Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11

January 14th, 2006 at 15:43 Björn Hallberg

Which makes total sense once you realize that the systems also engineered the events of 9/11 to cause the system wide perturbations and casus belli necessary to fuel the transition. Just like the draconian patriot law, a brick of a legislation, turned up after 9/11 like it had been penned long ago, and saved for when the time was right. Jason Leopold notes that

Truthout - The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document.

The NSA’s vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups.

So that maims any sort of security rationale for keeping up the surveillance. If it indeed began prior to 2001, and the president was informed in early 2001, and we believe the official version of 9/11, then obviously the whole data mining machine of state terror didn’t do diddly-squat to make anyone safer. Indeed, with the added workload of the last few years, it is far likelier that the program has become totally unmanageable. But then again, no one really believes that it was initiated to make anyone safer. So here we stand, with the US sunken deeper into the authoritarian mud than many authoritarian states, who thankfully don’t have access to fancy technology and don’t have their populace tied into an information grid to which you can tap in.

Kurt Nimmo brings his brilliant polemicising to the table in NSA Snoop Program: Greasing the Skids of the Police State. Among other things, he quotes one Peter Dale Scott as saying

Alternet - But there are reasons to suspect that the illegal eavesdropping, and the related program of illegal detentions of U.S. citizens as well as foreign nationals, began earlier. Both may be part of what Vice President Dick Cheney has called the Bush administration’s restoration of “the legitimate authority of the presidency” — practices exercised by Nixon that were outlawed after Watergate.

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