"In public life as in kindergarten, the all-important word is no."

[understandinglife]

The Biggest Secret
By Thomas Powers

A Review of State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration by James Risen.

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In public life as in kindergarten, the all-important word is no. We are living with the consequences of the inability to say no to the President's war of choice with Iraq, and we shall soon see how the Congress and the courts will respond to the latest challenge from the White House -- the claim by President Bush that he has the right to ignore FISA's prohibition of government intrusion on the private communications of Americans without a court order, and his repeated statements that he intends to go right on doing it.

Nobody was supposed to know that FISA had been brushed aside. The fact that the National Security Agency (NSA), America's largest intelligence organization, had been turned loose to intercept the faxes, e-mails, and phone conversations of Americans with blanket permission by the President remained secret until the New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau learned over a year ago that it was happening. An early version of the story was apparently submitted to the Times' editors in October 2004, when it might have affected the outcome of the presidential election. But the Times, for reasons it has not clearly explained, withheld the story until mid-December 2005 when the newspaper's publisher and executive editor -- Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Bill Keller -- met with President Bush in the Oval Office to hear his objections before going ahead. Even then certain details were withheld.

What James Risen learned in the course of his reporting can be found in his newly published book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, a wide-ranging investigation of the role of intelligence in the origins and the conduct of the war in Iraq. Risen contributes much new material to our knowledge of recent intelligence history. He reports in detail, for example, on claims that CIA analysts quit fighting over exaggerated reports of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as word spread in the corridors at Langley that the President had decided to go to war no matter what the evidence said; that the Saudi government seized and then got rid of tell-tale bank records of Abu Zubaydah, the most important al-Qaeda figure to be captured since September 11; and that "a handful of the most important al Qaeda detainees" have been sent for interrogation to a secret prison codenamed "Bright Light." One CIA specialist in counterterror operations told Risen, "The word is that once you get sent to Bright Light, you never come back."

Digging out intelligence history is a slow process, resisted by officials at every step of the way, and Risen's work will be often quoted in future accounts of the Iraq war. But nothing else in Risen's book rivals the NSA story in importance, revealing that the President not only authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans without seeking court orders, but to listen in a new way, by intercepting a large volume of communications among categories of people, and then analyzing or "mining" the data in those calls for suspicious patterns that might offer "potential evidence of terrorist activity."

"This is the biggest secret I know about," one official told Risen.

Much, much more at:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=54458

How many more lies; how many more atrocities, ......


Peace.

[BurgherHoldtheLies]

1. K&R. nt

[Cha]

2. Fucking Apathy is

killing our Country.

[DemReadingDU]

3. K&R

last sentence...

The question now is whether the President could do it all again -- take the country to war, and scrap restraints on spying, just as he pleases. The answer is yes, unless Congress and the courts can say no.

[Time for change]

4. The inability to say no

That is the the symptom.

The underlying cause is because most people are incapable of acknowledging how bad things are. Bush says that he has spied on us, and he will continue doing do in order to protect us against terrorists. The corporate media makes sure that we hear that over and over again, and the good majority of Americans don't want to think about the real reasons that he is doing this.

Just like they don't want to hear about a stolen election.

And they don't want to contemplate the real reason why we invaded Iraq.

These are the unmnentionables. And not many people are going to say no until they get a good grasp of what is happening.

[understandinglife]

5. "most people are incapable of acknowledging how bad things are."

And, throughout history, that has always been the rot the collapsed civilizations.

Perhaps we can be creative enough in our messaging to convince enough of our fellow citizens to bore-out and flush the rot before the Republic disintegrates.


Peace.

[Time for change]

6. Perhaps -- That is a tremendous challenge

The DU has done a great deal in that regard.

And your numerous excellent posts have been especially helpful.

Yet it is hard to imagine how we are going to be able to get through on this to the good majority of Americans, given how the corporate national media is so aligned against us.

But still, maybe it is somewhat encouraging that, despite our CM, which is the major source of news for the vast majority of Americans, doing so much to protect the Bush administration, his approval ratings are still in the 30s?

[justabob]

7. Encouraging maybe...

but I think more people are just dropping out rather than changing "sides". Look at the reports about how low the approval ratings are for Republican congresspeople, but the ratings for Dems aren't any better. No one, or very few, out there are speaking for the people and the people know it.