Saturday, July 7, 2007

Spies Like Us



Cold War Surveillance Dwarfed by the War on Terror
Remember the "Cold War?" If you're over 40, you lived through it. The raison d'ĂȘtre of the Cold War, as expounded by seven U.S. presidents, was to contain the spread of Soviet and Chinese Communism, by any means necessary.
In the United States, some of those means included illegal imprisonment of suspected spies, warrantless surveillance on Americans and a campaign of "dirty tricks" against opponents of the Cold War.
Thanks to a 700-page archive released last week by the CIA, we now have a glimpse of these activities. The documents provide details of illegal detentions, assassination plans, illegal wiretaps, a seven-year domestic surveillance operation, attempted break-ins, and even mind-control experiments on Americans and foreign leaders.
Yet, looking these documents over, one is struck by the relatively small scale of the CIA's misdeeds - trivial in comparison to the activities conducted today in the name of the War on Terror.
For instance, in the 1970s, the CIA held a former KGB agent in solitary confinement for more than three years and interrogated him night and day to determine if he was a genuine defector, or a double agent. CIA officials questioned the legality of the detention, but the agency's lawyers approved it.
In comparison, today's CIA detentions are on a far larger scale. More than 100 suspected terrorists are in secret CIA prisons overseas, and both CIA officials and President Bush defend the detentions. Several hundred more suspected terrorists are imprisoned without charge and without access to the courts at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Another example is electronic surveillance campaign carried out in the 1960s and 1970s by the National Security Agency (NSA). In hearings before the Senate in 1977, witnesses testified that the NSA's program was the "largest governmental interception program affecting Americans." Yet, according to James Bamford, who has written two books on the NSA, the agency's current monitoring of phone calls and email messages of Americans almost certainly dwarfs its domestic surveillance efforts during the Cold War.
It may be quaint to observe, but it was NSA wiretapping abuse that led to the enactment in 1978 of a law requiring the agency to obtain warrants from a secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, before it engages in domestic wiretaps. President Bush has signed a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to bypass these requirements.
However, some things don't change. Just like it was in the 1960s and 1970s, the CIA, NSA and the President are operating without a formal declaration of war, and asking Congress and the public to "Trust us." The 700-page report released last week clearly shows we shouldn't have trusted the government to obey the law during the Cold War. And we shouldn't now, either.

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