Bush Era Goons Issue Open Letter to Decry RNC's NSA Resolution

Remember, remember the eleventh of September. That is the message being delivered by Bush era thugs in an open letter to RNC Chairman Reince Preibus over Friday’s daring  “Resolution To Renounce The National Security Agency’s Surveillance Program”.  The letter invokes nearly every bullshit talking point that Americans were fed after the September 11, 2001 attacks that were then seized upon by corrupt politicians and bureaucrats (including the signatories) and used to launch two ruinous Middle East wars and redistribute billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the national security state spoils system. The attacks also allowed for the massive expansion of big government creating the decidedly anti-American Department of Homeland Security, paramilitary police forces and legions of private contractors of enormously more expense had their functions been performed by civil servants. If you want to see exactly why this once great country is on the verge of collapse and goose-stepping towards insolvency you only need to read the open letter to the RNC.

The letter, obtained and published by the website The Daily Beast is stunning in its callous disregard for constitutional principles as well as a blanket denial that the NSA programs are illegal, as it as open letter and fairly brief here it is:

Dear Chairman Priebus:

As Republicans who are familiar with the threat that terrorism still poses to this country, we are compelled to dissent from the ill-considered resolution adopted by the Republican National Committee on January 24 by voice vote.

The Republican National Committee plays a vital role in political campaigns, but it has relatively little expertise in national security.  Unfortunately, that lack of expertise is on full display in the resolution. The RNC condemns “the secret surveillance program called PRISM,” and claims that it “monitors [the] searching habits of virtually every American on the internet.”  In fact, there is no program that monitors the searches of all Americans.  And what has become known as the PRISM program is not aimed at collecting the communications of Americans. It is targeted at the international communications of foreign persons located outside the United States and is precisely the type of foreign-targeted surveillance that Congress approved in 2008 and 2012 when it enacted and reauthorized amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The errors in the resolution do not end there.  The resolution falsely implies that NSA collects and has easy access to telephone metadata, when in fact every search of the data requires a reasonable and articulable suspicion and is strictly limited by the courts, with oversight by the intelligence committees of both houses of Congress.

The resolution says that the program violates the Constitution, something that will come as news to the many judges who have found to the contrary – and to the Supreme Court, which has said that such limited billing data is not protected by a constitutional expectation of privacy.  The resolution’s claim that the program violates section 215 also runs counter to the rulings of practically every court to address the issue.

As far as we can tell, none of these facts was presented to the RNC before it adopted the resolution.  It is  a shame that the resolution reached the Committee without correction of its many errors.

Worse, the RNC resolution threatens to do great damage to the security of the nation.  It would be foolhardy to end the program without ensuring that we remain safe from attack. This database provides a uniquely valuable capability for discovering new phone numbers associated with international terrorist organizations, including numbers that may be used by terrorist cells within the United States.  Former Deputy Director of the CIA Michael Morrell has testified that having this capability might have prevented 9/11 and could help to prevent the next 9/11. 

This is not a Democratic or a Republican program.  Protecting Americans from terrorism should not be a partisan issue.   The program was first launched under President George W. Bush. It was approved by Congressional leaders of both parties. And for good reason.  It helps to keep Americans safe.

It may be appropriate to modify the program in certain respects, if that can be done without a significant loss in effectiveness, but abolishing it without any idea how to close the intelligence gap that 9/11 exposed is not a recipe for partisan advantage.  It is a recipe for partisan oblivion.

Count us out.

The seven signatories are led by the three-headed monster of Michael Chertoff, Michael Hayden and Michael Mukasey. That latter is Bush’s former Attorney General who was an apologist for the grotesque torture programs of that administration and the other two have in their post government careers on the other side of that infamous revolving door become profiteers off of the same national security state that they themselves helped to create. With former government contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden having just given an interview to German public television in which he stated that the NSA programs are used for industrial espionage it is no surprise to see rats like Chertoff and Hayden getting restive. Clearly the revelations of NSA criminality that have already been made public only scratch the surface of what is to come and both of these men given their ability to reap the financial profits from the years when their salaries came courtesy of the American taxpayer stand to be outed as the corrupt swine that they truly are. Don’t forget that it was the lobbying firm inconspicuously named The Chertoff Group that opportunistically seized on the Christmas Day “Underwear Bomber” plot to bilk taxpayers into putting those nifty naked body scanners into the nation’s airports.

