"...what does seem unprecedented here is the role that Tice has been handed: to play Virgil to Congress for a tour of the intelligence underworld, where powerful bureaucrats make life and death decisions without much oversight or even supervision."
And what the article illustrates is there is a plethora of whistleblowers pointing out problems and excesses in Bushworld. Probably what Tice is going to testify about is the relationship and cooperation between Google, major communications companies and NSA domestic spying using their massive databases. David Bier http://public.cq.com/public/20060210_homeland.html CQ HOMELAND SECURITY INTELLIGENCE Feb. 10, 2006 8:47 p.m. In From the Cold: Shays to Give NSA Whistleblower a Hearing By Jeff Stein, National Security Editor Had all this happened in the 1970s, Russell Tice would have been on the run and secret White House burglars would be rifling through his psychiatrist's files in search of dirt they could use against him. Instead, the former National Security Agency (NSA) manager is giving interviews on the inside world of the forbidding, code-breaking labyrinth whose warrantless domestic telephone and e-mail intercepts have suddenly convulsed congressional Republicans. Tice is hardly alone. On Tuesday, he'll be one of a half-dozen intelligence workers emerging from the shadows to testify at a House hearing chaired by Connecticut Republican Rep. Christopher Shays on legislation to protect national security whistleblowers from retaliation. It's as if Deep Throat had outed himself and signed up as a television analyst while Woodward and Bernstein were still churning out Watergate stories. Tice played no such central role in The New York Times' revelations of the NSA's domestic spying, says another national security whistleblower who knows him well. He's not this generation's Daniel Ellsberg, the Defense Department dissenter who leaked the secret Vietnam War documents that became known as the Pentagon Papers. But what does seem unprecedented here is the role that Tice has been handed: to play Virgil to Congress for a tour of the intelligence underworld, where powerful bureaucrats make life and death decisions without much oversight or even supervision. Wilderness of Mirrors Tice gave an extraordinary interview recently to the libertarian magazine Reason in which he hinted at the depths to which the NSA story may eventually drill. "I've known this for a long time and I've kept my mouth shut," he said. "You're referring," the interviewer asked, "to what [New York Times reporter] James Risen calls `The Program,' the NSA wiretaps that have been reported on?" "No," Tice answered. "I'm referring to what I need to tell Congress that no one knows yet, which is only tertiarily connected to what you know about now." "[T]hese things are so deep black," Tice said, "the extremely sensitive programs that I was a specialist in, these things are so deep black that only a minute few people are cleared for these things." He risked losing his security clearance, he said, even by merely questioning a program's legality inside the building. "So you have literally nowhere to go." Except to the press, and now, Congress, which until recently has shown little inclination to drill into his dark world. Tice says he was "the worker bee who does the work, writes the reports, goes into the field, does the liaison work, makes the phone calls." Being "the nitty-gritty detail guy," he says, made him a lethal threat to NSA bosses. Tice is not likely to spill everything he saw and heard at the NSA in open testimony. The Shays committee's focus is retaliation against national security dissidents, who are exempted from the protections afforded federal whistleblowers in non-classified jobs. Tice will tell a hellish tale. His black-chamber bosses ordered him to undergo a psychiatric exam, pronounced him unfit for duty and stripped him of his security clearance. It "destroys your career in the intel field, makes you unemployable forever," he says. Except, perhaps, as an expert analyst on MSNBC. Secret Lovers Another scheduled witness, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) operative Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, will tell the committee about what happened after he went public with his insistence that U.S. intelligence knew about the impending Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and could have prevented them. He entered what's often called a "wilderness of mirrors" a phrase spies use to describe a paranoid world where their life of deception turns back on them. Shaffer, who spent years as a super-secret DIA agent handler, surfaced last year in stories about a deeply clandestine DIA data-mining unit code-named "Able Danger," which he says latched onto the movements of Mohammed Atta and other al Qaeda hijackers weeks before the Sept. 11 attack. Another leader of the units says the same. Shaffer will tell Shays' Subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations how his career was sidetracked and his reputation trashed when he challenged the official version of events handed down by the Sept. 11 commission, a source familiar with his 66-page prepared statement says. But the next day, Feb. 15, Shaffer will get a chance to tell the whole Able Danger story under oath to a closed-door, joint hearing of two House Armed Services subcommittees. The fact that Shaffer, now on paid leave from the DIA, is finally getting such a forum to tell his story is testimony to the weakened power of the White House to control events related to intelligence abuses on Capitol Hill. More than 200 members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have signed on to a demand that the Defense Department investigate Shaffer's claims. For months Shaffer's version of events has not only been dismissed by Sept. 11 commission Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, but tarnished through his close association with Republican Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania. Weldon has a reputation among intelligence journalists, fairly or not, as someone whose allegations aren't always backed up by the facts. As Shaffer's scheduled testimony drew near, there were whispers that the White House had engineered the lifting of Shaffer's gag order in exchange for a promise that he would focus on Clinton administration intelligence failures, not their own. Contacted by telephone late Friday, Shaffer emphatically rejected that notion. He repeated his previous desire only to testify on important matters he says the Sept. 11 commission left out, and citing the same gag order declined to discuss the issue further. Whistleblower Windfall Washington is suddenly awash in people like Shaffer, according to Sibel Edmonds, an ex-FBI translator and founder of the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, which gets "five to 10 calls every day" from disenchanted intelligence and homeland security employees, she says. The group now has 75 members. Besides Shaffer, the committee will also hear from 16-year FBI special agent Mike German, who will describe how his career went south after he complained about irregularities in a Florida terrorism investigation. Shays has also summoned the Justice Department inspector general to explain why his report on German's complaint of official misconduct has not been made public. And the committee will hear from Richard Levernier, a former senior Department of Energy security specialist, whose reward for complaining about the vulnerabilities of nuclear power plants earned him mostly opprobrium and ridicule from his superiors. Former U.S. Army Intelligence Sgt. Samuel J. Provance III, who in 2004 disobeyed an order not to discuss the abuse of prisoners at Iraq's infamous Abu Ghraib jail, is also on the witness list. Provance will tell the committee how he was stripped of his security clearance, pursued by Army detectives and threatened with court martial. After he told his story to ABC News, he was deluged by e-mails, he said last year. "The first one I got was from a retired military police officer. He wrote, `Thanks for doing the right thing.' About an hour later I got another one that said, `You're a sorry soldier.'" People said as much about Daniel Ellsberg. Backchannel Chatter Code Red: Clark Kent Ervin, the acting Department of Homeland Security inspector general who was unceremoniously cut loose before the second Bush term, "candidly discusses the circumstances of his departure" in a book scheduled for April, according to his publisher. "He ... shows how his team's prescriptions for urgent change were ignored leaving the U.S. vulnerable to another terrorist attack," says St. Martin's Press ... Risky Business: Overclassification of documents is putting the nation's intelligence system at "risk," says no less than a top FBI lawyer. Writing in the current edition of the American Intelligence Journal, published by the National Military Intelligence Association, FBI counsel M.E. "Spike" Bowen points out that "the person most likely to encounter a person who means to do harm is the local law enforcement agent." But because cops don't have high security clearances, "Information that might be used to identify a potential terrorist is ... not in the hands of those in a position to act on it." Jeff Stein can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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