General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsNSA up for congressional renewal. Meetings held in secret.
https://theintercept.com/2016/05/10/senate-kicks-off-debate-over-reauthorizing-controversial-nsa-programs/merrily
(45,251 posts)Having seen aerial shots of the massive NSA complex, I can conclude only that the sunset provision was a wink wink.
yourpaljoey
(2,166 posts)merrily
(45,251 posts)yourpaljoey
(2,166 posts)Name a drunker architect:
A boozier Corbusier!
(I just like saying the name 'Corbusier.')
merrily
(45,251 posts)yourpaljoey
(2,166 posts)merrily
(45,251 posts)Equinox Moon
(6,344 posts)can you offer more to explain?
yourpaljoey
(2,166 posts)This was a style of architecture and design attributed to a man with
the adopted name of Le Corbusier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Corbusier
Cool stuff!
yourpaljoey
(2,166 posts)Now, if he can just pass the TPP, privatize Social Security,
appoint a Republican Supreme, and keep Hill's pay-for-play scandal from bubbling up
on his way out the door, he will be golden.
Agnosticsherbet
(11,619 posts)merrily
(45,251 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Part of that was We the People knowing what the Government was up to.
Now it's the Government that knows what We the People are up to.
The late Sen. Frank Church warned us about the NSA's powers in 1975:
I dont want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, he narrowly lost re-election a few years later.
And what happened to Church, for his trouble to preserve Democracy:
SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1
From GWU's National Security Archives:
"Disreputable if Not Outright Illegal": The National Security Agency versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald, Frank Church, et al.
Newly Declassified History Divulges Names of Prominent Americans Targeted by NSA during Vietnam Era
Declassification Decision by Interagency Panel Releases New Information on the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Panama Canal Negotiations
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 441
Posted September 25, 2013
Originally Posted - November 14, 2008
Edited by Matthew M. Aid and William Burr
Washington, D.C., September 25, 2013 During the height of the Vietnam War protest movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the National Security Agency tapped the overseas communications of selected prominent Americans, most of whom were critics of the war, according to a recently declassified NSA history. For years those names on the NSA's watch list were secret, but thanks to the decision of an interagency panel, in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive, the NSA has released them for the first time. The names of the NSA's targets are eye-popping. Civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King and Whitney Young were on the watch list, as were the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. Also startling is that the NSA was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls and cable traffic of two prominent members of Congress, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Howard Baker (R-Tennessee).
SNIP...
Another NSA target was Senator Frank Church, who started out as a moderate Vietnam War critic. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Church worried about U.S. intervention in a "political war" that was militarily unwinnable. While Church voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, he later saw his vote as a grave error. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson made decisions to escalate the war, Church argued that the United States was doing "too much," criticisms that one White House official said were "irresponsible." Church had been one of Johnson's Senate allies but the President was angry with Church and other Senate critics and later suggested that they were under Moscow's influence because of their meetings with Soviet diplomats. In the fall of 1967, Johnson declared that "the major threat we have is from the doves" and ordered FBI security checks on "individuals who wrote letters and telegrams critical of a speech he had recently delivered." In that political climate, it is not surprising that some government officials eventually nominated Church for the watch list.[10]
SOURCE: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB441/
I wonder if Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-PA) also got the treatment from NSA?
I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up. Senator Richard Schweiker on Face the Nation in 1976.
Lost to History NOT
Like Ray McGovern said: Our nation has become like J Edgar Hoover with Supercomputers.
merrily
(45,251 posts)Businesspeople, slavers, etc. did a lot of fomenting of the revolution. The Framers were all white, all male and mostly rich at the time. The records of their then secret meetings showed they tried hard to keep most of the control out of the hands of voters.
Government was anti labor, which morphed into anti-union, and pro business all along and pretty much still is, unless painted into a corner. Once the Constitution went into effect, only about 6% of the population was allowed to vote. Women did not get the vote until less than 100 years ago. Party bosses were already controlling politics and still try to. Etc.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Lincoln freed the slaves. Women got the vote. Unions were empowered. FDR began the democratization of the nation's resources. JFK was expanding that for ALL Americans. His untimely death benefited one class of American above all others, those willing to kill to make a buck.
