Reform the 'Patriot Act'? Of course!

Now that the federal appeals court ruling has come down that the main NSA surveillance program - based on the Patriot Act  - has been illegal, what should be the reaction of our congress critters? Well, total reform! But instead we see the usual lunatics on the Right saying it must be sustained. Mitch McConnell, not known for being the sharpest knife in the drawer, actually said that had the current  dragnet, mass surveillance program existed back in Sept. 2001 the attacks never would have occurred.

Of course, this is out and out blatant balderdash. But, as usual the 'pukes play on Americans' short term memories of events to exploit new fears. The facts? There was a surfeit of data available at the time that - had the Bushies paid the slightest attention - could have thwarted the attacks.

Nowhere do reepos like Marco Rubio or McConnell mention how FBI agent Coleen Rowley  and her Minneapolis FBI field office  nabbed "20th hijacker" Zaccharias Moussaou  just before 9/11- and detained him.  The Minneapolis FBI office immediately sought a criminal warrant to search his belongings  but were prevented from doing so. Management at the FBI dealing with the request threw up numerous obstacles to the agents, and even withheld information from them, including the now-infamous Phoenix Memo written by an agent in Arizona warning of terrorists training in flight schools for a possible upcoming attack. The request was denied and agents were prevented from searching Moussaoui's laptop, which contained information that would have tipped the FBI off to the 9/11 plot.

So the information was right there, suspect at hand and a critical search in the offing, but it was ignored!  Bush himself stands accused of the most blatant carelessness in not responding proactively  to the President's Daily Briefs (PDBs)  that came his way that August. If one goes to the official 9/11 Commission Report he will find the following, under the section: ‘The System was Blinking Red’

Page 254:

"Each PDB (President's Daily Brief) consists of a series of six to eight relatively short articles or briefs covering a broad array of topics; CIA staff decides which subjects are the most important on any given day. There were more than 40 intelligence articles in the PDBs from January 20 to September 10, 2001, that related to Bin Ladin. "

On page 255:

"In the spring of 2001, the level of reporting on terrorist threats and planned attacks increased dramatically to its highest level since the millennium alert. At the end of March, the intelligence community disseminated a terrorist threat advisory, indicating a heightened threat of Sunni extremist terrorist attacks against U.S. facilities, personnel, and other interests."

And further (ibid.):

"On March 23, in connection with discussions about possibly reopening Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, Clarke warned National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that domestic or foreign terrorists might use a truck bomb—their “weapon of choice”—on Pennsylvania Avenue. That would result, he said, in the destruction of the West Wing and parts of the residence. He also told her that he thought there were terrorist cells within the United States, including al Qaeda."

Further (ibid.):

"In May 2001, the drumbeat of reporting grew louder with reports to top officials that “Bin Ladin public profile may presage attack” and “Bin Ladin network’s plans advancing.” In early May, a walk-in to the FBI claimed there was a plan to launch attacks on London, Boston, and New York.

Attorney General John Ashcroft was briefed by the CIA on May 15 regarding al Qaeda generally and the current threat reporting specifically. The next day brought a report that a phone call to a U.S. embassy had warned that Bin Ladin supporters were planning an attack in the United States using “high explosives.”

Of course, the most sensational Daily Brief of all was that dated August 6, 2001 and headed: Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US . Bush received this while at his Crawford, TX retreat. (He took more vacations than any other president in his first year alone.) And how did Bush respond to this? He gave a quick glance then went to clear some ....bush. But what ought to have made his eyeballs pop out was the short paragraph reading (p. 255-56):

"An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [—] service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike."

I also found it interesting to read through the communication exchanges as the hijackings became apparent, especially for American Flt. 11. According to the transcripts in the Report (page 20):

FAA: Hi. Boston Center TMU [Traffic Management Unit], we have a problem here.We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to,we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.

NEADS: Is this real-world or exercise?

FAA: No, this is not an exercise, not a test.

