The Real Terrorists or Big Brother is Watching You

Sometimes it is nice look at news that makes you think and for that I invariably turn to 'Democracy Now' .1 Today, I watched Amy Goodman interview James Bamford who has written; "The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the eavesdropping on America." If you don't want to read the book, perhaps you should, at least, follow the interview at http://www.democracynow.org/. However, let me begin by briefly putting you in the picture as to what the NSA is.
The NSA is America's most powerful but least visable spy agency. It is based outside Baltimore on the road to Washington in a place called Fort Meade and it is so secret you cannot even contact them by phone. No, you don't phone them, they listen to you.2 Oh and if James Bamford is right, they certainly do eavesdrop with the capability to surveil just about every type of communication you can think of. Indeed, they are so good at their job that as early as December 1999, while monitoring Bin Laden's base in Yemen, they even picked up on the first clues that the 9/11 bombings were being planned and yet, somewhere, along the line they sort of just lost, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the conspirators they were shadowing and strangely enough so did the CIA and this weird story has an even whackier ending because there they were, five of the hijackers living in a motel right outside the gates of the NSA.3 Now am I insuating something here? No, of course, not, even although an FBI agent, who was attached to the CIA, was prevented by the CIA from informing his agency that Khalid al-Mihdhar had a visa for the United States when he was being tracked in Malaysia in January, 2000.4 The mind boggles and where would a suspected terrorist with a visa for the United States be going? Yet somehow the CIA and the NSA didn't pick up on him, not even when he was shopping in the same supermarket, drinking his coffee in the same Starbucks and eating his dinner in the same restaurant as some of the 38,000 NSA employees.
However, enough of my conspiracy theories, let us move onto after 9/11 and there was Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden, Director, National Security Agency/Chief, Central Security Service a wee bit peeved at letting the terrorists slip through his fingers and, while James Comey at the Department of Justice, the Attorney General John Ashcroft and the FBI's Robert Müller III sort of stood up to Dick Cheney when Dick wanted to extend his warrentless and useless evesdropping on American citizens, Michael sort of took a step back and now we have NSA "secret rooms" installed inside major American telecommunication companies such as the AT&T operation at Bridgetown, Missouri. Now, just imagine you have a wee job as a "listener in" at the NSA and there you are listening in to all this private, irrelevant stuff, "nudge, nudge"; right you've got it, you are going to have wee jokes with your colleagues about other peoples' "private" stuff and, wait for it, .... this private stuff is actually tanscribed and kept on record.5 Well, there are not a lot of people out there who are really going to shake the system and get away with it, are there? No big changes with Obama then and if there were going to be, we would probably have heard his "little secret" a long time ago and I am surprised not to hear that Mullah Omar likes a wee glass of whisky from time to time? Joking aside though, more immediate and more important, however, are the allegations made by two ex-NSA employees, the former Military Intelligence Sergeant Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk, a Linguist, and their accusations that action is instigated by the NSA on information supplied by people who are not qualified. Murfee in particular mentions how a Linguist with little more than a year's training in classical Arabic might not understand properly what he is hearing but supply information that could lead to a number of people dying in Iraq.6 The evidence would seem to suggest that big brother is not only watching us but that he is killing us indiscriminately. "The indiscriminent killing of innocent people"; could this be an accurate definition of "terrorism".
1 http://www.democracynow.org/
2 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/2033791.stm
3 Ibid
4 http://visibility911.com/jongold/?p=699
5 http://www.democracynow.org/2008/10/14/james_bamford_the_shadow_factory_the
6 Ibid