February 9, 2014

The first congressman to battle the NSA is dead. No-one noticed, no-one cares.

http://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-the-nsa-is-dead-no-one-noticed-no-one-cares/



Last month, former Congressman Otis Pike died, and no one seemed to notice or care. That’s scary, because Pike led the House’s most intensive and threatening hearings into US intelligence community abuses, far more radical and revealing than the better-known Church Committee’s Senate hearings that took place at the same time. That Pike could die today in total obscurity, during the peak of the Snowden NSA scandal, is, as they say, a “teachable moment” —one probably not lost on today’s already spineless political class.

In mid-1975, Rep. Pike was picked to take over the House select committee investigating the US intelligence community after the first committee chairman, a Michigan Democrat named Nedzi, was overthrown by more radical liberal Democrats fired up by Watergate after they learned that Nedzi had suppressed information about the CIA’s illegal domestic spying program, MH-CHAOS, exposed by Seymour Hersh in late 1974. It was Hersh’s exposés on the CIA domestic spying program targeting American dissidents and antiwar activists that led to the creation of the Church Committee and what became known as the Pike Committee, after Nedzi was tossed overboard. Pike was an odd choice to take Nedzi’s place—he was a conservative Cold War Democrat from a mostly-Republican Long Island district, who’d supported the Vietnam War long after most northern Democrats abandoned it, and who loathed do-gooder Kennedy liberals and Big Government waste. So no one expected Pike to challenge the National Security State and executive privilege so aggressively and righteously—and some argued, recklessly—as he wound up doing.

The reason is simple if you think in 1975 terms. Pike was an ambitious political animal—and in 1975, standing up to the secrecy-obsessed NatSec State like Warren Beatty and Robert Redford did on screen seemed like smart politics. Pike was looking to trade up to the Senate in 1976, just as Frank Church was looking to use the Church Committee hearings to springboard into the White House. Pike was less interested in sensational scandals like Church’s poison darts and foreign assassination plots than he was in getting to the guts of the intelligence apparatus, its power, its funding, its purpose. He asked questions never asked or answered since the start of the Cold War: What was America’s intelligence budget? What was the purpose of the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies and programs? Were they succeeding by their own standards? Were taxpayers getting their money’s worth? Were they making America safer?

Those were exactly the questions that the intel apparatus did not want asked. The Church Committee focused on excesses and abuses, implying that with the proper reforms and oversights, the intelligence structures could be set right. But as the Pike Committee started pulling up the floorboards, what they discovered quickly led Rep. Pike and others to declare that the entire intelligence apparatus was a dangerous boondoggle. Not only were taxpayers getting fleeced, but agencies like the NSA and CIA were a direct threat to America’s security and democracy, the proverbial monkey playing with a live grenade. The problem was that Pike asked the right questions—and that led him to some very wrong answers, as far as the powers that be were concerned. It was Pike’s committee that got the first ever admission—from CIA director William Colby—that the NSA was routinely tapping Americans’ phone calls. Days after that stunning confession, Pike succeeded in getting the head of the NSA, Lew Allen Jr., to testify in public before his committee—the first time in history that an NSA chief publicly testified. It was the first time that the NSA publicly maintained that it was legally entitled to wiretap Americans’ communications overseas, in spite of the 1934 Communications Act and other legal restrictions placed on other intelligence and law enforcement agencies. It was also the first time an NSA chief publicly lied to Congress, claiming it was not eavesdropping on domestic or overseas phone calls involving American citizens. (Technically, legalistically, the NSA argued that it hadn’t lied—the reason being that since Americans weren’t specifically “targeted” in the NSA’s vast data-vacuuming programs in the 1970s, recording and storing every phone call and telex cable in computers which were then data-mined for keywords, that therefore they weren’t technically eavesdropping on Americans who just happened to be swept up into the wiretapping vacuum.)

Pike quickly discovered the fundamental problem with the NSA: It was by far the largest intelligence agency, and yet it was birthed unlike any other, as a series of murky executive orders under Truman at the peak of Cold War hysteria. Digging into the NSA’s murky beginnings, it quickly became clear that the agency was explicitly chartered in such a way that placed it beyond legal accountability, out of reach of the other branches of government. Unlike the CIA, which came into being under an act of Congress, the NSA’s founding charter was a national secret. In early August, 1975, Pike ordered the NSA to produce its “charter” document, National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 6. The Pentagon’s intelligence czar, Albert Hall, appeared before the Pike Committee that day—but without the classified NSA charter. Hall reminded Pike that the Ford White House had offered to show the NSA charter document to Pike’s committee just as it had done with Church’s Senate Committee members, who had agreed to merely view the charter at a government location outside of Congress, without entering the secret document into the Senate record. Officially, publicly, it still didn’t exist. Pike refused to accept that:



Assistant Defense Secretary Hall told an incredulous Pike that he hadn’t brought the NSA charter with him as he’d been told to, and that he couldn’t because “I need clearance” and the charter “has secret material in it.”