The reaction of NEADS (National Emergency Air Defense System), i.e. asking “Is this real world or exercise?” is instructional. Evidently, as came out later, no less than five different military “exercises” were planned and underway, including:

‘Operation Vigilant Guardian’ which simulated hijacked planes in the northeast sector-corridor. This definitely contributed to the confused response on the given day, as evidenced after NORAD received a phone call from Boston Center about a hijacking and Lt. Col. Dawne Deskins responded “It must be part of the exercise”.

Thus delaying critical response to the REAL attacks in NYC.

Then there was ‘Operation Northern Vigilance’ – planned months in advance of 9/11 (tracked to when the peak of terror warnings were being issued in May, as reported by the 9/11 Report) and for which jet fighters were removed from the east coast and sent to Alaska and Canada. Thereby, leaving a security hole at the precise date and region which would be most directly affected

As I learned more about these exercises, and the withdrawal of needed air security, the similarity to what transpired in the days before the Kennedy assassination was striking. Researchers learned only in the wake of that executive action that: 1) The Secret Service detail had been changed in the days leading up to the Dallas motorcade, with an inexperienced agent in Kennedy’s car, while the more experienced guy (Cliff Hill) protected LBJ, and 2) The usual Army security detail from Ft. Sam Houston, TX was removed so their presence was nowhere on Dallas’ streets on Nov. 22, 1963. Ordinarily they’d have had building oversight, ensuring no open windows and have had snipers posted themselves as a counter measure.

Were the 9/11 military exercises, planned in advance as a cover or distraction to make effective air defense response more unlikely? The basic answer is we don’t know, although the extent of withdrawn protection makes one suspicious.

Without wading into the morass of 9/11 conspiracy theories  - most of which I deem improbable - the main  point in context here (re: renewing of full Patriot Act) is there was: a) ample surveillance data present at the time to have stopped the attacks if proper response from authorities was forthcoming, and b) there were likely ample military resources to prevent the attacks had these not been displaced to a location where they became useless.

In effect, if a surfeit of data available then didn't stop the  9/11  attacks it is  logical to assert that vacuuming up massive amounts of data now won't make us any safer either. It will merely increase the 'haystack' in which the critical 'needle' must be found. Hence, we don't need the Patriot Act as it stands and it merely serves as an excuse to undermine civil liberties, nothing more.

As Sen. Ron Wyden put it this morning on MSNBC, citing the President's own Advisory Group  - (made up of "very conservative people with strong national security credentials") said on page 104 of their report:

"Collecting all of these phone records from law-abiding Americans with no connection to wrongdoing does not really advance the cause of fighting terror. That information can be obtained by  conventional means."

To his credit, Sen. Wyden made clear that if the fear mongers seek to go with a "short term extension" he plans to filibuster - unless there are reforms to the bulk collection program. Wyden stated he's "tired of extending a bad law".

Let's also recall that one of the original authors of the Patriot Act, Jim Sensenbrenner, has asserted that Section 215 was never intended to go as far as Bush and Obama have driven it. Writing in the Summer, 2014 issue of the ACLU Stand:

"Section 215 was intended to give the government the ability to secure 'any tangible thing' connected to specific terrorism investigations. As is now common knowledge, the Bush and Obama administrations took the limited power Congress intended and went rogue. If we had known during any subsequent re-authorizations what we now know about Section 215's blatant misinterpretation, Congress would have allowed it to sunset.  And if it's not fixed by the 2015 re-authorization, Congress will.

The basic idea behind the American search and seizure law is that you can't investigate unless you can first provide at least some articulable reason to do so. Investigations just can't be arbitrary. The government's definition, on the other hand, is the very definition of arbitrary. "

Let us hope Congress processes that carefully, before taking any reckless action to approve this egregious law's extension or reinstatement.

Cheney Calls Snowden a Traitor? HAHAHAHAHA!

