by Michael Hammerschlag
The decision by the Bush Administration to go after the
New York Times for exposing a portion of their spying-
the unauthorized NSA spying on calls to Afghanistan-
sets up the central struggle for America’s soul. Truthfully, no one is much alarmed by monitoring
connections with Afghanistan or scanning
US mosques for radiation; both have a legitimate
national security justification (61% approve
in a poll). But the FBI is spying on 30,000 people a year- according to the Washington Post, permitted by warrantless so-called national
security letters (NSLs) under Section 505
of the Patriot Act, and now it turns out the Pentagon, CIA,
and NSA have all also been engaged in illegitimate
and unjustified spying on Americans, including
harmless peace groups and all US-foreign
e-mail. In October, Bush expanded access
to those files by "state, local
and tribal" governments and "appropriate private sector entities",
whereas John Ashcroft had canceled the
6 month destruction of the records of innocents-
now they are kept forever. The
Pentagon, especially, appears unable
to distinguish between legitimate protest
and possible threat. As warriors, they are
trained to attack preemptively, which is
why there are so many prohibitions against
the military operating inside America.
The Total Information Awareness program (run by John Pointdexter)
mined and linked all government and commercial
databases: 20 billion records including bank
records, motor-vehicle records, driver's
licenses with digital photographs, credit
histories, family, Social Security #, names
of neighbors and landlords… for “interesting” associations. It was
supposedly shut down after a public outcry
in 2003, but in reality it was just shifted
to the Commerce Dept., and renamed the Matrix: the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange - built by Florida’s Seisint Inc. after 9-11, and run by ex-drug smuggler
Hank Asher, whose company performed the Felon Purge against mostly black Florida voters in the
2000 election (42% inaccurate, according
to our research*). “Seisint turned over the resulting 120,000 names
- people the company claimed had a high terrorism
quotient... - to federal and Florida
law enforcement authorities.”-- St. Petersburg Times. Seisint has since been sold to Lexis/Nexis after Asher was forced out. States
participating in Matrix include Florida,
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Connecticut;
and formerly Alabama, Georgia, Utah, Kentucky,
Louisiana, South Carolina, Oregon, and New
York. Technically privately owned (though
run by the FBI and HSA), the MATRIX has no oversight mechanism- inaccurate information
can’t be corrected or removed. The program
was supposedly partially dismantled last
April. Meanwhile, the NSA’s and ex-British
allies’ worldwide Echelon monitoring system reportedly scans some
3 billion calls and messages a day.
Given that there were only 300 NSL’s before
9-11, there's no way there are 30,000 legitimate
terrorism suspects a year in America - there
probably aren't even 3000. People cognizant
of the depths of this administration’s vindictiveness
understand this is a Bush Enemies List, targeting those who dare to criticize the
crimes of this arrogant imperious administration.
Why else would he ignore the rubber
stamp FISA court in the separate NSA cases,
which has turned down only 1 request in
3500? We are now talking about maybe abusing
the privacy of one hundred thousand innocent
citizens, or more. It is unconstitutional,
illegal, vicious, cowardly, and has the potential
to destroy the America we thought we were;
yet incredibly, the Patriot Act makes exposure of this spying a serious
crime, meaning victims are left forever in
the dark, basting in their suspicions. Congress
is close to renewing these atrocious provisions
permanently, which allow thousands to rip
through anyone's life without any oversight
or limits. Aware people realize the NSA has
been scanning all foreign calls since the 70’s- a 1978 law
banning monitoring US Citizens was never
really followed, but snooping intentionally
directed at individuals is radically different.
Desperate to prevent the imminent parade
of victims and the full extent of the Orwellian
structures Bush has created from being exposed,
he is fighting back with the most potent
thing he has: investigating the NYT for who
leaked the information about his illegal
spying. This has the enormous ancillary benefit
of muddying the waters on the Plame leak
investigation, permitting Republicans
to practice their favorite smokescreen- equivalence.
