Their letter to the president is particularly self-serving for three of the directors (Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, and George Tenet), who would presumably be the subject of any investigation, and simply self-aggrandizing for the others (John Deutch, James Woolsey, William Webster, and James Schlesinger), whose stewardship of the CIA since the early 1970s has contributed to the Agency’s loss of influence and credibility.

The key to managing a complex organization such as the CIA is based on the integrity and competence of the director and his senior management. These traits were certainly lacking during the two decades these “magnificent seven” were at the helm.

The letter itself represents a stunning display of irrelevance and wrong-headedness. The former directors argue, for example, that any reopened investigation would damage the intelligence community’s ability to obtain cooperation of foreign intelligence agencies.

In fact, the opposite is the case. Foreign intelligence agencies have been holding back their liaison activities and their cooperation with the CIA because of the crimes associated with secret prisons, torture and abuse, and extraordinary renditions. It is quite unbelievable that CIA leaders decided to compromise the governments and intelligence services of the European community by locating secret prisons and using logistical facilities within their borders. It is very unlikely that any member of the European Union will cooperate with such CIA activities in the future.

The seven directors argue predictably that career prosecutors have already investigated the relevant cases where “Agency officers appeared to have acted beyond their existing legal authorities,” but with the exception of a prosecution of a CIA contractor there was a determination that prosecutions were not warranted. They do not mention that a political appointee in the Bush administration, Paul McNulty, was responsible for these decisions and they do not refer to the unconscionable politicization of the Bush administration’s Justice Department.

Finally, the letter argues that any criminal investigation would “seriously damage the willingness” of intelligence officers to “take risks to protect the country.”

This is arrant nonsense! One of the reasons why the CIA had to resort to independent contractors, particularly former military officers and enlisted men, to staff secret prisons and conduct torture and abuse was because of the opposition of professional intelligence officers to the policies of the Bush administration. An investigation would not compromise the national security interests of the United States, although it would cause grave embarrassment to those who carried out these policies and would perhaps guarantee that these actions would never again be permitted.

It is also worthwhile to examine those individuals who signed the letter to the president.  Jim Schlesinger abolished the Office of National Estimates, the most prestigious Agency department for intelligence analysis, because of its independence and created a group of National Intelligence Officers who would be more responsive to the policy demands of the White House and the National Security Council.

Upon arrival at the CIA in 1973, he assembled the CIA’s Soviet analysts and told them to “stop fucking Richard Nixon.” Judge William Webster obstructed the Walsh investigation of Iran-Contra, particularly the case against a high-ranking operations officer who was responsible for illegal arms deliveries to the Contras. The officer was indicted by a Grand Jury for making false statements and obstructing the investigations of the CIA’s Inspector General as well as the work of the Tower Commission, but the case was dismissed after Webster refused to release necessary documents.

Jim Woolsey and John Deutch were short-lived directors who weakened the Agency’s role in collecting intelligence and conducting analysis in the key fields of arms control and international terrorism. Woolsey’s unwillingness to punish any of the eleven senior officers who were responsible for allowing Aldrich Ames, the notorious long-spy for the Soviet Union, to move into sensitive clandestine positions over a ten-year period led the Clinton administration to force his resignation.

Deutch’s security breaches at the CIA included the compromise of the most sensitive clandestine operations of the directorate of operations.  Deutch had introduced sensitive intelligence to his home computer that had been used for accessing pornographic sites, but he blamed others in the household for the compromise.

Tenet, Goss, and Hayden were directly involved in the decision-making that led to the creation of secret prisons in Europe, Southwest Asia, and the Far East; the use of torture and abuse; and the rendition of individuals who were guilty of no crimes against the United States. Tenet, moreover, was directly responsible for the false intelligence given to the White House to support the use of force authorization against Iraq in 2002 as well as the phony speech given by Secretary of State Colin Powell to the United Nations in 2003.

Goss worked assiduously to cover-up the 9/11 accountability report of the CIA’s Inspector General. His handpicked executive secretary, the third highest position at the CIA, was Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who is currently serving a jail sentence for steering Agency contracts to a lifelong friend who bribed former congressman Randall “Duke” Cunningham.

Hayden entered the CIA under a cloud because, as director of the National Security Agency, he approved the warrantless eavesdropping program that began after 9/11.  And he left the CIA under a cloud this year because of his success in compromising the work of the Office of the Inspector General.

President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder must ignore the efforts of the former CIA directors and many others to find the truths that would be part of any investigation of activities that went beyond any legal authority. Twenty-five years ago, CIA director William Casey tried to cover-up crimes that were committed in the remote El Salvadoran village of El Mozote. Eventually the Salvadoran government established a Truth Commission to investigate the crimes that had been dismissed by the Reagan administration.

Today, the United States needs to create a Truth Commission to understand the crimes that were committed over the past decade.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

George Tenet is one of seven former CIA directors who sent a letter to President Obama Friday urging him to stop a Justice Department review into torture.

Seven former directors of the CIA sent a letter to President Barack Obama Friday asking him to take the unprecedented step of personally blocking a Justice Department “review” of cases where agency officers and contractors allegedly exceeded legal guidelines during the interrogations of “war on terror” detainees.

The ex-directors claim the investigation authorized last month by Attorney General Eric Holder into will “only help Al Qaeda elude US intelligence and plan future operations” and “will continue to make it harder for intelligence officers to maintain the momentum of operations that have saved lives and helped protect America from further attacks.”

Those statements are nearly identical to warnings made by Republican lawmakers in recent weeks, which have been disputed by veteran interrogators and a former Bush administration official as a clear-cut attempt to shield top Bush officials who came up with the torture policies, in violation of anti-torture laws, from scrutiny.

Three of the former directors—George Tenet, Michael Hayden and Porter Goss—were personally involved in the policy discussions and decisions during George W. Bush’s tenure that lead to the implementation of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” According to recently released documents, CIA headquarters in Langley micromanaged the torture of at least one high-value detainee, Abu Zubaydah, in 2002 when Tenet was CIA director.

Another former director who signed the letter, James Schlesinger, conducted an investigation into the abuse and torture of prisoners at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The other three former directors are John Deutch, R. James Woolsey, both of who served in the Clinton administration and William Webster, a former federal judge who served as CIA director in the administration of George H.W. Bush and is currently chairman of the Homeland Security Advisory Council. Tenet also served as CIA director during the last three years of the Clinton administration.

Repeatedly invoking 9/11 in their letter, the former CIA directors asked Obama to exercise [his] authority to reverse Attorney General Holder’s August 24 decision to re-open the criminal investigation of CIA interrogations that took place following the attacks of September 11.”

Their request comes weeks after former Vice President Dick Cheney, during an interview with Fox News, said Obama, as the “chief law enforcement officer of the administration,” had the authority to thwart the Justice Department investigation.

