"Surprise Over Government Criminality in the Corporate Media Echo Chamber
Kurt Nimmo
TruthNews
December 18, 2007
Commenting on that now old news article by the “Timesmen Eric Lichtblau, James Risen and Scott Shane,” Ryan Singel, for Wired, tells us the “Drug Enforcement Agency, for one, continued and expanded the data mining records of phone calls and emails from the United States to Latin American countries in order to catch smugglers” and the “program began under President Clinton in he 1990s and expanded under President Bush.”
Any excuse will suffice, be it the “war” on drugs or the “war” on government manufactured terrorism, as the point is to monitor everybody 24/7, especially possible opponents to the established ruling order.
I don’t know if Wired is considered “mainstream,” part of the corporate media, but this sort of brain death is indeed becoming wearisome.
Back in 2005, Earl Ofari Hutchinson wrote about what some of us have known for years:
Even before President Harry Truman established the NSA in a Cold War era directive in 1952, government cryptologists jumped in the domestic spy hunt with Operation Shamrock. That was a super secret operation that forced private telegraphic companies to turn over the telegraphic correspondence of Americans to the government. The NSA kicked its spy campaign into high gear in the 1960s. The FBI demanded that the NSA monitor antiwar activists, civil rights leaders, and drug peddlers. The Senate Select Committee that investigated government domestic spying in 1976 pried open a tiny public window into the scope of NSA spying. But the agency slammed the window shut fast when it refused to cough up documents to the committee that would tell more about its surveillance of Americans. The NSA claimed that disclosure would compromise national security. The few feeble Congressional attempts over the years to probe NSA domestic spying have gone nowhere. Even though rumors swirled that NSA eyes were riveted on more than a few Americans, Congressional investigators showed no stomach to fight the NSA’s entrenched code of silence.
So, please, stop with the mouth-agape surprise. Snooping — indeed, thievery, fraud, lying, and murder — are defining hallmarks of government. Supposedly intelligent writers need to reverse the brainwashing that has them buying into the lie that “our” government would never do such things — and that includes the persistent stupidity that blocks acceptance of the fact the government pulled off the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.
“Maybe having the phone companies relearn to say to the government ‘Come back with a warrant,’ isn’t such a bad thing,” Mr. Singel concludes. “That might be a good thing for keeping the Constitution safe.”
In fact, the Constitution is punctured full of holes. The “phone companies,” actually transnational corporate leviathans, will certainly do nothing about that. All they are concerned about is covering their posteriors.
It is, really, quite laughable to think CEOs — who are basically fascists, as Mussolini knew — will be saviors of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights."
