Saturday, Dec. 17, 2005
Update: Bush confirms New York Times report, and admits he authorized spying on U.S. citizens
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4538286.stm
From the BBC report:
Senator Arlen Specter, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said "there is no doubt that this is inappropriate," adding that Senate hearings would be held early next year as "a very, very high priority."
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FRIDAY'S REVELATION, with the Sun conjunct Pluto and approaching the Galactic Core (astrology students, please make a note), that George Bush signed an order allowing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans is rather stunning.
But as Steve Bergstein pointed out in Psychsound yesterday, the U.S. government spying on Americans is nothing new; among the more famous incidents, in the 60s and early 70s, there was something called COINTELPRO. However, one difference I see is that COINTELPRO (nickname for the now allegedly defunct Counter Intelligence Program of the FBI) was mainly targeted at activists, such as in the Black Panthers, and was not only about intelligence gathering, but also destroying their lives whenever possible (for example, making a fake letter from a fake girlfriend and leaving it where some prominent activist's wife would find it, such as in her dresser drawer).
The program was officially discontinued in April 1971, after it was disclosed publicly. It existed all through the 1960s when activism was rampant in the United States, and helped the U.S. government deal with the "crisis of democracy" that was threatening its ability to do whatever it pleased and say whatever it wanted (such as regarding Vietnam, for example).
I'll leave a couple of URLs about the COINTELPRO program at the bottom of this article so you can get the flavor.
And in other historical bits, we know that the history of J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy was the history of the U.S. government spying on its people. This was done in the name of the Communist threat, because of course the devil is everywhere.
What we learned in the mainstream press yesterday was that the "president" had ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to do the spying. This is weird because the NSA is an organization that the US government would normally assign the job of spying on a foreign embassy, or to eavesdrop on somebody's military jet squadron. NSA's specialty is breaking encryption codes, the kind used for transmitting sensitive data. It's actually a pretty fascinating and rather large, well-funded agency. A few weeks after Sept. 11, a new book came out on the NSA called Body of Secrets by James Bamford (his second book on the agency) which I quoted at the time in an article that I'll link you to below. (I am not trying to take up your entire Saturday reading, just make sure I'm covering the bases.)
Basically, the NSA's job is to mess with foreign governments, not American citizens. It has boats and airplanes packed with radios and computers and code buster people and translators, and they hang out off-shore and home in with their spy beams on this, that and the other thing -- Cuban military operations, Russian nuclear chit-chat off of the North Pole, Ambassador So and So talking seductively to his mistress, she talking seductively back to him, the lot of it; the NSA makes James Bond look like Radio Shack.
For messing with Americans, the government has a whole smorgasboard of options, from the FBI on up -- but Bush, as we are learning, is not on very good terms with his own intelligence community (and it all just got worse). Also, the NSA is extremely focused and very good at what it does; the CIA is like its little brother. Now, to be fair, the CIA is also extremely impressive; they can do things that are on the level of David Copperfield, only in real life (poof, mommy, where DID that huge building go?).
The current fuss is happening because Bush ordered the NSA to tap domestic phones and emails without first getting a warrant from something called the FISA Court. Here's how it was described yesterday in a CNN.com article:
The NSA eavesdrops on billions of communications worldwide. While the NSA is barred from domestic spying, it can get warrants issued with the permission of a special court called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court.
The court is set up specifically to issue warrants allowing wiretapping on domestic soil.
In the New York Times report, the paper said the NSA has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants during the past three years as part of its war on terror.
original at: http://snipurl.com/kuxs
This is only the second or third time I've seen the FISA Court mentioned in print, ever. I love how when this covert shit appears in the mainstream press for the first time, they try to make it sound like they're writing about the Post Office. Oh, yeah, Bush would just need to go down the block and get a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court -- kind of like paying a parking ticket, and stop for a coffee with Gonzalez on the way home.
