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Thompson Wrong on Nine Eleven, Right On Snoop Program Last month, I shovel a truckload of grief in the direction of Doug Thompson of Capitol Hill Blue for his slander of the nine eleven truth movement, a response on my part that drew sharp criticism from Teresa Hampton, editor of the website (see this post for more detail on this incident). In the wake of Thompson’s tizzy and an editorial jihad of sorts at Blue (a bevy of articles were supposedly pulled, as they were said not to meet the editorial stands of the website), I have not read Thompson’s editorials, and in fact removed the link to his website from my blog. However, surfing around this afternoon, I came across a link pointing to a recent Thompson article, entitled New CIA director Hayden plans massive expansion of spying on Americans, a title demanding I read the article. “Now that he is officially sworn in as the new head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael Hayden plans to build a vast domestic spying network that will pry into the lives of most Americans around the clock,” Thompson writes. “President George W. Bush told Hayden to ‘take whatever steps necessary’ to monitor Americans 24/7 by listening in on their phone calls, bugging their homes and offices, probing their private lives, snooping into their financial records and watching their travel habits.” Can I prove this in a court of law? No. Do I know it is happening? Yes, without a doubt. Enough sources within the CIA, FBI, NSA and Pentagon have come forward in recent days to warn about Hayden’s plans for an expanded, consolidated spy network aimed at Americans, not terrorists, and violating numerous laws that prohibit such activities against citizens of this country…. The CIA operation will also coordinate with the Pentagon’s domestic spying program that monitors activities of anti-war groups, organizations critical of the Bush administrations and others tagged as enemies of the state. Thompson declares he knows “it is happening. People I’ve known for years and trust tell me it is happening and the past record of spying, lies and deceit by the Bush administration point to just such an operation.” However, as I have argued here repeatedly, the Bush administration is not the first to snoop on its enemies (see my May 26 post, NSA Snoop Program: All about the Neocon Enemies List), and if we don’t get rid of the government as currently configured, it certainly will not be the last. It is completely and entirely natural for government to snoop on its citizens, even aggressively subvert their constitutionally protected right to disagree. Our founders knew this, and that is why they formulated the First Amendment (and the Second, as a way to protect usurpation of the First and indeed all the other amendments, although our rulers would have us believe the Second was crafted to protect the right to deer hunt). As a sidebar, it is interesting to note the somersaults a complisant AT&T performed in order to accommodate the NSA snoop program, which is essentially TIA—Total Information Awareness, later renamed Terrorism Information Awareness, a program supposedly killed by Congress in September 2003—revisited. “Wired Magazine has obtained, and has posted, the complete text of a document that attempts to chronicle how AT&T equipped a ’secret room’ at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco to track domestic and international phone calls made by American citizens and others,” writes Russell Shaw for ZDNet. “The document, entitled AT&T’s Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens, was prepared by now-retired AT&T communications technician Mark Klein,” a retired AT&T technician turned whistleblower “who provided the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) with a number of documents tending to show not only that AT&T was cooperating with the illegal NSA surveillance program, but also that that program was far broader than the narrow program Alberto Gonzales has described as targeted at the international communications of terrorists,” notes Shayana Kadidal of the Huffington Post. In the future envisioned by the neocons running the Bush administration, Mark Klein and other whistleblowers will go the way of the dodo bird, as will a handful of journalists who manage on occasion to publish something revelatory in the corporate media. Thompson, even though he is unable to grasp the fact his government is capable of crashing airliners into buildings and killing thousands of innocent people (to say nothing of killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, millions of S.E. Asians, and a not inappreciable number of others around the world), is spot on in his latest article. “This nation is under attack,” Thompson warns. “We, the people, are under attack. And the enemy in this case is not an Islamic radical hiding in a cave in Afghanistan but a cabal of truly evil men and women at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and on Capitol Hill aided by carefully-picked, law-ignoring appointees at the Hoover Building on Pennsylvania Avenue, a black glass-walled building at Fort Meade, MD, and a complex in Langley, Virginia.” I’d only add that the “Islamic radical hiding in a cave in Afghanistan” was groomed and financed by the same folks now vacuuming up all telephone and internet traffic from a small room at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco. Of course, it can be argued the former worked at the CIA and the latter for the NSA. However, with Michael Hayden formerly of the NSA heading up the CIA, any difference is now strictly academic. ---------------------------------------------------
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