Harman, AIPAC and NSA Wiretaps - Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed? »
Posted By hyperbola 8 months ago in Political NewsFor some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.
There has been speculation on both the left and the right, and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been blackmailing key members of the Congressional leadership, most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National Security Agency (NSA).
.... the NSA in 2006 recorded Rep. Harman negotiating with an alleged Israeli agent about helping Israel win a reduction in the espionage charges filed by the US in 2005 against two members of the AIPAC lobby accused of providing US intelligence information to the Israeli government. .... Attorney General Alberto Gonzales subsequently intervened with the FBI to prevent any prosecution of Harman, a key member of Congress on whom the administration was relying to help it persuade the NY Times to withhold its NSA wiretapping exposé until after the 2006 election. In the event, Rep. Harman did later make calls to a Times editor, the paper did hold its story until after the election, and Harman later was a leading backer of the administration’s controversial (and illegal) NSA spying program. ...
There are several serious issues here. One is the extraordinary glimpse it offers into the extent to which Israel has penetrated the centers of power in Washington. It is illegal for foreign governments to directly lobby and to offer to arrange financial contributions for members of the US government, but here, clearly, Israeli agents were doing just that. The role of AIPAC as a front for the Israeli government in Washington, as exposed here, is simply stomach-turning, and should make it a toxic organization to politicians. ...
A second issue is the NSA’s spying activities themselves..... Back in 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in direct response to the disclosure during the Watergate hearings and subsequent investigations that the Nixon Administration had been using the NSA to conduct illegal monitoring of the communications of anti-war activists, and of members of Congress.
Now that we have seen proof that the Bush administration was not above using its NSA-acquired knowledge to pressure a member of Congress, it becomes absolutely essential that Congress and the Justice Department investigate to see whether other members of Congress were also victims of agency spying, and whether others besides Rep. Harman were similarly extorted or otherwise compromised.
The American public can, at this point, have zero confidence in the integrity of the Congress or of their own representatives, knowing that politicians and government officials may be acting not in the public interest but rather under duress in the interest of those who control the National Security Agency. We can have zero confidence either in the integrity of the president, who likewise may well have been compromised by NSA surveillance conducted on him before he became president.
The only possible position for the public to adopt as of today is to be suspicious of any politician who opposes a full and public investigation into the NSA’s seven-year-long campaign of sweeping, warrantless electronic eavesdropping, since opposition to such an investigation, in the wake of the Harman episode, could well be an indication that the political figure in question is afraid she or he has been monitored, or worse, that she or he has been threatened by those who have the records.
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hyperbola
Military brat (14th generation American) with unassuaged wanderlust. By age 11, schools in four states and three foreign countries (in 3 languages). Left home at ...
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yayatuleiComment removed: Hard Banned
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bgamall8 months ago
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Harman also tried to say those opposed to 9/11 were guilty of hate speech. My natural father was Jewish (I am adopted) and I am embarrassed for the descendents of the Jews. I believe this woman is controlled by some unsavory characters. The US has to set her own foreign policy in her own national interest. http://hubpages.com/hub/george-bush-legacy
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rally-monkeyComment removed: Abusive1 Reply
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bgamall8 months ago
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I am not anti semite. I am anti neocon, anti empire building, anti Sarah Palin, anti Iraq Oil War. I am not anti semite. You guys need to study a little more regarding what is going on in the world. The neocons would dump their mothers overboard if it were helpful in furthering their empire. Israel should realize that they were a bad group for Israel to support. Neocons are hated in America. They have overly influenced politicians like Harman. If Israel herself feels guilty about what the neocons have done against Jewish law, for example, they need to speak up. The neocons are amoral starting with their intellectual father, Leo Strauss.
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The neocons want to provoke Russia and get us all into WW3. How does that help Israel who I support? In NO WAY!-
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hyperbola8 months ago
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Isn't it ironic that we now have neocons (zioncons) telling Americans that they have to adopt Hitler's ideology!
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Leo Strauss And His Three Great Awful Truths
In the early part of the 20th Century, a young college student in Germany came under the sway of Carl Schmidt, who served in various professorial posts in German universities before becoming the political advisor to Adolf Hitler. The young protoge was Leo Strauss, who absorbed much of what the Nazi theoretician had to say, particularly with regards to the ineffectiveness of democracy and uselessness and corruption of democratic institutions, and why governance by a powerful, even dictatorial executive is so superior a form of government. Schmidt was the primary political influence on Adolf Hitler and guided much, if not most of Hitler's political program. And so impressed was Schmidt with his young protoge, that he eventually arranged for him to become an adjunct professor at the University of Chicago (Strauss' biographers routinely claim that Strauss was a Jewish refugee, escaping Nazi tyranny - a claim that is patently false), where he taught other subjects for many years while writing on the subject of political theory, and organizing a coterie of carefully selected and highly political students, whose political philosophy as guided by Strauss, has become known as "Neo-conservatism." As evidence of just how successful Strauss was in poisoning the minds of his young protoges, many of those students have gone on to become high officials in the administration of George W. Bush, Jr. Familiar names, such as John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, David Wurmser, Richard Perle and several other members of the Bush administration were part of this group. A few others that were never brought into the Bush administration have become quite influential while remaining outside it. Two of the most influential are William Kristol and Norm Podhoretz....
http://www.bidstrup.com/great-awful-truths.htm
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calitennflo8 months ago
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No...we are all being Cabaled by the NSC...the essence of or pertaining to the equal measure between two courts. KKK...or the pentagon...the same thing. It's a civil matter about slavery.
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So be cool and warm to their hot and cold...they were biblically foretold....Satan's synagogue...carelessness always leads to this end. The profit of untruth...causes civil war. The war between the children of light and the children of darkness...armageddon.
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