By Jim Fetzer and PressTV
"Snowden is not revealing information that places the national security of the nation at stake but information revealing the NSA has instead been tracking enemies of the national security state."
The most obvious responses to Edward Snowden's revelations that the NSA has been conducting massive and all-pervasive surveillance of the American people--and, indeed, of targeted populations abroad--have come from those, such as Sens. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsay Graham (R-SC), who maintain that he is placing the national security of the United States at risk.There is no evidence that that is the case, where the very idea that the world's greatest spying agency would attempt to have him prosecuted for espionage is at least faintly absurd.
Other less-familiar sources have taken the opposite tact by asserting that, since everything he has revealed was "already known", his integrity and sincerity are in doubt, where he may actually be some kind of dupe or double-agent. The Anti-New York Times, for example, contends that he cannot have abandoned his $200,000 a year salary, his girl friend and his life to tell the world such familiar information, which makes his actions highly suspicious from the opposite side of the spectrum.
That strikes me as very odd, since no one I know has ever taken for granted that the NSA had such an all-encompassing surveillance program in place, especially one that vacuums up our phone calls, our emails, our financial transactions and, no doubt, our medical records as well. A more intriguing proposal has come from Jon Rappoport, "Ed Snowden, NSA, and fairy tales a child could see through", who considers the situation to be completely preposterous:
Let’s see. NSA is the most awesome spying agency ever devised in this world. If you cross the street in Podunk, Anywhere, USA, to buy an ice cream soda, on a Tuesday afternoon in July, they know.
They know if you sit at the counter and drink that soda or take it and move to the only table in the store. They know if you lick the foam from the top of the glass with your tongue or pick the foam with your straw and then lick it.They know if you keep the receipt for the soda or leave it on the counter.
They know whether you’re wearing shoes or sneakers. They know the brand of your underwear. They know your shaving cream, and precisely which container it came out of.
But this agency, with all its vast power and its dollars…
Can’t track one of its own, a man who came to work every day, a man who made up a story about needing treatment in Hong Kong for epilepsy and then skipped the country.Just can’t find him.
Rappoport believes that these revelations come from the CIA, which is engaged in a "turf war" with the NSA, resenting that the NSA has been granted funding at the expense of the CIA, for which it is now engaged in retaliation by embarrassing it.None of those who question Snowden's actions, however, are responding to the implicit distinction that his revelations have accented between "national security", on the one hand, and "the national security state", on the other.
The targets the NSA has been focusing upon--such as veterans, Constitutionalists, Ron Paul supporters, NRA members and 9/11 Truthers--do not pose any threat to the national security of the United States. What they pose is a threat to the imposition of a fascist military/police state of the kind the world has seen with The Fourth Reich and the former Soviet Union, where the NSA and DHS are two sides of the same fascistic coin.
The situation appears to be dire, as I have sought to explain here. We must take appropriate measures--which including arming ourselves for the conflict to come--by confronting the grim reality that his revelations have exposed. His true motivation was displayed when he said he was doing this because "I am an American"!
Why Edward Snowden is an American hero
by Dr. James Fetzer
"Edward Snowden is both an American and an international hero for speaking out against tyranny and the conversion of America into a fascist state. He deserves commendation, not prosecution."The espionage charges against Edward Snowden for informing the American people and the world that the NSA has been conducting the most massive spying operation in history are completely baseless and absurd.
Snowden is not revealing information that places the national security of the nation at stake but information revealing the NSA has instead been tracking enemies of the national security state.
Those who seem to be the real targets of this surveillance program include veterans, Constitutionalists, NRA members, 9/11 Truthers, Ron Paul supporters, and any one else who might have both the courage, the integrity and the ability to resist the imposition of a new military police state under DHS. The latest figures about the “Main Core” list of political dissidents stands at around 8,000,000 today.
No domestic terrorist threat
We know from a report released by a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Intelligence on 3 October 2012 that, after surveying 680 “fusion center” reports gathered from 2009-2010, it had discovered that there were no indications of any terrorist activity: NONE. ZILCH. NADA. NOT ONE! Yet this astounding data has yet to be broadcast or published by ABC, NBC, CBS, or CNN.
