The Intelligence Community Can Be Dangerous

[babylonsister]

This gave me the heebie-jeebies.

http://www.boomantribune.com/story/2014/1/17/10432/8613

The Intelligence Community Can Be Dangerous

by BooMan
Fri Jan 17th, 2014 at 10:04:32 AM EST


With President Obama set to call on Congress to overhaul to NSA's surveillance programs, it's important to understand what he's up against. He is not messing with people you want to be messing with.

Edward Snowden has made some dangerous enemies. As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30 year-old leaker.

“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”

“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single handedly the greatest traitor in American history.” That violent hostility lies just beneath the surface of the domestic debate over NSA spying is still ongoing. Some members of Congress have hailed Snowden as a whistleblower, the New York Times has called for clemency, and pundits regularly defend his actions on Sunday talk shows. In intelligence community circles, Snowden is considered a nothing short of a traitor in wartime. “His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas Intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”

One Army intelligence officer even offered BuzzFeed a chillingly detailed fantasy.

“I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” he said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow, coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.”

We'd like to think that our intelligence services are filled with do-good patriots who only want to keep America safe, and that is for the most part true. But their ranks include no shortage of what you and I would consider homicidal maniacs. Cross them in the wrong way, and even if you are an American, some will want you dead.

We have no problem understanding this phenomenon in Russia or Syria or Egypt, that intelligence services have the final say on who rules the country, but we've been fed on myths about the virtues of American democracy that make it hard for us to understand (pdf) how difficult and risky it can be for an American president to rein in the intelligence services.

You may have your own theories about the JFK assassination, but one thing is clear. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy said that he wanted to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." He began that process, and he didn't get to stand for reelection. Whether a faction within the CIA played or role in his death or not is still hotly disputed, but no president can feel comfortable that they can cross the intelligence community with impunity.

I suspect that most progressives will feel that the president's proposals don't go far enough. I anticipate that I will feel that way, myself. I am also a realist. No one wants to be put on the same list as Edward Snowden.

[phantom power]

1. recommended

[2naSalit]

2. I suspect

that you are correct in your imaginings here. I will go further in suspecting that not only is the intelligentsia running things for mic/corporate ovrlords, they also have a gun to his head on the new trade fiasco they want. They seem to think they have us where they want us and can now coerce this nation into their web of world dominance/fascism. Not sure how to counter that since there are so many of us who are totally mesmerized by the electronic toys of one kind or another, all conditioning us to obey the buy.buy.BUY mindset that we will work our asses off for the latest toy and "convenience" that rules our personal lives, our world. Unless we can free ourselves from the spinning spiral wheel that hypnotizes us, we have no collective hope of surviving this. We have to teach the young and strong the virtues of peace and nonviolence so that they can understand why they need to refuse to take up arms against their fellow humans and strive for our lives rather than taking them with the flick of a finger on a trigger. It is our only hope at this point. When we stop doing the bidding of the destroyers for food and shelter, we will have a chance at changing this.

My 5 cents.

[bemildred]

3. Like all self-serving frauds, they get real sanctimonious when they are exposed. nt

[starroute]

4. The CIA also sabotaged Jimmy Carter

Robert Parry is the go-to guy for that story.

http://consortiumnews.com/2013/08/26/a-cia-hand-in-an-american-coup/

A CIA Hand in an American ‘Coup’?
August 26, 2013

By Robert Parry

It has taken six decades for the CIA to formally acknowledge that it undertook a coup against Iran’s elected government in 1953, but the spy agency might never concede that some of its officers joined in a political strike against a sitting U.S. president in 1980, yet that is what the evidence now indicates. . . .

The apparent 1980 plot to undermine Carter by sabotaging his negotiations with Iran over the fate of 52 American hostages would have been pulled off by rogue CIA officers collaborating with the Republican presidential campaign of Ronald Reagan (and his running mate George H.W. Bush), without the knowledge of Carter and CIA Director Stansfield Turner.

It would have been the work of what legendary CIA officer Miles Copeland described to me as “the CIA within the CIA,” the inner-most circle of powerful intelligence figures who felt they understood the strategic needs of the United States better than its elected leaders. These national security insiders believed Carter’s starry-eyed faith in American democratic ideals represented a grave threat to the nation. . . .

