Michael Hayden is one very smart cookie. He makes the best defense of the security establishments egregious invasions of American privacy imaginable but even Hayden can’t make me believe that NSA isn’t more interested in power than they are in security. It just isn’t human nature and James Clapper the current Director of Intelligence at NSA is certainly cut more from the Joe McCarthy cloth than the Hayden cloth.
It’s unfortunate that Hayden is still looking to get even with Edward Snowden but I guess that’s to be expected from a man, no matter how intelligent, who has spent much of his working life immersed in the bowels of the intelligence community.
The House Advisory Internal Security panel has come down firmly against NSA and its data-collecting program. The courts have also come down against it. It seems that everyone except the President and James Clapper, head of the NSA realize that it is wrong and un-American and must be strongly restricted.
Yes, we need intelligence but we need it done in a manner that is intelligent and that’s not the way we’re getting it now. There are, incredibly, a group of morons who want to put the collection of such information into the hands of private companies like the phone company. Yeah, that would work. The answer is not to expand the possibilities for our private information to be used illegally but to restrict it. The simple plan would be to control NSA, not to ship the job out to Toys r’ Us.
Congressman Mike Rogers is one of those who are especially adamant about backing NSA and wanting to prosecute Ed Snowden. Rogers is a smart guy but that doesn’t make him right on everything. Right now he is championing our need to be extra careful because during the holiday season the threat alert went up. That sounds good, but if the threat alert is as accurate as the rest of the surveillance that we have obtained through this massive phone tap, is it less than worthless.
Rogers says that we can protect all the things we should protect and still stay within the bounds of the Furth Amendment. Okay Mike, why aren’t we doing that? If you want to be a shill for NSA why don’t you tell them to give you some workable material? Why are you letting them hang you out on a limb?
Mark Udall disagrees with Rogers up to a point. He understands that we have to protect the safety of our people but also sees that we have to protect the bill of rights.
Everyone says that there has been no obvious abuse of this record taking – so far – but any reasonable man like Mike Morrell former interim director of the CIA disagree. He points out that if the potential for abuse exists, the abuse will follow – inevitably, and he says it already has.
Udall thinks that Snowden should come back here and make his case but I think that both these men are being naive or just want to see him n prison. Snowden will stand no chance of a fair trial here, just as Chelsea Manning didn’t. Udall says we protect whistleblowers in this country but that’s a fantasy. As soon as that whistle sounds everyone who is affected wants the man who blew it to lose his head, and most of those looking for revenge are in the US government or a branch thereof. An ordinary citizen stands about zero chance of getting a fair shake.
Yes, Snowden broke the law, but it was a law that was protecting an organization that was itself, breaking the law, and ignoring the constitution. The law Snowden supposedly broke, The Espionage Act of 1917, much like the Official Secrets Act in Great Britain, was established, not to fight spies but to keep our own government workers from reporting to the citizens of the nation, what their intelligence operations were doing in their name. Sure it was supposedly set up to protect national security that’s not what it is ever used for. Real spies don’t even get charged. They just get thrown into some place like Guantanamo and simply disappear. The rap against Snowden is that he revealed classified documents, at least that’s what all the naysayers are braying about. The fact is that classified documents are a joke. We even classify toilet paper records in our military. So if you classify everything, you classify nothing. So what the hell is he really being charged with, making the NSA look bad?
When Bill Kristol is asked if Snowden should be tried even tough, he has in fact been vindicated by what has been revealed, he says, “Nothing has been revealed.” Is this slug completely brain dead? NSA is spying on every American and is in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. If you can’t see that yourself, Bill, all you have to do is watch the scramble by all the backers of NSA to cover its ass and their own. That should tell even you something.
The President’s Advisory Panel made 46 recommendations about how to rein in the NSA. Michael Morrell the former CIA director, who was on that panel, explains that NSA wasn’t doing anything wrong; that they had high-level oversight and that they were doing exactly what the government asked them to do. The last part is true. The question is were they doing more than they were asked to do, and had they created a situation where their actions were open for abuse?
Morrell’s explanation of the situation is as clear as I have heard to this point. NSA collects this data and stores it. If we have information that someone outside the US is looking to do us ham NSA can then retrieve that data, see if that enemy is contacting an American source and thereby warn us of imminent danger. The panel has recommended that this data be held by a third party and only accessed with a court order or in the case of emergency by an order of the Secretary of Defense , followed by the issuance of a court order. The idea seems to be that this third party would be putting at least one generation between the NSA and its ability to violate a person’s privacy.
