Obama On Health Care: A Comprehensive Betrayal

http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-health-care-comprehensive-betrayal-%E2%80%93-where-do-we-go-here

Obama On Health Care: A Comprehensive Betrayal – Where Do We Go From Here?
The shrunken and eviscerated public option in the Obama health care plan may now be discarded in favor of something called a health co-op. The mounting toll of concessions to drug companies and bailouts of private insurers contained in the Obama plan have transformed it, according to Rep. John Conyers, into “crap,” and threaten to make Obama a one-term president. Republicans, all the while, are fighting Obamacare every bit as resolutely as if it were Medicare For All, drumming up disinformed protesters for health care town meetings. And the embargo of single payer media coverage continues, despite its being the majority sentiment of Americans. This is the year of health care reform. Or not.
By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon
Wed, 08/12/2009

At some point in last year's presidential election campaign, Barack Obama went on Bill O'Reilly's show to concede that maybe the war in Iraq, and Bush's murderous escalation of that war, the so-called surge, were not such bad ideas after all. Obama met with the admirals and generals and came away declaring that withdrawal from Iraq really meant withdrawal to secure bases inside Iraq. A US troop pullout would not happen until well into his second term, if then, with the accent on the “if.”

Casting the wishes of most Americans and the overwhelming majority of his own party under the bus, Democratic leaders and the corporate media told us all, was the wise, the realistic, the pragmatic thing to do. The election, they said, would be waged on domestic policy, on health care. Barack Obama has again and again doubled down on that set of promises, declaring that his first term should be judged on whether he manages to deliver comprehensive, affordable health care to everybody, including the nation's fifty million uninsured.

Seven months into his administration, Barack Obama has never been the antiwar president. He was the first president in American history to keep a Secretary of Defense appointed by the other party. Obama is not the anti-warrantless wiretapping president, or the anti-torture president or the anti-NAFTA president, or the pro-public education president, either. He bought GM but refused to use it as a lever to create a new passenger rail industry or green jobs, instead crushing the auto workers and forsaking his promises to make it easier to organize unions. Obama has transferred, as Glen Ford points out, $12 trillion dollars to fraudulent Wall Street banksters, more than all previous presidents combined. Beyond the lovely wife and family, and the novelty of a black president who speaks full sentences in correct English, not much is left of the man or the cause tens of millions thought they voted for.

It looks like Barack Obama won't be the health care president either. Obama's health care plan is so full of concessions to drug companies, so crammed with a constantly growing list of bailouts and exceptions for insurance companies that the White House is deliberately withholding information on it from Obama' own supporters. Organizing For America, the remnant of the Obama campaign and inheritor of its 13 million strong email and phone list, is calling supporters to canvass and turn out for health care “town meetings,” but dares not tell people exactly what they are supporting. For a while it was something called “the public option,” which would compete with and keep the insurance companies honest. Now it's something even cloudier, called a health co-op.

No less a progressive stalwart than Detroit's Rep. John Conyers announced his deep disappointment with Barack Obama before a crowd of progressives last month in Washington's Busboys and Poets restaurant. Obama, he opined, could be a one-term president if he doesn't manage to deliver on health care.

Conyers is the sponsor of HR 676, the Enhanced Medicare For All Act, which proposes the expansion of the highly successful Medicare program, along with enhancements such as dental coverage to all Americans. President Obama has admitted many times in recent months that Medicare For All, also called single payer, is the only way, and the least expensive way to cover the uninsured while at the same time bringing costs down. But with few exceptions, leading Democrats, themselves in the pay of health insurance companies and Big Pharma, have declared that Medicare For All is “politically infeasible.”

With corporate media shutting off all points of view to the left of the president, and Republicans fighting even the hopelessly compromised Democratic plans as if they were single payer, the public is presented with an utterly distorted picture of the health care debate --- pro-Obama legislators being shouted down by right wing white seniors on Medicare worried about government coming between them and their doctors, and liberal Democrats pleading for civility. It's worth remembering that the same people calling for amiable and civil discourse on health care have ruthlessly censored any mention of single payer from the broadcast airwaves. Even the White House has disinvited the president's own family doctor for his single payer sentiments, and removed the testimony of single payer advocates from White House transcripts and video.

For the moment, argues Dave Lindorff, single payer advocates have more in common with some of the deluded Republican protesters at public health town meetings than they have with Democratic legislators at the front of the room. They know they're being lied to and they know that the proceedings are sham and theatre and they are acting accordingly. Maybe we ought to be doing the same. We ought to insist on a floor vote on HR 676, and demand that our representatives support it. We also have to demand that states be free to pursue their own single payer experiments.

It's time to stop listening to Democrats who say Medicare For All is “politically infeasible” despite its being the democratic will of most of the American people. On their lips, political feasibility is just another name for whether it can pass the legislature this session. Political feasibility is not even in the language of movements for social change. The activists of the 1950s and 60s Freedom Movement knew very well that their demands were not politically feasible. Should they have shut up until Congress and the Supreme Court caught up with them?

Barack Obama may well make himself a one-term president by adding health care to the growing list of his betrayals, and he might come close to handing the Congress back to Republicans as soon as next year. Those are the wages of comprehensive betrayal. If that's what they want to do, we can't stop them. We've got our own work to do, going forward, and regardless of what they Democratic leaders and corporate media imagine is politically feasible.

