As well, it should be noted that Rosenbaum’s final Times piece, published in late December, revealed that Samuel Alito Jr., Bush’s Supreme Court nominee, had written a 1984 memorandum as a government lawyer in the Reagan administration "arguing that top officials should not be subject to lawsuits in any in circumstances, including when they knowingly violated the law." Alito’s memo "offered recommendations concerning a lawsuit against a former attorney general, John N. Mitchell, over a wiretap he had authorized in 1970 without a court’s permission," Rosenbaum wrote.

Rosenbaum’s article, co-written with Adam Liptak, prompted the neocon White House to state "that the issues raised in Mr. Alito’s 1984 memorandum were not the same as those posed by President Bush’s orders to the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on international communications without court permission." Moreover, the Alito memo set off alarm bells in Congress and apparently endangers, at least minimally and superficially, his assured confirmation to the Supreme Court. "Within hours of the release of the 1984 memorandum, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, a Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, wrote to Judge Alito that he intended to question him about warrantless wiretapping during the judge’s confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court next month. And another Democratic member of the committee, Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, said, 'The questions surrounding the Alito nomination get more troublesome every day,’" Liptak and Rosenbaum wrote.

Is it possible Rosenbaum was assassinated in order to send a strong message to the corporate media to tow the line? Of course, the corporate media has more or less dutifully disseminated the neocon line—from the so-called "war on terrorism" (rife with lies and fakery) to selling the Straussian neocon invasion of Iraq (more lies and outright fabrication)—but even so, the New York Times’ primary goal is to sell newspapers and enrich stockholders and no doubt the NSA snoop "scandal," splashed across headlines a year late, sold a few extra copies of the "Gray Lady" and also restored to a certain degree the newspaper’s reputation in the wake of the fact it served (primarily through the neocon shill Judith Miller) as a propaganda organ for the Straussian total war agenda, beginning with the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

As we know, the neocon Pentagon has vigorously instituted the "Salvador Option" in Iraq—that is to say, the Pentagon has organized and unleashed, in part, paramilitary death squads, as an integral component of its counterinsurgency doctrine based on the model of Nazi suppression of partisan insurgents, as Michael McClintock documents (Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990; chapter 3, The Legacy of World War II). Obviously, as the NSA snoop revelations reveal, the neocons believe "counterinsurgency" is required in America and thus it is not stretch to speculate that journalists in this country are possible targets, as are their counterparts in Iraq. For instance, consider the assassination of Steven Vincent, a writer and blogger who made the deadly mistake of reporting the news in Basra. I wrote last August:

As the Los Angeles Times reported, one of Vincent’s abductors was "an Interior Ministry employee," and a witness was told it was the "duty" of the U.S.-installed puppet government to grab people off the street and murder them. "A few hours later, the journalist’s body was found dumped by a road outside the city, with multiple bullet wounds to the head. He suffered bruises to his face and shoulder, had been blindfolded and his hands were tied in front with plastic wire." Smells like democracy to me.

It’s no secret the Interior Ministry is under the control of the CIA, as reported by Knight Ridder on May 8, 2005. "Right after Saddam’s ouster, the U.S.-led coalition took the top intelligence agents from each of the main opposition parties and trained them in how to turn raw intelligence into targets that could be used in operations, said an Iraqi intelligence expert who participated in the program," Hannah Allam and Warren P. Strobel wrote. An Iraqi official interviewed by the journalists admitted that

the CIA recruited agents from SCIRI, Dawa, the two main Kurdish factions, and two secular Arab parties: the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Accord led by Ayad Allawi, who later became the interim prime minister. This group, the prototype for an Iraqi intelligence group that represented Iraq’s diversity, became CMAD: the Collection, Management and Analysis Directorate.

When the U.S.-led occupation authority ceded power to the semi-sovereign interim government last June, the official said, CMAD was split, with roughly half the agents going to the new interior ministry and the rest to work on military intelligence in the defense ministry. Both ministries’ intelligence departments are led by Kurds, the most consistently U.S.-friendly group in Iraq, and report to the Iraqi prime minister.

But an elite corps of CMAD operatives was recruited into the third and most important Iraqi intelligence agency, the secret police force known by its Arabic name: the Mukhabarat…. The Mukhabarat’s money comes straight from the CIA.