Israel’s Likud government of Menachem Begin was livid with Carter over the Camp David Accords in which Israel had been pressured to return the Sinai to Egypt. ... So, according to accounts from a variety of participants and witnesses, the 1980 “October Surprise” dirty trick against Carter represented a joint covert operation by senior Republicans (including former CIA Director George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s vice-presidential running mate), high-level CIA officers (though not its Carter-appointed leadership), politically well-connected private U.S. citizens and Israeli intelligence officers assigned by Prime Minister Begin.

[siligut]

5. This answers the question some naive people posed as to why Snowden left the USA.

The position was "If he didn't believe he did anything wrong, why did he feel he had to leave?". The answer is that these people in the Intelligence Community don't care about what is right or wrong, they have a sweet set-up and Snowden wants to ruin it for them.

[babylonsister]

6. Maybe they honestly think he's a traitor.

I by no means agree with their solution to what they believe, but he just might have made their jobs tougher by releasing so much info.

[siligut]

9. Even when the rules are well defined, deviants find ways to rationalize their thinking/behavior.

Of course he made their jobs tougher, there is no way to avoid it, but he did what he had to.

[librechik]

7. "forget the trial and just hang him" Yeah, that's the attitude they have

about all of us. Bastards. Did they even read the Constitution they took an oath to? Oh, they have their own expurgated version in their heads when they do that.

[hunter]

8. I had a job and a boss... let me tell a fictionalized story...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1018556749#post6

After that, never again!

[siligut]

10. MFM would have loved the "invisible" flasher coat

Were you really in Military Intelligence? That would kind of explain things. Otherwise the idea of posting MFM threads arbitrarily into other threads is hilarious . . . but Admin might think we are taking the tribute too far.

[hunter]

12. There is no "Intelligence" Community. Trust me.

My favorite movie is Brazil. 1984 didn't happen.

I could tell you the exact date I became a believer in complete government transparency, "top secret" and everything else. But I won't.





No big deal. I once wrote some don't-ask-don't-tell proprietary software. My boss sold it to the MIC.

Boss bought a house within walking distance of the beach. I got a few hundred dollars mad money and graduated without student debt thanks to that, my mom, and crazy grandma too.

Quit job, burned bridges, my name down the memory hole.

I took job as urban school science teacher, met my wife, now living happily ever after (more or less) and occasionally writing Open Source software. I never want to be burned again.

That is all.

[siligut]

13. It has always been my theory that some loose associations only appear to be so

Mainly because the observer hasn't enough knowledge to make the connections or has been paid not to. It takes a certain predatory mindset to function well within the MIC.

[OnyxCollie]

11. Story Time!

Inside the NSA’s Domestic Surveillance Apparatus: Whistleblower William Binney Speaks Out
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/6/10/inside_the_nsas_domestic_surveillance_apparatus_whistleblower_william_binney_speaks_out

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, it was pretty hard for me to believe that my agency, that I had supported for so many years, and the country, of course, and the laws that we had, including the USSID 18 that has—which was our guiding documentation internally in NSA about not spying on U.S. citizens—when they started doing that after 9/11, it was just hard for me to believe they did it, but it—the evidence—I mean, I had direct evidence that they were doing it, so I just couldn’t—I couldn’t stay there. I couldn’t be a party to that. And what I did after that was tried—I went to the intelligence committees first to try to get them alerted to it, so they would try—address it. I mean, their responsibility was to prevent the intelligence community from spying on U.S. citizens, based on the FISA laws. And after that, when that didn’t work, I even tried, with Diane Roark and others, to address this issue to the Chief Justice Rehnquist of the Supreme Court. But we weren’t able to do that. And so, eventually, I tried the—as well as Kirk Wiebe and I, we both tried to get to the Department of Justice inspector general’s office and alert them to this and say there are ways to do it without violating all the U.S. citizens’ privacy. But that wasn’t what the government wanted to do. I mean, when Qwest, the CEO of Qwest, was approached in February of 2001—that was before 9/11—to give over customer data, it was all—it was still targeting domestic spying, and that was call records they were trying to get from that. So, the—