“I think if you look at the Constitution, the President of the United States is the chief law enforcement officer in the land. The Attorney General’s a statutory officer. He’s a member of the cabinet. The President’s the one who bears this responsibility.

“And for him to say, ‘gee, I didn’t have anything to do with it,’ especially after he sat in the Oval Office and said this wouldn’t happen, then Holder decides he’s going to do it.”

But Cheney and the former CIA directors have taken an expansive view of the Constitution, specifically Article II, which says, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States.”

In common practice and understanding, however, the attorney general is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. The attorney general “evolved over the years into chief law enforcement officer of the Federal Government,” according to the Department of Justice’s website.

During the Bush administration, the Department of Justice was politicized and former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales used the agency to advance the policies of the Bush administration, an episode noted by no less than four investigations conducted by Justice Department watchdogs.

Furthermore, contrary to what Cheney claims, Obama never said there wouldn’t be an investigation into torture. What he said, and what his political appointees have echoed to the dismay of civil liberties groups and some Democrats, is that he had hoped to “look forward” not “backwards” and that those CIA interrogators “who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.” He also added that the decision was ultimately up to Holder.

Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, said if there is a problem with Holder’s investigation its “focus is too narrow.”

“There is abundant evidence that torture was authorized at the highest levels of the Bush administration, and the Justice Department’s investigation should be broad enough to encompass Bush administration lawyers and senior officials – including the CIA officials – who authorized torture,” he said.

But that is highly unlikely and in that sense, the probe is reminiscent of the investigations into Abu Ghraib, in which low-level MPs were court-martialed and imprisoned for acts that supposedly had not been sanctioned by their superiors, who included, among others, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Matthew Miller, a Justice Department spokesman, made it clear Friday that the investigation authorized by Holder is simply a “preliminary review” and “that review will be narrowly-focused.”

“The Attorney General’s decision to order a preliminary review into this matter was made in line with his duty to examine the facts and to follow the law,” Miller said. “As he has made clear, the Department of Justice will not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by the Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees.”

Last month, Holder instructed Assistant U.S. Attorney John Durham to undertake a “preliminary” inquiry into whether some interrogators exceeded the parameters that the Bush administration placed on the treatment of “war on terror” detainees.

With Cheney’s strong support, interrogators were permitted to engage in a variety of torture techniques, including the drowning sensation of waterboarding, but some interrogators allegedly engaged in practices outside those guidelines.

Durham is also investigating crimes related to the destruction of CIA torture tapes, a dozen of which show two high-value detainees being subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Holder’s decision came on the day the CIA released a declassified version of an inspector general’s report on the agency’s interrogation and detention program.

The May 2004 report prepared by CIA Inspector General John Helgerson said interrogators staged mock executions, revved a power drill and brandished a revolver during interrogations and threatened to kill the family of self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and rape the wife of another high-value detainee, Abd Al-Rahim Al Nashiri.

Threatening prisoners in custody of the U.S. government with imminent death is a violation of the Convention Against Torture.

Helgerson also investigated the deaths of detainees in U.S. custody, but the details of those cases were redacted.

The ex-CIA directors claim, like other critics of the probe, that career federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia had already spent considerable time probing cases Helgerson referred to the Justice Department and “determined that one prosecution (of a CIA contractor) was warranted. A conviction was later obtained. They determined that prosecutions were not warranted in the other cases.”

“The CIA, at its own initiative, forwarded fewer than 20 instances where Agency officers appeared to have acted beyond their existing legal authorities…,” the CIA directors’ letter says. “In a number of these cases the CIA subsequently took administrative disciplinary steps against the individuals involved.”

Jane Mayer, in her book The Dark Side, said there was a mountain of evidence to support prosecutions and a belief by some “insiders that [Helgerson's investigation] would end with criminal charges for abusive interrogations.”

But top Justice Department officials, including former head of the criminal division Michael Chertoff, his deputy Alice Fisher and Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty, allowed the cases to languish and may have even scuttled the probes to protect the Bush White House.

McNulty resigned in disgrace two years ago and is under scrutiny by a special prosecutor investigating the firings of nine US attorneys. McNulty faces obstruction of justice and perjury charges related to his February 2007 testimony to Congress about the ordeal.

The former CIA directors said the Holder’s “decision to re-open the criminal investigation creates an atmosphere of continuous jeopardy for those whose cases the Department of Justice had previously declined to prosecute.”

“Moreover, there is no reason to expect that the re-opened criminal investigation will remain narrowly focused,” they wrote.

But according to a report in Saturday’s Washington Post, that’s exactly what appears to be happening.

“The Justice Department’s review of detainee abuse by the CIA will focus on a very small number of cases, including at least one in which an Afghan prisoner died at a secret facility, according to two sources briefed on the matter,” the Post reported.

“Although earlier reports indicated that Durham would look into 10 cases, a source said recently the number is much smaller,” according to the Post. In all, 24 alleged abuse cases were earlier referred to federal prosecutors by the CIA inspector general, of which 22 were declined, according to a letter in February 2008 from a Justice Department legislative liaison.”

The Post, citing unnamed sources, also said that a report by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility on legal advice related to interrogations attorneys in the agency’s Office of Legal Counsel gave to the Bush administration “does not point to problems with attorneys in the Eastern District of Virginia… but it does explore differences of opinion within the working group that examined the detainee allegations over how to proceed on the few cases that were ‘close calls.’

“In a small number of instances, career lawyers disagreed about whether the evidence was sufficient to seek indictment and ultimately win in court. Some of those issues were assessed — as is normally the case — by political appointees, including Paul J. McNulty, the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia who was nominated to serve as deputy attorney general in October 2005. There are no allegations that cases were rejected for improper political reasons.”

In an interview two weeks ago with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Helgerson said Holder “had no choice” but to authorize an investigation.

But, “at the end of the day, I think he will find it is not feasible to prosecute anyone who participated in the approved program,” Helgerson said. “I personally would not prosecute. There are a number of complex and mitigating circumstances in all these cases, including the passage of time, the nature of the evidence, and — importantly — the clear absence of any criminal intent.”

The late senator Daniel P. Moynihan created the PIDB in the 1990s to reduce the “torment of secrecy,” which denied important information on national security to the American people. The EAB was designed to deal with the complexities of managing the CIA and to improve the access of intelligence information to the Congress and the American people. Hayden and Rudman have a cold war preoccupation with secrecy and have never been known for improving access. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-KY, is responsible for the Hayden appointment; CIA director Leon Panetta appointed Rudman.

As Steven Aftergood, the editor of Secrecy News noted, Hayden is “not well known as a classification critic or a proponent of declassification.” As director of the National Security Agency (NSA), Hayden instituted the warrantless eavesdropping program that violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution that prohibits unlawful seizures and searches.

