NYT reporter Risen’s new book will be interesting. Some early nuggets are to be found in this AP piece and in Time.
(T)he book said a CIA officer mistakenly sent one of its Iranian agents information that could be used to identify virtually every spy the agency had in Iran. The book said the Iranian was a double agent who turned over the data to Iranian security officials.
Is that the background of the "Chalabi gives information to Iranians" story?
Maybe, but the more important stuff is the NSA spying and there are some interesting details.
First not from the book but from Slate this:
A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president’s now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a "data-mining" operation, which might eventually cull "millions" of individual calls and e-mails.
So the spying did not start with 9/11, but earlier, without presidential war power or other legal bullshit. Who initiated this and why?
Risen does not yet answer that question, but according to Time:
Risen writes that with the White House’s anything-goes mandate in place, everything went. While the NSA began monitoring communications of some Americans suspected of links to al-Qaeda–snooping on "millions of telephone calls and e-mail messages on American soil" …
From a censored letter from house minority leader Pelosi to the NSA’s Hayden this:
You indicated that you were treating as a matter of first impression, [redacted] being of foreign intelligence interest. As a result, you were forwarding the intercepts, and any information [redacted] without first receiving a request for that identifying information to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The NSA started snooping on people in the U.S. before 9/11. They snooped on "millions of calls and e-mails". They are forwarding (yes, it is ongoing) their catches (Can you imagine their criteria for forwarding? Remember – it started prior to 9/11!) to the FBI and who knows to whom else.
Are you still feeling save?
Note the morals of the man behind all of this:
Bush summoned CIA director George Tenet to the White House to ask what intelligence Abu Zubaydah had provided his captors. According to Risen’s source, Tenet told Bush that Abu Zubaydah, badly wounded during his capture, was too groggy from painkillers to talk coherently. In response, Bush asked, "Who authorized putting him on pain medication?"