"The Bush" and His Cult Spying on Americans

June 6 issue - The bitter debate about John Bolton's nomination to the United Nations may have called unwelcome attention to the spying practices of the National Security Agency.

Bolton told Congress last month that he asked the NSA for the names of Americans in raw intel reports. NSA rules prohibit the agency from spying on Americans; if electronic eavesdroppers inadvertently pick up American names, the NSA is supposed to black them out before forwarding reports to other agencies. But analysts and policymakers can make written requests to the NSA for U.S. names, which the State Department says Bolton did 10 times since 2001.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee asked for more information about Bolton's requests, but the administration refused, leading to last week's vote to delay Bolton's nomination. Meanwhile, the Senate intelligence committee's chairman, Pat Roberts, and its top Democrat, Jay Rockefeller, got a closed-door briefing on Bolton's NSA dealings from the deputy intel czar, Gen. Michael Hayden.

The senators agreed Bolton's initial NSA requests for U.S. names were legit. But the normally collegial Roberts and Rockefeller couldn't agree on whether Bolton handled the names appropriately once he received them. In dueling letters made public, the senators aired their differences. Senator Roberts argued that Democrats called unnecessary attention to intel "sources and methods" by raising Bolton's NSA dealings publicly.

Rockefeller complained that Bolton sought out a State Department official whose name was supplied by the NSA "to congratulate him"—for unspecified reasons—which Rockefeller said was "not in keeping" with Bolton's request for the uncensored NSA report. Roberts said this charge was ill founded.