Bolton Testimony Revealed Domestic Spying

[kpete]

Bolton Testimony Revealed Domestic Spying
Submitted by davidswanson on Mon, 2006-01-02 10:43. Media
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report

This past spring, an explosive nugget of information slipped out during the confirmation hearings of John Bolton - nominated by President Bush to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations - that in hindsight should have blown the lid off Bush's four-year-old clandestine spy program involving the National Security Agency.



During one routine wiretap, the NSA obtained the name of a state department official whose name had been blacked out when the agency submitted its report to various federal agencies. Bolton's chief of staff, Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA official, revealed during the confirmation hearings that Bolton had requested that the NSA unmask the unidentified official. Fleitz said that when Bolton found out his identity, he congratulated the official, and by doing so he had violated the NSA's rules by discussing classified information contained in the wiretap.

In a letter to Gen. Michael Hayden, then the NSA's outgoing director, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Intelligence Committee's vice chairman said, "the NSA memorandum forwarding the requested identity to State (Intelligence and Research) included the following restriction: 'Request no further action be taken on this information without prior approval of NSA.' I have confirmed with the NSA that the phrase 'no further action' includes sharing the requested identity of U.S. persons with any individual not authorized by the NSA to receive the identity."

"In addition to being troubled that Mr. Bolton may have shared U.S. person identity information without required NSA approval," Rockefeller wrote, "I am concerned that the reason for sharing the information was not in keeping with Mr. Bolton's requested justification for the identity in the first place. The identity information was provided to Mr. Bolton based on the stated reason that he needed to know the identity in order to better under the foreign intelligence contained in the NSA report."
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/6240

[FloridaPat]

1. Another * toady broke the law. Why am I not suprised.

[bigtree]

2. you gotta add this to the reports that Scooter Libby was asking Bolton

for information about Valerie Plame. Why would Bolton, a State Dept. official, need a name, or anything else, from a NSA intercept?

[hang a left]

3. Did John congratulate him by throwing him out a window?

During one routine wiretap, the NSA obtained the name of a state department official whose name had been blacked out when the agency submitted its report to various federal agencies. Bolton's chief of staff, Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA official, revealed during the confirmation hearings that Bolton had requested that the NSA unmask the unidentified official. Fleitz said that when Bolton found out his identity, he congratulated the official, and by doing so he had violated the NSA's rules by discussing classified information contained in the wiretap.

[pushycat]

5. Fox News posted something about a man falling out a State

Dept window into a sunken parking lot while his wife waited for him. No shoes, no jacket, just a shirt and tie and pants...Can't find the link anymore but remember Fox News was only one to mention this that I ever saw.

[hang a left]

6. Kokal was the man's name.

There was a story in the Post about it buried on page Z666. Deemed a suicide from the get. Case closed.

[HereSince1628]

4. To me the question is what made this one a routine wiretap?

That Bolton misled NSA about his interest in the identity of the person is separate from Bush's warrantless wiretapping. It adds to the general the dimension that at least this one item of information gained by NSA wasn't used strictly as intelligence.

It begs the question of if and how Bolton ever interacted with state department personnel who during NSA wiretaps said things Boltont didn't find worthy of congratulations.

The question I have is how does wiretapping the state department relate to the general issue of warrantless NSA surveillance on US citizens? How is it that such wiretapping is seen as routine? Do such routine wiretaps require a warrant? If not under what authority is the wiretap conducted?

[Jara sang]

7. Bolton is a very important figure in Bush's Reich

He has some very seedy relationships and is shuffled around to seemingly innocuous postings in the secondary tier of the Federal government. My guess is that he is far more powerful than any of us suspect.