"If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich"
-- Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy, Friday, January 20, 1961
In the short time he had, President Kennedy did what he could to balance the interests of concentrated wealth with the interests of the average American -- necessary for the good of the country.
Professor Donald Gibson detailed the issues in his 1994 book, Battling Wall Street: The Kennedy Presidency.
From the book:
"What (J.F.K. tried) to do with everything from global investment patterns to tax breaks for individuals was to re-shape laws and policies so that the power of property and the search for profit would not end up destroying rather than creating economic prosperity for the country."
-- Donald Gibson, Battling Wall Street. The Kennedy Presidency
More on the book, by two great Americans:
"Gibson captures what I believe to be the most essential and enduring aspect of the Kennedy presidency. He not only sets the historical record straight, but his work speaks volumes against today's burgeoning cynicism and in support of the vision, ideal, and practical reality embodied in the presidency of John F. Kennedy - that every one of us can make a difference." -- Rep. Henry B. Gonzalez, Chair, House Committee on Banking, Finance, and Urban Affairs
"Professor Gibson has written a unique and important book. It is undoubtedly the most complete and profound analysis of the economic policies of President Kennedy. From here on in, anyone who states that Kennedy was timid or status quo or traditional in that field will immediately reveal himself ignorant of Battling Wall Street. It is that convincing." -- James DiEugenio, author, Destiny Betrayed. JFK, Cuba, and the Garrison Case --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Had he lived to serve a second term, I'd bet on JFK and Labor over The Fed and Goldman Sach's Too Big To Fail chums. He also would not tolerate bigotry by anyone or any agency in the federal government. We can still ask Abraham Bolden for witness.
merrily
(45,251 posts)On rare occasions, when government feared a popular uprising, as after the Crash of 1929 and in the 1960s, some bones were thrown. But, as fast as government could, it took them back.
snot
(10,538 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Thanks, snot! Your kind words and friendship mean the world to me. Here's something important on NSA for the Infodump:
CIA directors George HW Bush and William Colby, I think appearing before Congress.
No-one noticed, no-one cares.
By Mark Ames
Pando, written on February 4, 2014
EXCERPT...
It was Pikes committee that got the first ever admissionfrom CIA director William Colbythat the NSA was routinely tapping Americans' phone calls. Days after that stunning confession, Pike succeeded in getting the head of the NSA, Lew Allen Jr., to testify in public before his committeethe first time in history that an NSA chief publicly testified. It was the first time that the NSA publicly maintained that it was legally entitled to wiretap Americans communications overseas, in spite of the 1934 Communications Act and other legal restrictions placed on other intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
It was also the first time an NSA chief publicly lied to Congress, claiming it was not eavesdropping on domestic or overseas phone calls involving American citizens. (Technically, legalistically, the NSA argued that it hadn't liedthe reason being that since Americans werent specifically targeted in the NSA's vast data-vacuuming programs in the 1970s, recording and storing every phone call and telex cable in computers which were then data-mined for keywords, that therefore they werent technically eavesdropping on Americans who just happened to be swept up into the wiretapping vacuum.)
Pike quickly discovered the fundamental problem with the NSA: It was by far the largest intelligence agency, and yet it was birthed unlike any other, as a series of murky executive orders under Truman at the peak of Cold War hysteria. Digging into the NSAs murky beginnings, it quickly became clear that the agency was explicitly chartered in such a way that placed it beyond legal accountability, out of reach of the other branches of government. Unlike the CIA, which came into being under an act of Congress, the NSAs founding charter was a national secret.
SNIP...
In early August, 1975, Pike ordered the NSA to produce its charter document, National Security Council Intelligence Directive No. 6. The Pentagons intelligence czar, Albert Hall, appeared before the Pike Committee that daybut without the classified NSA charter. Hall reminded Pike that the Ford White House had offered to show the NSA charter document to Pikes committee just as it had done with Churchs Senate Committee members, who had agreed to merely view the charter at a government location outside of Congress, without entering the secret document into the Senate record. Officially, publicly, it still didnt exist. Pike refused to accept that:
Youre talking about the document that set up the entire N.S.A., its one which all members [of Congress] are entitled to see without shuttling back and forth downtown to look at.
Assistant Defense Secretary Hall told an incredulous Pike that he hadnt brought the NSA charter with him as hed been told to, and that he couldnt because I need clearance and the charter has secret material in it.
