During the Fourth of July holiday and all of the phony patriotic excesses in The Homeland - I happened to catch a brief portion of Friday's nationally televised New York City fireworks display and was sickened and astonished at the overt worship of militarism - why don't they just do away with the subtlety next year and just roll the tanks and missiles across the Brooklyn Bridge like the old USSR. What passes for patriotism, loyalty and sacrifice to country here on the star-spangled lemming colony is putrid rot, distilled down into a potent brew of American exceptionalism from which to dispense from the electronic Kool Aid vat. For real patriotism one had to look towards Germany where several NSA whistleblowers not named Edward Snowden were providing testimony before the Bundestag on the criminal acts of the American Stasi.
Testifying before a committee to investigate NSA spying in Germany in German Bundestag were former NSA employees and whistleblowers William Binney, a technical genius who was instrumental in building the machines but quit out of disgust and conscience after it became apparent that the agency was in gross violation of the Constitution and Thomas Drake. Both men were subsequently targeted ruthlessly by the US establishment in an attempt to crush and make examples of them. Like Edward Snowden - who didn't testify because the US puppet government would not provide asylum to him - these two men are patriots of the highest order and not that red, white and blue baloney that gets trotted out every July 4th for mass consumption by the sheeple.
While it was nowhere to be found in the corrupt, US state-corporate media which is a tool of the rogue government other than occasional limited-hangouts like Barton Gellman's NSA story in the Washington Post on Sunday the foreign media and alternative media blogs in the USA! USA! USA! provided coverage and the testimony was chilling - take for example Mr. Binney's opening statement alone:
I’ve worked for the NSA as a technical director.
I live four miles away from NSA headquarters.
The relationship between NSA and BND is still very good and important.
The complete surveillance of the society is the biggest threat to democracy since the American Civl War.
Total Information Awareness – NSA wants every information from everybody. But they don’t understand it completely, it’s prone to errors on a high level.
The whole world is in peril.
This behavior of our government is totalitarian. To spy on your own people is the beginning of totalitarism.
It began mid October 2001. After two weeks, I resigned. I’ve spied against the Soviet Union for thirty years, but after 9-11, it went way too far.
Your questions?
Binney makes reference to "Total Information Awareness" or TIA, for those who don't recall this was the DARPA program that was presided over by former Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter (ever notice how often some of the turds associated with that subversion of the Constitution keep popping up?) that was allegedly suspended after the Orwellian nature of the program was questioned. Well, it never really stopped as we can see by the NSA's drive under General Keith Alexander to "collect it all". Binney has been one of the most credible and outspoken critics of the coming totalitarian state although he sadly and predictably gets zero attention from the domestic media.
German site DW (Deutsche Welle) provides coverage on Binney in English in stories "Snowden leaks only tip of the iceberg" and "NSA 'totalitarian,' ex-staffer tells German parliament" which also cites Drake. There is a very good series of short interviews with Binney available courtesy of monetary system critic Bill Still that are worth a listen no matter what your opinion bay be of the interviewer: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five, Part Six and Binney earlier this year sat down for an extensive interview with Rob Kall of progressive website OpEd News which can be found here and from which I excerpt the following from the transcript:
R.K.: Anything that we haven't covered yet? We have got to wrap this up. Anything that we haven't covered that's really important that you would like the listeners to know about?
W.B.: Just that my major concern isn't with NSA having access to this data or having this data, it's the use of it and once they get it and store it, being used by law enforcement and our law enforcement is spreading that around the world to other law enforcement and so it's corrupting not just our democracy, we're becoming a police state because of this but it's also corrupting the countries around the world so it's really endangering the democratic process and the court systems that we have established. That is really destroying our society. We may not know it yet but eventually it'll get to all of us.
R.K.: Bad news. So you told me that you're going to spend the rest of your life on this.
W.B.: Yes. Until my government basically starts to do the right thing, and that means become a constitutionally based operating government.
R.K.: Do you see any ideological or party differences in the way this is being handled?
W.B.: Actually no. I think they're all basically the same. They've been, I mean for example you know Bush would refer to have acquired the terrorists, captured them, put them in to torture them to get information; whereas Obama would kill them with a drone. So it's the same principle, I mean they're just doing whatever they want, there are no limits to what they want to do. Especially the latest NDAA that talks about giving the president the power to declare anybody, any US Citizen even in this country a terrorist and have the military pick them up, take them off the street, incarcerate them indefinitely, and give them no due process.
That to me is executing something very similar to what the Nazis did in 1933, Special Order 48, that did exactly the same thing. And that's how they got rid of all of their opposition. All the communists and anybody else that opposed them. But I mean they sent them to the concentration camps. So far we have not been sending them to the concentration camps but they'll do things like send the FBI after you or maybe attempt to put you in jail like they tried to do with a number of us.
So they're not as radical yet but the problem is that when you give people that kind of power or they hold that kind of power, sooner or later, they're going to use it. One way or another.
R.K.: You know it seems to me that the same applies to technology. If the technology is available or if it can be developed they're going to develop it and they're going to use it.
Binney and Drake are absolutely correct on where this is going and for proof of their validity one only has to note the absence of testimony from the US mainstream media. Ironic in that with all of the monstrous aspects of it's history that it is Germany of all places that is giving them an opportunity to testify.
No comments:
Post a Comment