Richard Nixon usually gets whatever blame is usually assigned for Operation Menu, the secret bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the deaths of millions of Cambodians in the killing fields. The bombing itself is estimated to have killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians over a fourteen month timespan.
What’s often forgotten, however, is that the Menu operation began less than two months after Nixon took office. Nixon did, indeed, give the authorization, but he did so within days of his inaguration. The plan itself had been drawn up at the Pentagon during the Johnson administration, but LBJ didn’t authorize it.
Operation Menu came to mind last week when the reports that telecom companies had been approached to provide call records to the NSA by February 2001, just a month after the Bush administration took office. According to a filing by former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, Qwest had declined the NSA’s request by 27 February 2001, which means that the request had presumably been delivered sometime before that.
That leads to the fairly safe conclusion that the program was on the shelf somewhere before then, most likely inside of the government. It would be interesting to know who developed and proposed it, and who knew about it prior to its authorization.