Domestic spying inquiry killed

[Anonymous]

Justice Department says NSA wouldn't grant clearance

http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05/10/ ... index.html

Wednesday, May 10, 2006; Posted: 8:19 p.m. EDT (00:19 GMT)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers security clearance.

The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax Wednesday to Democratic Rep. Maurice Hinchey of New York saying it was closing its inquiry because without clearance it could not examine department lawyers' role in the program.

"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.

Jarrett wrote that beginning in January his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.

"Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," Jarrett wrote.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."

Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules.

He declined to comment when asked if the end of the inquiry meant the agency believed its lawyers had handled the wiretapping matter ethically.

Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December.

He said lawmakers would push to find out who at the NSA denied the Justice Department lawyers security clearance.

"This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them," Hinchey said.

In February, the OPR announced it would examine the conduct of its own agency's lawyers in the program, though they were not authorized to investigate NSA activities.

Bush's decision to authorize the largest U.S. spy agency to monitor people inside the United States, without warrants, generated a host of questions about the program's legal justification.

The administration has vehemently defended the eavesdropping, saying the NSA's activities were narrowly targeted to intercept international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the U.S. with suspected ties to the al Qaeda terror network.

Separately, the Justice Department sought last month to dismiss a federal lawsuit accusing the telephone company AT&T of colluding with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.

The lawsuit, brought by an Internet privacy group, does not name the government as a defendant, but the Department of Justice has sought to quash the lawsuit, saying it threatens to expose government and military secrets.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

[Anonymous]

It seems that the America of our Founders is now dead, now it is an Orwellian Amerika.

Why does Justice not demand that the clearances be given to a small, select group of investigators? Because the Bush Administration has no intention of ever investigating any wrongdoing by itself.

We have a President that has said repeatedly that he can dowhat he wants, outside of the law, in fact he uses "signing statements" to declare that he may pick and choose which part of a law he will abide, while signing that very law. By doing so, he does an end run around Congress writing the law, and has his own version.

Gee, isn't that called a dictatorship?