reasons caused the intelligence sources to reveal the operation.

“The only reason it has come to light is because of concerns raised by high-level sources within federal law-enforcement and intelligence circles that the operation was compromised by politicians—includingmid- and senior-level White House aides—either on behalf of or in support of President Clinton and major donor-friends who helped him and the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, raise money.”

So, during the Clinton Administration, evidence existed that:

• an invasive, extensive domestic eavesdropping program was aimed at every U.S. citizen;
  
  
• intelligence agencies were using allies to cir vent cons utional restrictions;
  
  
• and the administration was selling at least some secret intelligence for political donations.

These revelations were met by the New York Times and others in the mainstream media by the sound of one hand clapping. Now, reports that the Bush Administration approved electronic eavesdropping, strictly limited to international communications, of a relative handful of suspected terrorists have created a media frenzy in the Times and elsewhere.

[Vashner]

You and or the media checked every Top Secret do ent from the Clinton Admin? Give me a ing break...

[Yonivore]

You and or the media checked every Top Secret do ent from the Clinton Admin? Give me a ing break...

Let me change that...you're satisfied with anonymous sources quoted in the New York Times now...but not named sources when Clinton was doing something far worse than what Bush is accused of?

[mookie2001]

the NeoCons.

those crooked gerrymandering snow skiing neocons

[gtownspur]

Hey someone start a thread with "OJ did not kill Nicole Brown Simpson"

Source: OJ.

"NO i did not kill anyone or that matter on that night"-OJ

And this my freinds is NBAdan Scholarly research 101.

[Vashner]

Clinton didn't even go to NYC after the 1st bombing attempt anyway...

Did you expect him to wiretap... or tap that ass?

He was busying Tapping that ass.

[gtownspur]

He didn't even get to tapp that ass. He only got head and raped a subordinate.

[gtownspur]

I can see the next NbaDan post...


Bill Clinton did not have sexual Relations with Monica


source: Bill Clinton.

[SA210]

or STRAIGHT FROM CHENEY

[Vashner]

That pic of President Sheen is hilarious...

[Nbadan]

ECHELON wasn't created by President Clinton, it's been around since WW2 as a way for the USUK Alliance to monitor communications of East-bloc governments. The United States, with its vast array of spy satellites and listening posts, monitors most of Latin America, Asia, Asiatic Russia and northern China. Britain listens in on Europe and Russia west of the Urals as well as Africa. Australia hunts for communications originating in Indochina, Indonesia and southern China. New Zealand sweeps the western Pacific.

The limits of a large system such as ECHELON are defined by its very size. Though the system intercepts 3 billion communications daily, clients must know which intercepted communications to monitor before they can realize an intelligence advantage. For example, in the months before the September 11 attacks on the United States, signal intelligence produced by ECHELON developed considerable "chatter", or snippets of dialogue, that suggested some sort of attack was imminent. Analysts were unable to pin down the details of the attack, though, because operatives planning the attack relied largely on non-electronic communications. Even overt signals, such as a dramatic increase in trading activity of stock options on companies that were to be damaged in the attacks, failed to alert analysts, apparently because they did not know where within the daily deluge of electronic messages to look, much less how to connect the dots pointing to a specific attack.

Before the September 11, 2001 attacks and the legislation which followed it, US intelligence agencies were generally prohibited from spying on people inside the US and other western countries' intelligence services generally faced similar restrictions within their own countries. There are allegations, however, that ECHELON and the UKUSA alliance were used to cir vent these restrictions by, for example, having the UK facilities spy on people inside the US and the US facilites spy on people in the UK, with the agencies exchanging data (perhaps even automatically through the ECHELON system without human intervention).

The proposed US-only "Total Information Awareness" program relied on technology similar to ECHELON, and was to integrate the extensive sources it is legally permitted to survey domestically, with the "taps" already compiled by ECHELON. It was cancelled by the U.S. Congress in 2004.

It has been alleged that in 2002 the Bush Administration extended the ECHELON program to domestic surveillance. This controversy was the subject of the New York Times eavesdropping exposé of December, 2005.

Wikipedia

[xrayzebra]

ECHELON wasn't created by President Clinton, it's been around since WW2 as a way for the USUK Alliance to monitor communications of East-bloc governments. The United States, with its vast array of spy satellites and listening posts, monitors most of Latin America, Asia, Asiatic Russia and northern China. Britain listens in on Europe and Russia west of the Urals as well as Africa. Australia hunts for communications originating in Indochina, Indonesia and southern China. New Zealand sweeps the western Pacific.



Wikipedia

Gee, Dan is soooooooo smart. He just knows soooooo much. I wonder
how he does that with his head in the sand?

[Vashner]

Clinton's signature is on a huge bunch of stacks of stuff all over the place that's classified. It comes with the job.

Bottom like.. NBA is ing wrong again just like every other stupid ass liberal link he posts. Sure he got to masturbate on Bush again like he does about 3-4 times a day. But this post accomplished nothing.

The more they step in the deeper they become (Demorats).

[Yonivore]

Gee, Dan is soooooooo smart. He just knows soooooo much. I wonder
how he does that with his head in the sand?

Thanks for posting Nbadan's response.

Hey, Dan...the NSA existed before George W. Bush was President but, that's not hte issue. It's how each President used those resources that is in question.

I think the Barrett report will shed some light.

[lectrik]

I think the Barrett report will shed some light.

You mean the report the Dim-O-Crats®, Bill Clinton and his wife, the Oinkubus are trying to quash?

[Nbadan]

You mean David Barrett, the inpendent counsel that was originally created to Investigate HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros (who was pardoned long ago by Clinton), and has cost taxpayers millions of dollars with his generational, boon-doogle investigation?



Yeah, I'm looking forward to those findings.

[Nbadan]

By the way, the reason the Barrett report won't be published anytime soon is because it would destroy Neo-lib Hillary Clinton's chances in 08', and the NeoCons who control the Republican Party won't ever allow that.

[gtownspur]

^THat's the most assinine excuse of a conspiracy theory ever posted. I think dale from king of the hill is light years ahead in you're dept.

[lectrik]

Last Independent Counsel Report Set For 'Release'; Focus On Clinton Administration
Sun Jan 15 2006 19:35:32 2006

In Monday's edition of the NEW YORK SUN, reporter Brian McGuire and contributor R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., break the first look at the long-anticipated report from Independent Counsel David Barrett, whose investigation lasted 10 year and cost taxpayers $23 million.

The SUN outlines the report's details surrounding the alleged illicit activity and cover up that involving former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros before and during his time in the Clinton Administration.

The Sun reveals that the Barrett report connects the dots that allege that senior officials of the Clinton Administration hindered investigations by the IRS in both Texas and Washington, as well as the investigations of a grand jury examining the independent counsel's evidence.

The full report, more than 400 pages line, with more than 100 pages of redacted material, hits the street on Thursday morning at 9 am.

Democrats in the House and Senate have been fighting for months to block the release of the report and keep the 100 pages of highly damaging redacted material from ever seeing the light of day.