The real problem, aside from the invasion of privacy issue seems to be that the plan just doesn’t work the way NSA envisions it. The Boston bombing was the prototype of what NSA has set the plan up to stop, The authorities had a warning about the plot, before the act, which is exactly what the NSA claims it wants, in order to use the material they have collected. Except no one used the information so four people got killed and a number of others got maimed. So if you don’t use the information why collect it, thereby causing all this potential for abuse? The answer is simple, you don’t collect it, thereby avoiding the possibility of abuse and saving the taxpayers the eleven billion dollars that it costs to collect this useless information.
When asked about Snowden, Morrell agrees with all the other government figures that have been interviewed that he should not be given amnesty. He states that, “A whistleblower doesn’t run.” No, Mike, he just goes to jail. The reality is that our much touted whistleblower protections, just don’t exist, but as seen in this case we desperately need whistleblowers because of we hadn’t had Snowden we would never have known about this egregious violation of our national privacy.
The argument to that statement, professed by Bill Kristol, is that this was all debated n congress two years ago. It sure was and where did that get us? Exactly nowhere. Congress rubber-stamped a bill that most of them didn’t understand, that almost none of them had bothered to read; a bill that is clearly in violation of the Constitution and clearly in violation of our civil rights. If I am a citizen, not involved in any crime or violation of any law where does the NSA get off sticking their noses into my private life.
Morrell like others says that if Snowden is the patriot he says he is, he should come home to be judged. Why? We have shown no fairness in judging previous whistleblowers and until we do, there should be no case for this country to get that opportunity.
There are a couple of points that must be considered relative to Edward Snowden and how he fares from here. Everyone is now involved in whether or not NSA has violated the constitution. No matter how that rolls out, it is a healthy debate and it would never have happened if not for Snowden. If we don’t accept Snowden back, what will the next guy who has important information think about the fact that Snowden was punished for doing the right thing? It is worth considering that Snowden did what he did, despite what happened to Chelsea Manning, but it must also be considered that he was forced to flee the country because of what we did to Chelsea Manning.
No one has been able to point to one instance of NSA actually stopping a single terrorist incident. When queried on this, NSA apologists throw out that old besotted excuse of classified information. Anyone who knows anything about government knows that this is pure unadulterated bullshit. If there has been even a single instance of the NSA program stopping a terrorist attack the government would be trumpeting it to the skies.
A prime example of this is that during the Benghazi attack, our enormous system of phone and e-mail intercepts discovered only one phone call coming from someone involved in the mob that precipitated the attack. It was to a friend somewhere in Africa who was supposed to have al-Qaeda contacts, According to the call, the friend knew nothing about any al-Qaeda involvement in the attack, suggesting that al-Qaeda had no prior knowledge of the whole situation. This was, according to US officials, evidence of al-Qaeda having no part in the attack. It was the only evidence for or against al-Qaeda, exposed by our vast spy system and it was conveniently disposed of because it didn’t fit our Pentagon inspired accusations against al-Qaeda and the White House.
One of law enforcements most functional tools is the use of the turned witness, the process whereby, through the promise of a reduced sentence or some other reward or penalty, officialdom is able to cajole, threaten or convince a perpetrator to reveal evidence against his fellow criminals. This is an accepted practice and used throughout the criminal justice system. But when an innocent man of high moral stature, sees a wrong, criminal or just unconstitutional and reveals it to the public, he becomes a pariah.
I understand the difference between a turned witness and a whistleblower and I understand the processes that have been set up, supposedly to allow the whistleblower to reveal his information, but past history tells us that they don’t work; are not functional. An investigation of those processes reveals that rather than being a channel for the whistleblower to bring his information to the authorities it is more than likely to be a means to suppress that information and punish the whistleblower. There are many such cases into which, I could go in detail but do to the limits of space I will bring up only one, mainly because it is probably the best known.
Chelsea Manning went through the command structure available to him and was first ignored. When he pressed forward he was investigated for mental instability, the army’s way to intimidate those it wishes to suppress. The army had the structure in place but the structure was protecting the army, not the whistleblower. So Manning went public and his act of morality, remember he got nothing for this, was rewarded by his being tortured by the military and then railroaded into prison.
No one has been able to show any harm done to this country by anything that either Manning or Snowden have revealed. Of course if you think that showing up the NSA for their questionable program is doing something bad, then you don’t accept this. That’s very important. Whistleblowers are essential to transparency in the world and the world cannot be a fair place to live without them.