It was a hoot and a holler this morning seeing the frothing, outraged mug of Dick Cheney on network television calling Edward Snowden a “traitor”. I was so struck with the irony of it: the putative biggest traitor since Benedict Arnold calling "the kettle black", that I doubled over with laughter, even incepting another bronchitis -coughing spasm. Let’s recall here that it was Cheney who had a plan underfoot to bogusly attack Iraq from 1992  (under the banner of the 'Project for the New American Century') operating under the presumption that Poppy Bush (George the First) would be re-elected. Well, he wasn’t, Clinton took the election thanks to Ross Perot splitting the ‘puke vote. This meant Cheney’s plan had to be put on hold until another Bush could get in, and that wasn’t until 2000 – when five treasonous Supreme Court justices interrupted a Florida recount to hand the election to Junior.

Even then it wasn’t a done deal, a pretext still had to be found for invasion and occupation. The gift fell into the laps of Bush, Cheney and their Neocon warmonger cohort with the devastating 9/11 attacks. People will argue over 9/11’s real origins until their dying day but one thing we do know: the Bush Criminals profited handsomely in the wake, with Bush’’s approval rating shooting up into the 90s (from below 35%) even as the national security state and military –industrial complex got the go ahead for the biggest spending in 60 years. At the very least, while many of us don’t believe these vermin deliberately blew up the Twin Towers, we do think it highly probable they KNEW what was coming and sat back and did nothing. In other words they let it happen.  It was simply too great a benefit ‘plum’ to do otherwise. See also: http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/09/how-responsible-was-bush-for-911.html

It also finally enabled the original Cheney Iraq invasion-occupation plan to be put into motion. All the Neocon memos surfacing from just after 9/11 (many from Paul Wolfowitz & Cheney) showed repeated underscored emphases like: “TIE SADDAM TO 9/11! HOW?” Indeed, how? Since Saddam was a resolute secularist who had no tolerance for religious extremists of either the Sunni or Shi’ite Muslim stripe. But the traitor Cheney and his Neocon ilk were determined to make the connection and have the corporate U.S. media coopted to assist in the PR blitz that lasted from October, 2002 until March, 2003 when the Cheney-bred dogs of war were unleashed. To that end, the Cheney-directed Neocons employed every sort of ruse - from 'yellowcake' to aluminum tubes and alleged claims of WMD (from an Iraqi traitor rat named 'curve ball') - to pump up a bogus case for invasion just like Hitler and the Nazis did (using faked imagery of German fraus being raped by Poles) to justify an invasion of Poland in 1939. Once he had the U.S. corporate media on his side it was merely a matter of drum beating a sheep-like American public into giving him the poll numbers he desired to launch an invasion in March, 2003.


The end results were absolutely disastrous, for both the Iraqi people and the U.S.: a wasteful occupation that in the end cost us over $3 trillion and more than 4400 American lives as well as 600,000 innocent Iraqi lives (according to WHO, the World Health Organization). Meanwhile, the bloody Nazified takeover as well as hyped rhetoric (“Axis of Evil”) drove the other two members of that defined “axis”, Iran and North Korea, to develop their own nuclear weapons – realizing this would likely be the only deterrent to the crazed Amerikkan pre-emptive warmongers. So, if Iran and North Korea do have ‘x’ atomic bombs today, you can lay the blame on Dick Cheney’s lap as well as his accomplices, aka the Neocon rats like Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Richard Perle et al.


Make no mistake that Cheney is the real traitor, whose costly pre-emptive war will cost us well into the future, including the brain-damaged vets needing aid, and benefits. To call a real hero like Snowden a traitor is not only to miss the mark on the meaning of the word, but how far our own country has gone down the sewer of decline and mental damage in the last twelve years. The fact the media would put a turd like Cheney on to bloviate and cast aspersions on Snowden also reveals the extent to which the media itself have devolved into total state propaganda whores. (Evidenced even now as most pile onto Snowden, decrying everything from his lack of education, to going to Hong Kong for his revelations and being a "narcissist". Many other people I once respected have disclosed themselves to be shills, including Bob Schieffer and Debbie Wasserman-Schulz)


