The CIA Destroys Tapes...(What's New?)

Just this past weekend (Sunday Feb 3), I saw a scrolling headline on ESPN that U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter wants to meet with NFL Commissioner Roger Gooddell about the destruction of the "Spygate" tapes, in which the New England Patriots were caught cheating by video taping the signals of the New York Jets. I find this quite disturbing when the CIA, in it's commission of war crimes, destroyed evidence of torturing "alleged terror detainees." Al Qaida does not exist, it's an organization that was made up by the Bush Idiocracy after September 11, 2001. Until the torture victims faces turn white, there will be no outrage by the American people. But it's just a matter of time before that starts happening.

* The CIA Destroys Tapes...(What's New?) *
* {col. writ. 12/9/07} (c) '07 Mumia Abu-Jamal **

As news agencies and politicians express shock and awe over the destruction by the CIA of videotapes recording the interrogations of suspected numbers of Al Qaeda, I can't help but be surprised - by the surprise.

We like to think (or pretend to think) that the CIA is merely an intelligence (or information gathering ) agency, which dutifully reports back to the government on events transpiring around the globe.

Instead, they are more like the Praetorian Guard of Rome, who did anything and everything they were told to do.

And I /do/ mean everything.

As noted by investigative journalist John Kelly, in his article, "Crimes and Silence: The CIA's Criminal Acts and the Media's Silence" [published in Kristina Borjesson's (ed.) Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of the Free Press. {Amherst, N. Y.: Prometheus Books, 2002} pp.311-322] the agency doesn't engage in occasional lapses of judgment, but commits thousands of crimes a year all over the earth. Kelly cited as his source the CIA itself, as it reported to the House Intelligence Committee.

A committee staff study on the CIA report found, " The CS (Clandestine Service of the CIA), is the only part of the IC (Intelligence Community), indeed of the government, where hundreds of employees on a daily basis are directed to break extremely serious laws in countries around the world. "

The staff study went on to estimate that these actions occur "several hundred times every day," or several hundred thousand times a year (p.311)

What was the government's legislative response when such news saw the light in House Intelligence Committee documents?

The Senate Intelligence Committee proposed a mass immunization bill for CIA employees, that would make the commission of crime legal. Kelly wrote, "This is the Nazi rationale, plain and simple." On Dec. 27, 2000, then president Bill Clinton signed the bill into law, as the Intelligence Authorization Act.

Under the law, the CIA could violate international law and treaties, as long as they were following orders.

In the past, according to intrepid journalists, researchers and former CIA officials themselves, the agency has toppled governments, staged assassinations, supported terrorists who unleashed waves of violence against their people (they called them 'contras'), bombed people, undermined national economies and democracies, and a host of other crimes - because they were told to do so.

In this context, compare that they destroyed tapes - even tapes of torture! Why is this objectionable, yet all else that they do isn't even worthy of reporting?

That's because the major corporate media doesn't seriously question what the government does. We saw this when the government sold the People a bill of goods to start the Iraq war. At a time when the American people really needed their press, they were compliant, quiescent, and servile.

The US media hasn't yet come to terms with what the CIA either does, or actually is. They are Praetorian Guards, obeying the Emperor, whose word is law.

Why should we be surprised?

Weren't they 'chust followink Orders?'

--(c) '07 maj

Government Redefining Privacy?

Government seeks to redefine privacy

By PAMELA HESS,
Associated Press Writer 56 minutes ago

A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, a deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.

Kerr's comments come as Congress is taking a second look at the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act.

Lawmakers hastily changed the 1978 law last summer to allow the government to eavesdrop inside the United States without court permission, so long as one end of the conversation was reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S.

The original law required a court order for any surveillance conducted on U.S. soil, to protect Americans' privacy. The White House argued that the law was obstructing intelligence gathering.

The most contentious issue in the new legislation is whether to shield telecommunications companies from civil lawsuits for allegedly giving the government access to people's private e-mails and phone calls without a court order between 2001 and 2007.

Some lawmakers, including members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appear reluctant to grant immunity. Suits might be the only way to determine how far the government has burrowed into people's privacy without court permission.

The committee is expected to decide this week whether its version of the bill will protect telecommunications companies.

The central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco.

Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.