Kurt Nimmo

Infowars

March 30, 2008

In his new book, New York Times writer Eric Lichtblau tells us the neocon plan to create an Americanized version of Stasi “sparked heated legal concerns and silent protests inside the Bush administration within hours of its adoption in October 2001, according to current and former government officials.” Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson refused to sign off on any of the secret wiretapping requests and technicians at the FBI “stumbled onto the N.S.A.’s program accidentally within 12 hours of its inception, setting off what officials described as a brief firestorm of anxiety among senior officials,” according to the New York Times.

Sure it did. Because these government officials understand well enough the neocon Stasi snoop plan is an in-your-face violation of the Fourth Amendment. “Some who had not been told about the program were concerned that the agency was violating laws that required a court order for the singling out of Americans in wiretaps, and they immediately alerted higher-ups to what they had discovered.”

Of course, most of these higher-ups are neocons or if not specifically neocons believers in an autocratic executive. No doubt many of them simply shut-up because they were not willing to sacrifice their careers, their homes, their beamers to protect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as many of them had promised to do upon taking an oath.

Robert S. Mueller III, the F.B.I. director, assured nervous officials that the program had been approved by President Bush, several officials said. But the presidential approval, one former intelligence official disclosed, came without a formal legal opinion endorsing the program by the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.

In other words, Mueller told “nervous officials” to check their concern at the door and forget about the fact Bush, the neocon sock puppet, had violated the Constitution. Bush, or again the neocons, have nothing but contempt for the Constitution, which Bush infamously referred to as nothing more than a “g.d. piece of paper,” and the officials who were mollified by Mueller’s assurances are as guilty as Bush and the neocons of treason.

Former AG John Ashcroft admits he was little more than a paper weight. Ashcroft complained to associates at the time that the White House, in getting his signature for the surveillance program, “just shoved it in front of me and told me to sign it.”

Aides to Mr. Ashcroft were worried, however, that in approving a surveillance program that appeared to test the limits of presidential authority, Mr. Ashcroft was left legally exposed without a formal opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel, which acts as the legal adviser for the entire executive branch. At that time, the office had already issued a broad, classified opinion declaring the president’s surveillance powers in the abstract in wartime, but it had not weighed in on the legality or the specifics of the N.S.A. operation, officials said.

In short, Ashcroft realized he was doing something big time illegal, but that did not stop him. Come the day of reckoning, John Ashcroft will wear an orange jumpsuit along with his associates, criminals all. Or so we can hope.

At this point, with so little enthusiasm for arresting and prosecuting these traitors, we may as well wish for a golden pony and a visit from the tooth fairy. Millions of Americans are not only vaguely aware of the crimes committed in their names, they are also dangerously ignorant of the Constitution beyond the fact it promises them the right to free speech, usually translated as the right to have 100 cable channels or boom obnoxious music at three o’clock in the morning.

It was John Yoo, advocate for torturing toddlers with pliers, who declared “that the president’s wartime powers allowed him to order the N.S.A. to intercept international communication of terror suspects without a standard court warrant.” In fact, the NSA has intercepted all communication for several decades now and the international part is miniscule, as there are few terrorists plotting to blow up buildings, that is unless they are nudged in that direction by FBI infiltrators, as in the case of the hapless poor kids in Miami, said by the government to hankered to knock down the Sears tower in Chicago. Actually, these less than intellectually stellar street kids were attempting to shake down the FBI for cash.

Yoo’s “opinion” on violating the Constitution is classified, as should be expected. “It was apparently written in late 2001 or early 2002, but it was revised in 2004 by a new cast of senior lawyers at the Justice Department, who found the earlier opinion incomplete and somewhat shoddy, leaving out important case law on presidential powers. Mr. Yoo declined to discuss the issue. Even after the final legal opinions were written, lawyers at the National Security Agency were not allowed to see them, officials said.”

Yoo is a professor of law at the Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, and not a Constitutional scholar, not that you need one to understand the Fourth Amendment. But then Yoo works for the American Enterprise Institute, neocon central, where Bush admits he gets his “minds,” that is to say his various warmongering psychopaths. AEI is not Constitution friendly territory.

In fact, neocons agree: you have no rights, especially when it comes to having your phone, internet, credit and medical information snooped. Congress apparently agrees as well, with the exception of a few hardy souls in the House.

Eric Lichtblau’s book may provide us with a few details, more or less useless so long as there is no legal recourse and Congress and the judiciary allow Bush — and soon enough, his successor, be it Obama or Hillary — to conduct wholesale high-tech snooping, not of average Americans, who do not yet pose a threat to our rulers, but scattered activists who need to be subverted, or as the FBI would have it, need to be “neutralized.”

Now that the FBI and the CIA are in on the action, we can expect a return of COINTELPRO and Operation Chaos. In fact, such programs never went away, they simply changed names. As should be obvious, the so-called 9/11 truth movement has weathered an “Operation Chaos” for years now and is bogged down in irrelevancies and petty bickering over planes, no-planes, space beams, and other counterproductive minutia.

Lichtblau’s book may now collect dust in the library. Most people are blissfully unaware they live in a police state, sans any functional rights — all rights now are strictly ceremonial and having nothing to do with reality — and in fact many of them would not know how to act if they did in fact live in a constitutionally limited republic. Liberty necessitates responsibility. Far too many Americans have surrendered responsibility for vague promises issued by the nanny and police state. As experience teaches, any meaningful promise made by the state will be broken, especially now that our rulers insist there are sacrifices to be made.

Soon enough, Mr. Lichtblau’s book may be included in a little bonfire, not unlike the one staged on the Opernplatz in Berlin, that is if history plays out as it usually does.

You may remember the fire at Opernplatz. It was staged by the Nazis in 1933 and they burned around 20,000 books.

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