As Wayne Madsen, a researcher and former communications security analyst with the NSA in the 1980s, noted in 2002, the CIA was at that time busy assassinating political enemies around the world at the behest of the Straussian neocons. According to Madsen, the CIA enjoys a "new unbridled authority to assassinate political nuisances to U.S. interests around the world. In Bush’s 'New World Order’ … 'if you’re not with us, you’re against us,’ [and] social activists and progressive political leaders everywhere are now within the crosshairs of the CIA and its local notorious surrogates and warlords. America’s traditional concepts of human rights have been relegated to the dustbin of history in post-constitutional corporate statist America."

It would be dangerously naive to believe the CIA does not operate in America (as its charter supposedly mandates). In October, 2002, the Associated Press reported that the "CIA is increasing its presence at FBI field offices by assigning intelligence officers to domestic anti-terrorism teams," an excessively worrisome development considering the snoop and murder agency’s track record over the last fifty or so years. Under Operation CHAOS and Project MERRIMAC, the CIA, according to former CIA undercover operative Verne Lyon, "infiltrated agents into domestic groups of all types and activities. It used its contacts with local police departments and their intelligence units to pick up its 'police skills’ and began in earnest to pull off burglaries, illegal entries, use of explosives, criminal frame-ups, shared interrogations, and disinformation."

As the history of COINTELRPO reveals, the government not only disrupted and subverted the civil liberties of Americans, but killed more than a few of them as well. "Among the most remarkable of the COINTELPRO revelations are those relating to the FBI’s attempts to incite gang warfare and murderous attacks on Black Panther leaders," writes Paul Wolf (COINTELPRO: The Untold American Story). According to Wolf’s research and "thousands of pages of documentary evidence," the FBI "utilize[d] private right-wing operatives and terrorists" who conducted "fire-bombings, burglaries, and shootings" against official enemies. In the case of the "American Indian Movement in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, the FBI conducted a full-fledged counterinsurgency war, complete with death squads, disappearances and assassinations, recalling Guatemala in more recent years." It is not encouraging the grand daddy of political assassination, the CIA, is now soundly ensconced in FBI offices and local police departments as well.

In 1975, the lid hiding the activities of the CIA was briefly lifted, revealing all manner of impropriety. Gerald Ford’s Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (also known as the Rockefeller Commission) "looked into all aspects of CIA operations within the United States. Its report, submitted to the President in June 1975, lists the following significant areas of investigation: mail intercepts; Intelligence Community coordination; 'Operation CHAOS’ (collecting information on dissidents); protection of the Agency against threats of violence; other investigations by the Office of Security; involvement of the CIA in improper activities for the White House (including Watergate); domestic activities of the Directorate of Operations; domestic activities of the Directorate of Science and Technology; CIA relationships with other federal, state, and local agencies; indices and files on American citizens; and allegations concerning the assassination of President Kennedy. The Commission also looked into the legal authority of the CIA and its internal and external controls." (See U.S. President’s Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States: Files, [1947-1974] 1975, located at the Gerald R. Ford Library).

Of course, David Rosenbaum was not a Black Panther nor particularly radical and worked for a newspaper that was staunchly pro-Bush and gung ho in its effort to sell the illegal and immoral invasion and occupation of Iraq to a mostly somnolent American public. Even so, since the advent of COINTELPRO, the political climate in America, under the fascist Straussian neocons, has shifted radically to the reactionary end of the spectrum, parroting in many ways the behavior of previous fascist and authoritarian regimes.

As Operation CHAOS reveals, the CIA has never honored its domestic hands-off charter and it is not a stretch to conclude that it has for some time operated unfettered in America, using the same murderous tactics it has used and continues to use elsewhere in the world at the behest of various presidents and their handlers. In such a highly charged reactionary climate, it is a distinct possibility the neocons have unleashed death squads against American journalists, especially journalists who worked for a corporate media mouthpiece that has recently irked and possibly embarrassed the neocons by running the NSA snoop story, although it can be argued as well that the neocons in fact "leaked" the story as a psychological warfare tactic designed to chill both whistleblowers and investigative journalists who fear the roving eye of Big Brother, Straussian-Machiavellian style.