Thousands of 4th Amendment Violations? Time to Put a Leash on the NSA!

“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” – Samuel Johnson

"The fundamental reason for the conversion of the state into a gigantic spy apparatus is the nature of deeply destructive domestic and foreign policies which the government has so forcefully pursued. The vast expansion of the police state apparatus is not a response to the terror attack of 9/11. The geometrical growth of spies, secret police budgets, and the vast intrusion into all citizen communications coincides with the wars across the globe. The decisions to militarize US global policy requires vast budgetary re-allocation , slashing social spending to fund empire-building. 

Mass spying is designed to identify the citizens who oppose both imperial wars and the destruction of domestic welfare.”       – James Petras, in an article on American loss of liberty

“If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged” –  Cardinal Richelieu

The  news from The Washington Post that the National Security Agency has "broken privacy rules" (transl. the 4th Amendment!)  or overstepped its legal authority thousands of times each year since Congress granted the agency broad new powers in 2008, has civil libertarians hopping mad again. And demanding the cowardly congress get off their keysters for once and put a leash on this super snoop agency which Sen. Frank Church once described as being a path to all out tyranny if not reined in. Why should ANY citizen in the true sense have a difficult time grasping this? Anyone who's ever studied the U.S. Constitution ought to process this and how these transgressions of the 4th amendment are intolerable as well as exposing those politicos who have not upheld their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution!

Yet we still have looney tunes blaming Edward Snowden and calling for his head, when HE was the one that provided the channels to expose this law breaking! The guy should be awarded a fuckin' medal for god's sakes! Also, if Obama has any balls left by the time he leaves office, he ought to issue an executive pardon for Snowden - which will allow his return to the U.S. and free of sanctions! 

Look, let's clear the air here for any stupid hypocrites: two CIA-hire terrorists orchestrated the destruction of  Cubana Airlines Flight  455  off the southwest coast of Barbados on Oct. 6, 1976. (The actual 'mechanics', i.e.  planters of the bombs,  were Freddy Lugo and Hernan Ricardo Lusano who joked about it while deplaning in B'dos).  I was at Paradise Beach with my nieces when it occurred, and they are still as traumatized as when the bloody body parts first washed ashore in the aftermath. The two terrorists, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch have walked Scott free thanks to the two Bush presidents.  See e.g. http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/042606.html

Excerpt 1:

"Not only did the first Bush administration free Bosch from jail a decade and a half ago, the second Bush administration has now pushed Venezuela’s extradition request for his alleged co-conspirator, Posada, onto the back burner."

Luis Posada Carriles: A Terrorist long before bin Laden!

Excerpt 2:

"Reporter Juan Manuel Cao interviewed Bosch, who had been jailed for illegally entering the United States but was paroled in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush at the behest of his eldest son Jeb, then an aspiring Florida politician.

“Did you down that plane in 1976?” Cao asked Bosch.

“If I tell you that I was involved, I will be inculpating myself,” Bosch answered, “and if I tell you that I did not participate in that action, you would say that I am lying. I am therefore not going to answer one thing or the other.”

But when Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados, Bosch responded, “In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach.”

Tell that to the families of those victims, you degenerate! Tell it to my nieces who still are traumatized and can't sleep as the bloody images of floating heads,  arms, legs and torsos - seep into their brains in the dead of night! Tell it to my wife who worked at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital at the time and had to perform radiographic identification when some bodies were too mangled to allow effective ID.  And when you do make sure you understand WE who were there regard you rat fuckers as every BIT the terrorists that al Qaeda and bin Laden have been, and I don't give a shit what excuses or rationalizations you come up with. And oh, btw, the loss of life as a percentage of national population was vastly greater than that wrought by 9/11 in the U.S. and Barbados didn't go batshit crazy taking away its citizens'  rights!

So hear me out - IF two TERRORISTS can be given relative freedom by the 2 Bush presidents, then Obama can sure as shit pardon Ed Snowden for fulfilling the duty of a real citizen and whistle blowing on government transgressions of the Constitution! See also: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/robert-scheer/51088/restore-honor-and-pardon-edward-snowden

Anyway, the NSA's violations have been exposed as a result of an internal audit and other top secret documents. (Thanks to Snowden, a 4th amendment HERO!)  Most of the infractions involve unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the United States. They range from significant violations of law to typographical errors that result in interception of U.S. emails and telephone calls.