Report: Bush surveillance program was massive

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090710/ap_on_go_co/us_domestic_surveillance

Report: Bush surveillance program was massive
By PAMELA HESS, Associated Press Writer Pamela Hess, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jul 10, 2009

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration built an unprecedented surveillance operation to pull in mountains of information far beyond the warrantless wiretapping previously acknowledged, a team of federal inspectors general reported Friday, questioning the legal basis for the effort but shielding almost all details on grounds they're still too secret to reveal.

The report, compiled by five inspectors general, refers to "unprecedented collection activities" by U.S. intelligence agencies under an executive order signed by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Just what those activities involved remains classified, but the IGs pointedly say that any continued use of the secret programs must be "carefully monitored."

The report says too few relevant officials knew of the size and depth of the program, let alone signed off on it. They particularly criticize John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general who wrote legal memos undergirding the policy. His boss, Attorney General John Ashcroft, was not aware until March 2004 of the exact nature of the intelligence operations beyond wiretapping that he had been approving for the previous two and a half years, the report says.

Most of the intelligence leads generated under what was known as the "President's Surveillance Program" did not have any connection to terrorism, the report said. But FBI agents told the authors that the "mere possibility of the leads producing useful information made investigating the leads worthwhile."

The inspectors general interviewed more than 200 people inside and outside the government, but five former Bush administration officials refused to be questioned. They were Ashcroft, Yoo, former CIA Director George Tenet, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card and David Addington, an aide to former Vice President Dick Cheney.

According to the report, Addington could personally decide who in the administration was "read into" — allowed access to — the classified program.

The only piece of the intelligence-gathering operation acknowledged by the Bush White House was the wiretapping-without-warrants effort. The administration admitted in 2005 that it had allowed the National Security Agency to intercept international communications that passed through U.S. cables without seeking court orders.

Although the report documents Bush administration policies, its fallout could be a problem for the Obama administration if it inherited any or all of the still-classified operations.

Bush started the warrantless wiretapping program under the authority of a secret court in 2006, and Congress authorized most of the intercepts in a 2008 electronic surveillance law. The fate of the remaining and still classified aspects of the wider surveillance program is not clear from the report.

The report's revelations came the same day that House Democrats said that CIA Director Leon Panetta had ordered one eight-year-old classified program shut down after learning lawmakers had never been apprised of its existence.

The IG report said that President Bush signed off on both the warrantless wiretapping and other top-secret operations shortly after Sept. 11 in a single presidential authorization. All the programs were periodically reauthorized, but except for the acknowledged wiretapping, they "remain highly classified."

The report says it's unclear how much valuable intelligence the program has yielded.

The report, mandated by Congress last year, was delivered to lawmakers Friday.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Ca., told The Associated Press she was shocked to learn of the existence of other classified programs beyond the warrantless wiretapping.

Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a terse reference to other classified programs during an August 2007 letter to Congress. But Harman said that when she had asked Gonzales two years earlier if the government was conducting any other undisclosed intelligence activities, he denied it.

"He looked me in the eye and said 'no,'" she said Friday.

Robert Bork Jr., Gonzales' spokesman, said, "It has clearly been determined that he did not intend to mislead anyone."

In the wake of the new report, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt, renewed his call Friday for a formal nonpartisan inquiry into the government's information-gathering programs.

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden — the primary architect of the program_ told the report's authors that the surveillance was "extremely valuable" in preventing further al-Qaida attacks. Hayden said the operations amounted to an "early warning system" allowing top officials to make critical judgments and carefully allocate national security resources to counter threats.

Information gathered by the secret program played a limited role in the FBI's overall counterterrorism efforts, according to the report. Very few CIA analysts even knew about the program and therefore were unable to fully exploit it in their counterrorism work, the report said.

The report questioned the legal advice used by Bush to set up the program, pinpointing omissions and questionable legal memos written by Yoo, in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. The Justice Department withdrew the memos years ago.

The report says Yoo's analysis approving the program ignored a law designed to restrict the government's authority to conduct electronic surveillance during wartime, and did so without fully notifying Congress. And it said flaws in Yoo's memos later presented "a serious impediment" to recertifying the program.

Yoo insisted that the president's wiretapping program had only to comply with Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure — but the report said Yoo ignored the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had previously overseen federal national security surveillance.

"The notion that basically one person at the Justice Department, John Yoo, and Hayden and the vice president's office were running a program around the laws that Congress passed, including a reinterpretation of the Fourth Amendment, is mind boggling," Harman said.

House Democrats are pressing for legislation that would expand congressional access to secret intelligence briefings, but the White House has threatened to veto it.

'I'm Just Very Disappointed' NSA Wiretapped Me

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/04/21/harman-wiretapping-disappointed

Harman: 'I'm Just Very Disappointed' NSA Wiretapped Me, After I Voted To Allow Them To

On Sunday, CQ reported that the NSA had wiretapped Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), listening in on a call in which she apparently offered a quid pro quo to a lobbyist group. Harman has vigorously denied the reports. Today, she appeared on MSNBC to express her shock and outrage that her phone calls were listened to, saying she was "disappointed" that the U.S. could have allowed such "a gross abuse of power":

HARMAN: I'm just very disappointed that my country -- I'm an American citizen just like you are -- could have permitted what I think is a gross abuse of power in recent years. I'm one member of Congress who may be caught up in it, but I have a bully pulpit and I can fight back. I'm thinking about others who have no bully pulpit and may not be aware, as I was not, that right now somewhere, someone's listening in on their conversations, and they're innocent Americans.

