New shocking documents reveal espionage aimed at the USA's first lady and former president Jimmy Carter

  

The USA's first lady, Hillary Clinton, has been singled out as an espionage target by the very same intelligence agency for which her husband, President Bill Clinton, is commander-in-chief.

The NSA, the USA's intelligence service, is responsible for singling out Hillary Rodham Clinton as a surveillance target. This is stated in three, recently declassified top-secret documents that also reveal that former US president Jimmy Carter is also a designated target for the spies - and that all US politicians who participated in the 1996 US election campaign were being monitored by Echelon.

The new documents describe in detail how surveillance reports for Carter, Clinton and said politicians should be handled in the system. The documents were prepared by the NSA, the US's intelligence agency, which is the leading partner in the international surveillance ring, aka Echelon.

NSA is short for National Security Agency. With 38,613 employees at its headquarters in Fort Meade, USA, the agency is the senior partner nonpareil in the espionage cooperation with intelligence services from large parts of the Western world. Denmark's counterpart, the DDIS, has been cooperating with the US on surveillance since 1947.

The newly released documents verify Ekstra Bladet's previous exposés of the fact that the NSA and Echelon are by no means solely occupied with military intelligence, counter-espionage and the surveillance of presumed terrorists and other criminal elements.

In a long series of articles, Ekstra Bladet has documented that the system is being used for industrial espionage, and for monitoring and registering politically active persons and organizations, ranging from Greenpeace and Amnesty International to high-ranking politicians, ministers and government officials.

Three former NSA spies - Margaret Newsham, Fred Stock and Wayne Madsen, who have done their spying in Canada, the UK and the US - have previously informed Ekstra Bladet that politicians both in the US and Europe, including Denmark, are potential Echelon targets.

The new revealing documents additionally confirm the allegations of the three agents.

Hillary's phone receiver
According to US law, the NSA is not allowed to monitor and spy on US citizens. Nevertheless, in 1993 the NSA established guidelines for how surveillance of the president's wife Hillary Clinton should be handled.

Among other things, the document states that "Ms. Clinton may only be referred to in the reports by her title (currently a board member of the President's Council on the National Health Reform) without advance permission whenever this title is necessary for understanding or processing foreign items of information and whenever the information contained in the report concerns her official duties".

The document continues, "As with all other leading officials in the state apparatus, reports on Ms. Clinton's private life and actions may only be publicized if they involve evidence of criminal action and only after review by the NSA's management and the OCG." (The OCG is the NSA's advisory office - ed.)

Citizen Carter
Ex-president Jimmy Carter became an object of interest to the spies when he started mediating in the Bosnia War in 1994. In this context, the NSA drafted a secret document on how to handle the surveillance of the ex-president:

"Any report that either deals with his trips to Bosnia or his participation in attempts to end the war may only refer to him as a 'US citizen'. Only if former president Carter at some time in the future is given the status of an official envoy for the US government may he be identified as a 'former US president'", the document states, which is stamped 'Handle via comint channels only. Secret'. 'Comint' is a code word for surveillance.

In the third document, dating from 1996, the NSA describes how the spies at the various listening posts shall handle intercepted phone conversations, e-mails, and telefaxes from the candidates in the US election campaign that same year.

Both congressional and presidential elections were held in 1996.

The new documents were unearthed by the EPIC, a civil rights organization that received the documents after a number of suits filed against the NSA. Currently, the EPIC has a new suit pending against the NSA. The EPIC is seeking official confirmation of the documents unearthed by Ekstra Bladet from a US military computer system last March. These documents single out the Red Cross, among others, as a surveillance target for the NSA and other intelligence agencies that use Echelon.