It has been Woody'z firm belief, since the first day the most recent NSA 'scandal' was exposed, that there was about it something of the "Breitbartian" freak show, a la ACORN, with "Snowden" in the Jamie O'Keefe role of the faux-naif...
Nothing which has since transpired has changed that impression one single, solitary iota.
The whole thing stinks.
And not the LEAST of the stinkage emanates from the fact that ALL of what is deemed remarkable and terrible (which it must be, to some) has been researchable, AND ALWAYS objectionable, since the Raygoons established the "US Intelligence Community" in 1981. That's the official US Intel cartel: 19 (published) Fed-bureaucratic intel agencies, with now up to and even over 2 THOUSAND private coropRatz, employing now over one MILLION operatives and other employees. To pilfer your mail, listen in on your fone--sex. It's an outrage, indeed. But it's been going on in plain sight for over 30 years.
The Raygoons started, quite publicly, farming out USer intelligence ops to those private companies led by former military intel honchos--not ALL of whom, incidentally, are USers, and which have grown like toxic shrooms since 9/11.
Revelations about this activity were known Where was the FURY when Mark Klein's allegations about the NSA/AT&T hook-up in the AT&T building at 641 Fulsom Street, in SFO?
Room 641A and the controversies surrounding it were subjects of an episode of Frontline, the current affairs documentary program on PBS. It was originally broadcast on May 15, 2007. It was also featured on PBS's NOW on March 14, 2008. The room was also covered in the PBS Nova episode "The Spy Factory".
The Congress, including then Sen. LowBar, voted in 2007 to grant immunity to corpoRatz which willingly cooperated with "unconventional" gummint surveillance.
But hey. How about a real memory stretcher: Remember the Church Committtee? It was supposed to impose Congressional
supervision on domestic intel ops, in the '70s, after the revelations
of Watergate and COINTELPRO, and Operation Northwoods and all that.
What
we got out of that was the FISA law and the FISC, which has only ONCE
in over 3000 chances refused a request for covert surveillance. There's
also a congressional committee which hears--but cannot talka bout what
it hears in--testimony from the brass.
And they ALL--don't forget, it was
Gummint AND paid, private spooks who be dooin' the spookin'--felt the
need to go around even that minimal superfision.
But ALL the outrage is focused on Prez. Lowbar.
I'm not defending LowBar. He's a factotum of the Status Quo (and I am still surprised when folks don tumble to the fact), a tried-and-true agent of the oligocracy. But he ISN'T doing anything that ANY and ALL of the previous four occupants of the Office have done, with the (implicit) blessing of the people and the press. Was there talk of impeachment when the Chimperor quietly drowned habeas corpus in a barrel of Lone Star in 2006? If there was any, it didn't register on any political seismometers I know of.
What's unseemly, then, in this context, is the sudden upwelling of mostly invented "outrage" at (admittedly potentially criminally intrusive) practices only NOW, when their existence has been certainly not-very-well-concealed, common knowledge since white guys still ran things.
It stinks of
selective memory, and THAT reeks of ulterior motives. I sense the cold, dead tread of Breitbart behind the falls, a la ACORN, with Snowden in the Jamie O'Keefe role.
In passing, too, I'd mention that this whole scenario, to me, illustrates nothing less than how
inextricably the interests of private profit have insinuated themselves
into, and strangled, the whole arena of "public service."
And like the freak
show it is, like a python swallowing a capybara, you can neither take your eyes off it, nor UN-watch.
