Who's Crazy?

Well—so where is everybody? A guy comes out and says that he tapped Obama’s phone, as well as Senator Feinstein, Supreme Court justice Alito, General David Petraeus, and a host of others. He goes on to suggest that Obama may be being blackmailed, and that there is a sinister force at work. He calls it a “rogue agency that has J. Edgar Hoover capabilities at a monstrous scale on steroids."

And the guy—Russell Tice—has a track record: he worked for twenty years in the Air Force, Office of Naval Intelligence, Department of Intelligence Agency, and ended up in the National Security Agency. He turned to The New York Times in 2005, and was one of the principal sources for the wiretapping revelations published that year.

So he has the connections, and he has big news—shouldn’t be a problem to pick up the phone and get the news splashed over the country’s papers, computer screens, and cell phones. Instead, with the exception of the Huffington Post, the mainstream media have ignored Tice’s most recent allegations.

Instead, Tice had to go to another whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds, and make his revelations on her Boiling Frogs podcast. And Sibel, who worked as a translator for the FBI until 2002, makes a damning charge: the mainstream media are controlled by the corporations and the government. She tells the story of MSNBC who sent a town car to pick up Tice for an interview, and then cancelled the interview on the way to the studio. Huffington Post picked up the news, and then MSNBC called again, stating that they hadn’t canceled, rather they had only meant to reschedule. The town car arrives again, and all is well until minutes before the interview. Then, Tice is told that MSNBC’s New York lawyers have advised them—don’t talk about the recent allegations, just talk in general terms. He protests: he’s in the studio to do just that, but goes through with the interview, anyway.

Edmonds makes further charges in an interview on the James Corbett Report. She alleges that the whistleblowing process that is supposed to protect people who step forward is completely ineffective. And she should know: she was fired in 2002 and the FBI’s own internal process stated that it was likely true that “some” of her claims of retaliation were true.

She also maintains that the FBI keeps both digital and paper files in huge quantities. And if, in the process of investigating a person who FISA has issued an order on, the FBI gets information on another, non-FISA ordered person—the policy is to destroy that evidence. Does it? No way—it keeps everything, because guess what? It may come in handy.

Edmonds makes the point that Congress has never taken on the FBI in any meaningful way—removing a director, taking it to the justice department, etc.

Edmonds goes places I wouldn’t go. She’s convinced that the Boston bombings were a government sponsored set up; she has appeared on The Alex Jones Show. It’s hard to know—who’s telling the truth?

But check out the two clips below—and you decide.   

Trust Us

Well, Greta Van Susteren says she knows the guy, so it must be all right.

Granted, I didn’t know Greta Van Susteren, so I had to do a little checking around to see if I could trust Greta enough for her to tell me that Reggie B. Walton is OK.

Don’t know Reggie B. Walton?

Join the club, but I can now tell you that he is the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. And he came out in a rare statement bristling at the idea that the court—which had 1856 petitions last year and approved all 1856 of them—is a rubber stamp. Here, with the impartiality for which this family of wordsmiths is famous, is what the guy said:

“The perception that the court is a rubberstamp is absolutely false. There is a rigorous review process of applications submitted by the Executive Branch, spearheaded initially by five judicial branch lawyers who are national security experts, and then by the judges to ensure that the court’s authorizations comport with what the applicable statutes authorize.”

Here’s the deal with the FISA courts—they only hear one side of the story. In every other court in the United States, the opposition gets a chance to come forward, state his defense, and have a judge or jury weigh in. But FISA listens to the government’s case, and then decides.

So that means, that you and I never had a say in the question of whether Verizon turned over your call history to the government. Oh, and not just your call history but your Internet history and also your snail mail, which is photographed—every single last piece of it. All of which can be accessed by the government by petitioning the “rigorous” FISA court, so famously not a rubber stamp.

OK—here’s the dope on Walton: he grew up in Donora, Pennsylvania, a steel town, and was dabbling in gangs when he saw a friend nearly get killed. So that sobered him up, and he went to West Virginia State College on a football scholarship and then to The American University, Washington College of Law for his law degree. Here’s Wikipedia on Walton:

Walton served as an Associate Judge of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia from 1981 to 1989 and from 1991 to 2001. He also served as associate director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In 2001, he was nominated to the federal bench by President George W. Bush, and subsequently confirmed by the U.S. Senate. In 2004, Bush appointed him to chair the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission, investigating ways to curb prison rape. In May 2007, Chief Justice of the United States John G. Roberts Jr. appointed him to a seat on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.[3]

The Washington Post reported, "fellow judges and lawyers who appear before him say Walton's decisions do not appear to be guided by politics but by a tough-on-crime mentality." Walton is known by local defense attorneys as a "long ball hitter" - a judge willing to impose long sentences in order to deter future crimes.[3] In fall 2005, the judge was driving his wife and daughter to the airport for a vacation when he came across an assailant attacking a cab driver on the side of the road. Walton tackled the assailant and subdued him until police arrived. The D.C. police spokesperson noted in response, "God bless Judge Walton. I surely wouldn't want to mess with him."[3]

OK—that’s a good story. Sounds like the kind of guy you could trust to make the right decision, right? And I like it that Walton was the guy who sent Cheney’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, to jail.

Now then, what about Roger Vinson.

Having another “who he” moment?

He’s the Florida judge who authorized the government to demand that Verizon turn over your telephone history (assuming you’re a Verizon customer—but don’t worry, because all of the wireless providers have done so).

OK—Walton may be OK, this guy is questionable. Good news—he’s moderate on drug sentencing. Bad news, he’s a Tea Party conservative who even he acknowledges gives out draconian sentences. He also is the author of the famous broccoli quote:  “If they decided that everybody needs to eat broccoli because broccoli is healthy they could mandate that everybody has to buy a certain amount of broccoli each week.”

One piece of good news, via Huffington Post: “Vinson is known for his love of the flowering camellia tree. He is a longtime member of the Pensacola Camellia Club and is a former president of the American Camellia Society.”

Well, it’s a thing to know….

Here’s something else to know—Vinson’s order to Verizon expires on 19 July—in twelve days. Presumably, someone will walk into the E. Barrett Prettyman United States Courthouse and ask Vinson or another judge to approve the petition for another three months.

Will we know? Will anyone be around to argue the case for NOT collecting the data?

Don’t think so.

Earlier this week, I was watching Rachel Maddow explain—as only she could—how the FBI has killed 70 people and shot another 80. Here’s the New York Times quoting the FBI:

“The F.B.I. takes very seriously any shooting incidents involving our agents, and as such we have an effective, time-tested process for addressing them internally,” a bureau spokesman said.

It may be that the FBI takes shooting incidents seriously, but guess how many of 150 shootings have been found to be justified? That’s right—all 150 of them. And, like the FISA courts, this is wholly internal—no district attorney can declare that the death of, for example, a young Chechen was a homicide committed by agents of the Federal government. A young Chechen whose family retrieved the body, and discovered it with six bullet holes, including one fired point blank to the temple.

More than ever, I am mistrusting my government. We have got to find a way of putting advocates for civil liberties to argue the case for privacy in every FISA petition.

And we gotta do it quick.

A Cry to Stamps!

For half a century (OK, really only 48 years) J. Edgar Hoover ran the FBI, as well as threatening the hell out of everyone. He did it illegally.

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?

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