Former head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under G.W. Bush, General Michael Hayden, recently tried a do-it-yourself makeover to recast himself as an open-government champion. The result: Hayden's pro-secrecy record of retribution against whistleblowers and extra-legal Executive power grabs is just as ugly as ever.
Hayden's failed re-branding is on full display in his CNN column and as he happily - albeit not credibly - touts the benefits of transparency in Alex Gibney's We Steal Secrets:
. . . the American people need to know what it is their government is doing for them.
(More on
We Steal Secrets here).
Hayden's preposterous revisionist history is a transparent attempt to beat up on Obama for Executive "overreach," and it's made all the more ridiculous considering Hayden is the NSA Director who presided over the Bush-era warrantless domestic surveillance programs. Hayden even has the audacity to criticize the prosecution of vindicated NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake, when it was Hayden who began the retaliation against the NSA four (Drake and three other NSA clients of mine, J. Kirk Wiebe, Bill Binney, and Edward Loomis) after they complained about Hayden's wasteful spending through proper government channels. Hayden may have forgotten all of the anti-whistleblower, anti-transparency, anti-Constitution actions he took while heading NSA & CIA, but the public should not.
The New Yorker's Jane Mayer detailed a taste of what life at NSA was like under General Hayden:
After learning that Binney had attended a meeting with [congressional oversight staffer Diane] Roark at which N.S.A. employees complained about Trailblazer, Hayden dressed down the critics. He then sent out an agency-wide memo, in which he warned that several “individuals, in a session with our congressional overseers, took a position in direct opposition to one that we had corporately decided to follow. . . . Actions contrary to our decisions will have a serious adverse effect on our efforts to transform N.S.A., and I cannot tolerate them.” Roark says of the memo, “Hayden brooked no opposition to his favorite people and programs.”
(emphasis added).
See the loathing come over Hayden's face when Drake questioned him publicly in 2010, months before the Drake case collapsed. Hayden describes working outside the lines of legality after 9/11, and puts "security" before "liberty." Here's how Hayden operated, from the horse's mouth:
We will keep America free by making Americans feel safe again.
(emphasis added)
In his effort to "make Americans feel safe," Hayden secretly authorized warrantless domestic spying. Hayden's appetite for silencing opposition extended to defending the unconstitutional program and going so far as to call the votes on the Supreme Court that he thought were in his pocket:
Hayden, who knew of her strong opposition to the surveillance program, wanted to talk to her. They met at N.S.A. headquarters on July 15, 2002. According to notes that she made after the meeting, Hayden pleaded with her to stop agitating against the program. He conceded that the policy would leak at some point, and told her that when it did she could “yell and scream” as much as she wished. . . . During the meeting, Roark says, she warned Hayden that no court would uphold the program. Curiously, Hayden responded that he had already been assured by unspecified individuals that he could count on a majority of “the nine votes”—an apparent reference to the Supreme Court. According to Roark’s notes, Hayden told her that such a vote might even be 7–2 in his favor.
Hayden can play transparency-advocate dress-up to score political points all he wants, but the NSA whistleblowers won't be fooled, and the public shouldn't be either.