06 May 2006

New spy boss a Cheney tool

This is frightening news:

The new CIA director will be a secretive henchman of Dick Cheney who's behind the illegal spying on millions of Americans.

Late Friday night, word leaked out that Gen. Michael Hayden is the White House choice to take over CIA duties from suddenly-fired spook insider Porter Goss.

Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force general, was the "human face" of the National Security Agency's criminal spying on Americans that actually began before the convenient 9/11 attacks.

Accused in July 2001 of using the NSA to spy on millions of Americans, Hayden made the bizarre claim that everything was fine because the White House and Pentagon held the reins.

"We aren't off the leash, so to speak, guarding ourselves. We have a body of oversight within the executive branch, in the Department of Defense, in the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board."

Hayden made the claims on the TV show Nightline back in the summer of 2001.

When the latest NSA spying scandal made the news in January, Hayden was sarcastically dismissive of the concerns of Americans.

In 2005, he was moved from the "highest ranking military intelligence officer in the U.S. military" to the new post known as "principal deputy director of national intelligence."

That post was created by U.S. supervillain John Negroponte, who just last year was made "the nation's first director of national intelligence," with Hayden as his second-in-command.

(Some of the many recent rumors about Porter Goss' sudden shameful resignation as head of the CIA say that Negroponte is holding the axe.)

A lifelong spook operating under cover of an Air Force uniform, Hayden was put in charge of NSA -- known as "No Such Agency" for much of its cryptic history -- by none other than Bill Clinton.

Clinton had authorized the first attempt at constant electronic surveillance of Americans, a repugnant project called Echelon that was launched in concert with his police-state comrade Tony Blair.

01 May 2006

Conspiracy theories

I believe every word of this, and I'm not paranoid. However, I believe every word of this, too.

I don't trust the government to run a competent investigation (qv: Warren Report), or to execute a competent conspiracy/coverup on the scale of the Kennedy assassination, Area 51, etc.

That doesn't mean that there aren't certainly things that are being hidden to manipulate us. More careful sleuthing is needed to uncover the truth.

I definitely agree that Bush/Cheney were anticipating 9/11:

The Busheviks were forewarned ("Bin Laden determined to strike in the US"), but they expected attacks on the scale of the USS Cole and the African embassies: perhaps a few dozen casualties -- "acceptable." They did not take countermeasures because they saw a strategic advantage in such a "mini-Pearl Harbor." For such a purpose, the attack on The Pentagon would suffice. They did not expect the destruction of the World Trade Center. However, after 9/11 the die was cast, and so they eagerly launched their "war on terror," along with the policy outrages that were to follow: the USA PATRIOT ACT, Abu Ghraib, Gitmo. The Iraq War, we now know from Richard Clarke and the Downing Street memos, was on the drawing boards long before 9/11, awaiting just such an event to set it in motion.

In any decent country there would be blood in the streets over this...