The open letter, following the deranged Peter King’s opening salvo will provide a platform for the other defenders of the rampant criminality of the NSA and the fascist state propaganda machine will be churning out jeremiads and screeds from their shills like link sausage made with tainted skunk meat. It is imperative to the corrupt system that has hijacked constitutional government in The Homeland to beat back the coming threat to their secret state and all of the tools that they use to protect it. The invocation of ‘the day that changed everything’ will be all inclusive but the RNC’s bold (although still suspect) move to begin to punch back at Leviathan is evidence that when it comes to the phony war on terror that the zeitgeist has already changed.

When the dam finally does burst on those other activities, aside from industrial espionage that these illegal and anti-American programs have been used for there will be no stopping the waves of outrage and revulsion and this is what truly terrifies the signatories of the open letter and their ilk. 

The Innocuous Face of Government Criminality

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, what they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together

-Hannah Arendt

Former NSA and CIA leader Michael Hayden is indicative of the horrors of the coming American authoritarian state. He is a bookish, cherubic, nondescript, avuncular man who nonetheless has contributed greatly to those programs of such a degree of enormous potential for evil are only waiting for the correct political climate and leadership to trigger a reign of darkness and terror unique to this country's history. The "banality of evil" is the term used by political theorist and author Hannah Arendt to describe Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, a nondescript German man in a position of great authority whose work was instrumental in the murder of six million Jews. Hayden has been a regular on the Sunday morning propaganda circuit along with fellow fascists Mike Rogers and Peter King as they frantically work to protect the NSA surveillance machine and smear former government contractor Booz Allen employee turned whistleblower Edward Snowden and others who challenge their tyrannical wet dreams. After the serendipity of a post-Christmas ruling by in the bag federal judge William Pauley in a Manhattan courtroom erecting a firewall around the unconstitutional and Orwellian programs that sent turned the prior week's funk into holiday joy Hayden was a part of a full court press as the new year will feature a counteroffensive as inevitable as it will be furious. 

While using the CBS forum of Face the Nation to affix the 'traitor' tag to Snowden and perhaps step up behind the scenes efforts to have him added to the extrajudicial kill list Hayden continued the media push. In a USA Today piece (quite possibly the most dumbed-down newspaper on the planet) Hayden blasted Barack Obama for not having the "political courage" to reject any suggestions to establish oversight on the NSA:

"President Obama now has the burden of simply doing the right thing,...and I think some of the right things with regard to the commission's recommendations are not the popular things. They may not poll real well right now. They'll poll damn well after the next attack, all right?"

It must be pretty tough to swallow to be called out by a eunuch for having no balls but Barry has a thin skin, already runs one of the most oppressive administrations of all time and sics his attack dog Eric Holder's Justice Department on whistleblowers, journalists and political foes on a whim. Not that his hand picked NSA review panel was going to push for any serious reforms to begin with but the deep state that Hayden represents has no tolerance for even cosmetic changes that will allow the sheeple to continue their long, slow shuffle towards the steel chutes.  

Very interesting that Hayden would reference the “next attack” because with these programs, that obviously have zilch to do with actually preventing terrorism the aftermath of the “next attack” is exactly what they really are about. When Hayden was over at NSA it would be fair to wonder whether he might have been more than a bit involved in the MAIN CORE project that was revealed in a pair of 2008 articles by Christopher Ketcham entitled The Last Roundup as well as another by Tim Shorrock entitled Exposing Bush's Historic Abuse of Power.  The articles refer to a massive database in which the names and information of millions of Americans are being accumulated for the day that the opportunity presents itself for the pickup and detention (and Christ only knows what else) by government goons. It is to be the ultimate purge of political dissent and opposition to the programs of the surveillance state and will likely include journalists, activists, lawyers, educators, civil libertarians, gun owners and even bloggers who dare to criticize Leviathan. With the expansion of NSA surveillance and data dragnets the possibility that the crackdown could extend to even donors to organizations like the ACLU which has all of the traits of what will be declared an ‘enemy of the state’ and even readers of ‘forbidden’ blogs and articles, probably on this very website. This is the world of Hayden and his criminal compatriots who despise the very notion of freedom, liberty and the limitations on out of control government power imposed by that pesky Constitution.