I first heard about the FISA Court in the mid-90s. Around this time I was covering slightly more frightening things than Pluto, and happened to write for a magazine called Lies of our Times. LOOT, as it was called, covered the press itself and specialized in doing exposés on the delusional articles of big newspapers, particularly The New York Times. The big media can be so deceptive and so utterly consumed with their agenda you would just not believe it's even possible. While I'm giving you links, I'll tack a LOOT story onto the end, too.
It may seem like news that The New York Times keeps getting busted for printing fake articles (such as by Jayson Blair, remember that guy, who lied about everything...and then Judy Miller, who was dreaming of WMDs, and others) but actually there was so much going on in terms of the Times and its journalistic acid trips that for a while, a whole magazine was devoted to the subject. There is a potential LOOT story in yesterday's revelation -- the Times kept the business of the NSA spying on Americans quiet for an entire year -- and negotiated over the content of the story with the Bush administration!
LOOT had an older cousin, published by the same people, called Covert Action Quarterly. This is the only magazine to actually cover the CIA. As far as I know, it's still in print, and it's interesting, and rather annoying to the government. They print the kind of stuff that will keep you up at night thinking your bed sheets are transmitting your dreams to a big database. So, one day along the investigative reporting road, I encountered this issue involving the FISA Court back when its powers were being expanded, and it was so interesting that I pitched a story to Covert Action. They accepted the proposal and I went to work.
The FISA Court, which Bush evaded by not getting warrants to spy on Americans, is something designed precisely to give him the power to do so. That's why the FISA Court is scary, and that's why Bush is so absolutely over-the-top. He and his administration are so out of it, so deep into their own world, they can't even use the normal terrifying powers at their disposal; they just do whatever the fuck they want. But of course, even if you're the White House and you go before a panel of federal judges and ask to spy on thousands of Americans, one of them, familiar with the Constitution, just might say no. Not that they've done so with any regularity; the odd thing about the FISA Court is they always grant the warrant if the government wants it. This is, after all, their job.
The FISA Court itself is top secret. It consists of specially selected, security-cleared federal judges whose names you don't usually get to hear, who (being called away from their day jobs [as regular ordinary federal judges] for an afternoon here or there) sit in closed (more like vacuum sealed) sessions that nobody else can attend (normally, you can just walk into any federal courtroom and sit down and listen to what's going on).
Well, I started gathering my information on the FISA Court for Covert Action and suddenly it was all too creepy. I am used to having piles of frightening, evidence-tagged documents stacked next to my bed or on my desk, and reading them till I've basically got them memorized, and that was particularly true of this prior era in my life. But this FISA business was a little much. I had a friend in the neighborhood who was a gutsy journalist, a good writer and avid Covert Action reader named Phil Colangelo, and (with my editor's consent), I passed the documents and the story assignment to him; he did a great job and got to break into writing for Covert Action, which was like a childhood dream come true.
So, now, in BushCo America, the FISA Court is somehow our friend.
Innit ironic. The thing that had me so scared I could not sleep was the very thing that was there to "protect" us and that Bush went around so he could spy on people more conveniently, with no oversight, no respect for the law or the judiciary or for that matter himself or anything at all.
This, brothers and sisters, is the country we are inheriting.
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Here is Philip Colangelo's excellent article on the FISA Court -- the one that I didn't do.
http://mediafilter.org/caq/Caq53.court.html
A bit about COINTELPRO...
http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/cointel.htm
A bit more about COINTELPRO, from Brian Glick, author of the definitive book on the subject, called War At Home, published by South End Press.
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/COINTELPRO/cointelpro-methods.html
"Dioxin Critic Sued," written for LOOT
http://www.planetwaves.net/dioxin_critic.html
Article where the NSA is mentioned, mentioned in my Pentagon fake plane crash article from 2002
http://www.ericfrancis.com/articles/wereitso_2.html
Jayson Blair Remembered
http://www.slate.com/id/2082741/
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