| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
| 1 | 3 | 6 | 9 | 12 |
|
These illegal actions were all part of a program called COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence
PROgram). It’s worth knowing more about that because it shows how information of the sort the NSA is
collecting now is used for political and agency purposes. The other day on January 17, 2014, President
Obama assured us that no illegalities and abuses had been revealed by Edward Snowden. Again, that’s an
absurd statement since the entire collection program as documented so far is a massive abuse of the
Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. Congress gave it some fig leaves of legality (though not
constitutionality) by giving telephone companies immunity for handing over all the data on telephone
calls to the government. But really, that had no shred of legality or constitutionality, even now.
In 2008, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) amendments, which Obama signed into
law, gave companies immunity. This law definitely should be repealed and should be found
unconstitutional if it comes up in the courts. So far, some cases have gone to the circuit courts, even to the
Supreme Court, on the violation of constitutional rights by this surveillance. They have been dismissed by
the courts on the grounds that the people complaining did not have standing because they could not prove
that they themselves had been overheard. Well, that argument has just gone by the wayside, because it
turns out that everyone is overheard. You’re all overheard, and you all have standing, in effect, and there
are class action suits going ahead on this. We’ll see where they go. But as I said, these mass warrants
were revealed by Snowden. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) was established in 1978
as a result of the Church Committee (the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activities) led by Senator Frank Church and as a result of the revelations that
came from this burglary—an act of nonviolent civil disobedience. And, actually, also by what came out of
my trial when I was found to have been overheard without warrant a number of times (despite the FBI
having sworn several times in court that there was no such overhearing).
When it came out that there had in fact been overhearing, and the judge asked for the evidence of
it to see if it had affected the trial, the FBI could not find the records. They had been kept out of the
records by the order of J. Edgar Hoover, and particularly by President Nixon, because they were
manifestly illegal. Now, what was he overhearing? It was on a home phone of a deputy to Henry
Kissinger, the assistant to the president for national security, that I was overheard. I had worked for
Kissinger at the beginning of the administration, writing options on Vietnam, which was the basis for
Kissinger’s first presentation to the National Security Council (NSC) in 1969. The reason his deputy
Morton Halperin’s phone was being tapped was that there had been a leak of the fact that we were
bombing Cambodia (supposedly with which we were not at war) for some time. And that leak led Nixon
and Kissinger to be very concerned that someone was telling the truth about this secret operation: that we
were at war with a country that, as far as the public knew, we were not at war with. We were bombing
them on a large scale. So to find that out, they listened to all the NSC aides including Halperin. I was
1
95 | Juniata Voices
Page
Quick Jump
|