4 January 2006 (# 30)
Shane Harris and Tim Naftali wrote an interesting article in
Slate on January 3, 2006, that I wanted to be sure you didn’t miss. Any effort by Bush and the neoconsters to continue the “if we had been doing it before 9/11, we might have prevented it …” is readily debunked by Harris and Naftali:
Citing current and former government and corporate officials, the
Times reported that the
companies have granted the NSA access to their all-important switches, the hubs through which colossal volumes of voice calls and data transmissions move every second.
A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a "data-mining" operation, which might eventually cull "millions" of individual calls and e-mails.
Like the pressure applied to ITT a half-century ago,
our source says the government was insistent, arguing that his competitors had already shown their patriotism by signing on. The NSA would not comment on the issue, saying that, "We do not discuss details of actual or alleged operational issues."
Link: http://www.slate.com/id/2133564It appears that as soon as Bush, Cheney, and Condi Rice got inside the West Wing all the rules were being broken as quickly as possible – and, even before junior legal eagles were instructed to paper Bush’s violations of the law and the Constitution with their opinions.
We have no reason to doubt that the Bush neoconster agenda is totalitarian oligarchy and unchecked imperialism.
We now have no reason to doubt that they began breaking the law and violating the Constitution upon being ushered into the White House by the Supreme Court.
As one colleague at
Democratic Underground cogently states:
Couple the above with the behavior of
NBC and Andrea Mitchell -- as
AMERICABlog and
Atrios note, NBC deleted two paragraphs from a transcript of Andrea Mitchell’s interview of New York Times reporter and author, James Risen. What did they delete?
Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?
Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that
Mitchell: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?
Risen: No, no I hadn't heard that.
Link: http://americablog.blogspot.com/2006/01/nbc-changes-official-transcript-of.htmlAnswer – the two paragraphs highlighted in bold + italics.
Why would Andrea Mitchell have asked such a specific question? And, even more importantly, why would she have named Christiane Amanpour?
As you know, Ms. Amanpour is the wife of Jamie Rubin – member of the Clinton administration, adviser to Gen. Wesley Clark and to Senator John Kerry during his 2004 Presidential campaign. One needs almost zero imagination to innumerate all the possible politically motivated reasons for Bush’s illegal spying activity that could be represented in the intercepts of communications of someone like Ms. Amanpour.
King George and his entire neoconsters entourage must be stopped. Impeachment of Bush and Cheney should be at the top of every Democratic candidate's list of commitments to their respective constituencies in the 2006 National Election.
Thank you for your continued leadership,
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