In defending warrantless eavesdropping at the National Press Club in January 2006, he argued that the Fourth Amendment did not stipulate the importance of “probable cause,” which of course it does. Hayden also conceded that he relied on advice for the program from White House lawyers and never considered consulting the legal staff of NSA.

Soon after arriving at the CIA as director, Hayden began an unprecedented investigation of the Office of the Inspector General, which had been critical of the CIA’s renditions and interrogations programs. Hayden even targeted the statutory inspector general of the CIA, John Helgerson, who had recommended the creation of “accountability boards” for CIA officers, including former director George Tenet, involved in 9/11 intelligence failures.

The failure of the chairmen of the congressional oversight committees to come to Helgerson’s defense made it extremely difficult for the IG to do his job and he announced his retirement seven months ago. The White House and the CIA have still not named a replacement for Helgerson, which is particularly damaging in view of the high-level investigations of CIA detentions and interrogations programs as well as the numerous secret prisons or “black sites” established after 9/11, which would benefit from an aggressive Office of the Inspector General.

In addition to naming Rudman to the EAB, Panetta has made the former senator the director’s special advisor on the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s (SSCI) special inquiry of past practices in detentions and interrogations.

Panetta has his own review group within the CIA on these practices, but has prominently placed current members of the National Clandestine Service (NCS) in the group. The Rudman appointment and the use of NCS officers does not augur will for genuine openness with the Senate inquiry. The NCS has been a major player in the culture of cover-up at the CIA, including the destruction of the 92 torture tapes that has been investigated by the FBI for nearly two years.

By placing Rudman as an intermediary between the SSCI and the CIA’s review group, Panetta has ensured himself that the most damaging information on detentions and interrogations will never see the light of day. Rudman was the most active member of the SSCI in trying to block CIA officials from testifying against the nomination of Robert Gates as CIA director in 1991.

Rudman actually branded those few individuals willing to come forward as “McCarthyites” in an effort to marginalize their testimony and to make sure additional witnesses would not testify or submit written affidavits against Bob Gates. There is ample evidence, moreover, of Rudman’s strong, even bellicose, partisan politicking over the years.

One of the greatest unknown scandals within the intelligence community is the over-classification of government documents in order to keep important information out of the hands of the American people. It costs billions of dollars for government and industry to classify documents, with several million individuals in the government and private industry having the right to classify information.

Government vaults hold over 1.5 billion pages of classified information that are more than twenty-five years old and, thus, unavailable to scholars and researchers, let along the general public. Documents are typically classified to hide embarrassing political information, not secrets. Greater respect for openness might have prevented the policies that led to the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, the CIA’s network of secret prisons, and the CIA’s detentions and interrogations programs.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was photographed shortly after his capture during a raid in Pakistan on March 1, 2003.

The lead story in today’s Washington Post, headlined “How a Detainee Became An Asset,” provides a one-sided and distorted account of the torture and abuse of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (KSM) and demonstrates the urgent need for a blue ribbon bipartisan commission to create a comprehensive and authoritative narrative of the eight years of misgovernment of the Bush administration.

The prosecution of low-level CIA officials and government contractors for resorting to torture and abuse beyond the sordid guidelines of the Justice Department will allow the major players of the Bush administration as well as the lawyers of the Justice Department to escape retribution and judgment. Since President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would never be held accountable, the entire nation would be better served by a full understanding of the war crimes that they authorized in our name.

Today’s article argues that the techniques of torture and abuse turned KSM into the CIA’s “preeminent source” on al-Qaeda. Citing an intelligence assessment by the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, which was presumably prepared for Vice President Cheney, the Post article argues that waterboarding was the key to breaking KSM’s spirit and eliciting valuable intelligence on the “inner workings of al-Qaeda and the group’s plans, ideology, and operatives.”

This view contradicts the findings of the authoritative 2004 report on detainees and interrogations of the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) as well as the personal views of the Inspector General (IG) himself.

As the Post acknowledges, John Helgerson, the former IG who commissioned the 2004 study, said that the work of the OIG did not permit “definitive conclusions about the effectiveness of particular interrogation methods.” Helgerson acknowledged that waterboarding and sleep deprivation “elicited a lot of information,” but the OIG didn’t “do a careful, systematic analysis of the use of particular techniques with particular individuals and independently confirm the quality of the information that came out.”

As a result, Helgerson recommended (but the Post article chose to omit) the creation of an independent panel of experts to “systematically evaluate the quality of the intelligence gained as related to the specific techniques used, or not used, in particular cases. This would clarify the value of the information and the utility of various approaches.” This recommendation was one of ten recommendations in the 2004 IG report; unfortunately, the Justice Deparment (presumably due to the importuning of the CIA) chose to redact all ten IG recommendations from the declassified report.

There is ample testimony to challenge the view that torture and abuse worked. There were FBI agents at the site where KSM was held who testified that torture and abuse didn’t lead to eliciting valuable intelligence. And a CIA operative has noted that KSM was willing to talk before being tortured, noting that “tea and crumpets” were all that was needed. The former head of U.S. Army intelligence, Gen. John Kimmons, remarked in 2006 that “No good intelligence is going to come from abusive practices. I think history tells us that.

I think the empirical evidence of the last five years, hard years, tells us that.” And more recently, several veteran FBI and military interrogators called for an investigation of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques (EIT),” because of their concerns about the legality, morality, and effectiveness of EITs.

It is important to remember that the 2004 IG report emphatically stated that the information elicited by torture and abuse “did not uncover any evidence that [any] plots were imminent.” Other CIA memoranda stated that information gained from detainees led to “arrests [that] disrupted attack plans in progress,” but did not attribute this information to the use of torture and abuse.

The IG study could not even determine if the 83 waterboardings given to Abu Zubaydah were the reason for his increased willingness to talk. The study noted, moreover, that torture was contrary to the Eighth Amendment against “cruel and unusual punishments;” the 1984 UN Torture Convention, which the United States took the lead in drafting and ratifying; and domestic law.

Finally, it is more important to remember that torture and abuse are evil.  Illegal, immoral, counter-productive, but most importantly evil. George Bush told a press conference in 2005 that “this country does not believe in torture,” but the fact is we conducted torture on those who were guilty and those who were innocent.

And Dick Cheney, who has fanatically been waging his own personal jihad in defense of torture and abuse, told Fox News in an interview that will air tomorrow that CIA interrogators were justified in exceeding even the broad authorizations provided by the Justice Department, suggesting that the ends justify the means. Perhaps the Washington Post could give front-page coverage to the 18-page memorandum that the CIA gave to the DoJ’s Office of Legal Counsel in 2004, which provides extraordinary details of the interrogations in plain, but sordid and sadistic, language.