Now when national security leak investigations come up, they can bring up
the dastardly exposure of the secret spying,
equate it to the treacherous betrayal of
the CIA's Plame (and her contacts and front
company); and talk reporters into the false
conclusion that both sides do it- about the
same, and so they balance themselves out.
Because of pressure to show both sides, reporters
are highly susceptible to this- even
though prosecuting a whistleblower who
exposes your crimes is outrageous.
Whether the press can resist this false dichotomy
and avoid being intimidated by the persecution
of the NYT, and pursue this story to the depths it leads,
depends nothing less than the future of the
American experiment. Even some liberal and
anti-government Republicans are deadset against
the unlimited snooping promoted by the President,
realizing 95% is still below the surface. This is an administration that has viciously
slandered any critics, practiced dishonesty
on an industrial level, started an unnecessary
disastrous war, transferred trillions of
dollars from the poor, middle class,
and unborn to the rich in tax cuts and
corporate payoffs, and now has engaged in
massive spying of its critics. The only possible
purpose for this is intimidation and
injury... and the potential for abuse
is infinite.
The levels to which they would stoop were
revealed by Ambassador Joe Wilson in a speech
at Brown University.
-----"In the year before the controversy,
I made $850,000. In the year after, I made
$150,000. They set out to destroy my consulting
business, and succeeded. I would have meetings
with people, and they would stop them and
say, 'don't deal with him, we're going to destroy
him.' “ (ProvJournal w audio) “If you cross the Bush administration, we will do to you what we just did to Joe
Wilson's family," he said. "Be afraid. Be very,
very afraid. That's what the message was."----
Mandating absolute secrecy mandates uncontrolled
abuses. No American should ever be spied
on without valid reason and a judge's consent.
Not only must these blanket Patriot Act spying provisions be reversed- the political
victims of them should be informed and
exonerated, and compensated for this treachery.
The total abrogation of citizens' privacy
has to be stopped, or we will all be nothing
more than bits and bytes, subject to deletion
at the whim of any bureaucrat.
Otherwise, with widespread torture, secret
prisons in Eastern Europe, more prisoners
than any other country, fanatical cult loyalty
towards the Leader, uncontrolled political
spying and bullying of critics: it is official: under Bush… we have become the Soviets.
__________________________
*In an examination of 14 Florida Counties,
Deb Cupples discovered 42% inaccurate matches: men matched to women, blacks matched to
whites, people of totally different names
but same birthdate. Because Florida listed
Party affiliation and race on voter forms,
this gave election supervisors extraordinary
ability to skew results, if they desired-
though real felons were already vastly Democratic.
They also matched felons from around the
country with voters in Florida, although
2 judges ruled that illegal. I had the
42,000 names around 9-11, since admitted
to be much more, but never pursued what was
Palast's story. In 2001, Palm Beach Post said 19,398 had actually been removed, 4800 of which didn't match.
In a long Vanity Fair story, DBT creator Asher amazingly comes off as
admirable, brave, and generous. He left DataBaseTech
before they perpetrated the notorious felon
purge: "They wrote the program wrong.
They forgot to only link people with felonies.
They had misdemeanors too, so if some poor
guy 20 years ago shoplifted, drove away from
a gas station without paying for the gas
or whatever, they tagged him as an illegal
voter… It’s idiotic!" Ironically, authorities
only discovered his smuggling past when Asher
came to them to help rid his Bahamian island
of Columbian dealers and told them, so even
his life is being screwed up by 23 year old
context-less allegations.
NOTE: Longtime NYT reporter David Rosenbaum was murdered in Washington DC Jan 8 in a beating/robbery near his NW
home- the last thing he wrote was how Alito
had defended Nixon's use of wiretaps in 1984,
saying the AG should be immune from ordering illegal wiretaps.
Michael Hammerschlag's commentary and articles
(HAMMERNEWS.com) have appeared in the Seattle Times, Providence Journal, Columbia
Journalism Review, Honolulu Advertiser, Capital Times, MediaChannel; and Moscow News, Tribune, Times, and
Guardian. He broke the first comprehensive story on media mistakes in the 2000 election.