NSA Security running amok to plug leaks about 9/11

by Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
July 7, 2009

(WMR) -- WMR has learned that the National Security “Q” Group, responsible for security, has grown to an immense security and counter-intelligence force, with an estimated one thousand government employees, contractors, and paid informants. NSA’s Security force is reportedly primarily tasked with plugging any leaks of classified or other information that points to U.S. government’s involvement with the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

NSA Security has doggedly pursued a number of NSA employees, some in “sting” operations, others in frequent polygraphs and repeated security interviews where threats are made by thuggish NSA security agents with and without the presence of FBI agents, and others in constant surveillance operations at their homes, churches, and other locations away from the Fort Meade, Maryland, headquarters of the agency.

The most egregious NSA Security operation against an NSA employee was the 2004 arrest of NSA analyst Ken Ford, Jr. Ford became a target of opportunity for NSA Security and the FBI after Vice President Dick Cheney noted his name on an NSA signals intelligence report on Saddam Hussein’s government that stated that there was no proof from interceptions of Iraqi communications that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction.”

Cheney and other neocons in the Bush White House arranged for a “sting” operation to be mounted as retribution against Ford. Ford was charged with taking classified papers home from NSA headquarters, something that is quite impossible considering the stringent security in place at one of the most-secured complexes in the world.

Ford was convicted by a tainted jury and sentenced to seven years in federal prison. Ford, who is African-American, originally had an African-American federal trial judge. However, the judge was replaced by a pro-Iraq war Jewish U.S. judge, Peter Messitte, who set out to ensure a guilty conviction of Ford in cahoots with Jewish U.S. Attorney for Maryland Rod Rosenstein, and Jewish Assistant U.S. Attorney for Southern Maryland David Salem, both Bush appointees. Nothing was done by the judge or prosecutors to dismiss from the jury a contractor whose company had major contracts with NSA. The trio of Messitte, Rosenstein, and Salem have also “rocket-docketed” a number of cases, resulting in slam-dunk convictions, against Arab- and Iranian-Americans in the southern district of Maryland.

NSA’s Security chief is Kemp Ensor III. Ensor has built up what amounts to a massive law enforcement and intelligence agency in Maryland that operates as a virtual independent operation that answers to no one. Maryland’s congressional delegation has shown little interest in oversight over the security operation.

In fact, WMR has learned that many NSA employees, aware of the political and other misuse of their agency by the Bush-Cheney administration, avidly backed Barack Obama for president hoping that the past era when NSA complied with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution would be restored. However, many NSA employees are bitterly disappointed that Obama has done nothing to curtail not only the widespread surveillance of the communications of law-abiding Americans but the constant “Stasi-like” harassment and surveillance conducted by Ensor’s team of agents and confidential informants.

WMR has also learned that NSA Security has been authorized to work directly with Washington area local police department intelligence divisions to carry out its surveillance of not only NSA employees and contractors, but journalists who report on the activities of NSA. Two police departments mentioned in this respect are the Alexandria, Virginia, and Anne Arundel County, Maryland, sheriff departments.

One senior level NSA official recently found himself sitting in front of NSA Security questioners asking why he gave his NSA business cards to some students at a university. It turns out the official was trying to recruit students for NSA employment. When the official asked why there was a problem in his handing out his business cards, the answer by NSA Security was that some of them, all American citizens, had “Russian last names.”

Even former NSA employees and contractors are being subjected to continual NSA Security surveillance and harassment at their work places and other locations, according to WMR’s sources. Some have lost their jobs as a result of pressure from NSA Security.

WMR has in the past reported on NSA surveillance of journalists. On December 28, 2005, we reported: “WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies -- including the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices. The journalist surveillance program, code named ‘FIRSTFRUITS,’ was part of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. FIRSTFRUITS was authorized as part of a DCI ‘Countering Denial and Deception’ program responsible to an entity known as the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC). Since the intelligence community’s reorganization, the DCI has been replaced by the Director of National Intelligence headed by John Negroponte and his deputy, former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden.”

