By Linda Lewis. In a bombshell interview, former NSA intelligence analyst Russell Tice provided new details about previously reported NSA wiretapping in the period 2002-2005. Speaking with Peter Collins and Sibel Edmonds (Boiling Frogs), Tice said NSA senior management were implicated in apparent monitoring of the communications of top government officials–Supreme Court judges, Senate Intelligence Committee members, senior military officers and candidates for public office–as well as international NGOs like the Red Cross. Tice said Barack Obama, Gen. David Petraeus and Sen. Diane Feinstein were among those targeted for surveillance.

Tice disclosed previously that he was a source for a New York Times’ expose of warrantless wiretapping. Tice went public with his concerns on December 16, 2005, the day the NYT article, written by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, hit newsstands. UPI detailed Tice’s efforts to go through “channels” with his concerns about possible NSA abuses. Subsequently, Tice appeared on several television news programs, including Keith Olbermann’s Countdown.

Boiling Frogs Post is the brainchild of Edmonds, the FBI whistleblower whose story was the subject of a Vanity Fair article, “An Inconvenient Patriot.” In May, 2005, Edmonds, Tice and more than a dozen other whistleblowers appeared on Capitol Hill to ask Congress for legal protections for whistleblowers who hold security clearances. Congress turned a deaf ear to their pleas.

Employees of conscience were left with three choices: (1) keep silent and be complicit in abuses; (2) speak out and be destroyed by the agency; or, (3) devise their own protections for speaking out. When Edward Snowden took the third option and fled the country, it should have surprised no one–Congress least of all. Politicians who painted Snowden as a “traitor” neglected to mention that his actions are a predictable consequence of bureaucratic dysfunctions that Congress failed to reform.

Note: The author writes occasionally for Boiling Frogs Post.

Photo: Russell Tice (May 2005) by Linda Lewis.