MAIN CORE would have been under the purview of Hayden during his reign at NSA Stasi Central which was from 1999 to 2005 according to his Wikipedia page, an interesting question would be what did Mr. Hayden know about the September 11, 2001 attacks and when did he know it. If he is going to hang his black beret on the peg of justifying the capture and storage of the communications and financial records of hundreds of millions of law abiding citizens as a necessity to prevent the “next attack” it would be one damned important question to ask why his NSA was unable to prevent the ‘day when everything changed’.  MAIN CORE was illegal to the point as Ketcham’s article points out that former Bush administration Justice Department official James Comey, second in command to Attorney General John Ashcroft and currently Obama’s FBI Director engaged in open conflict with administration figures over the authorization of Bush-Cheney surveillance programs. There is the now legendary race to the hospital that Mr. Comey engaged in to beat White House thugs Andrew Card and Alberto ‘Torquemada’ Gonzales to Ashcroft who was stricken with pancreatitis where they tried to coerce the sick man to sign the papers. Comey beat them there and in a hospital room showdown refulsed to authorize the renewal of obviously unconstitutional programs. This occurred in March of 2004 when General Michael Hayden was running the NSA. Perhaps today's NSA head General Keith Alexander is getting a bit of a bad rap considering the bulk of the unconstitutional programs seemed to be already in place during Hayden’s time. It would seem that his media friendly predecessor would benefit greatly from seeing Alexander thrown under the bus as well as having any further inquiries/lawsuits shut down lest they reveal his own criminality.

General Hayden also headed up the CIA from 2006-2009 replacing Porter Goss who clashed with then Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, a man who ran Latin American death squad operations during the Reagan-Bush regime as well as a member of the Iran-Contra gang.  It should be noted that Hayden was hand-picked by Negroponte who along with other Iran-Contra figures who returned to positions of power under Bush-Cheney had a pedigree that included a serious amount of contempt for the rule of law and the constitution.  When at CIA Hayden presided over the pox on America that is the rendition and torture programs which like the JSOC/CIA assassination programs have philosophical roots in the Iran-Contra era specifically Operation Condor and earlier in Vietnam with the infamous Phoenix Program. These people do not believe in anything even remotely resembling the concept of American values that at one time were at one time at least in theory virtuous and admired throughout most of the world. That is all gone now and Hayden and vermin just like him will not be satisfied until a total fascist dictatorship exists in the United States – we are getting there very, very quickly.  In Hayden’s world not only is Edward Snowden a “traitor” but so are tens of millions of those Americans whose respect for constitutional principles and a longing for the return of law and the two forces are on a collision course.

So of course Michael Hayden is fighting hammer and tong to call for Obama to ignore recommendations as tepid as they may be to shed light and implement control over the NSA surveillance monstrosity and by extension the torture and assassination programs that lie beneath it. Hayden is a fiend of a man who would in a normal society not only be denied the undeserved legitimacy and reverence that he is afforded by the corrupt state-corporate media but would fittingly be rotting in a prison cell for the rest of his life. During a Monday interview on the liberal Democracy Now, a part of a segment on the latest revelations from Der Spiegel on the NSA’s TAO (Tailored Access Operations) program former Guardian journalist pegged it in responding a question on Hayden’s bandying about of the “treason” term:

Here’s Michael Hayden. He oversaw the illegal warrantless eavesdropping program implemented under the Bush administration. He oversaw torture and rendition as the head of the CIA. James Clapper lied to the face of Congress. These are felonies at least as bad, and I would say much worse, than anything Edward Snowden is accused of doing, and yet they’re not prosecuted. They’re free to appear on television programs. The United States government in Washington constantly gives amnesty to its highest officials, even when they commit the most egregious crimes. And yet the idea of amnesty for a whistleblower is considered radical and extreme. And that’s why a hardened felon like Michael Hayden is free to walk around on the street and is treated on American media outlets as though he’s some learned, wisdom-drenched elder statesman, rather than what he is, which is a chronic criminal.

It would be highly advisable for Glenn Greenwald to stay in Brazil because he assuredly occupies a prime spot on the rogue government's target list and would represent a trophy to the surveillance state as it would send a crystal clear message to investigative journalists of what they will be subject to for challenging Hayden and his cabal of fascist thugs. There is however no way turning back at this point because MAIN CORE coupled with the increased technological ability of the NSA and it's arms to spy on and store absolutely everything for the day that the "next attack" makes it acceptable to begin rounding up law abiding American citizens can only be prevented by doing so with a ever increasing drive to expose the criminality of the bastards who have hijacked this country and bring them to justice just as their historical predecessors were at Nuremberg.