NSA: Free Speech is a Weapon of Mass Destruction

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Wed, 11 Jan 2006 18:16:28 -0800 (PST)

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NSA: Free Speech is a Weapon of Mass Destruction

 

 

 

http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=185

 

 

NSA: Free Speech is a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Kurt Nimmo, Another Day in the Empire

 

Wednesday January 11th 2006, 9:46 am

 

 

As further evidence the Bushcons are not interested in snooping

" al-Qaeda, " and in fact there is no " al-Qaeda " threat in America,

consider revelations that the NSA snooped the Pledge of

Resistance-Baltimore, a Quaker peace group. " The National Security

Agency has been spying on a Baltimore anti-war group, according to

documents released during litigation, going so far as to document the

inflating of protesters' balloons, and intended to deploy units

trained to detect weapons of mass destruction, " reports the Raw Story.

" According to the documents, the Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore, a

Quaker-linked peace group, has been monitored by the NSA working with

the Baltimore Intelligence Unit of the Baltimore City Police

Department. " Of course, it is completely absurd that the NSA and the

Baltimore police would actually believe a small group of Quakers have

weapons of mass destruction, that is unless they believe the Bill of

Rights is a weapon of mass destruction.

 

Last year, Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore " sent a letter to Lt. Gen.

Michael V. Hayden, the director of the National Security Agency,

requesting a meeting, " a press release reveals. " The letter raised

three major concerns: 1] the agency's involvement in Justice

Department plans to monitor and gather data about US citizens; 2] its

role in the war against Iraq; and 3] the eavesdropping on the

diplomatic delegations from several United Nations Security Council

nations [first reported March 2, 2003 in the London-based Observer].

Since there was no response to the letter, fourteen Pledge members

went to the spy agency on Oct. 4, 2003 to seek a meeting with the

director. Some forty security operatives blocked access to the

visitor's parking lot. After some dialogue about the Constitutional

right of citizens to petition government officials, Marilyn Carlisle,

Cindy Farquhar, Jay Gillen, Max Obuszewski and Levanah Ruthschild were

arrested and charged with trespass. Later the antiwar activists were

also charged with a failure to obey a lawful order. " In short, the NSA

went after the activist group because they insisted the Bill of Rights

means what it says.

 

The Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore press release continues:

 

Thus the Agency perceives Constitutionally-protected speech as

some kind of threat. It is believed the NSA is monitoring the

activities of the Pledge, which would explain the massive police

presence on Oct. 4. This may be an attempt to intimidate those who

question Agency operations…. At trial, scheduled for May 27, the

defendants intend to bring out the NSA's intimate involvement in the

duplicitous efforts to promote war with Iraq. They expect to be found

not guilty of both charges. All five Pledge members who were arrested

at the NSA on Oct. 4, 2003 continue to be involved in risk-arrest

actions protesting the war and the occupation.

 

It should not be surprising the NSA and the Straussian neocons in

control of the Bush White House and the Pentagon consider free speech

a weapon of mass destruction and also consider a small group of

Quakers a threat to national security (or a threat to their ability to

invade and occupy small countries). Indeed, the " NSA's intimate

involvement in the duplicitous efforts " were used " to promote war with

Iraq. " As declassified NSA documents reveal, " the Tonkin Gulf

[so-called incident] confirms what historians have long argued: that

there was no second attack on U.S. ships in Tonkin on August 4, 1964.

According to National Security Archive research fellow John Prados,

'the American people have long deserved to know the full truth about

the Gulf of Tonkin incident. The National Security Agency is to be

commended for releasing this piece of the puzzle. The parallels

between the faulty intelligence on Tonkin Gulf and the manipulated

intelligence used to justify the Iraq War make it all the more

worthwhile to re-examine the events of August 1964 in light of new

evidence,' " according to the National Security Archive. " President

Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara treated Agency SIGINT

reports as vital evidence of a second attack and used this claim to

support retaliatory air strikes and to buttress the administration's

request for a Congressional resolution that would give the White House

freedom of action in Vietnam. " This " freedom of action " resulted in

the death of around three million Vietnamese and 58,000 Americans.