Since the revelation of the NSA journalist monitoring database, which later added communications intercepts of journalists’ phone calls, emails, and faxes to its database, NSA Security has, according to information received by WMR, conducted physical surveillance of journalists it deems to be threats to the operations of the agency. The top targeted journalists, who make up a virtual “rogues’ gallery” at NSA Security, complete with photographs and other personal information, are: former Baltimore Sun and current Wall Street Journal reporter Siobhan Gorman, Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz, former Baltimore Sun and current New York Times reporter Scott Shane, Baltimore Sun reporter Phil McGowan, author James Bamford, New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, and this editor, Wayne Madsen.

In addition to the aforementioned, FIRSTFRUITS also contained the names of former Washington Post reporter Vernon Loeb, New Yorker journalist Seymour Hersh, and UPI’s John C. K. Daly.

Ironically, NSA Security allegedly has its own connections in the news media. A Washington Times source revealed that the paper’s writer of the “Inside the Beltway” column, John McCaslin, has a relative inside NSA Security -- Robert McCaslin, the chief of NSA Security counter-intelligence and the chief “sting” agent against Ford. Robert McCaslin, according to the Times source, is the brother of the paper’s columnist.

NSA Security is also able to utilize the agency’s most sophisticated electronic surveillance systems to monitor the activities of journalists. The cell phones of journalists are routinely used as listening devices, even when turned off. And what was considered a sure-fire method of avoiding having a cell phone used as a transmitter, removing the batteries in what has become known as “batteries out” conversations, is no longer safe. Even when the batteries are removed, the global positioning system (GPS) chip in cell phones continues to have enough residual power that two to three pings from satellites can give away a person’s location and what other uniquely identifiable cell phones are at the same location.

The bottom line is that a number of NSA personnel who were on duty in the months leading up to 9/11, the day of the attacks, and subsequent weeks and months, are aware of undeniable facts that point to a massive cover-up by the Bush-Cheney administration of the circumstances surrounding 9/11, including what actually befell United Airlines flight 93 and who was issuing direct military orders from the White House.

The Obama administration, rather than lessen the pressure on the NSA personnel, has turned up the heat and is resorting to even more draconian methods to ensure silence. The word from inside NSA is that a state of fear exists and the mission of the agency, to conduct surveillance of foreign communications to provide threat indications and warnings to U.S. troops and policy makers and protect sensitive U.S. government communications from unauthorized eavesdropping is suffering as a result.

Previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.

Copyright © 2009 WayneMadenReport.com

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report (subscription required).

The waning power of truth

by Paul Craig Roberts
June 22, 2009

David Ray Griffin, the nemesis of the collection of disinformation known as the 9/11 Commission Report, has taken up the question of Osama Bin Laden, dead or alive?

On the basis of the available evidence, Griffin concludes that bin Laden died in December 2001, most likely of kidney failure. He has been kept alive in the media by US government PSYOPS as a useful bogyman to justify America’s illegal wars of aggression. The messages received from bin Laden since his death appear to be conveniently timed fabrications designed to advance US government purposes.

Osama bin Laden is likely to become a mythical person, like the Georgia Tech student, George P. Burdell, who will be sighted from time to time over a period that exceeds the length of a human life.

It was less than one year ago that Americans were subjected to PSYOPS disinformation from their government concerning the Russia-Georgia conflict over South Ossetia.

Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin incorporated South Ossetia, formerly a part of Russia, into his home province of Georgia. When the Soviet Union broke up, Georgia became independent and retained South Ossetia. Secession movements arose in South Ossetia and in Abkhazia. These secession movements were the reason European members of NATO rejected the US government’s attempt to make Georgia a NATO member in order to extend the US/NATO military presence on Russia’s borders in contravention of previous US government agreements with Russia.

