'A Ton More People Were Wiretapped Than We've Been Led to Believe': FBI Whistleblower Thomas Tamm

By Liliana Segura, AlterNet. Posted April 18, 2009.

Earlier this month, Obama administration lawyers invoked the "state secrets" privilege to block a lawsuit on behalf of five AT&T customers "to stop the illegal, unconstitutional and ongoing dragnet surveillance of their communications and communications records," according to Electronic Frontier Foundation, the civil-liberties organization that brought forth the suit.

Cindy Cohn, legal director of EFF, called the legal filing by Obama's DOJ "very significant."

"This is the sort of disdain for the rule of law and the role of the courts that he campaigned against," she said via e-mail. "In our case, we have no reason to believe that the warrantless wiretapping has ended, so at some point we have to call it Obama's warrantless wiretapping."

I spoke to Tamm over the phone last week, only hours before the New York Times broke its story and the same week that he was awarded the Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling, an award that honors whistle-blowers whose work has helped to "protect the public interest, promote social justice or illuminate a more just vision of society."

Liliana Segura: You come from a long line of FBI officials and grew up with the bureau as a familiar entity -- and the Newsweek article describes you as being sort of disaffected before you discovered the NSA wiretapping program. What was it about the Bush administration that represented the most egregious violation? Was there a particular moment where you felt that you had to break your silence?

Thomas Tamm: Yes. I was disillusioned with the way that the death penalty was being administered, the change from the Reno administration to the Ashcroft administration. [Editor’s Note: Under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department encouraged U.S. attorneys to seek the death penalty as often as possible, reducing Tamm's office, the Justice Department's Capital Case Unit, which reviewed and made recommendations regarding capital cases at the federal level to "a rubber stamp," as he told Isikoff.]

When I was assigned to that unit, I had the privilege of meeting with some of the 9/11 families, and I just felt like I wanted to go after the person who had done that to 3,000 of our fellow citizens.

I was reviewing classified CIA cables [about the 9/11 plot], and I was reading cables about rendition -- people going off to Saudi Arabia or Egypt or wherever -- and the implicit understanding was that they were being sent there to be tortured.

And then I heard our government and the president saying that we don't send people to be tortured. Well, I knew that to be a bald-faced lie.

When I [transferred to the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review] and started doing the wiretapping, where I thought I was going to be contributing to going after al-Qaida, there were just so many tangential, inconsequential people who were tapped, and -- I kind of sniffed out the fact that there was this illegal program going on.

And I said, "Well, they're lying about the rendition; they're lying about the torture. Are they lying about the FISA?" And that's pretty much what pushed me over the tipping point.

LS: What did you make of the fact that the New York Times held the story until after the [2004] election?

TT: I really was conflicted, questioning my own motives, as to whether I wanted this information released because it might impact the election.

I mean, I hope its not the case; on the other hand, I think people should know what's going on when they go to vote. … It was very disconcerting that the Times did not appear as though they were going to publish it.

I met with Litchblau and Risen again, and they said, "Well, every time we talk about it, the White House says it's critical, people are going to die," And I said, "How is that possible? You guys have lawyers."

The fact that we wiretapped people without a warrant, and we wiretap people with a warrant, how does that implicate anybody's national security? They agreed and basically what happened is: Risen had been working on his book, and he told his editors, "I'm going to publish this book, and you guys can either write this story before my book comes out, or you can write it after it comes out."

LS: The original NSA wiretapping story broke a few years ago now, and the reporters who exposed it -- Eric Litchblau and James Risen -- have published books [about it]. Yet, when the Newsweek story broke, it revealed a whole new chapter in the saga. Why did you ultimately decide to "out" yourself when you did?

See more stories tagged with: 9/11, death penalty, fbi, michael isikoff, domestic spying, warrantless wiretapping, john ashcroft, state secrets, national security agency, james risen, thomas tamm, eric litchblau

Liliana Segura is an AlterNet staff writer and editor of Rights & Liberties and War on Iraq Special Coverage.

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