— by Polydamas
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who is officially listed as an Independent but describes himself as a democratic socialist, managed to grab some headlines when he recently sent a short letter to National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander. On January 3, 2014, Senator Sanders wanted to know if the National Security Agency spied on Congress. (http://bit.ly/1gz0yEB). “Has the NSA spied, or is the NSA currently spying, on members of Congress or other American elected officials?” the letter asked.
Unsurprisingly, the response from the NSA was opaque. On January 4, 2014, CNN reported the response “NSA’s authorities to collect signals intelligence data include procedures that protect the privacy of U.S. persons. Such protections are built into and cut across the entire process. Members of Congress have the same privacy protections as all U.S. persons.” (http://cnn.it/1d8dm5W).
The CNN story had a very curious headline “NSA Won’t Say Whether It Spies on Congress.” The NSA’s response above makes clear that the answer is affirmative. CNN’s spin was an aspirational, equal rights message, “Congress is just like everyone else. That’s the message the National Security Agency has for Sen. Bernie Sanders.”
We here at The Cassandra Times were far more interested to read further down in the CNN story that Attorney General Eric Holder reportedly told Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL) at the congressional hearing last summer, that “the NSA had no ‘intent’ to spy on Congress, but the issue was better discussed in private.” If the NSA truly treats Congress and the American people equally, as the it now claims, why would it have “no intent” to spy on Congress?
In the words of “Alice in Wonderland,” the story only gets “curioser and curioser.” Back on August 15, 2013, when the Edward Snowden story first broke out, the Washington Post reported that about an internal NSA audit. (http://wapo.st/19fFB1V). The May 2012 audit found that, in 2008, the NSA intercepted “’large number’ of calls placed from Washington when a programming error confused the U.S. area code 202 for 20, the international dialing code for Egypt, according to a “quality assurance” review that was not distributed to the NSA’s oversight staff.”
This revelation that the NSA listened to a large number of telephone calls placed from Washington during the 2008 election year means that members of the NSA bureaucracy knew very well the intimate details of both presidential campaigns of Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) and Senator John McCain (R-AZ). A large number of telephone calls from the 202 area code during an election year is a treasure trove of blackmail material.
We here at The Cassandra Times believe that the Obama administration received from the NSA the same level of cooperation that was provided by the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS audited and harassed ‘Tea Party’ members and conservative tax-exempt organizations and released their confidential financial and tax information to liberal groups. With its vast capabilities, the NSA rendered even greater services to the Obama administration. It is our belief that the FBI files that then-First Lady Hilary Clinton and her henchman Craig Livingstone possessed in 1993 allowed the administration of her husband Bill Clinton to select the ineffectual Senator Bob Dole as his Republican opponent in 1996 for an easy re-election. The blackmail material was used to keep Democrats in line and to intimidate Republicans during the Monica Lewinsky impeachment so as to allow Bill Clinton to avoid removal from office.
The FBI files in 1993 in the hands of Bill and Hilary Clinton made the third-rate burglary that was President Richard Nixon’s Watergate caper seem like chump change. What the NSA knows about the private lives of members of Congress would allow the ambitious and the unscrupulous to operate with impunity and to manipulate Senators and Congress Representatives like puppets on a string. It leads us at The Cassandra Times to sincerely doubt that the 2008 and 2012 were free elections as well as to doubt that there will be another free election in our lifetimes.