Two years ago, then CIA director Michael Hayden released a collection of long-secret documents compiled in 1974 that detailed domestic spying, assassination plots, and other CIA misdeeds in the 1960s and early 1970s. In releasing the documents, known as the “family jewels,” Hayden told a group of historians who had been pressing for greater disclosure from the Agency, that the documents provided a “glimpse of a very different time and a very different agency.” He also stated that, when the government withholds information, myth and misinformation “fill the vacuum like a gas.”

In order to prevent the Washington Post and others from adding to the myths and misinformation of torture and abuse, it is time to appoint a blue ribbon commission to study all aspects of the CIA’s detentions and interrogations policies.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

He even cites deputy director of the CIA, Stephen Kappes, one of the key ideological drivers for the policy of detention and interrogation, as someone who “doesn’t want to have anything to do with interrogation.”

Ignatius strongly believes that it is time for the CIA to “get on with it,” which was the signature line of former CIA director Richard Helms, who Ignatius considers the “savviest spymaster this country has produced.” Let’s forget that Helms lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1973 on the overthrow of the elected government in Chile and that a grand jury was called to see if he should be indicted for perjury.

Let’s forget that the Justice Department brought a lesser charge against Helms, who pleaded nolo contendere, and was fined $2,000 and given a two-year suspended prison sentence. And let’s forget that Helms was the major supporter of James Jesus Angleton, the crazed head of CIA counterintelligence for 20 years, who believed that the KGB had successfully penetrated the Agency.

We called Angleton “The Ghost” when I was at the CIA because no one had ever seen the man. And it was “The Ghost” who befriended Kim Philby, the Soviet spy from British intelligence, introduced him to high-level CIA officials, and defended him to the end. So much for counterintelligence.

In his efforts to prevent any investigation of the CIA’s interrogation program, Ignatius has also forgotten the lessons of the Nuremberg Trials in 1945-1946.  The International Tribunal taught us that crimes committed by individuals for state purposes were the responsibility of those individuals and punishable by state law. And, most importantly, following orders was not a defense. But Ignatius believes that all of the relevant evidence on torture and abuse was seen by “career prosecutors, who decided against bringing cases.” So, let’s forget that the career prosecutors were employed by the politicized Justice Department of the Bush administration and that they reported to a politically-appointed assistant attorney general.

Ignatius believes that investigation and accountability will hurt the Agency. It will actually restore the credibility of the Agency and lead to greater cooperation from important foreign intelligence services, which is essential to combating terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. It was CIA crimes such as secret prisons and extraordinary renditions that hurt the Agency, and led to reticence about sharing intelligence. For example, there is no intelligence service within the European Union that would assist in a rendition by the CIA; no EU country that would permit the CIA to transport a prisoner by aircraft; no EU country that would agree to a secret prison or “black site” within its borders.

Ignatius also reveals that he knows nothing about loyal dissent.  He argues that “questioning presidential orders isn’t really the job” of the CIA leadership, “especially when those orders are backed by Justice Department legal opinions.” This country has fought two unnecessary wars in the past 45 years with the deaths of more than 60,000 American men and women simply because high-level officials failed to expose the deceptions and manipulations of the Johnson and Bush administrations.

In supporting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Ignatius and the Washington Post appear enamored with U.S. military power, with the Post providing few opportunities for contrarian voices to be heard. The mainstream media, particularly the Post, has been far too complacent in holding the Bush and Obama administration’s feet to the fire in the case of these wars.

Finally, Ignatius claims that the CIA resorted to independent contractors for help in “waterboarding” and assassination programs because of a lack of expertise. In fact, the CIA turned to outside help in these egregious areas because it was trying to avoid accountability and there was internal resistance to both programs.  There were many officers in the National Clandestine Service opposed to the renditions and detentions program; the Office of Medical Service had serious problems with the waterboarding program, which is outlined in the 2004 Inspector General Program.

Presumably, there were some greybeards around who mentioned that resorting to Blackwater to run an assassination program resembled the CIA’s contacts with the Mafia in the early 1960s to kill Castro. The CIA assassination program led to the Church Commission hearings in the 1970s, which placed restrictions on covert action programs and created a congressional oversight process that has fallen into disarray.

It is unbelievable that Ignatius could read the chilling and appalling 2004 IG report and not temper some of his views.  His continued support of the CIA points to fanaticism and reminds me of Stalin’s reference to Western journalists who defended Soviet policy—he called them “useful idiots.”

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

In both cases, Ignatius relied on high-level sources from the CIA’s National Clandestine Service to make the best possible case for the Agency. This is neither good reporting nor professional journalism. [See Mr. Goodman's previous columns on David Ignatius' defense of CIA misdeeds here and here.]

Thanks to New York Times reporters, particularly Scott Shane and Mark Mazetti, we are learning more about CIA’s illegal assassination program. Ignatius and the Washington Post either failed to investigate the issue or simply dismissed it based on assurances provided by those at CIA with the most to lose from public exposure. And on Monday, thanks to the work of Attorney General Eric Holder, we should receive additional details of the CIA’s torture program.

Each revelation exposes more about the illegal, immoral, and counter-productive actions of the Bush administration and the CIA over the past eight years. Each revelation demonstrates that CIA has withheld information and sought to cover-up its actions. And each revelation speaks to the need for an accountability investigation that will restore the credibility of the CIA as well as the integrity of American democracy.

Ignatius’ focus is trivial, misguided, and aligned with the perspective of his CIA sources. His expressed concern is that any congressional inquiry or the appointment of a special prosecutor will lead to what he terms “slow rolling” at the CIA. Slow rolling means that Agency officers will “go through the motions…pass cables back and forth; take other jobs outside the danger zone…cover their backsides.” They will “keep their heads down. Duck the assignments that carry political risk.  Stay away from a counterterrorism program that has become a career hazard.” This is a recurrent theme, advanced by those seeking to prevent oversight. And it is arrant nonsense. CIA is staffed by professionals who want to conduct their activities in a legal and effective manner.

Both Ignatius and CIA director Panetta have fallen into a trap, failing to understand that accountability would actually boost morale at the CIA. The fact is that previous CIA directors (George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden) had to rely on independent contractors to conduct torture and abuse and to build an assassination program, because too many professional Agency officers refused to take part.

The CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS) did not believe that torture and abuse were either necessary or moral, so Tenet turned to two military retirees who were looking for a business opportunity to sell torture and abuse. The fact that neither man had ever carried out a real interrogation, had any expertise on al Qaeda, or had any knowledge of terrorism meant nothing to CIA officials.