Pike exploded:
It seems incredible to me, very frankly, that we are asked to appropriate large amounts of money for that agency which employs large numbers of people without being provided a copy of the piece of paper by which the agency is authorized.
CONTINUED...
https://pando.com/2014/02/04/the-first-congressman-to-battle-the-nsa-is-dead-no-one-noticed-no-one-cares/
This history from way back when is why the in-crowd occupying Wall Street-on-the-Potomac are doing swell, while most of the rest of the country can get tossed out of their homes without anyone really doing anything about it.
IDemo
(16,926 posts)It was Steve Symms (R - buffoon) who defeated Church in 1980, marking the beginning of a long slide into the right-wing cesspool that is now Idaho.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)The Frank Church story is one of the most important parts of US history missing from the tee vee and Texas school books. I don't know why, but it seems my original source confused FC's Senate colleague with the Senate challenger. That's what happens when human beings can do something. They can do it wrong. "Alot." Thus when I grab an old post with a mistake, I am repeat it.
Regarding the secret state and Sen. Church: Poppy's team did all they could to derail Frank Church, smearing him and the committee by blaming the assassination of the CIA station chief in Athens on them. The smear proved useful in generating rightwing hatred for liberals in general and stopping Congressional efforts to rein in CIA covert action specifically.
Back to Church
CHRIS MOONEY
The American Prospect, Dec. 19, 2001
Hawkish conservatives today must secretly reserve a special affection for the late Idaho Democrat Frank Church; after all, he provided them with the cudgel they've since used to batter liberal critics of the U.S. intelligence community. As chair of the Senate's 1975 intelligence investigation, Church famously characterized the Central Intelligence Agency as a "rogue elephant rampaging out of control." He was struggling to describe the lack of any clear presidential authorization for the agency's bungled assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders. But to Church's critics, the "rogue elephant" comment came to epitomize the barnstorming liberal senator's hopelessly naive approach to intelligence. What president, they asked, would leave behind a written assassination order? Who was Church kidding? And how dare the senator--gearing up to run for president--grandstand at the expense of national security?
SNIP...
The truth is that Church stuck to his promise to Colby that there would be "no dismantling and no exposing of agents to danger. No sources will be compromised." The committee made sure that it received no names of active agents, so that none could be revealed. Colby's successor as CIA director, George H.W. Bush, fully admitted that Welch's death had nothing to do with the investigation. In fact, Welch had been warned not to live in the Athens home that his CIA predecessors had occupied, because it was "notorious." And the Greek media had identified him as a CIA officer. [font color="red"]Yet when Church ran for re-election in 1980, Republican Senator Jim McClure of Idaho publicly blamed him for Welch's death. Church lost by just over 4,000 votes.[/font color]
The chief legacies of the Church committee--besides President Ford's executive order banning political assassinations, a key policy change resulting from the 1975 CIA probes--were the standing House and Senate intelligence committees formed after the investigation. How such oversight could have hamstrung the CIA is not clear. If anything, the committees were too lax with William Casey, the Reagan-era CIA director who easily misled them about the agency's dangerous mining of harbors in Nicaragua.
"There were not a great many things that Church took off the table," explains Frederick Hitz, director of the Project on International Intelligence at Princeton's Center for International Studies, who was inspector general of the CIA during the elder Bush's administration. Even if Church's investigation led to a "down period" for CIA activities, Hitz observes, "remember the Reagan period, in which Bill Casey came in and, if you will, sort of turned the spigots on again." The CIA saw a 50 percent increase in appropriations in the first three Reagan budgets. And the Church-inspired congressional oversight structure was obviously not sufficient to head off the Iran-contra affair.
CONTINUED...
http://prospect.org/article/back-church
The above is a great read, with import from 1975 through September 11, 2001 to the present day. I'd bet my source grabbed the McClure sentiment and "assumed" he was Church's opponent, not Senate colleague from Idaho.
PS: Thank you, IDemo! Really appreciate your patience.
IDemo
(16,926 posts)There's a phrase that evoked snorts of derision at Langley back in Dulles's day and must still nowadays.
pmorlan1
(2,096 posts)Thanks for posting it and my thanks to everyone for their contributions to it.