 

As an example of the super-secret snoop organization's respect for the

Constitution and the Bill of Rights, consider the following: " The

largest U.S. spy agency warned the incoming Bush administration in its

'Transition 2001 & #8242; report that the Information Age required rethinking

the policies and authorities that kept the National Security Agency in

compliance with the Constitution's 4th Amendment prohibition on

'unreasonable searches and seizures' without warrant and 'probable

cause,' according to an updated briefing book of declassified NSA

documents, " writes Jeffrey Richelson, senior fellow of the National

Security Archive at George Washington University. " The NSA told the

Bush transition team that the 'analog world of point-to-point

communications carried along discrete, dedicated voice channels' is

being replaced by communications that are 'mostly digital, carry

billions of bits of data, and contain voice, data and multimedia,' and

therefore, 'senior leadership must understand that today's and

tomorrow's mission will demand a powerful, permanent presence on a

global telecommunications network that will host the " protected "

communications of Americans as well as targeted communications of

adversaries.' " In other words, the NSA was telling the in-coming

Bushites they have no respect for the founding document of this

country and " adversaries " are both foreign and domestic (and as the

Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore case reveals, mostly domestic).

 

Meanwhile, in order to lower the heat focused on the NSA in the wake

of the revelations Bush used the snoop agency as his own personal

enemies monitoring network, the " National Security Agency's inspector

general has opened an investigation into the agency's eavesdropping

without warrants in the United States, " according to the Washington

Post. " The Pentagon's acting inspector general, Thomas Gimble, wrote

that his counterpart at the NSA 'is already actively reviewing aspects

of that program' and has 'considerable expertise in the oversight of

electronic surveillance,' according to the letter sent to House

Democrats who have requested official investigations of the NSA program. "

 

Gimble's letter appears to confirm that an internal investigation

into the NSA's domestic eavesdropping program, authorized in a secret

order by President Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is under

way. The Justice Department has opened a separate criminal

investigation into the recent leak of the highly classified program's

existence.

 

Of course, this will be about as useful as a bucket milking unit on a

bull. The NSA works closely with the Department of Defense and is

generally directed by a military officer—in other words, Thomas

Gimble's " investigation " will be something like the Mafia

investigating improprieties in its prostitution or drug pushing

operations. As an indication that any " investigation " will be about as

useful as the aforementioned milking unit, consider the remarks of the

NSA's inspector general, Joel F. Brenner, who declared " that

suggestions that any eavesdropping had been conducted for 'domestic

political purposes' is false, " according to the New York Times. In

other words, according to this factotum, when the NSA snooped the

Pledge of Resistance-Baltimore it had nothing to do with politics. If

you believe this, I have a bridge I want to sell you in Brooklyn.

 

In fact, the NSA has long snooped Americans for political reasons and,

as reported in December, it " conducted much broader surveillance of

e-mails and phone calls without court orders than the Bush

administration has acknowledged, " with plenty of help from your local

telecom corporation. " The story [published in the New York Times]

quoted a former technology manager at a major telecommunications firm

as saying that companies have been storing information on calling

patterns since the Sept. 11 attacks, and giving it to the federal

government. Neither the manager nor the company he worked for was

identified. "

 

But don't expect anybody to be held responsible because the NSA

" destroyed the names of thousands of Americans and US companies it

collected on its own volition following 9/11, because the agency

feared it would be taken to task by lawmakers for conducting unlawful

surveillance on United States citizens without authorization from a

court, according to a little known report published in October 2001

and intelligence officials familiar with the NSA's operations, " writes

Jason Leopold. " NSA lawyers told the agency that the surveillance was

illegal and that it could not share the data it collected with the CIA

or other intelligence agencies. " Once again, if you believe this—the

NSA destroyed many terabytes of perfectly good data and didn't pass it

on to its right hand, the CIA and other snoop agencies—then I have a

second bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

 

It should be assumed from the start the NSA, CIA, DIA, FBI, etc., have

long engaged in illegal and unconstitutional snooping against the

American people, who are after all their primary target, not the

phantom " al-Qaeda " or any number of CIA created terrorists. In a

police state, the enemy is the people, who may rise up at any moment

and throw off their shackles. Unfortunately, the vast majority of

Americans do not realize they are clasped in shackles and if they do,

most think there must be a good reason for it.