To terminate the secession movement and, thereby, remove the barrier to Georgia becoming a NATO member, the US, with Israel’s help, trained and equipped the Georgian military and gave the American puppet ruler, installed in the aftermath of one of the US-orchestrated “color revolutions,” the green light to attack South Ossetia.

Under mutual agreement, Russia and Georgia both provided peace-keeping troops in South Ossetia to prevent violence by secessionists. On the night of August 7-8, 2008, Georgian troops attacked South Ossetia, destroying a town and killing many Russian Ossetians and some Russian soldiers who were part of the peace-keeping force. Large numbers of South Ossetians fled across the border to Russia.

The US government, in its hubris, assumed that Russia would accept the ethnic cleansing of Russians from South Ossetia. Instead, Russian troops arrived and quickly destroyed the American-trained and equipped Georgian army and could easily have taken control of Georgia, but refrained.

Defeated in its aim, the US government unleashed a PSYOPS disinformation war against the Russian government, claiming falsely that Russia had initiated the conflict by attacking Georgia. The US government’s blatant and transparent lies were force-fed to the American public by the US media.

British disinformation services cooperated with their American masters, but the rest of the world blew the whistle. The real facts emerged, and an American disinformation campaign experienced a rare failure.

Now 10 months later, US “black ops” is at it again, pumping out disinformation about the “stolen” Iranian election. The US media is again serving the government’s disinformation campaign. This despite the fact that on May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert ‘black’ operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell . . . ABC News.”

On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”

A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”

On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”

The Iranian election protests, essentially led by the westernized youth of Tehran who wish to be free of Islamic moral codes, have the hallmarks of orchestration. The protesters are color-coded with green wristbands. Their protest signs are in English and are obviously directed at the Western media. Their chants are propagandistic and bear no relation to facts known by every Iranian.

And again, the US media and various experts, whose ambitions depend on government-related careers, are force-feeding the American public the disinformation designed to further isolate and weaken, if not overthrow, the Iranian government.

Until 1978 the US ruled Iran through the Shah. The US intends to again rule Iran through puppets. The only two remaining independent governments in the region are Iran and Syria. If the US doesn’t first bankrupt itself, both countries will fall to US black ops destabilization.

The limitless gullibility of the American people guarantees carte blanche to the US government’s schemes. Americans seemingly cannot put two and two together. They have already forgotten the lies about weapons of mass destruction that have resulted in the destruction of Iraq. They have forgotten Secretary of State Colin Powell’s publicly expressed remorse at the lies he told the UN. Americans blithely accept the conflation of Taliban with al Qaeda and terrorists and the new war that the Obama regime has started in Pakistan, a war that has already produced 2 million refugees.

It can fairly be said that there is not much difference between the American public and the fictional one under Big Brother in George Orwell’s 1984. The few independent voices that do exist are simply drowned out by the constant flow of disinformation.

The US government’s success in spinning 9/11 guaranteed the government’s success in pursuing a hegemonic agenda under a cloak of lies. Although a large percentage of the US population does not believe the government’s account and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of experts and informed and well-connected people have challenged the government’s tale, the US media have shown no interest despite the official account of 9/11 bearing every known hallmark of a cover-up.

High-ranking fire marshals have complained that legally required forensic procedures were not followed by authorities entrusted with investigation.

The testimony of more than 100 policemen, firemen, and maintenance personnel who were in the towers at the time and report hearing and experiencing a series of explosions was ignored and withheld from the public until the government got its story in place.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology studiously avoided testing for evidence of explosives. The severed steel beams were quickly collected and sold abroad as scrap.

As a number of observers have complained, the crime scene was destroyed, not investigated.

The government’s story of the destruction of the towers is based on computer simulations that produce results in keeping with the assumptions.

The collapse of the third building is not even mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

No one abroad believes the US government’s story. Europeans have produced documentary films that laugh at the official explanation.

Recently, an international team of scientists reported on their two-year examination of dust samples from the debris. They report that they found nano-thermite in the samples. To my knowledge no mainstream US media reported the finding.