CIA abandoned the worst of its interrogation techniques in 2004, after CIA’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued a report concluding that torture and abuse had not thwarted any “specific imminent attacks” and OMS advised that the risk to the health of the prisoners outweighed any potential intelligence benefit. Actually, FBI officials and military analysts previously had concluded that torture was “less reliable” than traditional psychological methods, and had warned that it would lead to an intolerable political and public backlash.

The additional fact that CIA had no way of determining which detainees had useful information and which had none almost certainly led to the abuse of low-level or even innocent people. Some or many of these detainees probably provided false “confessions” in an effort to stop the torment.

There is now ample public evidence about the CIA’s renditions, detentions, and interrogations program, but there remains much that is unknown. The job of a serious journalist is to pursue the unknown and shed light on areas of possible wrongdoing. A serious journalist would be trying to learn what was on the 100 hours of torture tapes that CIA operations officers destroyed.  A serious journalist would not rely on sources whose clear agenda is the cover up of their own, possibly illegal, actions.

We would be better off as a nation if journalists such as David Ignatius and congressional leaders such as Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA) stopped aiding and abetting CIA’s efforts to cover up its past actions and began to press for genuine reform of the institution. CIA necessarily operates on the edge of the law and in secrecy; it therefore requires strong, constant, and effective oversight from the congress and the press if it is to remain within legal bounds.

Thus far, the nation has benefited from the lawsuits of the American Civil Liberties Union, which have forced the release of government torture documents and the CIA’s IG report from 2004 detailing techniques that violated the Justice Department’s requirements. It has also benefitted from reporting by the New York Times and Warren Stroebel of the McClatchy Newspapers and from the investigation by the OIG. At the very least, Senator Feinstein should make sure that the White House and the CIA appoint another statutory inspector general at the CIA to replace John Helgerson, who announced his retirement more than six months ago. After all, our only comprehensive study on torture and abuse was produced under Helgerson’s leadership five years ago.

Ignatius warns repeatedly that the “sunlight of exposure” will blind our shadow warriors.” The reverse is true. The “sunlight of exposure” will restore the effectiveness of CIA’s “shadow warriors” by providing them a clear understanding of the parameters within which they can operate legally. CIA’s “shadow warriors” are both professional and patriotic; they seek to serve their country by protecting the principles on which it is founded—not by flouting them.

Investigation, public exposure, and accountability will ensure that the activities that have created more terrorists have ended.  They also will restore the credibility of our intelligence services, permit foreign intelligence agencies to cooperative effectively with the CIA, and reverse the damage that has been done to U.S. foreign and national security policy.

Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University, is The Public Record’s National Security and Intelligence columnist. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, said the probe will be part of a wide-ranging investigation about the way in which the CIA informs Congress about its covert activities and other matters.

Reyes, in announcing the wide-ranging probe Friday, said he had consulted with the panel’s ranking Republican minority leader, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, and other committee members. Reyes said he and concluded that an investigation into “possible violations of federal law, including the National Security Act of 1947” were warranted. Under that law, the CIA must keep Congress “fully and currently informed” via classified briefings about its intelligence activities.

“This investigation will focus on the core issue of how the congressional intelligence committees and Congress are kept fully and currently informed,” Reyes said. “To this end, the investigation will examine several issues, including the program discussed during Director Panetta’s June 24th notification and whether there was any past decision or direction to withhold information from the Committee.”

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., said Friday that her subcommittee will handle some part of the investigation into the CIA’s assassination program, which may have extended beyond al-Qaeda targets, according to veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker.

“Why was there such a high-level determination to keep it secret? And how may it have changed over all these years? And why was it immediately ended as soon as the current CIA director learned of it?” she said, describing the areas of focus for her subcommittee.

Reyes’ aides said the investigation will also delve into the use of torture by CIA interrogators and contractors against alleged “high-level” detainees, the agency’s destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes, 12 of which depict acts of torture against two prisoners, and the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program.

These aides added that the probe will also look into claims made by former CIA official Mary O. McCarthy, who accused senior agency officials of lying to members of Congress during an intelligence briefing in 2005 when they said the agency did not violate treaties that bar, cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment of detainees during interrogations, according to a May 14, 2006, front-page story in The Washington Post.

“A CIA employee of two decades, McCarthy became convinced that ‘CIA people had lied’ in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading,” The Washington Post reported.

On the matter of domestic surveillance, Bob Graham, the committee’s former Democratic chairman, said in 2005 that Vice President Dick Cheney, CIA Director George Tenet and National Intelligence Director Michael Hayden (who later headed the CIA) lied to him about the extent of the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance and never provided him with a full and complete briefing.

In an interview with ABC’s “Nightline” on Dec. 15, 2005 – after the New York Times disclosed the existence of the warrantless wiretapping program – Graham said he attended meetings in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office in 2001 and discussed surveillance activities, but added that neither Cheney nor then-National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden spoke about a plan to spy on Americans. (CIA Director George Tenet also took part in the meeting.)

“The issue was whether we could intercept foreign communications when they transited through U.S. communication sites,” Graham said. “The assumption was that if we did that, we would do it pursuant to the law, the law that regulates the surveillance of national security issues. …

“There was no suggestion that we were going to begin eavesdropping on United States citizens without following the full law. There was no reference made to the fact that we were going to use that as the subterfuge to begin unwarranted, illegal — and I think unconstitutional — eavesdropping on American citizens.”

Graham suggested that Cheney and the intelligence officials had lied to him and other members of congressional intelligence panels.

Cheney and other Bush administration officials – aided by Republican lawmakers – responded to Graham’s comments with a fierce counterattack. In another “Nightline” interview on Dec. 18, 2005, Cheney said Graham, as well as other members of Congress knew that the administration intended to spy on the phone calls of some Americans.

“He knew,” Cheney said. “I sat in my office with Gen. Hayden, who was then the head of NSA, who’s now the deputy director of the National Intelligence Directorate, and he [Graham] was briefed as long as he was chairman of the committee, or ranking member of the committee.”

Last week, an unclassified report prepared by inspectors general of five federal agencies said George W. Bush’s surveillance program was far more expansive than his administration had publicly revealed and that much of it was concealed from Congress.

The issue of the CIA’s use of torture and whether the agency fully informed top lawmakers on the Senate and House intelligence committees in 2002 and 2003 about techniques used against “high-level” detainees was called into question a few months back when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi claimed she was never told that the CIA tortured prisoners at secret “black site” prisons using methods such as waterboarding.

But a CIA document turned over in May to Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the House Intelligence Committee’s ranking minority member, that contained the dates and a summary of the briefings given to a select group of congressional leaders, including Pelosi as well as Graham, about “EIT’s” or “enhanced interrogation techniques…employed” against “high-value” detainees.

Republicans seized upon the document as a way of showing that Democrats were complicit in the Bush administration’s torture program by not raising objections to the use of specific interrogation methods when they were briefed.

But the briefing document turned over to Hoekstra was rife with errors. Three of the four dates in which the CIA said it had briefed Graham don’t match his records.

“When I asked the CIA when was I briefed, they gave me four dates, two in April and two in September of ‘02. On three of the four occasions, when I consulted my schedule and my notes, it was clear that no briefing had taken place, and the CIA eventually concurred in that. So their record keeping is a little bit suspect,” Graham said.

One of the disputed dates for a briefing on interrogations – in April 2002 – fell in the same month as one of the supposed briefings on surveillance. In both cases, Graham said no briefings took place.

Moreover, Graham said he was not told about the CIA’s torture techniques, which the agency’s records claim were explained to Graham and Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Alabama.

The CIA document also alleged that Pelosi was given a full accounting of the torture program, but Pelosi said in May that the CIA briefers obscured the fact that the agency already had begun subjecting prisoners to the near-drowning of waterboarding and was using other torture techniques.

The CIA also erred in 2006 when a four-page memo from Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte was turned over to Congress several that contained the dates lawmakers were briefed about the surveillance program, briefings that began shortly after President George W. Bush signed a highly classified executive order that removed some legal restrictions against spying on US. citizens.

The memo contained four dates that alleged Graham – along with Pelosi, then ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and their Republican counterparts, Rep. Porter Goss and Shelby – were briefed on Oct. 25, 2001, Nov. 14, 2001, April 10, 2002, and July 8, 2002. A cover letter accompanying Negroponte’s letter said the briefings took place at the White House.

But Graham, who famously keeps a detailed journal of his daily schedule, said he checked those dates against his own records, which revealed no briefings on Oct. 25, 2001 and April 10, 2002. The memo had claimed Graham was the only lawmaker briefed on April 10, 2002. On July 8, 2002, the document said Graham and Shelby were briefed.

“When I got those dates, I went back to my notebooks and checked and found that on most of the dates there were no meetings held,” Graham said in September 2007. “In fact, in several of them, I wasn’t in Washington when the meetings were supposed to have taken place. So I stand by what I said.”

Graham said he did attend briefings on the two other dates but he told the Washington Post “there was no discussion of anything [about spying on Americans' telephone calls] in the meeting with Cheney.”

“I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy,” Graham said.

Briefing lawmakers last month about a covert CIA assassination program that was recently shut down, CIA Director Panetta said it was Cheney who ordered the agency not to inform Congress about the covert activity for eight years, according to several lawmakers, including Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, and numerous media reports.

Last week, after attempts to get Panetta to change a statement he made in May in which he said it was not the CIA’s “policy or practice to mislead Congress” failed, Reyes and other Democrats on the intelligence committee publicly released a letter they sent the CiA director characterizing his briefing to them.

The letter was sent by Reyes to Hoekstra and other top lawmakers on the intelligence panel. It said CIA officials “affirmatively lied” to the panel, presumably about the assassination program, and misinformed the committee about on numerous occasions about other intelligence matters.

Republicans, including Hoekstra, said Democrats were trying to cover for Pelosi’s accusations that the CIA lied to her. On Friday, Hoekstra said neither he nor his Republican colleagues would support an investigation into the CIA.

“At no time will the Republicans of this committee agree to or take part in congressional Democrats efforts to tear down the CIA to provide cover for Speaker Pelosi,” Hoekstra said in a statement Friday.

However, the committee will also probe accusations that the CIA lied to Congress, as revealed in an agency watchdog report, about the shooting down of an airplane over Peru in 2001 carrying American missionaries. Hoekstra was the lawmaker who accused the CIA of lying to Congress about the incident, a fact that he has since distanced himself from.

In Thursday’s column, he has lambasted Attorney General Eric Holder for even considering the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate possible war crimes by CIA officers; congressional Democrats who want to conduct genuine oversight of the CIA; and President Obama who perhaps now understands that an investigation of the CIA is not merely about “petty grievances.”

Ignatius disingenuously argues that the Justice Department learned about CIA’s criminal actions five years ago and decided that no prosecution was warranted. But Ignatius knows the the politicized Justice Department was always part of the problem and never a part of the solution to the torture and abuse, the secret prisons, and the extraordinary renditions that have hurt U.S. credibility around the world.

Ignatius presumably also knows that Obama and Holder were never willing to investigate, let alone prosecute, CIA actions that followed the dubious legal authority to torture al Qaeda captives. We now know, however, in gruesome detail that sadistic CIA operatives went far beyond the so-called legal authority in their interrogation of these captives, and that there was the conduct of torture and abuse against captives who were never interrogated at all.

Obama never made a “grand bargain” with the CIA, as Ignatius alleges, and he certainly never intended to ignore criminal behavior.  But just as CIA director Leon Panetta never learned about a CIA assassination scheme until three weeks ago, five months after he was confirmed as director, President Obama was presumably late to learn the ugly details of CIA abuses under three CIA directors, George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden.

Both Obama and Holder now know that there has been a cover-up of these activities by the senior CIA leaders who never should have been retained by Panetta.

Ignatius’ apology for the CIA includes the typical handwringing of CIA clandestine officers whenever there have been CIA abuses. We heard these arguments in the wake of the Vietnam War and we heard them again after the discovery of Iran-contra.

Ignatius tells us that an investigation would “damage careers and morale at the CIA.”  Nonsense!  He cites the views of clandestine officers who state that the investigation will “leave a train of destroyed officers.” More nonsense! And he argues that “CIA employees will steer away from areas such as counterterrorism.” And even more nonsense!

The fact is that the CIA is staffed by professional officers who want to follow the law and a moral compass in order to strengthen the national security of the United States. Their morale is strengthened when they have the support and respect of the American people, and the majority of CIA intelligence analysts and clandestine operatives know that the abuses and transgressions of the Vietnam War, Iran-contra, and the Iraq War were damaging to their mission and to their charter.

Ignatius’s unnamed sources over the past 30 years have been from the CIA’s clandestine community. He had a strong source in the early 1980s, a senior clandestine officer–the late Robert Ames–who was the most impressive clandestine officer I met during my 24 years at the CIA.

Ignatius’s novel on CIA tradecraft, “Agents of Influence,” was based on material obtained from Ames. But Ames was killed in the attack on the U.S. embassy in Lebanon in 1983 and, since then, Ignatius has relied on a group of clandestine apparatchiks who have fed him stories that tell only one small side of the CIA picture.

Unfortunately, most of the news articles in the Post on the CIA use some of the same sources and provide only partial pictures from a small and self-serving segment of the intelligence community. The current CIA deputy director, Stephen Kappes, and the head of clandestine operations, Michael Sulick, are part of this community.

Ignatius concludes that the CIA must be depoliticized and that the only way to do that is for the Obama administration to drop any investigation of possible criminal activities. He even unconscionably states that the “unauthorized practices” merely involved “kicks, threats and other abuse.”

The fact is that the politicization of the CIA was a self-inflicted wound that began in the 1980s when CIA director William Casey and his deputy Robert Gates politicized intelligence on the Soviet Union, Central American, and Afghanistan. This politicization continued under director Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin who provided phony intelligence to the Bush administration and Secretary of State Colin Powell to make the case for an unnecessary war against Iraq.

A phony intelligence White Paper was circulate on Capitol Hill only days before the vote to authorize force against Iraq, and phony intelligence was prepared to form Powell’s speech to the United Nations in February 2003 only several weeks before the start of the war. And now the cover-up is designed to include not only torture and abuse and secret prisons, but assassination teams that remind us of the Phoenix program from the Vietnam War.

It is long past time for President Obama to push a reset button at the CIA to stop the pattern of abuse, and perhaps the Washington Post should push a reset button to make sure that it will provide objective and balanced information on the intelligence community.

Melvin A. Goodman, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent 42 years with the CIA, the National War College, and the U.S. Army. His latest book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

The existence of the program has been publicly known for years. Echelon was developed in the 1970s primarily as an American-British intelligence sharing system to monitor foreigners – specifically, during the Cold War, to catch Soviet spies. But sources said the spyware, operated by satellite, is the means by which the NSA eavesdropped on Americans when President Bush secretly authorized the agency to do so in 2002.

Another top-secret program code-named Tempest, also operated by satellite, is capable of reading computer monitors, cash registers and automatic teller machines from as far away as a half-mile and is being used to keep a close eye on an untold number of American citizens, the sources said, pointing to a little known declassified document that sheds light on the program.

Echelon has been shrouded in secrecy for years. A special report prepared by the European Parliament in the late 1990s disclosed explosive details about the covert program when it alleged that Echelon was being used to spy on two foreign defense contractors – the European companies Airbus Industrie and Thomson-CSF – as well as sifting through private emails, industrial files and cell phones of foreigners.

The program is part of a multinational spy effort that includes intelligence agencies in Canada, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, also known as the Echelon Alliance, which is responsible for monitoring different parts of the world.

The NSA has never publicly admitted that Echelon exists, but the program has been identified in declassified government documents. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have long criticized the program and have, in the past, engaged in fierce debate with the intelligence community over Echelon because of the ease with which it can spy on Americans without any oversight from the federal government.

Mike Frost, who spent 20 years as a spy for the CSE, the Canadian equivalent of the National Security Agency, told the news program 60 Minutes in February 2000 how Echelon routinely eavesdrops on many average people at any given moment and how, depending on what you say either in an email or over the telephone, you could end up on an NSA watch list.

“While I was at CSE, a classic example: A lady had been to a school play the night before, and her son was in the school play and she thought he did a – a lousy job. Next morning, she was talking on the telephone to her friend, and she said to her friend something like this, ‘Oh, Danny really bombed last night,’ just like that,” Frost said. “The computer spit that conversation out. The analyst that was looking at it was not too sure about what the conversation was referring to, so erring on the side of caution, he listed that lady and her phone number in the database as a possible terrorist.”

Ironically, during the first Bush administration, a woman named Margaret Newsham, who worked for Lockheed Martin and was stationed at the NSA’s Menwith Hill listening post in Yorkshire, England, told Congressional investigators that she had firsthand knowledge that the NSA was illegally spying on American citizens.

While a Congressional committee did look into Newsham’s allegations, it never published a report. However, a British investigative reporter named Duncan Campbell got hold of some committee documents and discovered that Newsham was telling the truth. One of the documents described a program called “Echelon” that would monitor and analyze “civilian communications into the 21st century.”

As of 2000, sources said, the NSA had Echelon listening posts located in: Menwith Hill, Britain; Morwenstow, Britain; Bad Aibling, Germany; Geraldton Station, Australia; Shoal Bay, Australia; Waihopai, New Zealand; Leitrim, Canada; Misawa, Japan; Yakima Firing Center, Seattle; Sugar Grove, Virginia.

A January 1, 2001, story in the magazine Popular Mechanics disclosed details of how Echelon works.

“The electronic signals that Echelon satellites and listening posts capture are separated into two streams, depending upon whether the communications are sent with or without encryption,” the magazine reported. “Scrambled signals are converted into their original language, and then, along with selected “clear” messages, are checked by a piece of software called Dictionary. There are actually several localized “dictionaries.” The UK version, for example, is packed with names and slang used by the Irish Republican Army. Messages with trigger words are dispatched to their respective agencies.”

Electronic signals are captured and analyzed through a series of supercomputers known as dictionaries, which are programmed to search through each communication for targeted addresses, words, phrases, and sometimes individual voices. The communication is then sent to the National Security Agency for review. Some of the more common sample key words that the NSA flags are: terrorism, plutonium, bomb, militia, gun, explosives, Iran, Iraq, sources said.

Because Echelon can easily spy on Americans without any oversight or detection, and because Echelon covers such a wide spectrum of communication, many current and former NSA officials said that it’s likely the agency used its satellites to target Americans, Mark Levin, a former chief of staff to Edwin Meese during the Reagan administration, wrote last month in a blog post on the National Review Online.

“Under the ECHELON program, the NSA and certain foreign intelligence agencies throw an extremely wide net over virtually all electronic communications world-wide. There are no warrants. No probable cause requirements. No FISA court. And information is intercepted that is communicated solely between US citizens within the US, which may not be the purpose of the program but, nonetheless, is a consequence of the program.”

Report Critical of NSA Program

Last week, an unclassified report prepared by inspectors general of five federal agencies said George W. Bush justified his warrantless wiretapping by relying on Justice Department attorney John Yoo’s theories of unlimited presidential wartime powers, and started the spying operation even before Yoo issued a formal opinion, a government investigation discovered.

Essentially, President Bush took it upon himself to ignore the clear requirement of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that all domestic intelligence-related electronic spying must have a warrant from a secret federal court, not just presidential approval. Illegal wiretapping is a felony under federal law.

The July 10 report didn’t identify any specific terrorist attack that was thwarted by what was known as the President’s Surveillance Program (PSP), although Bush has claimed publicly that his warrantless wiretapping “helped detect and prevent terrorist attacks on our own country.”

The inspectors general ‘s report also makes clear that the full PSP was more expansive than the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the warrantless wiretapping that was revealed by the New York Times in December 2005. The TSP involved intercepting calls between the United States and overseas if one party was suspected of links to al-Qaeda or to an al-Qaeda-affiliated group.