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about that for a moment, Bill, the former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio, the only head of a communications company to—the only head of a company to demand a court order or approval under FISA.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Yes, and the consequence for him was they targeted him, and now he’s in prison. So, I mean, they succeeded in prosecuting him. But what it told me was that the intent from the beginning was to do domestic spying, accumulating information and knowledge about the U.S.—the entire U.S. population. So I thought of that as a J. Edgar Hoover on super steroids, you know? It wasn’t that he had information and knowledge to leverage just the Congress. You have information and knowledge to leverage everyone, judges included, in the country. So, that’s why I got so concerned. I tried to work internally in the government to get people to do something about it, but that whole process failed. So what it did was it alerted them to what I was doing, and they targeted me with the FBI, and they attempted to falsely prosecute me. Fortunately, I was able to get evidence of malicious prosecution every time, so they finally backed off trying to prosecute me.

AMY GOODMAN: If you would briefly, though I don’t like to have you relive this, tell us what actually happened to you, with the FBI raiding your home.

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, they came in, and there were like 12 FBI agents with their guns drawn, and came in. My son opened the door, let them in, and they pushed him out of the way at gunpoint. And they came upstairs to where my wife was getting dressed, and I was in the shower, and they were pointing guns at her, and then they—one of the agents came into the shower and pointed a gun directly at me, at my head, and of course pulled me out of the shower. So I had a towel, at least, to wrap around, but—so that’s what they did.

And then they took me out and interrogated me on the back porch. And when they did that, they tried to get me—they said they wanted me to tell them something that would be—implicate someone in a crime. And I said, well, I didn’t—I thought they were talking about someone other than the President Bush, Dick Cheney and Hayden and Tenet, so I said I didn’t really know about anything. And they said they thought I was lying. Well, at that point, "OK," I said, "I’ll tell you about the crime I know about," and that was that Hayden, Tenet, George Bush, Dick Cheney, they conspired to subvert the Constitution and the constitutional process of checks and balances, and here’s how they did it. And I talked about program Stellar Wind, all the data coming in, about how they managed to graph it and also how they bypassed the courts. They didn’t tell the courts about this program, and they didn’t solicit any approval from the courts. And they also only told four people initially in Congress, that were the—they were the chiefs and deputies of the Intelligence Committee. That was on the House. That was Porter Goss and Nancy Pelosi. I don’t remember the Senate side. But when you do that and—I mean, Senator Rockefeller, when he got briefed into those programs in 2003, said he wasn’t capable of understanding any of it, because he wasn’t—he wasn’t a technician, he wasn’t a lawyer, so he couldn’t do anything about it. That was in his handwritten note to Dick Cheney. So, I mean, it was clear they were doing something that was unconstitutional and against any number of laws that existed at the time.

[riderinthestorm]

14. Bookmarked for those who think Snowden was "safe" to stay here

Or that he was a "coward" for NOT staying here...

Scary attitudes

“His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas Intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”

[TheKentuckian]

15. Fine, but I hope you understand why absolutely zero political cover is acceptable anyway.

Such malignancy cannot be allowed to fester or to be accepted.

This is what "make me do it" means, to create a political environment where no other action is possible without significant risk of destroying the entire game.

If anyone actually wants to help the people, their best friend is relentless pressure and biggest handcuffs are silence, tolerance, apathy, acceptance, mass rationalizations, and unwavering support.

There is no reason to make any concessions with folks who cannot or will not say no. All the pressure comes from regressives, meaning there is no reason to do anything but edge regressive. Worse, quiet or even kicking and screaming bloody murder tolerant acceptance sets the slipslide toward authoritarianism sets that swallowed out of unconditional love or whatever the rationale sets such as effectively the most progressive position available in the functional political spectrum.

If the situation is anything like what you describe the only way to get anymore leash is to keep pulling hard enough that if slack is not given, the illusion of democracy cannot be maintained.

[Savannahmann]

16. I give it another year, perhaps two.

Then a majority of the people will have realized the real enemy are those in our own Intelligence Agencies. Then watch out.

[rgbecker]

17. I have friends who are "Rules are rules" people and to listen to them,

otherwise seemingly friendly folks, they are incensed with Snowden's actions and start sounding like nut cases.

Basically they feel they need to defend the United States Government what ever that government does, meanwhile bitching that their taxes are too high.

[riderinthestorm]

18. pm kick. nt