Wednesday January 11th 2006, 9:46 am
As
further evidence the Bushcons are not interested in snooping
"al-Qaeda," and in fact there is no "al-Qaeda" threat in America,
consider revelations that the NSA snooped the Pledge of
Resistance-Baltimore, a Quaker peace group. "The National Security
Agency has been spying on a Baltimore anti-war group, according to
documents released during litigation, going so far as to document the
inflating of protesters’ balloons, and intended to deploy units trained
to detect weapons of mass destruction," reports the Raw Story.
"According to the documents, the Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore, a
Quaker-linked peace group, has been monitored by the NSA working with
the Baltimore Intelligence Unit of the Baltimore City Police
Department." Of course, it is completely absurd that the NSA and the
Baltimore police would actually believe a small group of Quakers have
weapons of mass destruction, that is unless they believe the Bill of
Rights is a weapon of mass destruction.
Last year, Pledge of
Resistance-Baltimore "sent a letter to Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the
director of the National Security Agency, requesting a meeting," a press release
reveals. "The letter raised three major concerns: 1] the agency’s
involvement in Justice Department plans to monitor and gather data
about US citizens; 2] its role in the war against Iraq; and 3] the
eavesdropping on the diplomatic delegations from several United Nations
Security Council nations [first reported March 2, 2003 in the
London-based Observer]. Since there was no response to the letter,
fourteen Pledge members went to the spy agency on Oct. 4, 2003 to seek
a meeting with the director. Some forty security operatives blocked
access to the visitor’s parking lot. After some dialogue about the
Constitutional right of citizens to petition government officials,
Marilyn Carlisle, Cindy Farquhar, Jay Gillen, Max Obuszewski and
Levanah Ruthschild were arrested and charged with trespass. Later the
antiwar activists were also charged with a failure to obey a lawful
order." In short, the NSA went after the activist group because they
insisted the Bill of Rights means what it says.
The Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore press release continues:
Thus
the Agency perceives Constitutionally-protected speech as some kind of
threat. It is believed the NSA is monitoring the activities of the
Pledge, which would explain the massive police presence on Oct. 4. This
may be an attempt to intimidate those who question Agency operations….
At trial, scheduled for May 27, the defendants intend to bring out the
NSA’s intimate involvement in the duplicitous efforts to promote war
with Iraq. They expect to be found not guilty of both charges. All five
Pledge members who were arrested at the NSA on Oct. 4, 2003 continue to
be involved in risk-arrest actions protesting the war and the
occupation.
It should not be surprising the NSA
and the Straussian neocons in control of the Bush White House and the
Pentagon consider free speech a weapon of mass destruction and also
consider a small group of Quakers a threat to national security (or a
threat to their ability to invade and occupy small countries). Indeed,
the "NSA’s intimate involvement in the duplicitous efforts" were used
"to promote war with Iraq." As declassified NSA documents reveal, "the
Tonkin Gulf [so-called incident] confirms what historians have long
argued: that there was no second attack on U.S. ships in Tonkin on
August 4, 1964. According to National Security Archive research fellow
John Prados, 'the American people have long deserved to know the full
truth about the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The National Security Agency
is to be commended for releasing this piece of the puzzle. The
parallels between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the
manipulated intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the
more worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964 in light of new
evidence,’" according to the National Security Archive.
"President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara treated Agency
SIGINT reports as vital evidence of a second attack and used this claim
to support retaliatory air strikes and to buttress the administration’s
request for a Congressional resolution that would give the White House
freedom of action in Vietnam." This "freedom of action" resulted in the
death of around three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans.
As
an example of the super-secret snoop organization’s respect for the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights, consider the following: "The
largest U.S. spy agency warned the incoming Bush administration in its
'Transition 2001′ report that the Information Age required rethinking
the policies and authorities that kept the National Security Agency in
compliance with the Constitution’s 4th Amendment prohibition on
'unreasonable searches and seizures’ without warrant and 'probable
cause,’ according to an updated briefing book of declassified NSA
documents," writes Jeffrey Richelson,
senior fellow of the National Security Archive at George Washington
University. "The NSA told the Bush transition team that the 'analog
world of point-to-point communications carried along discrete,
dedicated voice channels’ is being replaced by communications that are
'mostly digital, carry billions of bits of data, and contain voice,
data and multimedia,’ and therefore, ’senior leadership must understand
that today’s and tomorrow’s mission will demand a powerful, permanent
presence on a global telecommunications network that will host the
"protected" communications of Americans as well as targeted
communications of adversaries.’" In other words, the NSA was telling
the in-coming Bushites they have no respect for the founding document
of this country and "adversaries" are both foreign and domestic (and as
the Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore case reveals, mostly domestic).
Meanwhile,
in order to lower the heat focused on the NSA in the wake of the
revelations Bush used the snoop agency as his own personal enemies
monitoring network, the "National Security Agency’s inspector general
has opened an investigation into the agency’s eavesdropping without
warrants in the United States," according to the Washington Post.
"The Pentagon’s acting inspector general, Thomas Gimble, wrote that his
counterpart at the NSA 'is already actively reviewing aspects of that
program’ and has 'considerable expertise in the oversight of electronic
surveillance,’ according to the letter sent to House Democrats who have
requested official investigations of the NSA program."
Gimble’s
letter appears to confirm that an internal investigation into the NSA’s
domestic eavesdropping program, authorized in a secret order by
President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is under way. The
Justice Department has opened a separate criminal investigation into
the recent leak of the highly classified program’s existence.
Of
course, this will be about as useful as a bucket milking unit on a
bull. The NSA works closely with the Department of Defense and is
generally directed by a military officer—in other words, Thomas
Gimble’s "investigation" will be something like the Mafia investigating
improprieties in its prostitution or drug pushing operations. As an
indication that any "investigation" will be about as useful as the
aforementioned milking unit, consider the remarks of the NSA’s
inspector general, Joel F. Brenner, who declared "that suggestions that
any eavesdropping had been conducted for 'domestic political purposes’
is false," according to the New York Times.
In other words, according to this factotum, when the NSA snooped the
Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore it had nothing to do with politics. If
you believe this, I have a bridge I want to sell you in Brooklyn.
In
fact, the NSA has long snooped Americans for political reasons and, as
reported in December, it "conducted much broader surveillance of
e-mails and phone calls without court orders than the Bush
administration has acknowledged," with plenty of help from your local
telecom corporation. "The story [published in the New York Times]
quoted a former technology manager at a major telecommunications firm
as saying that companies have been storing information on calling
patterns since the Sept. 11 attacks, and giving it to the federal
government. Neither the manager nor the company he worked for was
identified."
But don’t expect anybody to be held responsible
because the NSA "destroyed the names of thousands of Americans and US
companies it collected on its own volition following 9/11, because the
agency feared it would be taken to task by lawmakers for conducting
unlawful surveillance on United States citizens without authorization
from a court, according to a little known report published in October
2001 and intelligence officials familiar with the NSA’s operations,"
writes Jason Leopold. "NSA lawyers told the agency that the
surveillance was illegal and that it could not share the data it
collected with the CIA or other intelligence agencies." Once again, if
you believe this—the NSA destroyed many terabytes of perfectly good
data and didn’t pass it on to its right hand, the CIA and other snoop
agencies—then I have a second bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
It
should be assumed from the start the NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI, etc., have
long engaged in illegal and unconstitutional snooping against the
American people, who are after all their primary target, not the
phantom "al-Qaeda" or any number of CIA created terrorists. In a police
state, the enemy is the people, who may rise up at any moment and throw
off their shackles. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans do
not realize they are clasped in shackles and if they do, most think
there must be a good reason for it.
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