The documents, provided earlier this summer to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. In one of the documents, agency personnel are instructed to remove details and substitute more generic language in reports to the Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And then we wonder why congress can't do proper oversight over this most dangerous and threatening agency of them all! Again, bear in mind Sen. Church's words here:

"I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America. And we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.” -


Is anybody paying attention? The capacity to make tyranny total? Every red-blooded real American ought to be on his congress critters to get a regulatory oversight leash - a real one- to deal with these guys. They are out of control!  "National security" is their cover. Asked about this information, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court told The Washington Post that the court lacks the tools to independently verify how often government surveillance breaks the court's rules that aim to protect the privacy of Americans. Without drastic steps, it also cannot check the veracity of government claims that all the violations its staff reports are unintentional mistakes, the judge said.

But let's be clear about a couple things here:

1) The only reason this is even an issue is because the original (1978) FISA law was trashed and the Bushies illegal mass wiretaps were made legal retroactively! But see, the Bush II lawbreakers didn't want to be slowed up in grabbing warrants. They wanted it done wholesale despite the fact the 4th amendment specifically mandates separate warrants with each manjack identified and the reasons set out. Too much trouble? Tough SHIT! That is the Constitution! And I will damned sure defend the 4th to the hilt as much as the 2nd amendment gun guys defend their right to own Glocks, Bushmaster .223s and AR 15s despite the fact that when the 2nd was written only single load muskets were common arms!

2) If the 4th were followed according to the letter as opposed to being trashed by a bastardized Patriot Act "retread" version - validated by weasels in congress,  there'd be no need to have additional funds or resources. This is because the time trajectory would be too stringent for the technology the NSA uses, i.e. to scoop up personal data. My point? You can't have faithful adherence to the 4th amendment and also the PRISM and XKeyscore technologies to grab data indiscriminately. In other words, the technologies used are precisely what's violating the 4th amendment.


In a response this morning over CBS News, the NSA offered the excuse that they were "only human" and hence could make mistakes.  But this only reinforces my point that they need a strong leash with constitutional oversight instead of the usual pussy footing around it our congress critters have been doing.  Any agency that can make such mistakes, especially in terms of repeatedly exceeding its authority - then lying about it like Clapper did to the Senate back in March  - needs to be brought under a stronger hand, which is what congress is supposed to do. They are not supposed to roll over like beaten whelps.

"Aw me, oh my! I wanna be protected from them bad guys!" At the cost of the Constitution? If so,  you don't deserve to call yourself an American! See e.g. http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2013/07/too-many-americans-dont-deserve-liberty.html

The tragic fact is that the more we let a crew of troglodytes like the NSA break our most fundamental amendment, the more clear it becomes that bin Laden and al Qaeda have won the so called "terror war". They have beaten our butts to a bloody pulp by getting we the citizens to do to ourselves what the robed loonies couldn't do on their own in a million years!

Should anyone need to get their brain adjusted more clearly on this, I suggest reading Ted Koppel's excellent article  ('Nine Years After 9/11 Let's Stop Playing Into Bin Laden's Hands'  ) in The Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/09/AR2010090904735.html 

For more on the Cubana Airlines terrorism, go to:

http://morallowground.com/2012/10/06/on-this-day-1976-the-bombing-of-cubana-airlines-flight-455/   

WAAAAH! Snowden-Chasing Journalists Get to Spend the Day in Cuba

"“The state of surveillance and perpetual war are one and the same. The U.S. government’s rationale for pervasive snooping is the “war on terror,” the warfare state under whatever name…….Those at the top of the U.S. government insist that Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning have betrayed it. But that’s backward. Putting its money on vast secrecy and military violence instead of democracy, the government has betrayed Snowden and Manning and the rest of us. “ – Normon Solomon

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We learned this morning that over 30 journalists, raving bloodhounds of the Neoliberal Corporate Empire (who make even the paparazzi look like gentlemen,) crowded onto an Aeroflot A330 Airbus at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport, hoping to buttonhole Edward Snowden. And undoubtedly harass him with a blizzard of dumbass, predatory, Neoliberal corporate punk questions for the 15 -hour duration of a flight to Havana, Cuba. Didn’t work out that way, as Snowden, who is definitely smarter than these yellow muckrakers (who’ve been piling bile on him the past week or more) clearly set them all up.

As one Brit put it in ditty form (based on ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’) in a comment on the UK Guardian this morning:

“They seek him here, they seek him there,
The journos seek him everywhere.
Is he in Hell, is he in Heaven?
That damned, elusive Eddie Snowden.”

