Turkish Daily News - Difficult days ahead
Difficult days ahead
Monday, December 26, 2005
TDN editorial by Yusuf KANLI Yusuf KANLI
The first time was spectacular. You will remember a few years ago, in February of 2001, to be precise, there was a prime minister in office who was old, fragile, ill and surrounded by political fortune-hunters who in public spared no effort to demonstrate their loyalty to their incumbent leader but who behind closed doors were engaged in battles of succession.
The country was just emerging from a mini-crisis in November, which, according to some adversaries, was an indicator of a larger crisis to come if the poor governance of the country persisted and the aged leader failed to accept calls to step down and leave his post as party and government leader to one of his confidants. Though the premier was at times confused as to whether he had only his socks on or his shoes as well and managed to greet the same guest two or three times during the course of a 30-minute reception, the three-way coalition government of the time was adamant that there was no need to refresh the national will -- that is, go to early elections -- stressing that there was harmony in the Cabinet and that the county was well governed.
Still, there were signs presaging that one day angry shop owners would throw their empty cash registers on the sidewalk in front of the Prime Ministry in protest -- a development that, when it in fact occurred, forced Ankara to establish a primitive version of today's “Green Zone” in Baghdad around the Prime Ministry, blocking all roads and cutting off any chance of the ageing premier seeing the desperate situation into which he had put the Turks with his poor governance. Some of the important infrastructure of the European Union reforms was established at that time, but many reforms, most notably those related to decreasing the participation of the military in the country's policy-making mechanisms, had yet to be legislated. For example, the National Security Council (MGK) was still headed by a general and the government was still required by law to give priority to and implement suggestions made by the military-dominated body.
In such an atmosphere, the council met one a cold February day at the Çankaya Presidential Palace for its routine, then-monthly meeting, and during the gathering the president and the prime minister decided all of a sudden to play-ping pong with a copy of the Constitution, vividly demonstrating their disagreement over some crucial matters pertaining to the separation of powers.
Emerging from that meeting, the elderly prime minister, in an angry and shaking voice, proclaimed that there was a “state crisis” in the country. What that meant nobody knew, but the markets went wild and the country plunged into the worst economic-financial crisis of its republican history, devouring at least half of the wealth of the Turks without discriminating between rich or poor. The people's desperation was so profound that despite its flat objection to an early election, the three-way government managed to stay in office -- with the premier for the most part in bed either in hospital or at his residence -- until November 2002, when it faced a humiliating electoral defeat and was rejected en masse from the Turkish legislature.
TÜSİAD standoff:
Four years later the country experienced yet another crisis over a copy of the Constitution. The premier, waving the document and reading some of its articles, “ordered” prosecutors to investigate some top businessmen, the president of the Higher Education Council (YÖK) and the main opposition leader on grounds that they had expressed opinions in such a way as to influence an ongoing trial, that of Van Yüzüncü Yıl University Rector Yücel Aşkın.
Markets failed to go wild nor was Turkey plunged into a serious financial crisis, although the country's European allies panicked, having perceived the developments as indications that the Turkish government was backing away from it road to the EU. After intense negotiations between the government and those top businessmen from late Friday to late Saturday night, both sides conceded the reality that further aggravating the situation with statements and counterstatements would do no good to anyone, and they agreed to refrain from adding further fuel to the fire in order to let it die down.
The second major controversy over the Constitution thus appears to have been resolved; however, the latest development should be taken as an indication of the difficult days in store for the new year, during which the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government will have to make some very difficult decisions, with Cyprus and the ports and airports issue as well as the anticipated buildup of pressure from Europe for a reconsideration of controversial articles in the new penal code topping the list.
After all, in a Turkey on its way to EU accession, putting intellectuals, academics and journalists behind bars -- particularly those from the country's minorities -- can only amount shooting ourselves in the foot, particularly in view of the growing Turkey skepticism within the European club.
