Banana Republic
by digby
What’s with all the military spying inside the US? Maybe the Pentagon ought to spend more time gathering intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan and leave the spying on US citizens to the FBI, DHS, INS, DEA, ATF and state and local police agencies. I think they can handle the illegal wiretapping, mailreading and bank account tracking all by themselves.
Here’s another troubling sign:
Deep into an updated Army manual, the deletion of 10 words has left some national security experts wondering whether government lawyers are again asserting the executive branch’s right to wiretap Americans without a court warrant.
The manual, described by the Army as a “major revision” to intelligence-gathering guidelines, addresses policies and procedures for wiretapping Americans, among other issues.
The original guidelines, from 1984, said the Army could seek to wiretap people inside the United States on an emergency basis by going to the secret court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, or by obtaining certification from the attorney general “issued under the authority of section 102(a) of the Act.”
That last phrase is missing from the latest manual, which says simply that the Army can seek emergency wiretapping authority pursuant to an order issued by the FISA court “or upon attorney general authorization.” It makes no mention of the attorney general doing so under FISA.
Bush administration officials said that the wording change was insignificant, adding that the Army would follow FISA requirements if it sought to wiretap an American.
But the manual’s language worries some national security experts. “The administration does not get to make up its own rules,” said Steven Aftergood, who runs a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists.
[…]
Like several other national security experts, Mr. Aftergood said the revised guidelines could suggest that Army lawyers had adopted the legal claim that the executive branch had authority outside the courts to conduct wiretaps.
But Thomas A. Gandy, a senior Army counterintelligence official who helped develop the guidelines, said the new wording did not suggest a policy change. The guidelines were intended to give Army intelligence personnel more explicit and, in some cases, more restrictive guidance than the 1984 regulations, partly to help them respond to new threats like computer hackers.
“This is all about doing right and following the rules and protecting the civil liberties of folks,” Mr. Gandy said. “It seeks to keep people out of trouble.”
And up is down and black is white.
This is bureaucratic buck passing that keeps the military perpetrators out of trouble by leaving the full responsibility with the Attorney General who they consider to be the unitary law enforcement officer of the unitary executive who claims unlimited power to wiretap without any kind of oversight. That would be how “doing right” is defined in our brave new world.
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