Meanwhile another commentator pointedly wrote:

“Stupidity of modern journalism - ambulance chasing instead of investigating”


While another tweeted:

“Thank heavens that most of the corporate hacks are on their way to Havana via Aeroflot airlines -- and without the customary pampering they are so used to. That leaves far fewer eyes searching for Snowden”

Ah yes, a 15 -odd hour flight to Cuba! What better punishment for ambulance chasing pseudo-journalists and state propagandists who aren’t interested in the real story: how the country has ceased to adhere to the rule of law since the Bushie illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent illegal renditions and tortures violating all international laws and the Geneva Conventions. In truth, all the Bushites ought to have been tried for treason, put on trial and hung. But what happened? All were allowed to escape any accountability! Even some of the worst, most egregious lawbreaking in the form of Bushie illegal wiretaps (violating the 1978 FISA laws) was ultimately re-written to give it the patina of “legal” benediction in 2008 by a pack of traitors in congress. And now these hollow, howling douchebags have the audacity to call Snowden a traitor?

Meanwhile, the usual parade of blow-dried hack punditry calumniated UK Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald on the Sunday talk shows. Of course, anyone who watches this weekly bullshit even occasionally knows they’re usually just PR platforms for the usual corporate, political and media whore rats. Sadly, Bob Schieffer, who used to have some gravitas, has fallen into the same Neoliberal hack mold as the likes of David Gregory and Georgie Stephanopoulis.


When you sweep away all the crappola, corporo-buzzshit etc. what is Snowden’s real crime? Humiliating the Corporate-War-Bankster- System entrenched in this country. Read more at:
http://www.salon.com/2013/06/19/snowdens_real_crime_humiliating_the_state/

Excerpt:

“Snowden’s crime, if you will, was that he disrupted the state’s ability to protect its monopoly of violence by exposing its widespread surveillance activities. He did this despite the widely claimed fears of interested parties that doing so would “undermine national security,” and in the face of the state’s insistence that these activities are justified and justifiably secret. In this sense, the fact that he challenged the prerogatives of the state itself makes his alleged crime so much more transgressive than, for example, merely lying to Congress about weapons of mass destruction, starting a war with a random nation in which tens of thousands die, or torturing rendered persons. None of these latter crimes are a threat to the state itself, and for that reason may be readily forgiven and forgotten. Manning and Snowden are, however, “great criminals” in that their actions embarrassed and undermined state power. They can never be forgiven or forgotten.

So, for a significant portion of the public, there seems to be an — open or perhaps grudging — admiration of Snowden because he has dared to challenge the state’s monopoly on violence.”

The last part is critical: Because if the entrenched perma-war spy enclave (in this case, more technically, the corrupt, corporate—warmonger-security SYSTEM) has such a monopoly on violence, say that it can exercise the prerogative to assassinate courageous leaders like JFK who challenge it-  then what we have is endemic tyranny and not any liberty.

See also: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/norman-solomon/50228/the-pursuit-of-edward-snowden-washington-in-a-rage-striving-to-run-the-world

Stay tuned as the Snowden saga continues. In the meantime, global citizens embodying true patriotism who value liberty over a specious security, and are steadfastly opposed to the corrupt U.S. SYSTEM (not the country - see e.g.  http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/09/america-haters-uhhno-system-haters.html)  and aren’t brainwashed by the State's propagandists. are hoping Snowden ultimately finds a refuge out of the grasp of "the Empire"!

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P.S. I will join the ranks of those calling for Snowden's head on the very day when the rat bastards who blew up Cubana Airlines 455 over Barbados on Oct. 6, 1976 - killing all  73 innocents on board - are brought to justice,  including Luis Posada Carriles and the CIA whelps who planned it.  Until then the U.S. media hypocrites and their political allies can go fuck themselves.

Questions for John Brennan (II): About Those DRONES

Should drones like this Predator even be allowed in U.S. skies, given a GAO report that expressed doubts  about their unreliable performance and sense-and-avoid technology that could avoid collisions? It’s also been found in tests that they can be electronically ‘hijacked’!

Rachel Maddow in her Tuesday night show came forward with pointed questions on the use of drones and targeted drone kills that “keep her up at night”. She observed that these questions were originally put to John Brennan by Dem Senator Ron Wyden. Basically the questions can be summarized, as Rachel put it, with: “Can the President order you dead? How do they determine who’s the bad guy?”

This is germane, irrespective of WHO is in the White House. As a nation ruled by laws (and Obama is a former Constitutional law professor), we cannot have the executive branch doing anything it wants, without parameters. Simply declaring an American an “enemy combatant” and hence invoking a license to kill is not good enough and one could argue it violates precepts inherent in the Constitution – including the right to trial by one’s peers before execution. Hence, Rachel’s questions weren’t spawned in vacuo.