One would think that such a finding would lead to a real investigation. Instead, within the US the finding is dismissed by debunkers of “conspiracy theories” (except of course the government’s own conspiracy theory) with the charge that the dust samples have not been in controlled environments since collected and could have been contaminated by those who volunteered the samples. In other words, the nano-thermite, if actually in the samples, was planted.

One wonders how residents of lower Manhattan obtained nano-thermite with which to contaminate the dust. Indeed, who has access to nano-thermite other than government?

Why doesn’t the National Academy of Science choose a team to examine the samples? If the finding of nano-thermite is verified, the issue of contamination can be investigated. If it turns out that the people who volunteered the samples have no possible access to nano-thermite, the case for a real investigation is established.

There is little prospect of such a development in the US. American science and the careers of scientists are heavily dependent on US government funding. It would be a career-ending event for American scientists to get involved with this matter other than as a contributor to a cover-up. Professor Steven Jones, a physicist at BYU who first raised the issue of explosives being used to bring down the three WTC buildings, was terminated, despite his tenure, by BYU. Many believe Jones was terminated because of political threats to the university’s funding.

In the US truth is an ineffective means by which to hold government accountable. Consider, for example, the fate of whistleblowers. Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers was perhaps the last successful whistleblower and that was three decades ago. Since then the government has put in place many defenses against whistleblowers.

The American public has looked to government for its salvation since Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. Government provides education, health care (Medicare, Medicaid), pensions (Social Security), food stamps, housing subsidies, child care and protects Americans from a long list of demonized villains ranging from spouse abusers and child molesters to terrorists. Americans see themselves and their government as the salt of the earth, an image supported by American generosity to other peoples who suffer natural calamities. Most Americans believe that their government does stupid things, but not evil things except perhaps by accident.

The right-wing believes that America was attacked on 9/11 because we are so good, hubris to which Bush successfully played with his statement that “they hate us for our freedom and democracy.”

The left wing finds emotional satisfaction in its belief that 9/11 was deserved blow-back from peoples oppressed by US foreign policy who rose up and struck back.

Truth is so impotent in America that the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty 42 years ago is still covered up by the US government despite the best efforts of Admiral Tom Moorer, who was Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and by decades of effort by the Liberty survivors.

This raises the question: Why do some people blow whistles? Why do those few write books and columns that challenge the lies and deceptions? There is probably more than one answer. For some, hope springs eternal. Others naively destroy their careers thinking that truth will be honored. Still others speak from a sense of responsibility to truth and not from a hope that anything will actually change.

In October 1987, John Stockwell, a former CIA cover operative who ran the CIA’s covert war in Angola, gave a lecture in which he said he abandoned his career when he realized that CIA covert operations resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people and were totally unconnected to any US national security interests. “I concluded that I just couldn’t see the point.”

Nothing has changed. What was the point of the US invasion of Iraq? Even President Bush eventually conceded that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

What was the point of the US invasion of Afghanistan and what is the point of Obama’s escalation of the war there? The Taliban is not al Qaeda and was totally focused on unifying Afghanistan under an Islamic government. The US was not on the Taliban’s radar screen.

What is the point of the war that the US has started in Pakistan?

What is the point of the destabilization of the Iranian government? After the stolen elections of the Karl Rove/Bush era, why does the US think it must overthrow the Iranian government because of allegations that Ahmadinejad stole an election?

If the answer is that these wars and interventions serve the interest of US hegemony, the obvious reply is that US hegemony is more likely to be lost from the massive red ink in the government’s budget that is likely to be monetized, thus destroying the dollar as reserve currency, the main source of US hegemony.

If the US wants to have an empire in the Middle East or elsewhere, the government should come out and say so. At least then Americans could revel in the glories of empire. As it is, the pleasure must be gained surreptitiously under the table, pretending that we are protecting the world from evildoers while we do evil ourselves.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider’s Account of Policymaking in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

Revealing the Secrets in Room 101 ...