Harman's anger seems a bit disingenuous, considering that she was one of the earliest supporters of Bush's warrantless wiretapping program. When the practice was revealed by the New York Times in 2005, she defended it as "essential," though admitted she was "concerned" about its scope:

"I have been briefed since 2003 on a highly classified NSA foreign collection program that targeted Al Qaeda. I believe the program is essential to U.S. national security and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities," Harman said. "Like many Americans, I am deeply concerned by reports that this program in fact goes far beyond the measures to target Al Qaeda about which I was briefed."

In fact, in 2004 she "urged that The [New York] Times not publish the article" revealing Bush's program.

Indeed, she issued a press release in 2007 specifically highlighting that the updated FISA bill she approved of would fully allow warrantless wiretapping:

This bill does a good job -- a far better job than the bill reported last month by the Senate Intelligence Committee. ... This legislation arms our intelligence professionals with the ability to listen to foreign targets -- without a warrant -- to uncover plots that threaten US national security. The bill also protects the Constitutional rights of Americans by requiring the FISA court, an Article III Court, to approve procedures to ensure that Americans are not targeted for warrantless surveillance.

To her credit, Harman warned against "a slippery legal slope to potential unprecedented abuse of innocent Americans' privacy" and stated her opposition to granting telecommunications companies retroactive immunity. Perhaps her outrage at being a target of wiretapping herself will force her to realize that the program she deemed "essential" invaded the privacy of untold millions of Americans.

Obama’s First 100 Days

http://www.prisonplanet.com/obamas-first-100-days-worse-than-even-we-predicted.html

Obama’s First 100 Days: Worse Than Even We Predicted
From protecting Bush officials who ordered torture from prosecution, to maintaining and expanding the American empire, to warrantless wiretapping of American citizens, all have remained and intensified under Obama
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, April 20, 2009

As President Barack Obama approaches his first 100 days in office, the corporate media prepares a new round of fawning idolatry about the Obama administration’s “achievements,” yet a summary glance at what Obama has actually done in that short time with regard to expanding the Bush police state and the Neo-Con empire is worse than even we predicted.

The day after Barack Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States in November last year, we challenged Obama supporters and the administration itself to follow through on the rhetoric of “change” by starting to dismantle the architecture of the Bush police state and beginning to roll back the unwieldy morass of the American empire. Obama has done neither, and in fact his every action has been about ensuring the Bush police state remains in place, that the people who put it in place are protected from prosecution, and that the empire continues to expand.

We presented Obama and his supporters with a series of issues on which to make progress. While we did not expect Obama to accomplish much in his first few months in office, we at least challenged the new President to take the first steps in reversing eight years of what was a de facto dictatorship and plotting the course for the “change” that was so consistently promised.

We asked the following questions of an Obama presidency;

- Will Obama support Dennis Kucinich’s efforts to bring war crimes charges against Bush, Cheney and others for deceiving the country into a war or will he protect them against such charges like Nancy Pelosi has done?

In April 2008, Obama promised that as President he would ask his Attorney General to “immediately review” potential war crimes that occurred under the Bush White House. Obama or his Attorney General have done no such thing, and every noise they have made suggests that top Neo-Cons will be protected from deceiving America into a war.

Similarly we asked;

- Will Obama bring war crimes charges against Bush, Cheney and others for authorizing torture and will the torture of suspects under U.S. detention, a complete violation of both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, cease under an Obama administration?

As we found out last week, the answer was a resounding NO. Upon the release of the torture memos, Obama’s right-hand man, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, told ABC News that top Bush administration officials “should not be prosecuted either and that’s not the place that we go.” In addition, Obama’s statement that accompanied the release of the torture memos stated, “In releasing these memos, it is our intention to assure those who carried out their duties relying in good faith upon legal advice from the Department of Justice that they will not be subject to prosecution.”

So no retribution for the people who ordered the torture, and no retribution to the people who carried it out, thus setting the precedent that future administrations are free to order torture - safe in the knowledge that they will face no consequences whatsoever.

- Will Obama withdraw American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan without sending them away again to bomb another broken-backed third world country?

The answer again is a resounding NO. Upon taking office, Obama announced that he would be sending another 17,000, and eventually perhaps as many as 30,000, extra troops to Afghanistan.

Regarding Iraq, after the “withdrawal” of U.S. troops in 19 months, a timescale that has since been put back again, “Mr. Obama plans to leave behind a “residual force” of tens of thousands of troops to continue training Iraqi security forces, hunt down foreign terrorist cells and guard American institutions,” reported the New York Times.

In terms of bombing another broken-backed third world country, Obama has beefed the U.S. military role in Pakistan beyond that pursued by the Bush administration and “expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan,” according to the New York TImes, with an increase in missile attacks by drone aircraft.

Meanwhile, Obama’s war chest demands came to a total of around $800 billion in war funds and subsidiary costs just to cover the rest of 2009.

Does any of this sound like a move towards bringing the troops home and rolling back the American empire, as Obama promised before he was elected?

- Will Obama end the warrantless secret surveillance and phone-taps of American citizens?