As for Cheney's claim that the current NSA dragnet surveillance would have stopped 9/11, don't make me freakin' laugh! The actual problem was that the Bushies ignored reams of key information, such as the August, 2001 President's Daily Brief highlighting "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."  Bush received this while at his Crawford, TX retreat. (He took more vacations than any other president in his first year alone.) And how did Bush respond to this? He gave a quick glance then went to clear some ....bush. But what ought to have made his eyeballs pop out was the short paragraph reading (9/11 Commission Report, p. 255-56):

"An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [—] service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative’s access to the US to mount a terrorist strike."



Then there was the monumental intelligence failure documented by former FBI agent Coleen Rowley who  testified in front of the Senate and for the 9/11 Commission about the FBI's internal organization and mishandling of information related to the September 11, 2001, attacks. She noted how  the FBI failed to take action on information provided by the Minneapolis, Minnesota Field Office regarding its investigation of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.

In contrast to Cheney's bullshit claims, the fact is that there was a surfeit of information and data - so much that the Bushie brats either chose to ignore it, or be over selective in what they'd attend to. But again, that's being generous, Those of us who are deep politics citizens and standard politics cynics can't leave out the conviction the Bushies allowed 9/11 to occur on their watch, to reap massive political gain. The past twelve years' growth of the military and super spy complex more than validates that, not to mention how Bush's history has now been so reconstructed at his Dallas' library that only Americans paying attention would know how much of it is bull crap.

See also:  http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1544.htm

---------------
Footnote: In a live Q & A on The Guardian website, Snowden fired back at Cheney, lambasting him as the one who engineered the warrantless wiretaps - before the FISA law was revised to make the illegal, legal. See Snowden take down the lying mutt Cheney in the Q&A published at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/17/edward-snowden-us-fair-trial?guni=Network%20front:network-front%20aux-1%20Mini-bento:Bento%20box%208%20col:Position1

In the course of the Q&A Snowden also gives much more background into the NSA surveillance program including the use of  "weasel words" by the spy masters to try to squirm out of what they're really up to. I guaran-damn tee you this is the only place you will see these things revealed.
Snowden also pointedly observed that to be called a "traitor" by the likes of Cheney was actually an honor, given, of course, Cheney is the real traitor!

A 'War on Whistleblowers'? Let's Hope to Hell NOT!

While it is undoubtedly true that many politicos - especially in high powered offices - might have a problem with 'whistleblowers', they should in fact be thankful this courageous lot exists. For often at great cost to themselves, they have exposed hidden corruption (as with Halliburton and Bechtel during the Bush Jr. yrs) and thereby eliminated dangerous parasites bleeding the treasury dry to pursue to their own agendas. Indeed, a government run program to protect and encourage ordinary citizens as whistleblowers on Medicare fraud has already been going for a number of years. Estimates of the money saved run from $100m to over $250m. Not exactly chump change.

At the same time, it's understandable that the powers- that-be will become more uncomfortable as whistleblowers emerge closer to the levers of power, whether in the State Department, the Pentagon or elsewhere. One of the most famous defense analyst whistleblowers has been Chuck Spinney, who in a 2002 NOW PBS appearance with Bill Moyers, first exposed the corruption in the Pentagon and the fact they have been unable to account for over $1.2 trillion dollars in funding.

This is absolutely an abomination! As Spinney correctly pointed out in that interview, it essentially means the Defense establishment is no longer beholden to the people, the taxpayers, and if this is so - we are no longer living in a democracy.....or for the purists....a Republic.  It is more a banana republic wherein no one is accountable for money used, lost or squandered.

Spinney is a hero, as much as the FBI agent Coleen Rowley who just before 9/11, let it be known how outraged she was after the so-called "20th hijacker" Zaccharias Moussaoui was detained on August 15th, 2001, and agents in her Minneapolis FBI field office immediately sought a criminal warrant to search his belongings - but were prevented from doing so. Management at the FBI dealing with the request threw up numerous obstacles to the agents, and even withheld information from them, including the now-infamous Phoenix Memo written by an agent in Arizona warning of terrorists training in flight schools for a possible upcoming attack. The request was denied and agents were prevented from searching Moussaoui's laptop, which contained information that would have tipped the FBI off to the 9/11 plot.

