Spying on Americans: Pardon us while we gloat

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Sun, 18 Dec 2005 01:07:19 -0500 (EST)

Spying on Americans: Pardon us while we gloat

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OpEdNews.com

 

Original Article at

http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_doug_tho_051216_spying_on_americans_3a.h\

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December 16, 2005

 

Spying on Americans: Pardon us while we gloat

 

By Doug Thompson

 

When President George W. Bush gathered his shell-shocked cabinet

together in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11,

2001, he turned to then attorney general John Ashcroft and said " John,

you do whatever is necessary to make sure something like this never

happens again. "

 

Those instructions to Ashcroft are documented in Steven Brill's book,

After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era, about the days

following 9/11 and the Showtime docudrama on the event. It is also

well-known that Ashcroft, a zealot who doesn't allow the Constitution

to get in the way of his crusades, took Bush's command to heart,

creating the rights-robbing USA Patriot Act, the controversial law

that allows the federal government to spy on Americans without cause,

without court order and without restraint.

 

But Bush went even further, turning the giant communications

monitoring apparatus of the National Security Agency into a personal

machine to snoop into the lives of Americans and setting Adm. John

Poindexter loose to create the Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA)

program.

 

Congress thought it shut down TIA but Bush ran an end around on the

Hill by transferring TIA into the Pentagon's " black bag " operations, a

fact we first reported in June of last year. We also reported the

program used technology developed by the National Security Agency to

snoop on phone calls and emails and that some NSA employees were

pissed about being involved in spying on Americans.

 

" I know NSA employees who have quit rather than cooperate with DARPA, "

Paul Hawken, owner of information company Groxis says. " NSA's mandate

is to track the activities of foreign enemies of this nation, not

Americans. "

 

But Bush ordered the NSA to start tracking the activities of

Americans, something we reported a year ago and reported today by The

New York Times. We also reported, last year, the Pentagon was building

a huge super secret database on Americans, something NBC News just got

around to confirming this week.

 

According to the " instant experts " who expound ad infinitum behind

anonymous handles on partisan computer bulletin boards, we sit in our

den in our mountaintop retreat and make all this stuff up, that

nothing we print ever ends up in the so-called " mainstream media. "

 

No wonder they don't use their real names. If I was as wrong as these

keyboard commandos, I'd hide behind an anonymous name too.

 

From the Capitol Hill Blue archives:

 

June 7, 2004: Where Big Brother Snoops on Americans 24/7.

 

June 8, 2004: How Big Brother is Watching, Listening and Misusing

Information About You.

 

November 20, 2002: Welcome to the American Gestapo

 

We realized early on that the Bush Administration has discarded the

Constitution and set the federal government on a course to snoop, pry

and invade the private lives of Americans at will.

 

We knew it. We reported it and the naysayers claimed it couldn't

possibly be true.

 

As usual, they were wrong. As usual, we were right. And, as usual, it

took the rest of the " mainstream media " about a year to catch up.

 

© Copyright 2005 by Capitol Hill Blue