Lie to Congress; Get Fourth Star

U.S.
Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander may well be harboring the thought attributed to
prevaricator Oliver North upon being spared punishment -- and instead getting
rewarded handsomely -- for lying about the Iran-Contra Affair: "Is this a great
country or what!"

Gen. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency
since August 2005, is about to become what the Army describes as "dual hatted."
The Senate is about to confirm him to another highly sensitive leadership
position requiring the utmost integrity and fidelity to the Constitution when
he has shown neither.

Despite that, after sizing up the enormous challenge of
running the new U.S. cyber-warfare command, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Oklahoma,
looked at Gen. Alexander and added, "And you're the right person for it."

Not for the first time, neither Inhofe nor his colleagues
seem to have done their homework. Or maybe it is simply the case that Congress
now accepts being lied to as part of the woodwork in the Capitol.

Alexander, you see, has a publicly established record of
lying about NSA's warrantless wiretapping. Call me naive or obsolete, but when
I was an Army officer it was understood that an officer did not lie - and
especially not to Congress. Gen. Alexander seems to have missed that block of
instruction.

And the same can be said for so many other very senior
Army officers. It becomes easier to understand why Army Maj. Gen. Antonio
Taguba compared some of his colleagues during the Bush administration to the
Mafia.

No Additional Stars for Taguba

Maj. Gen. Taguba conducted the first (and only real)
investigation of the abuses at Abu Ghraib. His brutally honest report was
leaked to the press - and thus became largely responsible for preventing the
scandal from being swept entirely under the rug. Rather than thank Taguba for
upholding the honor of the U.S. Army, the Bush administration and more senior
generals singled him out for ridicule, retribution and forced retirement. They
made him an example of what happens if you don't toe the party line.

Taguba told investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of a
chilling conversation he had with Gen. John Abizaid, then CENTCOM commander, a
few weeks after Taguba's report became public in 2004. Sitting in the back of
Abizaid's Mercedes sedan in Kuwait, Abizaid quietly told Taguba, "You and your
report will be investigated."

"I'd
been in the Army 32 years by then," Taguba told Hersh, "and it was the first
time that I thought I was in the Mafia."

Getting back to Gen. Alexander's nomination, if our
senators continue to feed on thin gruel like that served up by the Washington Post, Alexander is a shoo-in
to become the first head of the Cyber Command, newly established to enhance the
kind of capabilities for waging network warfare that the Pentagon believes it
needs.

Technically speaking, Alexander's training and experience
would qualify him for the job. But, as I will show in what follows, if Congress
wants to be able to get honest answers from someone in such a sensitive post,
it should send the general packing.

Premium on Trustworthiness

As Alexander testified Thursday before the Senate Armed
Services Committee that is weighing his nomination, it became frighteningly
clear that his new scope of responsibility would be virtually (no pun intended)
unbounded - the more so inasmuch as he would keep his job as NSA director.

Alexander himself conceded the point that much about
cyber-warfare is "unchartered (sic) territory." He got that right! It's also
uncharted.

"Civil
liberties, privacy all come into that equation," Alexander said, "while you try
to, on the same network, potentially take care of bad actors."

This gave little comfort to committee members with
concerns that civil liberties could take a back seat to the Cyber Command's
broadly-but-vaguely defined tasks, like "executing full-spectrum military,
cyberspace operations." Nathan Hodge, writing in Wired, observed that apparently Alexander would be cyber
guru over "everything but the kitchen sink."

No sighs of relief or reassurance were heard as committee
members read Alexander's written answers to earlier questions from senators.
For example, in an attempt to mollify some of the senators' concerns, Alexander
had written this:

"It is
difficult for me to conceive of an instance where it would be appropriate to
attack a bank or a financial institution, unless perhaps it was being used
solely to support enemy military operations."

What about the Internet? Could Alexander order his
cyber-warriors to shut it down?

Alexander promised to be sensitive to the vagaries of
cyber-warfare and said he would honor the laws of war and the impact on
civilians. It seems he was protesting a tad too much as he promised repeatedly
to "operate within applicable laws, policies, and authorities."

That should be a given, no? Not for Gen. Alexander. There
was an elephant in the room - Alexander's open record of deception - but no one
noticed it.

