Trifler, Fibber, Sophist, Spy: How Bush Abolished the Constitution

James Bamford is a codebreaker in his own right, an investigative reporter of the Seymour Hersh kind. His latest is the profile of John Rendon and the Rendon Group, chief flackers for the Bush administration and wag-the-dog manipulators of world opinion (the Rendon Group’s bogus storylines helped sell the Iraq war to a too-trusting American public). But six years ago, in the waning days of the Clinton administration, Bamford wrote a stunning short piece for the Washington Post about the NSA, the National Security Agency that, as the New York Times revealed on Monday, has been spying on Americans, on Bush’s orders, since 2001, and to the tune of perhaps 500 eavesdrops at any given time. Bamford (who later published one of the only books on the NSA) begins his Post piece by describing a massive NSA installation in Yorkshire, England, the largest of the agency’s many eavesdropping operations around the world. By 1999, the cold war long over, it should have been shrinking. Instead, it was expanding vastly. (By then the NSA, by far the largest intelligence agency in the western world, numbered 38,000 employees to the CIA’s 17,000). “People in Europe and the United States are beginning to ask why,” Bamford wrote in 1999. “Has the NSA turned from eavesdropping on the communists to eavesdropping on businesses and private citizens in Europe and the United States?” Read the full analysis of Bush's defense of the indefensible...