Rockefeller wrote letter to Cheney two years ago about NSA spying

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A glimpse inside the supersecret world of intel
Rockefeller letter exposes concern about ‘checks and balances’

ANALYSIS
By Ken Strickland
NBC News producer
Updated: 11:56 a.m. ET Dec. 20, 2005


WASHINGTON - Who knows how many times West Virginia's Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has sat on his hands or held his tongue about how our country gathers intelligence in the war on terror. But on Saturday, when President Bush acknowledged a highly classified domestic spying program, Rockefeller was liberated and spoke out against it.

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But membership also has its burdens. The "gang" — Republican Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas and Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan and Democrats Rockefeller and Rep. Jane Harman of California — is virtually gagged from discussing anything from meetings with anyone outside the group — not even other senators, staffers or lawyers with security clearance on the intelligence committees. “You can't discuss it with anybody as long as you live,” Rockefeller said Monday.

And for Rockefeller and Harmon, the senior Democrats on the Senate and House intelligence committees, respectively, membership can be even more problematic. If they want to object to anything the administration is doing, they're forbidden from doing so publicly.


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Rockefeller was annoyed. “They're just saying we're all briefed and informed and they implied implicit consent and all the rest of that and it's totally untrue,” he recounted outside the Senate chamber after Bush's news conference. He said the impression the administration was leaving was “totally phony.”

But once the president acknowledged — and defended — the classified program, it became unclassified. Rockefeller was then able to go back to a secure space in the Senate Intelligence Committee's offices and retrieve a handwritten letter he'd given to the Vice President Dick Cheney more than two years ago.

“I am retaining a copy of this letter in a sealed envelope,” the letter said, “to ensure that I have a record of this communication.”

(pdf of letter)
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/sections/news/030717_Rockefeller_Intell_Letter.pdf

Rockefeller's letter
The letter was written in the summer of 2003, just after Rockefeller had been made vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. It was his first meeting with the “heavy hitters.” The NSA program came up “and I just said I had some concerns.”

more...

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10544654/