Lying Is Okay

Would that the Washington
Post's Ellen Nakashima had done due diligence before talking to
Alexander's buddies and then writing a bland scene-setter before Thursday's
hearing. Nakashima had a follow-up on Friday, in which she noted that the
Senate committee members expressed confidence that he would be confirmed.

A few minutes of Googling would have turned up an incident
that, by any objective standard, should be an automatic disqualifier for
Alexander. (I realize that after 9/11 "everything changed." Does that mean that
lying to Congress is now okay?)

Here's the story on Alexander; it requires a bit of
background.

In December 2005, top New
York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact
that the Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens
without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA).

Get this: The fearless Times
had learned of this law violation well before the 2004 election and acquiesced
to White House entreaties to suppress this explosive information, which easily
could have proved a game-changer.

Over a year later, in late fall 2005, the Times' investigative reporter James
Risen reminded management that his explosive book, State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush
Administration, was about to be published and would expose the
warrantless eavesdropping and much else.

Times' publisher, Arthur Sulzberger,
Jr., bit through his lip when he realized he could defer to the White House no
longer. It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen's book out on the
street before Sulzberger let Risen and his colleagues tell the story in the
newspaper.

The Times
was already reeling from the well earned ridicule directed its way for its
shameless reporting on the threat from Iraq with its (non-existent) "weapons of
mass destruction," and the Times'
cheerleading for war. How could Sulzberger and his managers pretend that
the eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs's trademark criterion: All The News That's Fit To Print. (The Times' then ombudsman, Public Editor
Byron Calame, later branded the newspaper's explanation for the long delay in
publishing Risen's story "woefully inadequate.")

When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that
he could no longer delay reporting on Risen's findings, the publisher was
immediately summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with President
Bush on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story
in the Times.

But, alas, there is always someone who does not get the
word. This time it was the pitiable Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander. No one in the
White House thought to call NSA and tell Alexander, in effect, that the cat was
out of the bag.

Alexander The Not So Great

And so the following day, Dec. 6, Alexander spoke from the
old faux talking points when House intelligence oversight committee member Rush
Holt, D-New Jersey, made a parish call at NSA. No, never ever would NSA
eavesdrop on Americans without a court order, Alexander told Holt.

Holt is still possessed of the quaint notion that generals
and other senior officials are not supposed to lie to congressional oversight
committees. Accordingly, on Dec. 16 when the Times
published a front-page story by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, "Bush Lets U.S.
Spy on Callers Without Courts," Holt was surprised, to say the least.

He drafted a blistering letter to Gen. Alexander, but the
Intelligence Committee chair, Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, blocked any attempt to
hold Alexander accountable for his lie.

Holt, mind you, was not simply another committee member,
but rather the panel's most experienced and diligent worker in this area. Holt
also had served in the intelligence community as an intelligence analyst at the
State Department.

Here's what happened next. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature, President Bush publicly
admitted to - actually bragged about - committing a demonstrably impeachable
offense.

Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key
provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon.
On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by
bipartisan votes in the House Judiciary Committee, prompting Nixon's
resignation two weeks later.

Toughing It Out

For his part, Bush chose a frontal approach. Far from
expressing regret, the President proudly bragged about having authorized the
warrantless surveillance "more than 30 times since the September the 11th
attacks."

Declaring that he would continue to do so, Bush added:
"Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this
authorization and the activities conducted under it."

On Dec. 19, 2005, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
and then-Deputy Director of National Intelligence Michael Hayden held a press
conference to answer questions about the surveillance program. (Hayden had been
Alexander's predecessor as NSA director and would become head of the CIA in May
2006.)

At the press conference, Gonzales was asked why the White
House decided to flout the FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing
instead a "backdoor approach." He answered:

"We have
had discussions with Congress...as to whether or not FISA could be amended to
allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that
that would be difficult, if not impossible."

Hmm. Impossible? It strains credulity that a program of
the limited scope described would be unable to win ready approval from a
Congress that had passed the sweeping "Patriot Act" in record time.

James Risen has made the following quip about the
prevailing mood: "In October 2001, you could have set up guillotines on the
public streets of America." (And, further disproving Gonzales' transparent
excuse, FISA was amended before Bush left office essentially to make his
illegal actions "legal.")

