Bush’s Secret NSA Spying May Have Tainted Prosecutions, Report Warns

The Justice Department needs to investigate whether the secretiveness of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program tainted terrorism prosecutions by hiding exculpatory evidence from defendants, an oversight report from five inspectors general warned Friday. The report (.pdf), mandated by Congress, also warned that President’ Bush’s post-9/11 extrajudicial intelligence programs involved unprecedented collection of communications, and that the government needs to be careful about storing and using that data. The government has only admitted to eavesdropping on calls and e-mails where one end was overseas and one person was suspected to be a terrorist. It has never officially confirmed that it sucked in the telephone records of millions of Americans or eavesdropped wholesale on the internet, despite repeated media reports and confirmations from Congress members. But the report makes clear that there were more intelligence programs that the so-called “Terrorist Surveillance Program” that the administration acknowledged after the New York Times revealed in December 2005...Wired

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