{news} COINTELPRO IS ALIVE AND WELL: ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG and EXCERPT FROM GOOD WILL HUNTING
smderosa
smderosa at cox.net
Mon Dec 19 22:49:36 EST 2005
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Want to know how your member of Congress voted on the "Patriot Act"?:
HYPERLINK
"http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005/roll627.xml"http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2005
/roll627.xml (HOUSE)
HYPERLINK
"http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cf
m?congress=109&session=1&vote=00358"http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/ro
ll_call_lists/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=1&vote=00358
(Senate)
December 17, 2005
The New York Times and the NSA's Illegal Spying Operation Time-Delayed
Journalism
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
HYPERLINK
"http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn12172005.html"http://www.counterpunch.o
rg/cockburn12172005.html
And when it comes to zeal in protecting the Bill of Rights, between December
22, 1974 and December 16, 2005 it's been a steady run down hill for the New
York Times. Thirty-one years ago, almost to the day, here's how Seymour
Hersh's lead, on the front page of the NYT, began:
"The Central Intelligence Agency, directly violating its charter, conducted
a massive, illegal domestic intelligence operation during the Nixon
Administration against the antiwar movement and other dissident groups in
the United States, according to well-placed Government sources."
And here's the lead paragraph of the NYT's page one story this Friday by
James Risen and Eric Lichtblau:
"Months after the September 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized
the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the
United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the
court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according
to government officials."
Government illegality is the sinew of Hersh's first sentence. He says that
that what the CIA did was illegal and that it violated the CIA's charter.
What the NSA has been doing is also illegal. Its warrantless domestic
eavesdropping is in direct violation of the 1978 law which came about as a
direct result of Hersh's expose and the congressional hearings that
followed. The eavesdropping it also violates the NSA's charter, which gives
the Agency no mandate to conduct domestic surveillance.
Yet in Friday's story it wasn't UNTIL THE END OF THE THIRD PARAGRAPH that
Risen and Lichtblau wrote timidly that "SOME OFFICIALS familiar with the
continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched,
if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches."
In the eighth paragraph of Risen and Lichtblau's story comes the shameful
disclosure alluded to above:
The White House asked the New York Times not to publish this article,
arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert
would-be terrorists that they might be understand scrutiny. After meeting
with senior administration officials, the newspaper delayed publication for
a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration
officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.
Hersh put the word "massive" in his first sentence, and drew undeserved fire
for exaggerating the extent of surveillance, which a presidential panel
finally admitted was "considerable large-scale substantial". Risen and
Lichtblau shirk any direct estimate of how big the NSA's domestic spying has
been, though one can deduce from the ninth paragraph of the story that
probably many thousands of people had their phone conversations, and emails
and faxes illegally spied upon by the NSA.
The Times suggests that it held up the story for a year partly to do
"additional reporting". This "additional reporting" seems to have yielded
sparse results. Friday's story was extremely long, but pretty thin, once the
basic fact of NSA eavesdropping had been presented. The year's work doesn't
seem taken the reporters beyond what was urgently leaked to them in 2004 by
twelve different government officials concerned about the illegality of what
the NSA was doing and the lack of congressional oversight.
Indeed, Friday's Washington Post had a much more compact story by Dan Eggan
that not only stressed the illegality in its first paragraph but had
material that Risen and Lichtblau missed, namely that the NSA had begun its
illegal program right after 9/11, even before Bush signed the executive
order okaying the surveillance, some time in 2002. It was Eggan who reported
that faxes had also been spied upon by the NSA.
And again, it was Eggan in the Post who put the NSA story in a larger
context, namely the fact that in the past week the Pentagon has been forced
to admit that military intelligence agencies such as the Defense
Intelligence Agency have also been illegally surveilling US citizens within
the US.
In the TALON Program (Threat and Local Observation Notice) a Pentagon unit
called Counter Intelligence Field Activity (CEFA) has been amassing
thousands of files on potential threats to US military installations. Many
of the subjects of these files have turned out to be antiwar groups and
anti-recruiting activists. For example, when CIA director George Tenet
visited campuses and encountered protests, the CEFA unit would immediately
open files on the protesters. The unit was supposed to purge its files of
all names and organizations caught in its drift nets that failed to meet the
test of being any form of threat. But of course no such purge took place.
Eggan also reported that "Teams of Defense Intelligence Agency personnel
stationed in major US cities [have been] conducting the type of surveillance
typically performed by the FBI: monitoring the movements and activities --
through high tech equipment of individuals and vehicles."
The impression one gets from the Washington Post story is that the Bush
administration had given the green light to a truly massive program of
warrantless domestic surveillance by the NSA and military agencies. The New
York Times reporters suggested no such context, setting the spying
activities in a more forgiving light, as part of the war on terror.
Whi designed this policy? Deep in the Times story hardy readers trudging
through Risen and Lichtblau's leaden prose would have tripped over vice
president Cheney's name in the twenty-fifth paragraph where he is described
as bringing congressional leaders to his office to brief them on the
program. Only at the very end of the story, in the forty-eighth paragraph do
such readers as have survived the trek learn that the legal brief justifying
this onslaught on the US Constitution was written by Professor John Yoo, at
that time at the Department of Justice. Such readers would not have learned
-- as they did from the Washington Post -- that Yoo had written the
notorious memos justifying torture. The Times didn't make it clear that
Cheney and Yoo were key players in the Administration's insistence that the
Executive Branch has the inherent powers to sanction domestic spying without
oversight from either of the other two branches of the government.
