Time to Let the American Enabling Act Expire

In an all too rare display of chutzpah in post-September 11, 2001 America which has been hammered home incessantly as 'the day when everything changed' for nearly twelve and a half years by fascist opportunists there is a growing move to pushback against Obama's NSA Stasi and its illegality. Without delving into the depths of speculation and conspiracy trafficking it is apparent that the USA PATRIOT Act was to 9/11 what the Enabling Act was to the Reichstag Fire in the terms of historical analogies. While admittedly less ostentatious than the depraved Nazi regime and their orgy of state sanctioned thuggery and oppression, this anti-American piece of legislation has largely served the same purpose in empowering a criminal state to act with impunity. With the firewall of the surveillance state and all of its proctor - like the unhinged fascist demagogue Mike Rogers who is popping off today about stringing up journalist Glenn Greenwald by his balls for doing his job - flying like antibodies to protect a diseased system against any attempts to implement even the most tepid of controls over the NSA spying monstrosity which are destined to fail. The corruption is just too deeply entrenched and there is too much money and power at stake to expect a failed political system to function by implementing the now laughably outdated term of 'checks and balances'. So it is now being proposed to just let the American enabling act expire which would be a good start, having a national holiday every September 10th to celebrate the public burning of this fascist travesty and toast the trial and imprisonment of all who have foisted it upon us would be ideal.

That being said and according to a story in The Guardian (the state media is too busy performing necrophilia on the corpse of Phillip Seymour Hoffman to be bothered with covering actual news) members of the House Judiciary Committee boldly challenged Obama/Holder lackeys from the Justice Department. In demanding that the NSA bulk collection of telephone "metadata" be reigned in and the USA FREEDOM Act be supported that the most insidious piece of legislation in the lifetimes of all Americans currently alive be allowed to simply expire come renewal time in June of 2015 -  a mere decade after a sunset clause was to have rid of us all of this abomination. The "metadata" phone collection also does not cover the actual content collection which the Obama regime and the filth like Mike Rogers are so desperate to keep secret therefore the regular "two minutes hate" sessions denouncing Greenwald and former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden who are both rising to the top of that kill list that El Presidente presides over. That it is Congressman James Sensenbrenner, a father of the PATRIOT Act himself who is now one of the most vocal opponents is telling, it is his very own Frankenstein monster careening through the village today.

I excerpt from the Guardian piece, entitled "House committee urges US government to get behind NSA reform bill":

Members of Congress who want to end the National Security Agency's mass collection of Americans’ phone data sharply warned the Obama administration on Tuesday to get behind a bill to end the controversial practice, or risk losing the counter-terrorism powers provided by the post-9/11 Patriot Act.

Deriding the paucity of legislative alternatives after President Obama's announcement last month that he wants to transfer the responsibility for bulk collection out of the NSA, congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, the co-sponsor of the USA Freedom Act, told deputy attorney general James Cole at a House judiciary committee hearing that "you will get nothing" if the administration does not endorse the bill.

AND -

John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the panel, warned that permitting bulk data collection to continue unabated risked congressional support for the entire portion of the Patriot Act the government claims authorizes it, known as Section 215, a provision set to expire on 1 June 2015. "We should address bulk collection today, or we risk losing all of Section 215 this time next year," Conyers said.

AND -

Much as support for bulk surveillance is a bipartisan position in the House intelligence committee, opposition in the judiciary committee is bipartisan. Liberal Democrat Zoe Lofgren and conservative Republican Darrell Issa, both of California, probed Cole to say on the record that the NSA phone records trove includes legislators' call records, something the NSA has been hard-pressed to deny on the record.

"202-225 and four digits. Do you collect it?" Issa asked Cole, referring to the prefix of office numbers for members of the House of Representatives.

"Probably we do," Cole answered.

Issa rejoindered that he had been in touch with the deputy prime minister of Lebanon after accusations emerged that the official had given money to Hezbollah, warning that a senior member of Congress was only two degrees of separation from terrorists.

It is about damned time that Congressman Issa stopped pissing away taxpayer dollars on politically motivated witch hunts and devoted some time and effort towards getting these fascists not only under control but stripped of their God mode power to spy on everything that millions of law abiding American citizens do. Not only that but to also address the ongoing data-mining and exactly why that massive NSA facility sitting in a remote area of Utah is needed if the American Stasi is NOT collecting content for future persecution of dissidents. The USA PATRIOT Act should be stricken from the law of the land and the Constitution restored. All that it is going to take is a bit of effort from a failed and feckless Congress but at least there are signs of life albeit they are faint.