Pike exploded:



Pike’s investigations led him to believe that the combined intelligence agencies were massively understating their budgets, and that the true figure was in the area of $10 billion in 1975 dollars (about $43 billion today), with the NSA by far the largest intelligence agency of all. Broken down, he discovered that about one-fifth of the FBI’s budget went to counterintelligence, largely wasted except as it targeted and harassed leftist dissidents and political opponents. He estimated that the CIA spent about a third of its budget bribing or funding foreign political parties and foreign politicians, including in allied countries like Italy. And that the NSA was a powerful tool in some of the most nefarious—and illegal—domestic surveillance programs.

MUCH MORE....MUST READ!

Sources include: "Puzzle Palace" by James Bamford; "Challenging The Secret Government" by Kathryn Olmsted; archived articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Newsweek]

February 8, 2014

Pardon my scoffing

Exactly what kind of verifiable, trustworthy, scientific data could possibly have been collected in 1891?

The Victorian scientists were unreliable at best, and certainly couldn't cover the globe or even a small fraction of it. Given the massive prejudices, faulty techniques, and erroneous background information they held so tightly, I would be amazed if they had anything at all to contribute of any value to any topic. The recent reports in many a field are full of studies debunking long-cherished Victorian "scientific conclusions".

This is the biggest flaw in the climate change discussion: you can't make long-term predictions on short-term information, and you can't make any predictions without good data for a long period of time, which is simply not available. A long period is very long, climatologically; in excess of a millenium or 10.

All you can do is guess.

And if your guesses are designed to terrorize people, and move policy in ways that overturn governments and hurt people, then you are not a scientist, but an agitator.

You want to take down the 1%, that's fine. that's evolutionary and ethically just and proper. Just don't further distort science while doing it. Don't rush to judgment.

February 8, 2014

Weekend Economists Trace the Long and Winding Road February 7-9, 2014

Today turns out to be memorable in a lot of ways. Consider the birthdays for February 7th:

Sir Thomas More 1478
John Deere 1804
Charles Dickens 1812
Frederick Douglas 1817
Laura Ingalls Wilder 1867
Eubie (James Hubert) Blake 1883
Sinclair Lewis 1885
Larry "Buster" Crabbe 1908
Oscar Brand 1920
An Wang 1920
Eddie Bracken 1920
Wilma Lee Cooper (Leary) 1921
Keefe Brasselle 1923
Gay Talese 1932
Earl King 1934
King Curtis 1934
Dieter Bohlen 1944
Sammy Johns 1946
Jimmy Greenspoon (Three Dog Night) 1948
Alan Lancaster (Status Quo) 1949
Marilyn Cochran 1950
Miguel Ferrer 1954
Brian Travers (UB40) 1959
James Spader 1960
Garth Brooks 1962
David Bryan (Bon Jovi) 1962
Chris Rock 1966
Jason Gedrick 1967
Edward Bergenholz 1974
Ashton Kutcher 1978
Tina Majorino 1985

1795 - The 11th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified.

1913 - The Turks lost 5,000 men in a battle with the Bulgarian army in Gallipoli.

1922 - DeWitt and Lila Acheson Wallace offered 5,000 copies of "Reader's Digest" magazine for the first time.

1936 - The U.S. Vice President’s flag was established by executive order.

1940 - "Pinocchio" world premiered at the Center Theatre in Manhattan.

1941 - The Tommy Dorsey Orchestra and Frank Sinatra recorded "Everything Happens to Me."

1943 - The U.S. government announced that shoe rationing would go into effect in two days.

1944 - During World War II, the Germans launched a counteroffensive at Anzio, Italy.

1962 - The U.S. government banned all Cuban imports and re-export of U.S. products to Cuba from other countries.

1974 - The nation of Grenada gained independence from Britain. TO LOSE IT TO REAGAN, 9 YEARS LATER

1977 - Russia launched Soyuz 24.

1984 - Space shuttle astronauts Bruce McCandless II and Robert L. Stewart made the first untethered space walk.

1985 - "Sports Illustrated" released its annual swimsuit edition. It was the largest regular edition in the magazine’s history at 218 pages.

1985 - "New York, New York" became the official anthem of New York City.

1986 - Haitian President-for-Life Jean-Claude Duvalier fled his country ending 28 years of family rule.

1991 - The Rev. Jean-Bertrand Aristide was sworn in as Haiti's first democratically elected president.

1999 - King Hussein of Jordan died. His son was sworn in as king four hours after the announcement that his father had died.

2000 - California's legislature declared that February 13 would be "Charles M. Schulz Day."

But the February 7th that shaped our nation was this one: