Is NSA Spying Really About Blackmail?

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From: Fern...@aol.com
Sent: Saturday, November 9, 2013 8:08:50 PM
Subject:  Is NSA Spying Really About Blackmail?

 

Is NSA Spying Really About Blackmail?
CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names
http://tinyurl.com/ksthary

 

... If the NSA is spying on foreign leaders so widely and
 thoroughly, actually recording the conversations, not just
the numbers being called, and submitting the recordings
to keyword searches, isn’t it likely doing the same thing
to leaders in the US? And if it is possible to imagine that
the NSA is enabling the blackmailing of foreign leaders,
isn’t it equally possible that the same thing is going on
domestically?

 

.... Clapper indeed was forced to admit that he lied to
Congress — and right there we have prima facie evidence
that the NSA has been blackmailing members of Congress,
or at least that the members of Congress think they are
vulnerable to blackmail. This is because despite Clapper’s
outrageous offense of lying to the Congress about his
agency’s massive spying program, not one member of either
Senate or House, or of the two Congressional Intelligence
Committees, has called for a contempt resolution against him.

 

How can that be? Members of Congress routinely cite or
threaten to cite sports figures for contempt of Congress for
lying to senators or representatives about their steroid use,
 and yet when the head of the nation’s spying organization
network lies about an unprecedentedly huge spying operation,
 they just let it pass?

 

There has to be a reason for such cowardice in the face of
such an institutional insult.

 

... (Recall that it was Sen. Morse (D-OR) who, along with
Sen. Ernest Gruening (D-AK), voted against the Gulf of Tonkin
resolution which launched the US into a massive full-scale war
in Indochina. (Apropos of this issue of blackmail, after Morse
voted against the fraudulent Tonkin Resolution, and as he
continued his vocal opposition to the Vietnam War, it was later
 learned that President Lyndon Johnson ordered the FBI to
surveil the senator in an effort to dig up information that could be
used to silence him or defeat him politically.).

 

I would argue that it is almost a certainty that the NSA spying
on foreign leaders is just the tip of the political spying iceberg,
and that the real horror is that it is spying on domestic politicians,
 and probably dropping hints to make it clear that it is in a
position to blackmail them. On behalf of whom the NSA is acting
is the question. Ordinarily one might assume it would be on behalf
of the President and the White House, as was the case during
President Johnson’s tenure. But in the present era, it may be that
there are others who are in charge. This might explain the
phenomenal weakness and lack of political will and courage of the
current president. President Obama surely knows that the voters
who elected him want an aggressive job creation program, want
an end to foreign wars and a scaled down military, want a
break-up of the big banks, and want national health care, not an
insurance-industry-run Affordable (sic) Care Act that compels
them to buy insurance from a private company, and that allows
insurers to continue to suck profits out of the system. He knows
 too that the public wants not cuts in Social Security and Medicare,
but expansions of both programs and improvements in benefits.
Why would the president undermine his own legacy and the future
prospects of his own party by failing to press for any of these issues?
Why would he continually talk about a “Grand Bargain” that would
involve cutting benefits to the poor and the elderly — two bulwarks
of the Democratic Party’s majority.

 

Could it be that he too is afraid of blackmail, or that has he already
been successfully blackmailed?

 

... And by the way, another NSA whistleblower, Russell Tice, has
said that he was aware while at the NSA, that the agency, back in
2004, was spying on Barack Obama, then just a Democratic
Senate candidate from Chicago. Besides, even if members of
Congress and judges on the federal bench just think they’re being
spied on and are thus vulnerable to blackmail, they are not likely
 to step out of line and vote or rule the wrong way.

 

The only remaining question is who is behind all this spying and
potential blackmail? Is the NSA itself a rogue operator acting to
protect and expand its own power? Perhaps, but more likely, I
would guess, is that some larger “permanent government”
composed of the heads of key corporate interests — perhaps
key leaders of the financial and the military/intelligence sectors
and a few other key industries like the oil companies — is
pulling the strings.

 

Maybe Snowden has the answer to this question. If not, we’ll just
have to wait for the next courageous whistleblower to come forward.

 

Entire article at: http://tinyurl.com/ksthary

 

* * * Easy email action to oppose a bill that seeks to legalize some
of the worst forms of NSA surveillance.
Add your voice: https://eff.org/r.5chR


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