We have to realize that when we put Orhan Pamuk, Hrant Dink, Zülküf Kışanak and others on trial, we are indeed putting Turkey on trial.
© 2005 Dogan Daily News Inc. www.turkishdailynews.com.tr
Monday, December 26, 2005
Turkish Daily News - �US visits to Turkey have nothing to do with third countries�
Turkish Daily News - �US visits to Turkey have nothing to do with third countries�
Blogger Thoughts: Or perhaps visits have EVERYTHING to do with 3rd Countries...?
‘US visits to Turkey have nothing to do with third countries’
Monday, December 26, 2005
ANKARA - Turkish Daily News
A recent official visit to Turkey by CIA Director Porter Goss took place as a manifestation of the mutual will and effort by Ankara and Washington to strengthen bilateral relations between Turkey and the United States, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül said in an effort to head off speculation over the agenda underlying recent visits by U.S. officials.
Gül's remarks came in apparent response to foreign media reports that Goss, during his visit earlier this month, sought Turkish officials' support to attack Iran in 2006.
“Visits that took place in recent days have nothing to do with Iran and Syria. These visits are [contributions] towards strengthening bilateral relations [between Turkey and the United States],” Gül was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency over the weekend while speaking to reporters at a meeting in Bursa, in reference to a report by a German news agency.
“Those [visits] do not have any relation whatsoever to other countries. Reports written here and abroad are entirely fictitious,” Gül said, referring not only to the visit by Goss but also to an earlier working visit by FBI Director Robert Mueller in the same month. Talks with both Goss and Mueller touched on the issue of fighting members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) sheltering at a safe haven in northern Iraq, although no details were made public.
“Turkey and the United States are jointly fighting the PKK terror,” Gül was quoted as saying by CNN-Türk, reiterating, in response to claims, the focus of talks for Turkish officials. The PKK is listed as terror organization by the United States and the European Union as well as by Turkey.
The second largest German news agency, ddp Nachrichtenagentur, reported on Friday that “U.S. plans to attack Iran next year were on the agenda of both Goss and Mueller's talks in Ankara.”
Citing sources from Western intelligence services, the agency reported that Goss presented three files to Turkish officials, one of which concerned Iran's cooperation with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization.
According to the report, the United States requested Turkey's support for attacking Iran and offered to allow Turkey to launch a military operation against PKK camps based in Iran.
The agency also claimed that the United States had asked Land Forces Commander Gen Yaşar Büyükanıt -- who paid an official visit to Washington earlier this month -- to keep the Turkish Armed Forces primed for possible attacks on Iran.
© 2005 Dogan Daily News Inc. www.turkishdailynews.com.tr
Blogger Thoughts: Or perhaps visits have EVERYTHING to do with 3rd Countries...?
‘US visits to Turkey have nothing to do with third countries’
Monday, December 26, 2005
ANKARA - Turkish Daily News
A recent official visit to Turkey by CIA Director Porter Goss took place as a manifestation of the mutual will and effort by Ankara and Washington to strengthen bilateral relations between Turkey and the United States, Foreign Minister Abdullah Gül said in an effort to head off speculation over the agenda underlying recent visits by U.S. officials.
Gül's remarks came in apparent response to foreign media reports that Goss, during his visit earlier this month, sought Turkish officials' support to attack Iran in 2006.
“Visits that took place in recent days have nothing to do with Iran and Syria. These visits are [contributions] towards strengthening bilateral relations [between Turkey and the United States],” Gül was quoted as saying by the Anatolia news agency over the weekend while speaking to reporters at a meeting in Bursa, in reference to a report by a German news agency.
“Those [visits] do not have any relation whatsoever to other countries. Reports written here and abroad are entirely fictitious,” Gül said, referring not only to the visit by Goss but also to an earlier working visit by FBI Director Robert Mueller in the same month. Talks with both Goss and Mueller touched on the issue of fighting members of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) sheltering at a safe haven in northern Iraq, although no details were made public.