You’ll be shocked the learn that the answer was a resounding NO. Earlier this month, “The Obama administration formally adopted the Bush administration’s position that the courts cannot judge the legality of the National Security Agency’s (NSA’s) warrantless wiretapping program,” reported the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“President Obama promised the American people a new era of transparency, accountability, and respect for civil liberties,” said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. “But with the Obama Justice Department continuing the Bush administration’s cover-up of the National Security Agency’s dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans, and insisting that the much-publicized warrantless wiretapping program is still a ’secret’ that cannot be reviewed by the courts, it feels like deja vu all over again.”

- Will Obama cease his support for the Bush-administration backed banker bailouts, hated by the majority of Americans, and target the real cause of the problem - the Federal Reserve - or will he continue to give taxpayers’ money to banks who are merely hoarding it all for themselves?

Obama’s zealous push for more bailouts, along with increased power for the Federal Reserve and the implementation of global regulations that will effectively end any notion of a free market was perhaps the defining issue of his first 100 days as President. Obama has vigorously promoted the same financial policies that were introduced by the Bush administration in its final few months.

- Will Obama repeal Patriot Acts I and II as well as reversing Bush’s signing statement and acknowledging the repeal of the John Warner Defense Authorization Act? Will Obama seek to continue the militarization of America and preparations for martial law through Northcom and the secret government or will he dismantle the police state that has been constructed over the last eight years by the Bush administration?

Despite initial rhetoric about reversing Bush’s infamous signing statements, Obama himself stated that he will continue to use signing statements. The Patriot Act and its additions as well as the John Warner Defense Authorization Act, both core planks of the Bush police state, remain firmly in place, with no sign of any reversal.

Regarding militarization through Northcom, weeks after Obama’s election victory it was announced that, “The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials.” Militarization of law enforcement and troops being used domestically in preparation for martial law is continuing apace under the Obama administration.

- Will Obama follow through on his rhetorical support for the second amendment or will he seek to ban guns as he did in Illinois?

Despite Obama promising that he was not interested in going after the second amendment before his election, one of his first actions was to appoint the rabidly anti-gun Eric Holder as his Attorney General. Obama has also falsely blamed the drug war crisis in Mexico on American gun shops. The leaked Obama gun ban list would make millions of Americans criminals for owning weapons such certain types of rifles or pistols. Anti-gun legislation has found its way into stimulus and other unrelated bills as pork barrel. The first steps of the Obama administration with regard to gun control have resulted in record firearm and ammunition purchases across the country.

Upon Obama’s election we made a cynical but unfortunately accurate prediction of how the much vaunted promise of “change” would actually manifest itself. The fact is that the “change” began and ended on the day Obama won the election.

- Illegal warrantless surveillance and wiretapping of American citizens will continue under Obama.

- Top Bush administration officials who ordered torture and those that carried it out will be protected from prosecution under Obama.

- Top Bush administration officials who deceived America into a war will be protected from prosecution under Obama.

- The expansion of the military empire through continued occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and further military incursions into Pakistan will continue and expand under Obama.

- Banker bailouts, reckless spending, inflation of currency through overprinting and global regulations stifling the free market, all of which were initiated under Bush, will continue under Obama.

- The militarization of the United States and the architecture of the police state that was set up under Bush will be preserved and expanded under Obama.

- The attack on the second amendment right to bear arms will continue under Obama.

“The egregious spending will continue, government will balloon in size, American soldiers will be used as cannon fodder for more interventionist wars of the military-industrial complex, U.S. citizens will continue to have their phone calls tapped and their rights curtailed,” we forecast last year, “and the Federal Reserve will continue to rule the financial system with an iron fist while the middle class is squeezed out of existence.”

Who can deny that all those things have only intensified under the Obama administration?

The honeymoon is over - Barack Obama has proven himself to be nothing more than we predicted all along - another stooge for the global banking syndicate that has controlled every U.S. president since JFK, and nothing more than a black face on the new world order - sworn to continue and intensify the same agenda that the Bush-Clinton-Bush dynasty advanced before him.

Obama: throw out warrantless wiretapping suit

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/White_House_says_Obama_absolutely_stands_0410.html

White House: Obama 'absolutely' stands behind effort to throw out warrantless wiretapping suit
Eric Brewer
Friday April 10, 2009

President Barack Obama endorsed a Justice Department move to dismiss a case in which the National Security Agency is being sued over its warrantless wiretapping program, because he believes the case presents a risk to national security, the White House told Raw Story Thursday.

In response to a question at Thursday’s press briefing, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that President Obama stands firmly behind a Justice Department brief filed last week which aims to have a civil liberties group’s lawsuit dismissed.

He “absolutely does,” Gibbs said. “Obviously, these are programs that have been debated and discussed, but the President does support that viewpoint.”

The Electronic Frontier foundation is suing the NSA for damages over a program in which the government tracked the phone calls and emails of thousands of Americans following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

In their filing Friday, the Justice Department argued that the case should be dismissed because information surrounding the program was a “state secret” and therefore couldn’t be litigated or discussed. It also proposed that the government was protected by “sovereign immunity” under federal wiretapping statutes and the Patriot Act, arguing that the United States could only face lawsuits if they willfully elected to disclose intelligence obtained by wiretapping.

In other words, the motion posited that government agencies couldn’t be sued for spying because they never intentionally told anyone they were engaged in warrantless wiretaps, even if such a program violated the law.

During his presidential campaign, then-Sen. Barack Obama criticized the Bush Administration for its use of “state secrets” as a legal argument to prevent lawsuits from moving forward. His campaign website listed state secrets under the headline “Problems.”