This sort of shit is why so many Americans have lost all faith and trust in government. That and stonewalling and ridiculing citizens for pursuit of files - say pertaining to the JFK assassination - under the Freedom of Information Act. See, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/06/when-is-government-going-to-cease.html

All of which sends the unmistakeable signal that: a) government has something to hide, and b) is terrified of citizens finding out. Neither of these bodes well for the future of our Republic, which - even in an age of so-called "terrorism" cannot be allowed to forget the principles that have made us what we are...the nation we are. For, if we are going to go the way of hiding everything, and punishing transparency and efforts to make government work better....we can claim to be little better than China, or Russia.

Yes, the media nabobs often cooperate in this by finding excuses to side with government, whether in releasing more files to do with our recent history or in exposing current corruption that can undermine all the positive capacity for government action. For make no mistake, if filfthy vermin,  parasites and rot are eating away at whatever agency, then it makes ALL government components and departments dysfunctional by virtue of the fact any such infection can spread.

This is why it was disheartening to read David Sirota's latest blog and article that there is an ongoing "war on whistleblowers' and in an administration we all believed to be devoted to change. According to Sirota, in his op-ed appearing in today's Colorado Springs Gazette:

"As former Foreign Service officer Peter Van Buren reports, the federal government is now targeting whistleblowers for recrimination, with "the number of cases (against whistleblowers) suggest(ing) an organized strategy to deprive Americans of knowledge of the more disreputable things that their government does." That's right — rather than celebrating the heroes who expose wrongdoing and then stopping the illegal acts, the government is shooting the messengers in order to let the crimes continue.


If you are an Obama partisan who insists the crackdown is appropriate because your favored politician is in power, take heed of the president's own warning. As he said a few years ago, allowing any executive to ignore the Constitution is problematic because "you never know who is going to be president four years from now."

Of course, there is a logical inconsistency here. If something reported is indeed 'wrong doing', then to simply swat down the messenger is to compound the wrongdoing and hence make it double wrong doing. This is not the way a healthy society or government functions. In the same way a person, striving to be healthy and functional, will do all in his or her power to extract cancers that threaten the whole ....so also must government act to root out internal cancers. If it does not do so, or resists based on specious arguments, then it is as destined to be taken over by the internal cancer as a person is who resists cancer therapy.
As for Sirota's 2nd paragraph, that is indeed true and where the 'bear sits with the buckwheat'. Thus, while I may not have too many severe qualms believing Obama's actions will be responsible under The National Defense Authorization Act (which allows Presidential discretion to militarily detain people - including U.S. citizens - captured in any "battlefield"), it gives me the heebie-jeebies and cold sweats thinking of the NDAA powers under a Mitt Romney, or god forbid, Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum! 

Thus, while I welcome Obama's sobriety in his "signing statement" to the NDAA, I feel that the whole law is simply too risky overall to our liberties, under the potential assumption of power by a less than honest public steward. This is indeed, just the type of Constitutional hole that could putatively lead to an American dictatorship of the type Sinclair Lewis wrote of in his memorable novel, 'It Can't Happen Here':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_Can%27t_Happen_Here

The sanest option then is to bring the NDAA up for review, and if possible eliminate it, under an Executive Order if need be. Even if Obama wins re-election, no one can be sure of the quality of person to follow in his footsteps. A person who may not be a constitutional scholar.

As for the claimed "war on whistleblowers", I sincerely hope that Sirota has exaggerated it, and ...if not, I do hope Obama recalls why we voted for him, and why we do expect that in this new Hope environment, whistle blowers will continue to have their say for the betterment of all. If this isn't the case, then what's the point of it all?