In fact members of Congress, aside from Senator Jay Rockefeller, raised no
demur. It was the judiciary, in the form of the judge, Colleen
Kollar-Kotelly, presiding over the secret intelligence court established by
FISA, who reprimanded Justice Department lawyers for trying to get legal
warrants from her, using as "probable cause" data from the illegal
surveillance, although not admitting this.
In fact it's something of a puzzle why the Times finally did publish the
story, after sitting the information leaked to it by the NSA officials
worried that they might get prosecuted for illegal surveillance. It is true
that Friday's publication came in the closing hours of the battle in the US
Senate over reauthorization of the Patriot Act. And its probably true that
the publication of the story pushed enough wavering senators into the ranks
of those who on Friday successfully fought to get the bill shelved, in a
major defeat for the White House.
It's also true that all year Risen has been hard at work on a book about the
conduct of US intelligence agencies in the "war on terror" after 9/11,
slated for release next spring. The book's launch will no doubt be
accompanied by some new disclosure by Risen, designed to give the book lift
up the charts. Perhaps that too will be a story he's been keeping in the
larder for months.
This lamentable synergy featured in Bob Woodward's journalistic calculations
and also in the promotional circumstances of the book written by Judith
Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, Germs: Biological Weapons and
America's Secret War., The Times front-paged her stories in the paper in a
manner designed to push the book up into Bestseller status. It was a clear
conflict of interest that earned the paper plenty of money. This was when
Miller was sent that envelope of white powder that turned out not to be
anthrax spores, which gave the book yet another boost.
Risen, we should remind our readers, is one of the reporters who smeared the
late Gary Webb with the charge that Webb had overhyped his 1996 San Jose
Mercury News series on the CIA/contra/cocaine connexions. Webb didn't pace
his disclosures to suit a book-writing schedule. He only wrote his book
after he'd been forced out of his job.
CounterPunch readers may also recall that Risen was one of the New York
Times reporters, along with Jeff Gerth, who raced into print with baseless
smears that cost Wen Ho Lee almost a year of his life in solitary
confinement, being threatened with the death penalty by FBI interrogators.
On that occasion Risen and Gerth didn't wait a year to do additional
reporting and fact checking. They rushed to do the government's bidding
(relaying the smears of an Energy Department official who had it in for Wen
Ho Lee) just as Risen and the New York Times clicked their heels in the NSA
case, sitting on an explosive story through the 2004 election and for months
thereafter, and even then agreeing to withhold certain facts.
Such submissiveness on the part of the Times harks back to self censorship
by the paper in the early 1950s, covering up CIA plans for coups in
Guatemala and Iran; also to the paper's behavior in 1966 when it had
information about IA shenanigans in Singapore and through south-east Asia.
The editors submitted the story for review by CIA director John McCone, who
made editorial deletions.
In its Friday story, the New York Times meekly agreed not to identify the
"senior White House official" who successfully petitioned them to spike the
story for a year. The fact that no one was specifically named allowed Bush
to discount the entire story when he went the Lehrer News Hour on Friday
evening.
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Original Script by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck
The following is an excerpt from Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's Award Winning
Script for Good Will Hunting. It is what Matt Damon and Ben Affleck
originally wrote on paper before the movie was made.
Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody
puts a code on my desk, something nobody
else can break. So I take a shot at
it and maybe I break it. And I'm real
happy with myself, 'cause I did my job
well. But maybe that code was the
location of some rebel army in North
Africa or the Middle East. Once they
have that location, they bomb the
village where the rebels were hiding
and fifteen hundred people I never had
a problem with get killed.
(rapid fire)
Now the politicians are sayin' "send
in the Marines to secure the area"
'cause they don't give a shit. It
won't be their kid over there, gettin'
shot. Just like it wasn't them when
their number got called, 'cause they
were pullin' a tour in the National
Guard. It'll be some guy from Southie
takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he
comes home to find that the plant he
used to work at got exported to the
country he just got back from.
And the guy who put the shrapnel in
his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll
work for fifteen cents a day and no
bathroom breaks.
Meanwhile my buddy from Southie realizes
the only reason he was over there was
so we could install a government that
would sell us oil at a good price.
And of course the oil companies used
the skirmish to scare up oil prices so
they could turn a quick buck. A cute,
little ancillary benefit for them but
it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty
a gallon. And naturally they're takin'
their sweet time bringin' the oil back
and maybe even took the liberty of
hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes
to drink seven and sevens and play
slalom with the icebergs and it ain't
too long 'til he hits one, spills the
oil, and kills all the sea-life in the
North Atlantic. So my buddy's out of
work and he can't afford to drive so
he's got to walk to the job interviews
which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his
ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids.
And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every
time he tries to get a bite to eat the
only blue-plate special they're servin'
is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State.
A beat.
WILL (cont'd)
So what'd I think? I'm holdin' out
for somethin' better. I figure I'll
eliminate the middle man. Why not
just shoot my buddy, take his job and
give it to his sworn enemy, hike up
gas prices, bomb a village, club a
baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join
the National Guard? Christ, I could
be elected President.
7/27/01:
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Postcards (8)
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