“The Bush administration has ignored public disclosure and has invoked a legal tool known as the ‘state secrets’ privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of court,” his campaign site said.

Raw Story questioned Gibbs about the apparent contradiction.

“Before he was elected, the President said that the Bush administration had abused the state secrets privilege,” this reporter asked. “Has he changed his mind?”

“No,” Gibbs replied. “I mean, obviously, we're dealing with some suits, and the President will -- and the Justice Department will make determinations based on protecting our national security.”

“So he still thinks that the Bush administration abused the state secrets privilege?” Raw Story asked.

“Yes,” Gibbs said.

The invocation of state secrets privilege as a means of derailing suits against the government is nothing new. The Obama Justice Department made this claim in February, in response to a suit brought by victims of extraordinary rendition. But the Department’s “sovereign immunity” argument is unexpected.

A close review of the Department's brief suggests that the Justice Department took a quote out of context in an effort to bolster their case.

The Department asserts that the United States can’t be sued because it’s specifically excluded under the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. “In the Wiretap Act and ECPA, Congress expressly preserved sovereign immunity against claims for damages and equitable relief, permitting such claims against only a 'person or entity, other than the United States,'” the Department wrote.

In that section of the law, however, the phrase “other than the United States” is there only because those sections specify the penalties to be used in cases in which the law is violated by someone other than the United States. In contrast, another section of the law specifies penalties for violations of the law by the United States. (More on the law can be read at section 2520 (in chapter 119) and section 2707.)

Some legal scholars have raised eyebrows at the claim.

Orin Kerr, professor at George Washington School of Law, believes that the Administration's argument they can't be prosecuted unless they willfully provide wiretapping intelligence seems spurious.

"The statute itself says 'any willful violation,' and it expressly covers all of Chapter 121 (the Stored Communications Act), all of Chapter 119 (the Wiretap Act), and those explicit sections of the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act]," Kerr wrote.

The preceding article was a White House report from Eric Brewer, who periodically attends White House press briefings for Raw Story. Brewer is also a contributor at BTC News. He was the first person to ask about the Downing Street memo at a White House briefing.

NSA Monitored All Communications

http://www.prisonplanet.com/nsa-monitored-all-communications.html

NSA Monitored All Communications
Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Thursday, January 22, 2009

On January 21, former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice appeared Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show. Tice, who helped expose the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, told Olbermann government programs designed to spy on the American people are more extensive and far reaching than previously admitted. “The National Security Agency had access to all Americans’ communications — faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications,” Tice said. “It didn’t matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.”

During the Bush administration, it was claimed the intercepts involved foreign communications and the intelligence gathered was integral to the conduct of the so-called global war on terrorism. In order to get around the warrant requirements of FISA, a bill authorizing the use of United States Armed Forces against those supposedly responsible for the attacks on September 11, 2001, was passed (Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists). The authorization granted Bush the authority to use all “necessary and appropriate force” against those whom he determined “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the September 11th attacks, or those who harbored said persons or groups. AUMF allowed the Bush administration to avoid FISA and Wiretap Act restrictions.

But according to Tice, the NSA program was not limited to alleged al-Qaeda members, as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales claimed at the time, but included “news organizations and reporters and journalists” in the United States. The data “was digitized and put on databases somewhere.” It was not simply journalists, however, the NSA spied on and likely continues to spy now.

“Spying on Americans by the super-secret National Security Agency is not only more widespread than President George W. Bush admits but is part of a concentrated, government-wide effort to gather and catalog information on U.S. citizens, sources close to the administration say,” Doug Thompson wrote for Capitol Hill Blue on December 27, 2005. “Besides the NSA, the Pentagon, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security and dozens of private contractors are spying on millions of Americans 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.”

According to Thompson and his sources in the government, the “Pentagon has built a massive database of Americans it considers threats, including members of antiwar groups, peace activists and writers opposed to the war in Iraq.” In response to publicity, the Pentagon claimed it was “reviewing the files” to determine if the information was necessary to the conduct of the putative war on terrorism. “Given the military’s legacy of privacy abuses, such vague assurances are cold comfort,” Gene Healy of the CATO Institute told Thompson. “There’s a long and troubling history of military surveillance in this country,” added Healy. “That history suggests that we should loathe allowing the Pentagon access to our personal information.”

In addition to spying by the NSA and the Pentagon, documents released in 2006 revealed the FBI and its Joint Terrorism Task Force monitored and infiltrated several nonviolent activist groups. “Labeling law abiding groups and their members ‘domestic terrorists’ is not only irresponsible, it has a chilling effect on the vibrant tradition of political dissent in this country,” Ann Beeson, Associate Legal Director of the ACLU, said at the time.

According to a Washington Post report, the NSA has turned over information to the Defense Intelligence Agency, FBI, CIA and Department of Homeland Security.

Although the NSA monitors all communications — faxes, phone calls, and computer communications — it is impossible to collect all of this data, according to Tice. “What was done was sort of an ability to look at the metadata … and ferret that information to determine what communications would ultimately be collected,” he told Olbermann.

Obviously, the NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, and the Department of Homeland Security are not interested in “every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York,” as Olbermann sarcastically put it. They are primarily interested in the communications of “domestic terrorists,” or those opposed to government policies.