“Turkey and the United States are jointly fighting the PKK terror,” Gül was quoted as saying by CNN-Türk, reiterating, in response to claims, the focus of talks for Turkish officials. The PKK is listed as terror organization by the United States and the European Union as well as by Turkey.
The second largest German news agency, ddp Nachrichtenagentur, reported on Friday that “U.S. plans to attack Iran next year were on the agenda of both Goss and Mueller's talks in Ankara.”
Citing sources from Western intelligence services, the agency reported that Goss presented three files to Turkish officials, one of which concerned Iran's cooperation with the al-Qaeda terrorist organization.
According to the report, the United States requested Turkey's support for attacking Iran and offered to allow Turkey to launch a military operation against PKK camps based in Iran.
The agency also claimed that the United States had asked Land Forces Commander Gen Yaşar Büyükanıt -- who paid an official visit to Washington earlier this month -- to keep the Turkish Armed Forces primed for possible attacks on Iran.
© 2005 Dogan Daily News Inc. www.turkishdailynews.com.tr
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: December 18, 2005 - December 24, 2005 Archives
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: December 18, 2005 - December 24, 2005 Archives
How do we explain what appears to be a night and day difference between the year prior to November 2004 and the year since in terms of terror alerts and scares?
How do we explain what appears to be a night and day difference between the year prior to November 2004 and the year since in terms of terror alerts and scares?
911TrueStory.com
911TrueStory.com
This information focuses on the theory that the World Trade Center buildings ....
09/11/2001
This information focuses on the theory that the World Trade Center buildings ....
09/11/2001
The Agency That Could Be Big Brother - New York Times
December 25, 2005
Private Lives
The Agency That Could Be Big Brother
By JAMES BAMFORD
Washington
DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.
Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country.
A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A. has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment.
According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret.
Jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency," the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations.
But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned.
"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."
He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."
At the time, the agency had the ability to listen to only what people said over the telephone or wrote in an occasional telegram; they had no access to private letters. But today, with people expressing their innermost thoughts in e-mail messages, exposing their medical and financial records to the Internet, and chatting constantly on cellphones, the agency virtually has the ability to get inside a person's mind.
The N.S.A.'s original target had been the Communist bloc. The agency wrapped the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in an electronic cocoon. Anytime an aircraft, ship or military unit moved, the N.S.A. would know. And from 22,300 miles in orbit, satellites with super-thin, football-field-sized antennas eavesdropped on Soviet communications and weapons signals.
Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering and never moved, the N.S.A. is trying to find small numbers of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to country.
During the cold war, the agency could depend on a constant flow of American-born Russian linguists from the many universities around the country with Soviet studies programs. Now the government is forced to search ethnic communities to find people who can speak Dari, Urdu or Lingala - and also pass a security clearance that frowns on people with relatives in their, or their parents', former countries.
According to an interview last year with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the N.S.A.'s director, intercepting calls during the war on terrorism has become a much more complex endeavor. On Sept. 10, 2001, for example, the N.S.A. intercepted two messages. The first warned, "The match begins tomorrow," and the second said, "Tomorrow is zero hour." But even though they came from suspected Al Qaeda locations in Afghanistan, the messages were never translated until after the attack on Sept. 11, and not distributed until Sept. 12.
What made the intercepts particularly difficult, General Hayden said, was that they were not "targeted" but intercepted randomly from Afghan pay phones.
This makes identification of the caller extremely difficult and slow. "Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands," General Hayden said.
Still, the N.S.A. doesn't have to go to the courts to use its electronic monitoring to snare Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan. For the agency to snoop domestically on American citizens suspected of having terrorist ties, it first must to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, make a showing of probable cause that the target is linked to a terrorist group, and obtain a warrant.
