During the 1990's under President Bill Clinton, the National Security Agency conducted random telecommunications surveillance of millions of phone calls daily under a top secret program known as Echelon.
But according to at least two people familiar with the spy operation at the time, some of the surveillance was far from indiscriminate.
In a February 2000 interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," NSA operator Margaret Newsham revealed that the agency's listening post in Great Britain was involved in monitoring the phone calls of at least one top Republican on Capitol Hill.
Questioned by "60 Minutes" interviewer Steve Kroft, Newsham recalled how she learned of the illegal surveillance:
"I walked into the office building and a friend said, 'Come over here and listen to--to this thing.' And he had headphones on, so I took the headphones and I listened to it, and I looked at him and said, 'That's an American.' . . .
Ms. Newsham remembered, "It was definitely an American voice, and it was a voice that was distinct. And I said, 'Well, who is that?'
"And he said it was Senator Strom Thurmond."
Until his retirement from the Senate in 2002, Thurmond was a frequent critic of the Clinton administration, who played a leading role in the 1998 impeachment drama - though there's no known connection to the decision to wiretap the South Carolina conservative.
During the same program, however, Kroft consulted with Mike Frost, who worked for Canada's version of the NSA for 20-years.
Asked if it was commonplace for the NSA to monitor the phone calls of top U.S. politicians, Frost told CBS: "Of course it goes on. Been going on for years. Of course it goes on. That's the way it works."
Its stuff like this that should embarras liberals into just shutting their mouths. Bush spies on terrorist trying to blow up stuff in New York...Clinton spies on Strom Thurmond. This is how it always goes. The Left simply has not integrity.....I think they have to know it. Does anyone else get tired of story after story, "scandal" after "scandal" being completely false? This new xoff story is another one. Both parties will look bad on this one, yet every MSM story is about the Right....
Friday, January 06, 2006
Clinton NSA Wiretapped Top Republican
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5 comments:
Honestly, I didn't understand a single thing AmWay just said. I don't speak dufus.
LOL!
You might want to do a little research and stop believing what you read on (Minimal Truth) NewsMax. I did, and I found out that Margaret Newsham listened to Strom Thurmond while working at Menwith Hill in England. She worked there from 1977-1978. That would be 14-15 years before Clinton was elected. (Yeah, I know, Carter was president.)
However, Echelon was active through the Readgan and Bush 41 administrations as well as Clinton.
Now I don't know if Echelon was legal or not, and neither do you. Neither you nor I know any of the details that would allow us to make any judgement as to the comparability of Echelon to the current administration's policy. We certainly do know that the Bush administration has admitted that it has done this surveillance in some cases without judicial oversite.
The administration claims that since we are "at war", the executive branch is not bound by any laws in defense against terrorists.
I have a problem with that. Don't you?
Bush supporters claim that the President is our commander-in-chief and as such has certain powers granted to him by the Constitution during time of war. However, he is not my commander-in-chief and he is not YOUR commander-in-chief unless you are serving in the military. He is NOT commander-in-chief of the United States. He is commander-in-chief of the US armed forces.
US Contitution, Article II, Section 2--
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.
Nothing here gives him the power to ignore the laws of the US.
do you have any proof that Echelon was started by Reagan...there was a spying program started during the Clinton years...if it wasn't Echelon it was another one
I didn't say it was started by Reagan. I said the incident that Margaret Newsham related about listening in on Strom Thurmond must have happened during the Carter administration based on where she said it happened and when she worked there, 1977-1978. Therefore, there is no relationship between the "bugging" of Thurmond she describes and Clinton.
From what I can find on the Internet, Echelon in one form or another has been going on for decades, certainly the late 70's and perhaps earlier than that. That would include at least Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43. However, what we don't know about it's use pre Bush 43 is whether or not it was carried out in a legal manner. What we DO have in the case of Bush 43 is a pretty compelling case that this sort of surveillance was being done without judicial oversight and without Congress's approval.
This from Washingto Post story about the non-partisan Congressional Research Service"
"It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here," the authors of the CRS report wrote. The administration's legal justification "does not seem to be . . . well-grounded," they said.
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