Well before president Truman established the NSA in 1952, government cryptologists were spying on Americans under the Armed Forces Security Agency’s Project Shamrock, a program that worked with telegraphic companies to turn over the telegraphic correspondence of Americans to the government. “The NSA kicked its spy campaign into high gear in the 1960s,” writes Earl Ofari Hutchinson. “The FBI demanded that the NSA monitor antiwar activists, civil rights leaders, and drug peddlers. The Senate Select Committee that investigated government domestic spying in 1976 pried open a tiny public window into the scope of NSA spying,” but this window was slammed shut in the name of national security. “The few feeble Congressional attempts over the years to probe NSA domestic spying have gone nowhere. Even though rumors swirled that NSA eyes were riveted on more than a few Americans, Congressional investigators showed no stomach to fight the NSA’s entrenched code of silence.”

More recently, Congress has not only “showed no stomach” when it comes to illegal and unconstitutional spying of Americans, it has worked hand-in-hand with the executive and intelligence agencies to facilitate this process. In essence, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security serve as a domestic political police force little different than the NKVD of the former Soviet Union. The domestic political police force in the United States, like the NKVD’s Special Board, is interested in “socially dangerous” people, that is to say people opposed to the government.

Unlike Stalin’s NKVD, the FBI and Homeland Security have yet to engage in a Great Purge of arrests, interrogation, torture, imprisonment, and deportation. Bush, however, through the Military Commissions Act and other draconian legislation, has set the stage for a political purge, especially if another false flag attack occurs in the United States. Executive Orders associated with FEMA stand ready to suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and round up “socially dangerous” people and send them to newly constructed KBR concentration camps.

Unfortunately, far too many people naively believe all of this will change under Barack Obama. Mr. Obama, however, is merely a figurehead and window dressing packaged for public consumption, a friendly and smiling face slapped as a deceptive cover on the secret government of the bankers. If and when push comes to shove — another manufactured terrorist attack or civil disturbances related to an economic depression — Obama will pen an executive order sending “socially dangerous” people to concentration camps.

Whistleblower exposed NSA wiretapping

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Whistleblower_explains_why_he_exposed_NSA_1216.html

Whistleblower exposed NSA wiretapping because ‘this is crazy’
David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Raw Story
Wednesday, Dec 17, 2008

The whistleblower who exposed the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program three years ago told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday that he was motivated by a sense that “this is crazy.”

Former Justice Department lawyer Thomas Tamm had remained anonymous until he spoke to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff for an article last week. His appearance with Maddow was his first television interview.

Appearing clearly unaccustomed to public speaking, Tamm emotionally explained, “My entire life, really, was based on trying to enforce the law … and I believed that the law was being broken in the place where I was working.”

Tamm noted that he was not the only one in his office at the Justice Department who was aware of the wiretapping program, but he was the only one who stopped and said, “Wait a second. We assume that what they are doing is illegal? I don’t understand that. Why are we part of that?”

“I just stepped back and said, ‘This is crazy,’” Tamm told Maddow. “This is not what the Department of Justice is all about. This is not what the Constitution is about.”

Tamm would now like to see serious consideration of prosecutions for these crimes. “It offends me that we feel we’re not strong enough as a country, that our laws are not strong enough, that our Congress is not strong enough, that our courts are not strong enough to protect us,” he stated. “And I personally — I’m a prosecutor … I think it should be looked at very seriously.”

Zinn: 9/11 Truth Is For “Fanatics”

http://www.prisonplanet.com/zinn-911-truth-is-for-fanatics-has-no-practical-political-significance.html

Zinn: 9/11 Truth Is For “Fanatics”, Has “No Practical Political Significance”
New comments cause more outrage after leftist historian said he didn’t care about what really happened on 9/11
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Friday, Nov 21, 2008

Just days after left-wing anti-war icon Howard Zinn told an audience that he didn’t care if 9/11 was an inside job, he has repeated the sentiment, stating that questions regarding the attacks have “no practical political significance” and that 9/11 truth activists are “fanatics” who are wasting their time.

During a lecture at UQAM university in Montréal, Zinn was once again asked if he would support a new 9/11 investigation.

Zinn responded:

“I have said that what happened on 9/11 deserves to be investigated more than it has been because I don’t accept and believe official investigations and official reports.

But having said that, and I want to say that this has really annoyed a lot of people, but why not, and I will annoy more people by saying that I think there are many people who have become fanatics about 9/11. By fanatics I mean, they think we should drop everything and just concentrate our energies on finding out what happened on 9/11.

I don’t think the question of what really happened on 9/11 is the most important question we can ask.”

Zinn then took a direct swipe at the 9/11 truth movement by stating:

“To tell a movement of citizens in the United States that this is something that we really have to make an issue of, I don’t believe it because we don’t need what happened on 9/11, we don’t need that to tell us about the crimes of the Bush administration.

I believe there are certain things that happen in history and certainly questions that are asked that divert us from the important things that we have to do at hand.

The truth is I don’t think anyone will ever really know what happened on 9/11 just as I don’t think anyone will really know who killed John F. Kennedy, and there are a lot of people who wasted a huge amount of time working on something that did not have any practical political significance.”

Zinn then asserted that his previous comments at a lecture in Colorado has been distorted and that he never said he did not care about 9/11 or the fact that it was in the past.

Zinn’s exact words that day were “I don’t know enough about it (the 9/11 conspiracy) and the truth is I don’t much care, that’s past.”

