A society whose citizens refuse to see and investigate the facts,
who refuse to believe that their government and their media will
routinely lie to them and fabricate a reality contrary to verifiable
facts, is a society that chooses and deserves the Police State
Dictatorship it's going to get. -Ian Williams Goddard
Here are a few highlighted excerpts from The NSA and Domestic Espionage, Part One through Part Four.
The NSA and Domestic Espionage (Part One), (Part Two), (Part Three), (Part Four).
A 'Special Relationship' Indeed:
Here is how the game is played.
The British liaison officer at Fort Meade types the target list of
“suspects” into the American computer. The NSA computer sorts through
its wiretaps and gives the British officer the recording of any
American citizen he wants. Since it is technically a British target of
surveillance, no American search warrant is necessary. The British
officer then simply hands the results over to his American liaison
officer.
Of course, the Americans provide the same
service to the British in return. All international and domestic
telephone calls in Great Britain are run through the NSA’s station in
the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) at Menwith
Hill, which allows the American liason officer to spy on any British
citizen without a warrant. According to our sources, this duplicitous,
reciprocal arrangement disguises the most massive and illegal, domestic
espionage apparatus in the world. Not even the Soviets could touch the
UK-US intercept technology.
John Loftus' source is The Puzzle Palace: Inside America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization by James Bamford. Pgs 129, 331-332, 306.
...
Is it possible Bush is lying about a lie ? The lie in this case
being an at least three decades old charade about a FISA court order
being required to surveil on the American people ?
The back channel British liaison officer loophole is still in effect, despite the FISA provisions.
More from John Loftus:
FISA is restricted only to targeting by American agencies, leaving the British liaison officer with a major loophole. The restrictive language added to FISA left unchanged the arrangement under which the British wiretapped American suspects and then passed on the information to the NSA.
...
To this day Congress does not realize that the British
liaison officers at the NSA are still free to use American equipment to
spy on American citizens. And, in fact, they are doing just that.
Congress has been kept in the dark deliberately. This is a fact, not a
matter of conjecture or a conclusion based on anonymous sources.
John Loftus, Secret War Against The Jews, Pg 192. Loftus' source again is Bamford, Puzzle Palace, Pg 372.
A previous question:
Indeed, it couldn't be any clearer that the FISA provisions are not to be used against US citizens, and if they ever were, then the information gathered could not be retained or used.
Sections 215 and 218 of the USAPATRIOT Act supersede this FISA provision:
Section 215: The government can use these warrants for the "production of any tangible things."
Section
218: With section 218 Ashcroft picked another lock restraining the
dragon of central government power, in this case superintrusive bugs,
taps and black bag jobs. He changed FISA's provision that the
operation's "primary purpose" be to fight foreign intelligence or
terrorism to require that one of these be merely "a purpose."
See
Pgs 90-92. Charles Tiefer, Veering Right: How the Bush Administration
Subverts the Law for Conservative Causes. Univ of California Press. 2004.
The New York Times is reporting the espionage program monitored communications that were entirely domestic -- despite recent assurances from top administration officials that one end of the intercepted communications came from abroad. Government officials told the Times the intercepts were “accidental.”
Or..."incidental..." rather than "accidental" (see Loftus below) "incidental" intercepts are legal under Section 218 of the USAPATRIOT Act and FISA as they are "a purpose" of a foreign intelligence or terrorism surveillance and collections program. Once Pandora's cookie jar is opened, all the cookies in the jar are fair game.
Similarly, as Loftus also writes (Pg 191, Secret War) ...the information was acquired only "incidentally" [...] as part of the collection program.
...
Of course, Bamford doesn't mention any of the above information when appearing on C-Span (12/20/05). The implication is Americans obviously don't know how to read or handle the truth about their government's perpetual lying machine.
Comments