Originally published February 23 2006
Many see similarities between current and past eavesdropping scandals
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Loch K. Johnson said, "You feel like you're in an echo chamber, because the comments on both sides are so similar to 1975." Senator Pat Roberts has defended the program and dismissed the Nixon era comparison.
As the Senate prepares to hold hearings on Monday on domestic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, old Washington hands see a striking similarity to a drama that unfolded three decades ago in the capital.
In 1975, a Senate committee led by Senator Frank Church of Idaho revealed that the N.S.A. had intercepted the phone calls and telegrams of Americans.
Then, as now, intelligence officials insisted that only international communications of people linked to dangerous activities were the targets, and that the spying was authorized under the president's constitutional powers.
Both in 1975 and today, officials defending the N.S.A. operation said it had prevented terrorist attacks.
And Dick Cheney, who as vice president has overseen secret briefings for selected members of Congress on the N.S.A. program, was in the White House then, too, serving as a deputy to President Gerald R. Ford before succeeding Donald H. Rumsfeld as chief of staff.
That became the basis of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the law that critics say is being violated by President Bush's decision to authorize eavesdropping without court warrants on people in the United States linked to Al Qaeda.
He added: "There will be a legal debate about whether or not I have the authority to do this.
To read through the documents of the earlier era is to spot many themes from the current controversy: the cooperation of major telecommunications companies with the N.S.A.; the challenges of fast-changing communications technologies (then the expansion of satellite communications, now the Internet explosion); the legal rationale as laid out in detail by the attorney general (then Edward H. Levi, now Alberto R. Gonzales, who is to testify Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee).
The N.S.A. revelations of 30 years ago were unearthed simultaneously by the Church Committee, two House committees and the press, focusing on two programs code-named Minaret and Shamrock.
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