Her questions are then as follows, based on Sen. Wyden’s written questions to Brennan:

1) How much evidence does the President need to determine that a particular American can be lawfully killed?

And the ones that "keep Rachel up at night":

2) Does the President have to provide individual Americans with the opportunity to surrender before killing them?

3) Does this obligation change if the President’s determination that a particular American is a valid target has not been publicly announced or publicly reported?

As Rachel put it:

"Think about that. If you’re an American citizen and the President is going to kill you, do you have the right to give yourself up instead so you don’t get killed?”


And: “How do you know you should do that if the President’s decision to kill you is a secret decision that nobody ever tells you?”

Brennan’s answers yesterday were not particularly awe- inspiring and basically could be summarized with the catchall: “I’ll get back to you on that.” Let us hope he does, since currently the U.S. government's position is that it declines on national security grounds to declassify the full legal justification for its covert drone attacks. This can mean only one of two things: 1) they have no genuine legal justification that can withstand hard scrutiny, or 2) there are inflammatory 'justifications' embedded that will have the entire American Left on their case, as well as the International Court of Law in The Hague. (Interestingly, btw, it is the Senate Democrats that pressed Brennan for more openness and clarity, while the Repukes chastised him for possibly giving away too much. Methinks the Reeps are ok with their future prez being able to kill "socialists, leftists, communists" at will like Hitler did with his own methods.)

More daunting a question – when configured with the previous ones, is:

4) Are there any geographic limitations on the intelligence’s community’s authority to use lethal force against Americans? (Do any intelligence agencies have the authority to carry out lethal operations inside the United States?)

Some background here:

Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick in their book ‘The Untold History of the United States’ note on p. 572 that:

“Pakistani press reports over three years (2006 to 2008) killed over 700 civilians to only 14 terrorists or 50 civilians to one terrorist”. The authors note the ratio was lowered somewhat (to 15:1) after Pakistani photographer Noor Behram held a graphic 2011 exhibition in London, of 27 drone air strikes.”

Such results helped explain the radicalization of Muslims in Pakistan given 97% viewed drones negatively according to the authors (p. 573) while the number who saw the U.S. as an enemy climbed from 64% in 2009 to 74% in 2012. (Ibid.) Hence, the evidence supports the notion that we are creating more terrorists rather than de-populating them

Adding fuel to the fire is the recent news report (ABC, Feb. 6th) that the U.S. has a drone base in Saudi Arabia from which drone strikes have been launched into 6 countries. This is unsettling. Recall the 9/11 blowback from al Qaeda was based on using Saudi Arabia as a base for U.S. operations in the Gulf War.. Thus, the 9/11 attacks were blowback (according to author Chalmers Johnson, in his book Blowback) for defiling the holiest Muslim nation - the ancestral home of the Wahabbi sect and the host nation for the holiest Muslim shrine of Mecca. Johnson basically attributed the 9/11 blowback to U.S. foreign policy, which antagonized too many groups over decades. Stone and Kuznick in their own book, essentially concur with this assessment.

Stone and Kuznick also note the near universal criticism that drones are “a cowardly form of warfare” even quoting the Thailand Nation newspaper (p. 576) that these aerial robots are merely used to "satisfy the lily –livered need to eavesdrop kill and destroy without the slightest chance of reciprocation”.


Morally this troubled Director of National Intelligence Admiral Dennis Blair who: “tried to curb drone attacks and other CIA covert activities believing them a blot on America’s reputation” (p. 577)

He was replaced by retired Lt. Gen. James Clapper in 2010.

The latest issue of TIME (Feb. 11) in its drone cover story, notes (p. 30) that the UK Bureau Of Investigative Journalism estimates that up to 891 civilians were killed in Pakistan since 2004 by drone strikes. TIME goes on to note that Brennan has argued that drone attacks are lawful under a 2001 authorization that allows “use of force” for those responsible for the 9/11 attacks – but technically all those perps are dead and gone including Osama bin Laden. Hence, one can argue that the authorization for the use of the drones is now expired.

Beyond that the continued use of such attacks presents the dangerous element of unintended consequences and expanded use beyond that originally intended. This has been the argument made by Jameel Jaffer of the ACLU. Interestingly, on January 24 the UN announced a special investigation into civilian deaths arising from drone attacks.

But  the radicalizing nature of drone attacks goes far beyond the immediate killing to their unsettling and pathological effects on targeted populations’ psyches. (By ‘targeted population I mean all of those affected if a drone is covering x square miles and its ominous noise is being received as a kind of inflicted terror in its own right.) People quoted in the ABC News report, for example, reported the constant anxiety (as well as sleeplessness) in their own homes induced from the incessant whine of the drones circling outside. Imagine - if you will - the Chinese putting thousands of these fuckers in OUR skies and monitoring us every second then justifying kills based on their own judicial precepts. Would you not go ape shit? I believe most 'Muricans would reach for their Bushmasters or AKs.

