dutchdemocrat

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Thu Jan-12-06 06:18 AM
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This is Wiretap - The Alchemy of a Story

Edited on Thu Jan-12-06 07:13 AM by dutchdemocrat

This is Wire Tap

written by DD

The leaker of the NSA wiretap story which appeared in the New York Times under the pen of James Risen has now been identified as Russell Tice, a career spook who recently has been working in special access programs also known as black world operations. He says that some of the secret black world operations run by the NSA were conducted in ways that he believes to be illegal.

The mentality was we need to get these guys, and we're going to do whatever it takes to get them.

James Risen, the Times reporter who broke the spy story, has been making the media rounds praising his sources – including Tice. He told Katie Couric:

Well, you know, I think this was the most classic whistleblower case I've ever seen where people--you know, in--in a lot of stories people have mixed motives for why they talk to reporters. Some--some people--in some stories there's a turf battle, and they're losing out in the turf battle, or whatever. In this case--I've been a reporter for about 25 years, this was the purest case of a whistle--of--of whistleblowers coming forward, people who truly believed that there was something wrong going on in the government, and they were motivated, I believe, by the purest of reasons.

He also appeared on the Daily Show with John Stewart and with Mitchell on NBC (see videos below).

The NSA story is bigger than much of the public realizes - and the latest evidence and upcoming testimony from Tice (hopefully) means Congress can convene hearings then this can all come out on the record. Tice is willing to talk and he says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the thousand and possibly the millions. Many Americans, placing overseas calls, may have been more than likely... sucked into that vacuum.

Of course the Right is coming out fully gunned and their take on it is that the NSA Had 'Psychological Concerns' about NY Times Leaker, says Newsmax. In other words - he's a 'nutter'.

But the network acknowledged that NSA officials were apparently so troubled about Mr. Tice's state of mind that they revoked his security clearance last May - and fired him shortly thereafter.
That's when the disgruntled black program operator decided to torpedo one of the agency's most valuable counterterrorism operations, the post-9/11 plan to monitor phone calls between al Qaeda operatives and their agents inside the U.S.

I have been following this story closely from the start and am mirroring the research I am keeping at the This is Wiretap page at Empire Burlesque as well as at a new domain I recently launched at http://www.thisiswiretap.com.

I have a hunch this may be a Nixonian finale - and my personal feeling is Bush won't survive the debacle as the truth really starts to come out. There's some evidence that Christiane Amanpour of CNN may have been a target and both NBC and CNN are 'investigating' after excellent reportage by Americablog and Media Bistro. The problem is NBC wiped that part of the interview transcript off their website.
The FISA court is outraged that they were out of the loop and one federal judge even resigned over the issue.

Floyd explains it in a nutshell

With each passing day, it becomes more evident that the main purpose behind Bush's illegal, warrantless domestic spying program is not collecting intelligence on terrorists and would-be terrorists – a task for which the government's existing draconian powers of surveillance were more than sufficient. As many people have noted, Bush already possessed the legal right to order the immediate surveillance of any person in the country, subject to the sole restraint of having to seek approval from the secret FISA court within 72 hours. Given the established record of this court's near-total acquiescence to thousands of such requests over the years, it is simply impossible to believe that it would not grant its ex post facto approval to any surveillance ordered by Bush which had even the most tenuous connection to a potential terrorist threat.
This undeniable reality leaves us with only one logical conclusion: Bush's secret spy program is designed for activities not covered by FISA's copious security blanket. It is now apparent that these activities include using the vast powers of federal, state and local governments to spy on the Bush Administration's perceived political enemies – a vast group, given that the Bushist definition of an enemy is anyone who opposes any of their policies. (The Bushists don't have opponents, in the traditional sense – honorable rivals in the give and take and compromises of ordinary politics ; like all radical extremists, they have only enemies who must be destroyed.)

The alchemy of the Wire tap story via RSS scraping of Technorati and Google News.

You may need the latest Macromedia Flash 8 Plugin in order to see the video clips below. The dropdown menu contains clips and footage of other video sources related to the Wiretap story including clips of Bush in 2004 saying
A wiretap requires a court order, when he knew very well he was tapping without one at the time.

There so much more data at the research page and the scraped feeds I am still having trouble disseminating it all - it will take some time to properly index the articles and lighten the page up a bit so it's easy to navigate.

Click here for Flash 8 Streaming Russell Video

Click here for Flash 8 Streaming James Risen Video (Daily Show

Click here for Flash 8 Streaming James Risen Video (NBC)

NSA, FISA and the DNA of Tyranny

Written by Chris Floyd

With each passing day, it becomes more evident that the main purpose behind Bush's illegal, warrantless domestic spying program is not collecting intelligence on terrorists and would-be terrorists – a task for which the government's existing draconian powers of surveillance were more than sufficient. As many people have noted, Bush already possessed the legal right to order the immediate surveillance of any person in the country, subject to the sole restraint of having to seek approval from the secret FISA court within 72 hours. Given the established record of this court's near-total acquiescence to thousands of such requests over the years, it is simply impossible to believe that it would not grant its ex post facto approval to any surveillance ordered by Bush which had even the most tenuous connection to a potential terrorist threat.

The Raw Story gives us an excellent, and harrowing, glimpse of this authoritarian Geheime Staatspolizei in action – against those well-known dastardly terrorists, the pacifict Quakers – brief description from Wikipedia: "The role of the Gestapo was to investigate and combat "all tendencies dangerous to the State." It had the authority to investigate treason, espionage and sabotage cases, and cases of criminal attacks on the Nazi Party and Germany.[br />
"The law had been changed in such a way that the Gestapo's actions were not subject to judicial review. Nazi jurist Dr. Werner Best stated, 'As long as the ... carries out the will of the leadership, it is acting legally.'"
That last paragraph sounds chillingly familiar. Actions "not subject to judicial review" – this covers not only Bush's warrantless spying, but also the Regime's whole approach to the captives it seizes in the self-declared, eternal "Terror War." Bush has fought at every step to keep these prisoners outside any judicial review whatsoever – save for the rigged "military tribunals" that he himself has concocted. And of course Dr. Best's "philosophy" is directly echoed by Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo and other acolytes of the "unitary executive" – unbridled, arbitrary power for a "war president," who stands beyond the reach or restraint of any law or treaty, able to order torture, aggressive war, even murder ("extrajudicial killing").

Broad, vague, overexcited historial comparisons ("These Bush guys are exactly like Nazis! It's the Third Reich come again!") are incorrect, unsubstantiated and pointless. The particulars of any given political tyranny cannot be replicated in different historical and cultural situations; as Tolstoy says (in a vastly different context), each unhappy family is unhappy in its own special way. But the lineaments of tyranny – its mental framework, its DNA – are remarkably consistent over time and place and cultures, with the same rhetoric, the same justifications, the same tendency toward eliminationism (see Dave Neiwert for more on this), and many of the same policies – such as spying on domestic enemies, evading judicial review, inflicting torture, waging war, etc. – which are the logical, inevitable outgrowths of authoritarian rule.

The Bushists aren't Nazis; they are themselves, and bad enough for all that. But they are demonstrably infected by the common human disease of tyranny that erupted with such unprecedented virulence in Hitlerite Germany and Stalinist Russia.

ON EDIT - TYPO

This is Wiretap - The Alchemy of a Story

It shouldn't.