Though the undisclosed elements of the PSP remain highly classified, the report gave some hints to its scope by noting that the program originated from a post-9/11 White House request to NSA Director Michael Hayden to consider “what he might do with more authority.”

Hayden then “put together information on what was operationally useful and technologically feasible,” the report said. “The information formed the basis for the PSP.”

In other words, the PSP stretched the limits of what the NSA could accomplish with its extraordinary capabilities to collect and analyze electronic communications around the world. Various journalistic accounts have suggested that Bush’s spying program crossed the line from zeroing in on specific surveillance targets to “data-mining” a broad spectrum of electronic communications.

Suggesting that the government gathered information on many innocent people, the inspectors general stated that “the collection activities pursued under the PSP … involved unprecedented collection activities. We believe the retention and use by IC [intelligence community] organizations of information collected under the PSP … should be carefully monitored.”

By law, the agency is prohibited from spying Americans and if the NSA intercepts the names of Americans in the course of a wiretap, the agency is supposed to black out the names prior to distributing its reports to other agencies. But the NSA did not second guess Bolton’s requests and willingly turned over the identities of U.S. citizens caught up in the wiretaps. Last week’s report

The NSA, based in Fort Meade, Maryland, operates under the Department of Defense. It distributes analysis summaries of its intelligence-gathering to a certain number of senior US officials, but it is prohibited from sharing its raw data – transcripts from wiretaps – with anyone. The raw data is prized by intelligence analysts because it provides additional context and more leads than the watered-down summaries.

But it turned out that Bolton, who was nominated by George W. Bush to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about his requests to the NSA, was just one of many government officials who learned the identities of Americans caught in NSA intercepts in the aftermath of 9/11. In fact, by 2006 the State Department had asked the NSA to unmask the identities of American citizens 500 times since May 2001.

The NSA also disclosed to senior White House officials and other policymakers at federal agencies the names of as many as 10,000 American citizens the agency obtained while purportedly eavesdropping on foreigners. The Americans weren’t involved in any sort of terrorist activity, nor did they pose any sort of threat to national security, but had simply been named while the NSA was conducting wiretaps.

The “NSA received – and fulfilled – between 3,000 and 3,500 requests from other agencies to supply the names of U.S. citizens and officials (and citizens of other countries that help NSA eavesdrop around the world, including Britain, Canada and Australia) that initially were deleted from raw intercept reports,” according to a May 2, 2006 report in Newsweek.

“Sources say the number of names disclosed by NSA to other agencies during this period is more than 10,000. About one third of such disclosures were made to officials at the policymaking level; most of the rest were disclosed to other intel agencies and, perhaps surprisingly, only a small proportion to law-enforcement agencies.”

The NSA had also turned over its raw intelligence to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which used it to spy on Americans suspected of posing a threat, according to a Jan. 1, 2006 report in the Washington Post.

The names of American citizens that are blacked out can be revealed to government officials if they ask for them in writing and only if they’re needed to help the official better understand the context of the intelligence information they were included in.

But that wasn’t the case with Bolton or other government officials and agencies.

‘We typically would ask why” disclosure of an identity was necessary, said Stewart Baker, a former general counsel at the NSA, ”but we wouldn’t try to second-guess” the rationale.

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, though it’s unknown why, and by doing so he had violated the NSA’s rules by discussing classified information contained in the wiretap.

In a letter to Lt. General 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.”

Hayden “subsequently gave a top-secret briefing to Rockefeller and the Intelligence Committee’s GOP chairman, Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, about Bolton’s dealings with the NSA,” Newsweek reported on May 26, 2005. Newsweek further reported:

In this briefing, according to Rockefeller’s letter to the Foreign Relations Committee, Hayden allowed Rockefeller and Roberts to review the NSA intercept reports at the center of the Bolton controversy. However, according to Rockefeller, Hayden did not share with Rockefeller and Roberts the names of the Americans that the NSA had provided to Bolton. In all, Rockefeller said, Bolton’s requests for 10 uncensored NSA reports would have involved the unmasking of the identities of “nineteen U.S. persons.”

In his letter, Rockefeller said that based on the briefing he had received from General Hayden, he found “no evidence” that there was anything “improper” about how or why Bolton made his 10 requests for the NSA reports in which American names were uncensored. However, Rockefeller said that he was “troubled” by how Bolton had handled the uncensored NSA information after receiving it.

According to a congressional investigator working with Bolton critics, the substance of the NSA intercept report included a discussion between two foreigners who were discussing how an American official—presumably the one Bolton congratulated—had given them a hard time…Rockefeller indicated that he believes Bolton’s use of the uncensored NSA information to congratulate a State Department official was “not in keeping” with Bolton’s declaration to the NSA that he only wanted the censored information so he could better understand the meaning of the original intelligence report.

Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, said at the time that he was troubled that, other than the questions raised by Rockefeller, Congress and the Senate showed little concern over the NSA’s practices “beyond the specifics involving Bolton.”

“If the National Security Agency provides officials with the identities of Americans on its tapes, what is the use of making secret those names in the first place?” Keefe wrote in an August 10, 2005 op-ed in the New York Times. “We now know that this hasn’t been the case – the agency has been listening to Americans’ phone calls, just not reporting any names. And Bolton’s experience makes clear that keeping those names confidential was a formality that high-ranking officials could overcome by picking up the phone.”

In the summer of 2001, the NSA spent millions of dollars on a publicity campaign to repair its public image by taking the unprecedented step of opening up its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland to reporters, to dispel the myth that the NSA was spying on Americans.

In a July 10, 2001, segment on “Nightline,” host Chris Bury reported that “privacy advocates in the United States and Europe are raising new questions about whether innocent civilians get caught up in the NSA’s electronic web.”

Hayden, who was interviewed by “Nightline,” said it was absolutely untrue that the agency was monitoring Americans who are suspected of being agents of a foreign power without first seeking a special warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

“We don’t do anything willy-nilly,” Hayden said. “We’re a foreign intelligence agency. We try to collect information that is of value to American decision-makers, to protect American values, America – and American lives. To suggest that we’re out there, on our own, renegade, pulling in random communications, is – is simply wrong. So everything we do is for a targeted foreign intelligence purpose. With regard to the – the question of industrial espionage, no. Period. Dot. We don’t do that.”

But, when asked “How do we know that the fox isn’t guarding the chicken coop?” Hayden responded by saying that Americans should trust the employees of the NSA.

“They deserve your trust, but you don’t have to trust them,” Hayden said. “We aren’t off the leash, so to speak, guarding ourselves. We have a body of oversight within the executive branch, in the Department of Defense, in the president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, which is comprised of both government and nongovernmental officials. You’ve got both houses of Congress with – with very active – in some cases, aggressive – intelligence oversight committees with staff members who have an access badge to NSA just like mine.”