Were this to be allowed to happen I would be the first one to volunteer to kick in some money to deport Mike Rogers to a country where they have a similar contempt for journalists - Egypt seems to be a prime location these days and if that doesn't work there are plenty of other authoritarian regimes that would love to have a deranged swine like this guy as a key member of their intelligence service goon squads.  As I have previously noted, he conjures up valid comparisons to  the similarly minded thug Reinhard Heydrich and would very fittingly have belonged in a prior historical era given his blatant and constant state of venomous contempt for anything other than the most tyrannical of political systems.

There will be no stopping this ongoing use of the Constitution as so much toilet paper until the USA PATRIOT Act is revoked and relegated to our national history as the shameful attempt to eliminate our very cherished freedoms that it has always been. 

(Image: Dees Images) 

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. 

Here's an Innovative Idea: Cut off Water to NSA Utah Facility

While I have not idea whether it is practical or not an innovative idea of how to fight back against the NSA Stasi is being floated in Utah home of the huge NSA surveillance center that will soon be open for business. Courtesy of an op ed piece in the Salt Lake Tribune entitled Utahns should deny water to NSA center written by a Connor Boyack advocates for the people of the state to deny critical resources to this blight upon the state and the nation as a whole. In tossing in Lord of the Rings references the facility is referred to by the author in a metaphoric sense as the eye of Sauron, the all-seeing orb of the dark kingdom of Mordor. Cultural references aside the specs for the facility are cited as:

When fully operational, the NSA facility is expected to require a staggering 1.7 million gallons of water every day to cool down the computers harvesting information on people worldwide. That water is supplied by the Jordan Valley Water Conservancy District, a political subdivision of the state. Without it, the facility cannot function.

The original necessity for the remote NSA complex - which will come to allow the rogue government to one day when the order is given to retroactively haul in Americans and convict them for past statements and affiliations critical of the police state - came when it was no longer feasible to operate solely at Fort Meade due to the huge drain on the local power grid. In the SLT op ed piece it is stated that:

In 2006, the NSA faced major challenges at its facility at Fort Meade, Md. The energy consumption required by the computers at that complex maxed out the electric capacity of the Baltimore area power grid. The NSA, as Baltimore Gas & Electric’s largest customer, was using as much power as the entire city of Annapolis. Unable to use some of their costly and sophisticated new equipment, the agency knew it needed to look elsewhere.

The costs of operating in Utah would be far cheaper and the political climate would be friendly, longtime Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, a fixture on the Senate Intelligence Committee could be counted on to grease the rails. While at the time of its conception the NSA did not face the scrutiny that has been brought upon it by the revelations of former government contractor Booz Allen employee Edward Snowden that has portrayed the agency as exactly what it truly is, a menace to any concept of liberty and privacy and a blight upon the land that would effectively nullify good chunks of what remains of the Constitution. More detail on the Bluffdale spy center is provided by writer James Bamford in a 2012 piece that he did for Wired Magazine entitled The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say). This is a very dangerous facility but that it is at least now receiving some attention is good, such a thing would have been inconceivable in the early years of the decade of 9/11.

It is incumbent upon the people to find a way to reign in this travesty. There will be nothing done by a corrupt, craven and on the payroll Congress. The NSA and multi-billion dollar surveillance industry has powerful embeds within the government, notably the ultra-fascist Congressman Mike Rogers and the bursting at the seams sack of hypocrisy and amorality Diane Feinstein (DiFi) who are both pushing legislation in the House and Senate respectively to further immunize the American Stasi and cement it's power into place. The Supreme Court is in the bag as well and as far as Obama goes he has done nothing but defend the unconstitutional actions of the surveillance monstrosity. Perhaps the people of Utah can somehow mobilize against this facility by denying it the water/electricity it needs to function but that is doubtful given the state of TV addled lethargy that exists on the world's biggest sheep ranch that is The Homeland. Were they to be successful in any way it would likely trigger some sort of heavy handed paramilitary action of the sort that the fascist state always uses to put down resistance to its criminality. But that this sort of idea is even being floated is an encouraging sign that there are at least some patriotic souls who abhor what has been done to this once great country and are fighting back.