Here is a gigantic hint that the "other" NSA program was spying on Washington itself

HamdenRice

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Thu Aug-02-07 07:09 AM
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Here is a gigantic hint that the "other" NSA program was spying on Washington itself

Former Clinton administration official Sidney Blumenthal (writing in the Guardian of London) and Steven Clemons, publisher of the popular political blog, TheWashingtonNote.com, being interviewed for DemocracyNow, long ago gave us a gigantic hint about what the other NSA scandal is -- namely, that we have almost conclusive circumstantial evidence that some administration officials (notably John Bolton) used the NSA to spy on other administration officials (notably Colin Powell). This evidence emerged during the doomed Bolton confirmation hearings. If they were spying on their own Secretary of State, doesn't it stand to reason that they were spying on other officials and congressional democrats? Here are some excerpts from Blumenthal and Clemons:

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

Blumenthal in the Guardian:

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?

Steve Clemons on Democracy Now:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/19/1348223

The more important, in my view, question is how John Bolton has so frequently been a loose cannon in American foreign policy. And these are the areas that I have tried to outline most, one of which you got into with the N.S.A. intercepts issue. The N.S.A. intercepts are intercepts that the National Security Agency -- these are our most secret, most secret secrets in the country, and John Bolton may have very well have been spying on other officials that he worked with to get a fix on not only what they were saying about policy, but what they were saying about him. And that is -- that is the big question that we don't have answered yet. But Senator Dodd is working very, very hard to explore the ten cases of N.S.A. intercepts that John Bolton pursued.

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