who leaked “Able danger?”
Two years ago, the tantalizing story of Able Danger came to light as three of its team went public with information on the cutting-edge data-mining program. Coincidentally, as the AD story got fitfully reported over the succeeding months, the New York Times revealed an NSA surveillance plan that monitored communications on suspected terrorist lines and cell phones from points abroad into the US without a wiretap. Now it looks like the two may have more in common than first thought, at least conceptually, and that may prove that Alberto Gonzales told the truth in testimony this week in the Senate:
A fierce dispute within the Bush administration in early 2004 over a National Security Agency warrantless surveillance program was related to concerns about the NSA’s searches of huge computer databases, the New York Times reported today.The agency’s data mining was also linked to a dramatic chain of events in March 2004, including threats of resignation from senior Justice Department officials and an unusual nighttime visit by White House aides to the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, the Times reported, citing current and former officials briefed on the program.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, one of the aides who went to the hospital, was questioned closely about that episode during a contentious Senate hearing on Tuesday. Gonzales characterized the internal debate as centering on “other intelligence activities” than the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program, whose existence President Bush confirmed in December 2005.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III contradicted Gonzales, his boss, two days later, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee that the disagreement involved “an NSA program that has been much discussed.” …
The report of a data mining component to the dispute suggests that Gonzales’s testimony could be correct. A group of Senate Democrats, including two who have been privy to classified briefings about the NSA program, called last week for a special prosecutor to consider perjury charges against Gonzales.
The report also provides further evidence that the NSA surveillance operation was far more extensive than has been acknowledged by the Bush administration, which has consistently sought to describe the program in narrow terms and to emphasize that the effort was legal.
This may be good news for Gonzales, but will likely prompt more questions about the NSA’s surveillance program. The AD program got shut down in a hurry before 9/11, in some tellings because it got a little too indiscriminate with its connections between Clinton administration officials and potential enemies, but more likely because of its potential to cross lines separating military intelligence and domestic privacy laws. If the Pentagon’s lawyers got a case of the shakes around AD, the Department of Justice could easily have felt the same way about a similar program centered at the NSA.