Joke of the Day... (No.2):
U.S. Wiretaps Were of Limited Value, Officials Report
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The report provided previously undisclosed details about the legal and operational schisms that dogged the program in its five years of existence. The 38-page document released Friday was an unclassified version. The bulk of the findings remain classified in separate reports from each of the five inspectors general, who represent the Justice Department, the N.S.A, the C.I.A., the Defense Department and the Office of National Intelligence.
The inquiry included interviews with about 200 government and private-sector personnel, but a number of key players — including David Addington, a top aide to Mr. Cheney; George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director; John Ashcroft, the former attorney general; and John Yoo, a Justice Department lawyer who endorsed the wiretapping program — declined to be interviewed.
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Among other findings, the report concluded that Alberto R. Gonzales, as attorney general, provided “confusing, inaccurate” statements about N.S.A. surveillance activities to lawmakers in 2007, but did not “intend to mislead Congress.” Mr. Gonzales had said that a dispute between the White House and Justice Department lawyers in 2004 did not relate to the wiretapping program but rather to “other” intelligence activities.
The report states that at the same time Mr. Bush authorized the warrantless wiretapping operation, he also signed off on other surveillance programs that the government has never publicly acknowledged. While the report does not identify them, current and former officials say that those programs included data mining of e-mail messages of Americans. That was apparently what Mr. Gonzales was referring to in his Congressional testimony.
The investigation stopped short of assessing whether the wiretapping program violated the law requiring court-ordered warrants before wiretapping Americans’ communications. But the report faulted the administration for what it called a failure to conduct adequate legal review of the program at its inception.
The report said that Mr. Yoo, of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, gave the White House his first legal opinion endorsing the wiretapping in November 2001, weeks after it had begun, and that his boss, Jay Bybee, was not even aware of the program’s existence.
Moreover, Mr. Ashcroft gave his legal authorization to the program for the first two and a half years based on a “misimpression” of what activities the N.S.A. was actually conducting. In March 2004, a showdown occurred in Mr. Ashcroft’s hospital room when top Justice Department officials refused to sign off on the legality of the program and threatened to resign. The report said that the White House had the program continue by having Mr. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, sign the authorization.
What the report described as flawed legal opinions by Mr. Yoo and efforts to circumvent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret court that approves intelligence wiretaps, “jeopardized” the Justice Department’s relations with the court, the report said. The panel also recommended that the Justice Department examine criminal cases that grew out of the program to determine if prosecutors had complied with federal judicial requirements to disclose information to defendants.
In 2008, Congress restructured the federal surveillance law, the broadest such overhaul in three decades. The inspector generals’ report said the new law “gave the government even broader authority to intercept international communications” than did the original program. That same measure also gave legal immunity to the telecommunications companies that cooperated in the wiretapping program.
nytimes.com
Of course the real "joke" here is that despite the fact that this so called "report" doesn't say a thing you haven't already been told and has probably cost you at least $0.5M to date but will never be used to address the "reported" crimes... you could care less.
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