This sample, which was obtained under conditions that insured if any domestic terrorist activity had been taking place it would have been revealed, supports the statistical extrapolation that domestic terrorist activity in the United States is virtually non-existent.
It also explains why DHS and the FBI have had to fabricate phony events such as those at Sandy Hook and the Boston bombing, which were staged.
Unwarranted justifications
Even the claim by General Alexander, the head of the NSA, that this program had foiled 50 terrorist plots appears to be hokum. Ron Paul, for example, explained that it was an ad hoc exaggeration and that it included some 40 trivial events that were alleged to have occurred not in the United States but abroad and a story of an attempt to blow up Wall Street that has all the signs of another FBI fabricated event.
So the existence of a bona-fide domestic terrorist threat appears to be a cover-story to justify the most massive spying ever undertaking using enormous computer capabilities to accumulate information on our emails, our phone calls, our financial transactions and even (no doubt) our medical records. They want to know everything there is to know about each and every one of us to promote their own agenda.
DHS preparing for civil war
Everyone must know by now that DHS has acquired 2 billion rounds of .40 caliber hollow-point ammunition, which is not ever permissible in combat under the Hague Convention of 1899.
It has also obtained 2,700 light tanks of the kind deployed in Boston (in violation of Posse Comitatus) and 7,000 assault weapons (of the kind that gun control legislation has been proposed to ban). They are preparing for war.
DHS has even made special arrangements with funeral homes and mortuaries to handle “an excess of casualties” should hospitals and emergency care facilities be overwhelmed.
This can only be because the government is planning to take out or otherwise “neutralize” the enemies of the state that are being identified by means of its massive surveillance program, which Edward Snowden has revealed to us all.
(1) Violation of the 4th amendment
The first problem with this program is that blatantly violates the 4th amendment’s guarantee to freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures and a history of lower court decisions decreeing the right of citizens to privacy.
Rand Paul has spoken out eloquently about this and Snowden appears to have secret FISA court decisions that rule against the legality of the program that Obama is trying to defend.
Most Americans and others worldwide naively assume that the NSA scandal represents an excess of zeal in attempting to track down domestic terrorists who want to attack targets in America.
What they do not appreciate is that this has nothing to do with national security and everything to do with the national security state. They are not the same. From the perspective of DHS, veterans are potential terrorists.
(2) Potential for blackmail and manipulation
Those who say, “I have nothing to hide”, are being extremely naïve, because this surveillance program is complete. It was not designated as “Total Information Awareness” for nothing when first introduced by Admiral Poindexter.
The public outcry led to its re-designation as “Terrorist Information Awareness”, but that did not mean that anything had changed. The NSA wants to know everything about everyone so it can selectively use the information to control or modify our actions.
The use for the purpose of political blackmail ought to be obvious to anyone who knows, for example, that J. Edgar Hoover maintained sex dossiers on the members of Congress, while the Mafia kept one on him.
Relationships with girlfriends and mistresses, watching porn or having had an abortion are illustrations of the kinds of information that could be used to manipulate Senators, Presidents or the Courts.
(3) Surveillance programs privatized
Practically no one in the mass media has observed that Snowden had access to these records because he was working for a private firm, Booz Allen, which gave him opportunities to obtain data that a normal government program would not have allowed.
And most of our security and surveillance programs are run by Israeli companies, which is one of the mechanisms by which it controls our leaders.
When the US Senate voted 99-0 to support Israel should it decide to attack Iran in its own self-defense without adding that that would have to be in accordance with international law, it thereby violated not only the UN Charter but the US Constitution, which grants treaties, such as ours with the UN, the same status under the Constitution as the Constitution itself. It was a completely unjustifiable act given that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. But it was also an act of treason.
Real traitors
When Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) declares that the revelations by Edward Snowden are “not going to play out well for the national security interests of the United States”, therefore, she is not talking about the interests of the American people, who are entitled to have their privacy preserved and to be safe-guarded from blackmail and embarrassment. There is no legitimate national security interest that could not be better served by traditional procedures with warrants.
When Sen. Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), and (the usual suspects) Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham condemn Snowden for treason, they themselves are the ones who are violating the Constitution, their oaths of office and betraying the American people.
Edward Snowden is an American and international hero for speaking out against tyranny and the conversion of America into a fascist state. He deserves commendation, not prosecution.
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