Based on all the deceptions and circumlocutions, it was
not difficult to infer that the surveillance program must have been of such
scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it didn't have a
prayer of winning congressional approval.

So, the administration resorted to the tried and true
"brief/co-opt/and gag" approach that works so well with the invertebrate
leaders of the Intelligence Committees who fear nothing so much as being
painted "soft on terrorism."

Naming the Bugging

Despite Bush's hubris, going with the name, "Illegal
Surveillance Program (and Whaddya-Gonna-Do-About-It?)," didn't quite fit the
White House's public-relations purposes. It took six weeks to settle on
"Terrorist Surveillance Program," with Fox News leading the way followed by the
President himself. This branding would dovetail nicely with Bush's earlier
rhetoric on Dec. 17, 2005:

"In the
weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National
Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept
the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaeda and
related terrorist organizations. ... The authorization I gave the National
Security Agency after September 11 helped address that problem..."

"Consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution?" No way.
Congress had made FISA the exclusive means for conducting national security
wiretaps on Americans, and the Constitution's Fourth Amendment requires a
warrant based on "probable cause."

But, of course, Gonzales and Gen. Michael Hayden, who
headed NSA from 1999 until Alexander took over in August 2005, were on the same
page as the President, and brazened through as strongly as Bush.

Yet, in a moment of almost poignant candor during his May
2006 confirmation hearings to become CIA director, Hayden told of his deep
soul-searching when, as director of NSA, he was asked to eavesdrop on Americans
without a court warrant.

"I had
to make this personal decision in early October 2001," said Hayden. "It was a
personal decision. ... I could not not do this."

Small wonder it was a hard decision. It was not only in
direct violation of FISA (and thus a felony), but also of NSA's own
time-honored "First Commandment" - Thou Shalt Not Eavesdrop on Americans
Without a Warrant.

Call me old school, but I believe it was Hayden's duty to refuse an illegal order. I
take some satisfaction in the fact that two of Hayden's most admired
predecessors concurred in that judgment.

Accountability? What's That?

After President Bush nominated Hayden to be CIA director,
Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who led NSA from 1977 to 1981 and was actually a key
co-author of the 1978 FISA, minced few words about Hayden. At a public
discussion at the New York Public Library on May 8, 2006, Inman took strong
issue with Hayden's flouting of FISA:

"There
clearly was a line in the FISA statutes which says you couldn't do this,"
said Inman. He went on to call specific attention to an "extra
sentence put in the bill that said, 'You can't do anything that is not
authorized by this bill.'"

Inman spoke proudly of the earlier ethos at NSA, where
"it was deeply ingrained that you operate within the law and you get the
law changed if you need to."

The New York Times and the
rest of the Fawning Corporate Media missed the story.

The late Gen. Bill Odom, another former NSA director, was
even blunter, declaring that Hayden "should have been court-martialed" for
assenting to an order that violated federal law and the Constitution.

Odom's comment on Jan. 4, 2006 came while preparing to be interviewed
by George Kenney, a former Foreign Service officer and now producer of
"Electronic Politics." Odom added with equal fury that President Bush "should
be impeached."

But accountability for unconstitutional lawbreaking was
not in the cards, then or since. Hayden was easily confirmed as CIA Director on
May 26, 2006, after already acquiring a fourth star for his loyalty (to the
White House, not the Constitution - you don't get stars from the Constitution).

Gen. Alexander seems to have learned well from his NSA
predecessor. And he is likely to get a fourth star from President Barack Obama
upon taking over the new Cyber Command, after getting confirmed by senators who
either don't care that Alexander lied to Congress or don't know enough to care.
(I'm not sure which is worse.)

It all reminds me of the college student whom I asked to
explain the widespread apathy on campus. His answer: "I don't know, and I don't
care."

O Tempora, O Mores!

NSA will be in the news over the next days because of the
ex-NSA official who has been accused of giving information to a reporter about
cost overruns and other bureaucratic screw-ups at NSA. Would that the NSA cared as much about
honoring the law and protecting the privacy of the American people, as it does
about insiders who commit the unforgivable sin of exposing the spy agency's own
dirty laundry.

The media circus that is sure to follow will make it still
easier to divert attention from Gen. Alexander's proven willingness to deceive.

This
article first appeared on Consortiumnews.com.