Kurt Nimmo
Another Day in the Empire
October 18, 2007
It’s now official, the entire Senate is criminally complicit in undermining the Fourth Amendment.“Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources,” reports the CIA’s favorite newspaper, the Washington Post.
In standard doublespeak fashion, the Post is attempting to put the best face on the fact the Senate has dealt the telecoms a get out of jail free card. It is, as well, typical that the Post characterizes the legislation as a “control” mechanism when in fact it is a blank check. Of course, this hardly matters, as the NSA has worked with the telecoms for decades to subvert the constitutional rights of Americans, who are basically none the wiser when it comes down to the fact the government is a police state, long engaged in snooping of the sort Germany’s Stasi employed.
“Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.” In other words, Democrats, who are a Senate majority, disrespect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to the same disgusting degree as the neocon Republicans, and are thus as criminal. Naturally, this is nothing new, as you can turn your garden variety Democrat upside down and he or she will look identical to a Republican, never mind the corporate media turning somersaults in an effort to get us to buy into supposed differences, the very framework of the phony left-right paradigm on Capitol Hill. Millions of Americans—from your Rush Limbaugh Republican to your MoveOn Democrat—buy into this nonsense, apparently unable to break free of the voodoo trance of the corporate media buttressed fiction of ideological differences.
Said neocon traitor and so-called House Minority leader John A. Boehner: “There is absolutely no reason our intelligence officials should have to consult government lawyers before listening into terrorist communications with the likes of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and other foreign terror groups.” Translation: there is no reason the neocons should have to follow the Constitution and rule of law when snooping the phone calls and internet communication of millions of Americans. As we know, Osama is dead and “al-Qaeda and other foreign terrorist groups” are covertly—or not so covertly—organized, financed, and unleashed by the CIA, MI6, Mossad, indeed the entire “intelligence” monolith, legendary for spinning off useful terrorist groups. Moreover, as a well-read tenth grader might tell you, the NSA engages in the vacuum cleaner approach to “intelligence gathering,” not pinpoint monitoring of “al-Qaeda” phone calls made from a pay phone in Ship Bottom, New Jersey.
More than anything, this “agreement” (criminal conspiracy) was reached in order to protect multinational telecoms, open to “pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants.” Of course, the Senate and House were long ago turned into whorehouse parlors for transnational corporations, so this really is not surprising. Question is, how long will the government continue the charade there is actually legal recourse for Americans when the Constitution is so egregiously violated? How long before we are pitched into full-fledged decider-commander guy fascism?
“Senate Democrats successfully pressed for a requirement that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court review the government’s procedures for deciding who is to be the subject of warrantless surveillance,” the CIA’s favorite fish wrapper continues. “They also insisted that the legislation be renewed in six years, Democratic congressional officials said. The Bush administration had sought less stringent oversight by the court and wanted the law to be permanent.”
In other words, treasonous Democrats want to continue the illusion that the “constitutional compromise” FISA Court is legal, when in fact is it is a long-standing violation of the Fourth Amendment, as all surveillance must follow probable cause with a court order. But then bogus “special needs” categories, mutating from the unconstitutional province of drunk driving checkpoints and random drug tests to the federal government as a whole, are the rule of the day. As previously noted, “highly intrusive and wholly discretionary warrantless wiretapping” is nothing new, as the NSA has worked with the telecoms since at least the 1940s.
Even so-called “civil libertarians” are not dedicated to the original principles held in the Bill of Rights, preferring to play footsy with “conservatives,” i.e., fascist corporatists (an admitted redundancy), and sell the Constitution out lock, stock, and barrel. “Most Democratic lawmakers and party members—backed by civil libertarians and even some conservatives—wanted the new legislation to ensure for example that future domestic surveillance in foreign-intelligence-related investigations would be overseen by the foreign surveillance court. The court was created in response to CIA and FBI domestic spying abuses unmasked in the mid-1970s.” Of course, these exposed “spying abuses” were an aberration—a sign of the times, part of the outrage over Watergate and government criminality—and the CIA and FBI are feeling much better now, knowing that there are few if any people in government willing to unmask current abuses, that is to say long term and ongoing and endemic abuses.
“But conservative Democrats worried about Republicans’ charges that the Democratic bill extended too many rights to suspected terrorists,” that is to say the American people, a few who actually believe they have an intact Constitution, as there are no “suspected terrorists” on phone lines, or rather no genuine terrorists, simply government plants and clueless patsies, programmed to exude an air of terrorist scariness, no matter how absurd as it emanates from remote caves (complete with kidney dialysis machines and internet servers) and MI6 sponsored mosques or ISI facilitated religious schools.
Finally, in order to better understand the fascistic character of our rulers, consider Rep. Louie Gohmert, who blathered: the supposed Democrat horse trading compromise “extends our Constitution beyond American soil to our enemies who want to cut the heads off Americans.” Of course, this is ridiculous, and what Gohmert intended to say is that the Constitution itself is no longer required, is in fact dangerous, as it provides black op terrorists with an excuse to cut off our heads, a colorful if entirely fallacious allusion.
But never mind, none of this matters, as the average American is wholly bereft of any sense of loss, and in fact it can be argued he or she does not need the Fourth Amendment as more than likely they will chime “I don’t got nothing to hide,” so why all the fuss? It was like this when Martin Niemoeller supposedly made his famous claim in Nazi Germany. “First they came for the Jews,” and then everybody else, but then it was too late.
Dare I say it is too late in America? Our once cherished, now ignored and largely unknown, Constitution and Bill of Rights are dead numbers. The NSA, CIA, FBI, et al, may snoop on us at will, without legal or moral hindrance, not that it matters to the masses. Most will not receive visits by the Ministry of Homeland Security, receive national security letters, or be sent packing to a FEMA camp, if it ever comes to that. Most will, however, suffer the results, as did the people of Germany—roundly fire-bombed, defeated, and reviled around the world for years to come.