In our previous article we analysed how other leftist luminaries such as Noam Chomsky have belittled the efforts of 9/11 truth activists and attempted to dismiss the political significance of asking questions and highlighting evidence of government complicity in the attacks, while at the same time clearly acknowledging that the truth remains covered up and withheld.

This cements commentators such as Zinn and Chomsky as intellectual cowards and allows them to be used as leftist gatekeepers by an establishment that even they admit has used 9/11 as a means to facilitate aggressive and monstrous foreign and domestic agendas.

What really happened on 9/11 is not a distraction, it is the key to everything:

Without 9/11 there would be no “war on terror”.

Without 9/11 there would be no “clash of civilizations”

Without 9/11 there would be no war in Afghanistan.

Without 9/11 there would be no war in Iraq.

Without 9/11 there would be no war in Iran.

Without 9/11 there would be no war in… (insert any country classified as part of the “axis of evil” or defined as being “with the terrorists”)

Without 9/11 thousands of U.S. troops would not have been sent to their deaths.

Without 9/11 hundreds of thousands of citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan would not have been sentenced to their deaths.

Without 9/11 there would be no inaction on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Without 9/11 there would be no civilian contractors in Iraq and the scandal that has followed them would have been averted.

Without 9/11 there would be no false military reporting (Pat Tillman, Jessica Lynch), and no crack down on the freedom of the press (banning photographing the returning coffins).

Without 9/11 there would be no Patriot Act.

Without 9/11 there would be no NSA warrantless wiretapping program.

Without 9/11 there would be no Camp Delta and no Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay.

Without 9/11 there would be no Military Commissions Act and no coordinated program of extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention and torture of those defined as “enemy combatants”.

Without 9/11 there would be no vast increase in secrecy and complete militarization of intelligence under the newly created office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Without 9/11 there would not be thousands of dead and dying emergency workers who are suffering crippling and fatal respiratory illnesses.

Without 9/11 there would be no vast increase in military and security spending that goes arm in arm with huge cutbacks in other key social programs (such as levees in New Orleans).

Without 9/11 there would have been no total abandonment of fiscal restraint, which has contributed to plunging the nation into an abyss of debt and looks likely to tip the world into a deep recession if not a complete depression.

And on and on and on.

Perhaps most importantly, without 9/11 there would be no “post 9/11 society/mentality”.

The ongoing ignorance of official 9/11 lies will continue to feed the fear and hostility that this post 9/11 environment is founded upon. If it is “fanatical” to attempt to pay attention to the man behind the curtain, so to speak, then every member of the 9/11 truth movement should plead guilty.

The definition of a “fanatic” is, in this writer’s humble opinion, much closer to the actions of the fawning audience at both of Howard Zinn’s afore mentioned lectures, who proceeded to inanely cheer their hero no matter what came out of his mouth.

Much more fanatical are the kind of pocket radicals who latch on to one way of thinking, stick steadfastly to one political paradigm, completely close their minds to the wider picture, proceeding to repeat adfinum to their friends in the “coffee revolution” shops what Zinn, Chomsky, Vidal and their ilk have said, in between conversations about the finer points of Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness prose, their understanding of the term ‘multiculturalism’ and the origins of Che Guevara’s seminal manual on the theory and practice of guerrilla warfare.

Such people can groan all they like when questions over 9/11 are raised, it doesn’t change the fact that every single significant action the Bush administration has taken over the last seven years, every attack on freedom and crime against humanity that they have committed stems from the events of 9/11.

Yes Mr Zinn, you have angered a great many politically minded people with your comments, but what do you expect when you state that you do not care about what really happened on the most historically significant day in our recent history, and in the lifetimes of many of us?

Indeed, this is the key to Zinn’s comments. To him, what really happened on 9/11 is not significant because it is HE who represents the past, it is HE who is wasting his time and it is HE who is politically insignificant.

Conservative Newspaper Teaches Dems A Lesson

http://www.workingassetsblog.com/2007/08/americas_most_conservative_new.html

Sirotablog
Real-world wisdom from outside the beltway.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
America’s Most Conservative Newspaper Teaches Dems A Lesson

The Colorado Springs Gazette is one of the two most conservative papers in America (the other being the Waterbury Republican-American). This is no secret to anyone who has either read the paper, or who is in the journalism industry. But the political continuum is a circle, not a line, meaning that on some issues, ultraconservatives and progressives can make common cause. Today's Gazette editorial on the bipartisan support for warrantless domestic wiretapping and spying is a good example - and a good lesson for Democratic "strategists" cloistered in Washington with their weak-kneed and self-defeating pathologies.

Here's an excerpt:

"What do you do when critics call the legality of your secret spying program into question? If you’re the Bush administration, you defend it, by becoming ever more secretive and by claiming to be above the law. The legal basis for the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which was launched soon after 9/11 to capture conversations of potential terrorists, has always been shaky. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 outlawed warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, and in 2005 it was revealed that the Terrorist Surveillance Program did just that. Though supposedly altered so as to operate within the law, the surveillance program continues to be defended on alarming and seemingly contradictory grounds — that its legality depends on operational details too secret to be revealed, and that legality isn’t an issue, anyway, since President Bush’s powers as commander in chief cannot be so bound by law...We see the justifications of executive privilege as little more than weak excuses. Earlier this month, this same logic of secrecy, which plays on people’s fears, helped excuse a further weakening of the law as Congress, in the Protect America Act, effectively gutted FISA protections against warrantless surveillance...Now that Congress has promised to revise this temporary measure, Bush and Cheney’s continued excuses are all the more intolerable, obstructing Congress’ ability to examine the genesis of the Terrorist Surveillance Program."