The court rarely turns the government down. Since it was established in 1978, the court has granted about 19,000 warrants; it has only rejected five. And even in those cases the government has the right to appeal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which in 27 years has only heard one case. And should the appeals court also reject the warrant request, the government could then appeal immediately to a closed session of the Supreme Court.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the N.S.A. normally eavesdropped on a small number of American citizens or resident aliens, often a dozen or less, while the F.B.I., whose low-tech wiretapping was far less intrusive, requested most of the warrants from FISA.
Despite the low odds of having a request turned down, President Bush established a secret program in which the N.S.A. would bypass the FISA court and begin eavesdropping without warrant on Americans. This decision seems to have been based on a new concept of monitoring by the agency, a way, according to the administration, to effectively handle all the data and new information.
At the time, the buzzword in national security circles was data mining: digging deep into piles of information to come up with some pattern or clue to what might happen next. Rather than monitoring a dozen or so people for months at a time, as had been the practice, the decision was made to begin secretly eavesdropping on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people for just a few days or a week at a time in order to determine who posed potential threats.
Those deemed innocent would quickly be eliminated from the watch list, while those thought suspicious would be submitted to the FISA court for a warrant.
In essence, N.S.A. seemed to be on a classic fishing expedition, precisely the type of abuse the FISA court was put in place to stop.At a news conference, President Bush himself seemed to acknowledge this new tactic. "FISA is for long-term monitoring," he said. "There's a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring."
This eavesdropping is not the Bush administration's only attempt to expand the boundaries of what is legally permissible.
In 2002, it was revealed that the Pentagon had launched Total Information Awareness, a data mining program led by John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who had served as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to rebels in Nicaragua.
Total Information Awareness, known as T.I.A., was intended to search through vast data bases, promising to "increase the information coverage by an order-of-magnitude." According to a 2002 article in The New York Times, the program "would permit intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials to mount a vast dragnet through electronic transaction data ranging from credit card information to veterinary records, in the United States and internationally, to hunt for terrorists." After press reports, the Pentagon shut it down, and Mr. Poindexter eventually left the government.
But according to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush administration and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on data-mining techniques. "Our survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining," the report said, "shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts, of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational." Of these uses, the report continued, "the Department of Defense reported the largest number of efforts."
The administration says it needs this technology to effectively combat terrorism. But the effect on privacy has worried a number of politicians.
After he was briefed on President Bush's secret operation in 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a letter to Vice President Dick Cheney.
"As I reflected on the meeting today and the future we face," he wrote, "John Poindexter's T.I.A. project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance."
Senator Rockefeller sounds a lot like Senator Frank Church.
"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge," Senator Church said. "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
James Bamford is the author of "Puzzle Palace" and"Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency."
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
Private Lives
The Agency That Could Be Big Brother
By JAMES BAMFORD
Washington
DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.
Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country.
A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A. has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment.
According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret.
Jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency," the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations.
But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned.
"That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."
He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."
At the time, the agency had the ability to listen to only what people said over the telephone or wrote in an occasional telegram; they had no access to private letters. But today, with people expressing their innermost thoughts in e-mail messages, exposing their medical and financial records to the Internet, and chatting constantly on cellphones, the agency virtually has the ability to get inside a person's mind.
The N.S.A.'s original target had been the Communist bloc. The agency wrapped the Soviet Union and its satellite nations in an electronic cocoon. Anytime an aircraft, ship or military unit moved, the N.S.A. would know. And from 22,300 miles in orbit, satellites with super-thin, football-field-sized antennas eavesdropped on Soviet communications and weapons signals.
Today, instead of eavesdropping on an enormous country that was always chattering and never moved, the N.S.A. is trying to find small numbers of individuals who operate in closed cells, seldom communicate electronically (and when they do, use untraceable calling cards or disposable cellphones) and are constantly traveling from country to country.
During the cold war, the agency could depend on a constant flow of American-born Russian linguists from the many universities around the country with Soviet studies programs. Now the government is forced to search ethnic communities to find people who can speak Dari, Urdu or Lingala - and also pass a security clearance that frowns on people with relatives in their, or their parents', former countries.
