WSJ Online: Snoop Nation is All Good

Now that Rupert Murdoch has snarfed up the Wall Street Journal for a cool five billion, we can only hope the newspaper will go the way of the brontosaurus, although it will likely end up closer to the New York Post. In the meantime, we can expect more of the same from the Journal, that is to say more neocon nonsense from its “editorial” staff.

For instance, according to the WSJ Online, a Stasi-like state snooping on its citizens is a good thing, lest Osama and his dour Muslim cave dwellers get us again. “The good news is that the new law will at least allow the National Security Agency to monitor terrorist communications again. That ability has been severely limited since January, when Mr. Bush agreed to put the wiretap program under the supervision of a special court created by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The new law provides a six-month fix to the outdated FISA provision that had defined even foreign-to-foreign calls as subject to a U.S. judicial warrant.”

The NSA, of course, has snooped on Americans since it was established by pen flourish in 1952. In fact, government cryptologists set the precedent well before the creation of the NSA with the Shamrock program, an idea spawned by military censorship during WWII. “Copies of foreign telegraph traffic had been turned over to military intelligence during the war, and, when the war ended, the Army Security Agency sought to have this continue. All the big international carriers were involved,” Dr. Louis Tordella, a former deputy director at the NSA, told Brett Snider.

Shamrock begat Project MINARET, or maybe it was the other way around, not that it matters. MINARET, coordinated by the NSA, CIA, and FBI, used “watch lists” to snoop and follow around American “subversives” such as Malcolm X, Jane Fonda, Joan Baez, and Martin Luther King. NSA Director Lew Allen testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975 that the NSA had issued over 3,900 reports on watch-listed Americans and the NSA Office of Security Services cranked out reports on at least 75,000 Americans between 1952 and 1974. It is said MINARET was put to sleep by Attorney General Elliot Richardson. If you believe this, I have a bridge for sale.

“The Senate Select Committee that investigated government domestic spying in 1976 pried open a tiny public window into the scope of NSA spying,” writes Earl Ofari Hutchinson. “But the agency slammed the window shut fast when it refused to cough up documents to the committee that would tell more about its surveillance of Americans. The NSA claimed that disclosure would compromise national security. The few feeble Congressional attempts over the years to probe NSA domestic spying have gone nowhere. Even though rumors swirled that NSA eyes were riveted on more than a few Americans, Congressional investigators showed no stomach to fight the NSA’s entrenched code of silence,” or its entrenched habit of slamming the Fourth Amendment, now more or less comatose.

“The first duty of Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell is to prevent the next terrorist attack, and it’s disgraceful that some have vilified him for trying to revive our intelligence ability in that cause,” the WSJ continues.

It is apparently also disgraceful we have a Constitution and Bill of Rights, or at least once had such rights, never mind they were betrayed early on when Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, authorizing the president to deport aliens “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States” during peacetime, that is to say get rid of Americans who disagree with the government. It is quite normal for government to consider “any false, scandalous and malicious writing” as treason and a high misdemeanor, punishable by fine and imprisonment. In order to demonstrate its sincerity, the government of president Adams had twenty-five men arrested, most of them Republican editors, and their newspapers were forced out of business. One such high misdemeanor criminal was none other than Benjamin Franklin Bache, editor of the Philadelphia Democrat-Republican Aurora, and grandson of Benjamin Franklin.

According to WSJ Online op-ed writers, opposition to the NSA blank check to snoop is all about the “Democratic left” going after “a weak President near the end of his term,” never mind this supposedly weak president has granted himself near dictatorial powers by way of a National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, signed on May 9, 2007. “This directive, completely unnoticed by the media, and given no scrutiny by Congress, literally gives the White House unprecedented dictatorial power over the government and the country, bypassing the US Congress and obliterating the separation of powers. The directive also placed the Secretary of Homeland Security in charge of domestic ’security,’” writes Larry Chin. Of course, when the “Democratic left” rolls into the White House in early 2009, such directives will come in mighty handy. It should be remember that the “liberal” New York Times, now considered treasonous for reporting on Bush’s NSA program, characterized Bill Clinton’s use of Echelon—a global spy system said to be capable of snooping virtually every phone call, fax, email and telex message sent anywhere in the world—as a “necessity.” Government perfidy is always a “necessity,” irrespective of what party the decider hails from.

“The only reason [Clinton’s use of Echelon came] to light is because of concerns raised by high-level sources within federal law-enforcement and intelligence circles that the operation was compromised by politicians—including mid- and senior-level White House aides—either on behalf of or in support of President Clinton and major donor-friends who helped him and the Democratic National Committee, or DNC, raise money,” Insight Magazine reported in 1997. As well, a 1993 conference of Asian and Pacific world leaders hosted by Clinton in Seattle had been spied on by U.S. intelligence agencies, according to Insight.

Imagine my surprise.

“Goaded by the ACLU and much of the press corps, many Democrats want to use the courts and lawsuits to restrict Mr. Bush and future Presidents in their ability to gather intelligence in the war on terror,” the WSJ Online continues, never mind the next “future president” will likely be Hillary Clinton, wife of Bill, who had no problem using Echelon against his enemies or foreign leaders he mistrusted, apparently a legion. As usual, we are expected to buy into this partisan political nonsense when in fact you can stand both parties on their heads and not notice any difference.

“The weekend law expires in six months, and it would be nice to think enough Democrats would put aside this ideological obsession to work with Mr. Bush on a more permanent wiretap statute. Given the current state of Beltway rationality, we aren’t optimistic,” the WSJ Online concludes. “As negotiations unfold, we hope the President resists any deal that compromises the ability of his successors to defend the country. In 18 months, Mr. Bush will be leaving office, but the terrorist threat will continue. The stakes are too large for any President to accept new judicial limitations on his ability to track terrorists at home or abroad. Rather than accept such limits, Mr. Bush could use Congressional recalcitrance as an opportunity to withdraw the terrorist surveillance program from FISA authority, and thus toss the issue squarely in the middle of the 2008 Presidential campaign.”

It is simply astounding how effortlessly the WSJ Online trounces the Constitution and Bill of Rights—again, not that it particularly matters, as we have endured generations without protection and the illusion of rights in name only, easily withdrawn at the drop of a hat, or should I say turban?

Our global elite and transnational corporate rulers will certainly not accept “judicial limitations” in their drive to convert America to a sprawling slave plantation, a plan unfolding under the rubric of fighting “terrorism,” soon enough under one to save the planet from the carbon emissions of selfish and obese consumers who were, after all, trained well in their mindless consumption, once quite profitable, now a scurrilous eco-crime.

But never mind. Most Americans have precious little comprehension of their once cherished rights, even if in practice such rights were more or less an illusion, the stuff of high school history class lessons and Fourth of July parades. No, the average American will not miss the Fourth Amendment—that is until the day the cops, outrigged in SWAT black, bust down his door in search of “contraband” shipped into the country by their bosses, and at a none too modest mark-up.