We know there’ll likely be over 3.5 million drones in operation in U.S. skies by 2017, so what are they all going to be doing? Perhaps the Predator drones will be mandated to kill U.S. citizens for any number of reasons, and not necessarily by an Executive decision. A disturbng case cited in TIME (p. 32) is that of a North Dakota Sheriff who in June, 2011, called in a Predator drone from a local Air Force Base to hunt for three men believed associated with some missing cows. The drone spotted the men and could have killed them on the spot with a Hellfire missile, but ascertained they were unarmed, so they were just arrested. But who's to say this couldn't have suddenly gone south on another occasion? Three dead guys and they may not even know why they've been vaporized.

 Hell, maybe a hard core Tea Party repuke like Marco Rubio is in power and he mandates the CIA to off all JFK researchers plumbing into the assassination who are digging into why the files weren’t released as scheduled. Or maybe this guy of Cuban descent doesn’t want us mucking around into Luis Posada’s terror background and connections to the Bay of Pigs Brigade 2506. We don’t know unless the parameters for targeted kills are judicially spelled out. Maybe a hard core fundie like Paul (Moron) Broun is elected Prez and has commandeered all atheists and evolutionists be drone-killed for promoting ideas and “theories from the pit of Hell”. We don’t know! Not with the flimsy and vague criteria as given, or rather not given.

Oh, as a sideline, I had to laugh hard and long at a remark in the recent TIME article on drones (Feb. 11, p. 28), when the author noted he was pulled up by critics for using the word “drone”. As he put it (p. 29):

“I’ve been corrected and upbraided by drone users and manufacturers, military and civilian, for failing to use terms like ‘unmanned aerial vehicle’ or ‘unmanned aircraft system’ or ‘remotely piloted vehicle’. While technically accurate these terms have a clumsy, euphemistic feel"

Give me a break, already! Again, these sort of complaints about using direct language is part of why American brains are now so deformed and irrational, and incapable of coherent argument. Hell, they’ve been gutted by the substitution of collateral language (see the book by the same title).

But let's return to the core issue here: Killing people in other countries with which we are not at war. This again shows me that this nation - to regain its moral footing - needs to return to congressional declarations of war. If there is no such declaration, then NO ....you cannot launch ersatz wars, nor can we have any more "wars" such as VietNam and Iraq  based on idiotic "resolutions". I would go even further, and say unless taxes are mandated to pay for the declared war, it isn't on. Period! We cannot continue to exploit our own loose interpretation of international law and order to make ourselves policeman of the world with no consequences.

Rachel in her Thursday night show cited the main theme of the (1978) Church Committe Report and I quote from it:

“The evidence establishes that the United States was implicated in several assassination plots. The Committee believes that, short of war, assassination is incompatible with American principles, international order and morality. It should be rejected as a tool of foreign policy.”

This led Gerald Ford to issue an Executive Order banning assassinations.

Indeed, one can make the case, as I did earlier, that targeted assassinations in other nations is a counterproductive foreign policy in that it succeeds in creating more terrorists than it diminishes! It also erodes the moral basis of the nation and exposes it as an enclave of hypocrisy. For example, why haven’t right wing terrorists been targeted to the same extent? How the fuck is it that Luis Posada Carriles is still walking around alive and not dead from a Hellfire missile, while assorted accused other Americans (e.g. Anwar al-Alwaki) have been offed? Has there been the same degree of justification for the latter kills, as for the terrorist bone fides for Posada? I don’t believe so!

Add to that all the dead civilians as collateral damage and we’re really on shaky moral, legal grounds.


As Sen. Wyden noted last night on Rachel: Americans have a right to know if and when a President wants to kill them. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Right wing Alpha 66 terrorist like Luis Posada Carriles, or a run of the mill al-Qaeda tool like al-Awaki.

Wyden’s other ancillary point is equally crucial: that laws need to be public, not kept secret or private. We are either a society and a nation of laws and accountability or we’re no different from the Nazis with their special “Reich laws”.

We better decide and soon if we're going to continue to take the easy, lazy (I'd add cowardly) and expeditious path that leads to perdition, or if we will adhere to the American principles of yesteryear, so well enunciated in Kennedy's American University ('Pax Americana') speech in June, 1963. It's our choice and we better damned sure make the right one!