For the
last ten years (OK, really 12 years) two presidents have signed off on a
program that allows the NSA to collect
information on our telephone calls, emails, and text messages. They’re doing it
legally.
We had all
been saying it for years, all of us “radical” people who couldn’t quite get why
we had to sit in Vietnamese rice paddies, watch little kids approach, and
wonder if they had bombs under their dirty shirts. We spoke out against the
infiltrators, the bugged telephones, the informers, all of the people spying on
us as we protested an unjust war.
I miss it,
those innocent years before we paid others to fight our wars, and before we
gave away our privacy to the government, instead of protesting it. And I may as
well confess, I’m mostly of the opinion that Edward Snowden acted
correctly when he exposed the secret programs that are spying on us all.
Why?
Because we
wouldn’t have known, otherwise. And because everything—OK, much of what—we know
about J. Edgar Hoover came from a similar action. Somebody—nobody knows who but
you can bet it wasn’t for lack of trying—stole secret files from an FBI office
in Media, Pennsylvania.
It was a
night in 1971, and most of the United States was watching Joe Frazier fight
Muhammad Ali. But a guy or guys from the Citizens’
Commission to Investigate the FBI grabbed a crowbar, wrenched the 2-man FBI
office, and filched the files. All in all, over a thousand documents were
taken.
Two weeks
later, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times got
manila envelopes with copies of documents. There was the report on sending a
tape to Martin Luther
King; the tape showed King in his hotel room with women, not his wife. That
came accompanied by a note: “King, there is one thing left for you to do. You
know what it is.”
That
presumably meant suicide, which was the option actress Jean Seberg opted for,
after a (false) rumor was published saying that the father of her unborn child
was a Black Panther,
not her French husband.
Want more? Here’s one
writer on the subject:
The sheer
reach of a completely politicized FBI was one of the most frightening
revelations of the Media documents. Underground newspapers were targeted.
Students (and their professors) were targeted. Celebrities were targeted. The
Communist Party of the U.S.A., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
the Student Non-Violent Organizing Committee, the Black Panther Party, the
Women's Strike for Peace -- all were targeted. "Neutralize them in the
same manner they are trying to destroy and neutralize the U.S.," one memo
said.
Attorney General John N. Mitchell asked
Ben Bradlee of the
Washington Post, saying that doing so could “endanger people’s lives”—those
people out there spyi…err, collecting information vital for our national
security.
It was only
through that one act—forcing a window, raiding two file cabinets—that we
understood or rather we knew what we had always known. As well, we got a new
term—COINTELPRO, or
counter-intelligence program.
A few
months after the break-in, Daniel Ellsberg came
forth with the Pentagon
Papers, which revealed that the government knew early on that the Vietnam
War was unwinnable, and that the Johnson
administration had lied to the people, and to the Congress. All of that lead to
the Church Committee,
which has been described as the most—well, here’s Wikipedia….
Together, the
Church Committee's reports have been said to constitute the most extensive
review of intelligence
activities ever made available to the public. Much of the contents were
classified, but more than 50,000 pages have since been declassified under the President John
F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992.
The report
revealed that it wasn’t just at home that our intelligence system had gone
seriously off whack. Here’s more Wikipedia, from the same source:
Among the
matters investigated were attempts to assassinate foreign
leaders, including Patrice Lumumba
of the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile and Director of
Central Intelligence Allen Welsh Dulles's plan,
approved by the President Dwight D.
Eisenhower, to use the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba.
So now we
have a president who is telling us that we should trust these secret programs
because there is a mechanism to oversee them and so all is OK. But, in fact, a
meeting that was called before the Snowden affair of the heads of the
intelligence agencies and Congress had only 48 senators and representatives
show up. The meeting was on a Friday afternoon—the boys skipped out early that
day.
Oh, and the
FISA
judges approved every request from the NSA—all 1856 of them. Odd, why am
I thinking just now of rubber stamps?
Hmmm, you
know, it’s not a bad idea I have. Readers of this blog know that, for seven
years, I worked for a small company named Wal-Mart. My efforts in that
enterprise consisted largely of sitting a room, pounding on tables, and
throwing pencils at small groups of people. That all ended one Friday morning,
after the company had done an extensive re-alignment. I was outta line.
So what to
do now?
Readers, be
the first on your block to buy in. Give yourself a double shot of self
congratulations by helping a deserving blogger and your government. For
ten bucks (plus handling and shipping, as well as taxes where applicabl… oh,
and you ladies down there in Tobago—I know you’re there—I gotta charge more)
I’ll send you this valuable item, which you in turn (and in protest) can send
to the federal government. The one crucial thing they obviously don’t have….
