Connect NSA Wiretapping dots -- Bolton used NSA to spy on Powell

[HamdenRice]

There are lots of rumors and innuendo in the mainstream media that the NSA data mining operation is bigger and more illegal than the current story suggests.

But the media don't really need inside sources and leakers to tell them where that story leads; all they need is a memory that goes back more than a year or so.

Remember when John Bolton was nominated for his current post as US ambassador to the United Nations, and State Department personnel came out of the woodwork to tell what a creep he was?

Well around that same time, a few mainstream sources also reported that Bolton was using NSA intercepts of Secretary of State Colin Powell's conversations in order to undermine his policies. And of course, Michael Hayden was head of the NSA and would have approved this illegal surveillance of top Bush administration officials by other officials.

More broadly, it was alleged, the Pentagon neo cons were using NSA intercepts to undermine their archrivals at the State Department, for example here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1471879,00.html

<quote>

The Bolton confirmation hearings have revealed his constant efforts to undermine Powell on Iran and Iraq, Syria and North Korea. They have also exposed a most curious incident that has triggered the administration's stonewall reflex. The foreign relations committee has discovered that Bolton made a highly unusual request and gained access to 10 intercepts by the National Security Agency, which monitors worldwide communications, of conversations involving past and present government officials. Whose conversations did Bolton secretly secure and why?

Staff members on the committee believe that Bolton was probably spying on Powell, his senior advisers and other officials reporting to him on diplomatic initiatives that Bolton opposed. If so, it is also possible that Bolton was sharing this top-secret information with his neoconservative allies within the Pentagon and the vice-president's office, with whom he was in daily contact and who were known to be working in league against Powell.

If the intercepts are released they may disclose whether Bolton was a key figure in a counter-intelligence operation run inside the Bush administration against the secretary of state, who would resemble the hunted character played by Will Smith in Enemy of the State. Both Republican and Democratic senators have demanded that the state department, which holds the NSA intercepts, turn them over to the committee. But Rice so far has refused. What is she hiding by her cover-up?

<end quote>

So we already know where this scandal leads: Michael Hayden was allowing NSA intercepts to be used against political opponents of the neocons within the administration. And you can make a pretty good guess that if they were using NSA intercepts of members of their own administration, they were also using them against opponents outside the administration.