According to an interview last year with Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then the N.S.A.'s director, intercepting calls during the war on terrorism has become a much more complex endeavor. On Sept. 10, 2001, for example, the N.S.A. intercepted two messages. The first warned, "The match begins tomorrow," and the second said, "Tomorrow is zero hour." But even though they came from suspected Al Qaeda locations in Afghanistan, the messages were never translated until after the attack on Sept. 11, and not distributed until Sept. 12.
What made the intercepts particularly difficult, General Hayden said, was that they were not "targeted" but intercepted randomly from Afghan pay phones.
This makes identification of the caller extremely difficult and slow. "Know how many international calls are made out of Afghanistan on a given day? Thousands," General Hayden said.
Still, the N.S.A. doesn't have to go to the courts to use its electronic monitoring to snare Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan. For the agency to snoop domestically on American citizens suspected of having terrorist ties, it first must to go to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, make a showing of probable cause that the target is linked to a terrorist group, and obtain a warrant.
The court rarely turns the government down. Since it was established in 1978, the court has granted about 19,000 warrants; it has only rejected five. And even in those cases the government has the right to appeal to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which in 27 years has only heard one case. And should the appeals court also reject the warrant request, the government could then appeal immediately to a closed session of the Supreme Court.
Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the N.S.A. normally eavesdropped on a small number of American citizens or resident aliens, often a dozen or less, while the F.B.I., whose low-tech wiretapping was far less intrusive, requested most of the warrants from FISA.
Despite the low odds of having a request turned down, President Bush established a secret program in which the N.S.A. would bypass the FISA court and begin eavesdropping without warrant on Americans. This decision seems to have been based on a new concept of monitoring by the agency, a way, according to the administration, to effectively handle all the data and new information.
At the time, the buzzword in national security circles was data mining: digging deep into piles of information to come up with some pattern or clue to what might happen next. Rather than monitoring a dozen or so people for months at a time, as had been the practice, the decision was made to begin secretly eavesdropping on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people for just a few days or a week at a time in order to determine who posed potential threats.
Those deemed innocent would quickly be eliminated from the watch list, while those thought suspicious would be submitted to the FISA court for a warrant.
In essence, N.S.A. seemed to be on a classic fishing expedition, precisely the type of abuse the FISA court was put in place to stop.At a news conference, President Bush himself seemed to acknowledge this new tactic. "FISA is for long-term monitoring," he said. "There's a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring."
This eavesdropping is not the Bush administration's only attempt to expand the boundaries of what is legally permissible.
In 2002, it was revealed that the Pentagon had launched Total Information Awareness, a data mining program led by John Poindexter, a retired rear admiral who had served as national security adviser under Ronald Reagan and helped devise the plan to sell arms to Iran and illegally divert the proceeds to rebels in Nicaragua.
Total Information Awareness, known as T.I.A., was intended to search through vast data bases, promising to "increase the information coverage by an order-of-magnitude." According to a 2002 article in The New York Times, the program "would permit intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials to mount a vast dragnet through electronic transaction data ranging from credit card information to veterinary records, in the United States and internationally, to hunt for terrorists." After press reports, the Pentagon shut it down, and Mr. Poindexter eventually left the government.
But according to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush administration and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on data-mining techniques. "Our survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining," the report said, "shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts, of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational." Of these uses, the report continued, "the Department of Defense reported the largest number of efforts."
The administration says it needs this technology to effectively combat terrorism. But the effect on privacy has worried a number of politicians.
After he was briefed on President Bush's secret operation in 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a letter to Vice President Dick Cheney.
"As I reflected on the meeting today and the future we face," he wrote, "John Poindexter's T.I.A. project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance."
Senator Rockefeller sounds a lot like Senator Frank Church.
"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge," Senator Church said. "I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
James Bamford is the author of "Puzzle Palace" and"Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency."
Copyright 2005The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search Corrections XML Help Contact Us Work for Us Site Map Back to Top
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