Pundits and Democratic "strategists" in Washington, D.C. clearly have absolutely no concept that issues of privacy, civil liberties and government intrusion do not fit conveniently on their preconceived - and childishly ignorant - notions of "red" and "blue." They dismiss the vast American heartland as just a Republican Party monolith that supposedly supports all efforts to strip citizens of their freedom, and they believe that in order to start winning in this heartland, they just have to out-Republican the Republicans on these issues.

We know this not just because they capitulated last month by rubber-stamping Bush's warrantless domestic spying program, but because they all but run out and tell reporters just how totally out of touch they really are when it comes to these issues. Remember how Sen. Chuck Schumer (D) claimed that his efforts to preserve the most odious parts of the Patriot Act were designed to protect "our Democrats in red states?" Remember how the insulated Washington media fawned all over him when he said this, billing him as an amazing political guru? And remember how, at the very same time, Montana's Jon Tester was campaigning against the Patriot Act as a way to attract support from libertarian-leaning voters? Yeah - in a race that was decided by a tiny margin, had Schumer's drumbeat been any louder, it may have lost Tester the Montana senate seat and Democrats might not be in the majority today.

I learned the lesson inherent in the Gazette's spot-on editorial when I watched my friend Bernie Sanders in the House. As Rolling Stone's terrific profile showed, he worked closely with people like Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) and then-Rep. Butch Otter (R-ID) to forge left-right coalitions that passed legislation reforming the Patriot Act over the objections of Republican congressional leaders. Paul and Otter, you may recall, are among the most conservative elected officials in America. They know - sadly, more than many Democratic "strategists" in Washington - that there is nothing "weak" or "politically dangerous" about standing up for privacy and personal freedom and against government power grabs.

In fact, its the other way around: Democrats are exuding weakness and are walking into political peril by subscribing to the cartoonish "red" vs. "blue" outlook of those Washington insiders who claim expertise in a national political topography they clearly do not or do not want to understand. The panoply of privacy and civil liberties issues poses great opportunity for Democrats - but only if they show a shred of foresight and reject the absurd Washington conventional wisdom that says helping the most unpopular president in modern history trample Americans' freedoms is somehow "good politics."

Using Illegal Wiretapping and Spying Activity

http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/editorials/157

Bush Administration Has Been Using Illegal Wiretapping and Spying Activity for Political Purposes. Doubt It?
Submitted by mark karlin on Mon, 08/20/2007
A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

In an under covered trial in a California courtroom, a Constitutional drama of major significance is unfolding.

It is a federal lawsuit filed by Americans who claim that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of AT&T, illegally spied on them. The Bush Administration has taken the Orwellian position that the trial must not be allowed to proceed because it would require the White House to reveal if they indeed have illegally monitored the plaintiffs – and that, the Bush Politburo argues, would violate "state secrets."

Why do we sometimes think that we are living in the Soviet-era, Stasi run East Germany?

Maybe that’s because a headline last week read, "US moves to use spy satellites for domestic surveillance."

Or maybe, returning to the trial in California, that the White House refused to sign a document assuring the court that their "eavesdropping" was not being used domestically under the guise of claiming it was being used to stop terrorism:

But the 9th Circuit judges were skeptical. They wondered why at least one key issue cannot be explored -- whether there was domestic spying on Americans without court approval, which civil liberties lawyers say violates the law.

Judges Margaret McKeown and Michael Daly Hawkins, both Clinton appointees, cited public comments by President Bush and other administration officials denying any such warrantless domestic surveillance, and asked the government why it can't provide similar statements under oath in the court case.

McKeown, who stressed that she didn't expect Bush himself to provide the sworn statements, questioned how such evidence would jeopardize national security.

And when an AT&T lawyer later told the judges that Bush has already issued denials publicly, Hawkins said that public statements aren't the equivalent of statements under oath in court or in court declarations.

"No court in the land would be satisfied with public statements, be it the president of the United States or the president of AT&T," Hawkins said.

In short, we once again have the White House playing the game of we’ll talk with you, but we won’t testify under oath because then you can legally charge us with perjury because, of course, we’re going to lie.

But this is about spying on American citizens.

Reaching back into the recesses of our memory, we recall that in one of Alberto Gonzales’s farcical appearances before Congress – when the FISA illegal eavesdropping first broke in The New York Times (after they sat on the story for a year) – Gonzales was asked if the spying might have been used for domestic purposes other than terrorism. Gonzales responded, in essence, that he couldn’t say for sure.

In a recent BuzzFlash editorial, we noted that the acquisition of domestic spying powers for political purposes was one of three key strategies in the Republican effort to achieve long-term control of the United States apparatus of government.

With domestic spying powers just recently legally expanded by a Democratic Congress to include, according to The New York Times, certain types of physical searches on American soil and the collection of Americans' business records, the Bush Administration now has legal authority to achieve what Nixon attempted to do illegally in the Watergate burglary.

And if the Democratic Party were to sue over a modern day Watergate-style operation, the Bush Administration would tell the court that it can’t reveal why it conducted the spying operation on a political party because it would violate national security.

This is not BuzzFlash idle speculation; it is what the Bush Administration, now enabled by the lack of caucus discipline in a Democratic Congress, has achieved.

God help us all.