Harper's Magazine

Americans Want Torture Inquiry, Obama Doesn’t

by Thomas R. Eddlem
New American
February 13, 2009

A Gallup Poll released February 12 revealed that 62 percent of Americans want to investigate or criminally prosecute Bush administration officials who authorized torture in the so-called “war on terror.” But even though President Obama has said numerous times that “nobody's above the law,” on February 10 he used the Bush administration’s “state secrets” gambit to quash a lawsuit attempting to penalize some of those involved in renditioning torture subjects.

That lawsuit sought damages against a private airline used by the CIA to rendition low-value suspects for torture by dictatorial regimes abroad. One of the five plaintiffs, Benyam Muhammed (a British and Ethiopian citizen), alleged he was renditioned to Morocco where torturers made razor cuts on his penis. The lawsuit alleges that San Jose-based Jeppesen DataPlan Inc. should have known that its planes were being used to ferry suspects for torture and is therefore liable for damages.

But because the Obama administration invoked the “state secrets” policy at the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, the lawsuit’s likelihood of revealing felony torture on the part of Bush officials is now remote.

“This is not change,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero correctly told the Associated Press. “Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama's Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue.”

The Obama policy in San Francisco also drew a rare condemnation of a Democrat from the New York Times editorial page.

The Gallup Poll came just two weeks after it was revealed that the Obama administration’s Justice Department has dispatched several government lawyers to defend Bush-era Justice Department official John Yoo from a lawsuit by torture victim Jose Padilla.

Jordan Paust of the University of Houston Law Center calls giving Justice Department lawyers to alleged international war criminals “an outrage and constitute an embarrassing embrace of international criminal conduct that the international community has demanded must result in absolutely no form of impunity.” Paust says that alleged criminals should bear the costs of their own defense, and notes there is a long historical case for this. At “a 1781 Resolution of the Continental Congress, the Founders expected that 'the author of ... injuries [that are “offenses against the law of nations”] should compensate the damage out of his private fortune.'”

President Obama’s actions are fast diverging from his public rhetoric.

How Bush Threatened Britain, etc.

Introduction by Sean@iNoodle.com:

And what really happened to Michael Todd, the Manchester police chief "found dead in Snowdonia," and who, notably, led the investigation into Britain's involvement in the CIA's extraordinary rendition (cross-border kidnapping) and torture programs?

The British press coverage of his death made a mockery of journalism and professed fair and balanced reporting. The venomous accounts of Todd's life were wide-ranging and conflicting, even when held in juxtaposition with one another, irrespective of how they may have conflicted with the facts themselves.

It was as if the British media was given a license to kill the character in the public's eye of an esteemed public official – a sort of journalistic Jean Charles de Menezes thug-killing – to shame Todd beyond the grave, to shame his wife and children, and to show with what impunity the UK government and the British press can act when serving their own interests, as opposed to the well-being of the British people at large, should someone with the courage of conviction consider acting in behalf of the latter, and in accordance with the rule of law.

*****

by Andrew Sullivan
The Atlantic
February 6, 2009

In order to prevent any details of its torture record being publicly disseminated, the Bush administration threatened the British government with withdrawal of intelligence sharing if they allowed a court to publish the redacted evidence. Foreign secretary David Miliband denied this on Wednesday, but the letters from the US have been released by Channel 4 News. And their message is unmistakable. The first letter:

"I write with respect to proceedings … regarding Mr Binyam Mohamed," the letter said. "We note the classified documents identified in your letters of June 16 and August 1, 2008, to the acting general counsel of the Department of Defence … the public disclosure of these documents or of the information contained therein is likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm … intelligence information sharing arrangements between our two governments."

The second:

"Ordering the disclosure of the US intelligence information now would have only the marginal effects of serious and lasting damage to the US-UK intelligence sharing relationship, and thus the national security of the UK …"

That is a threat to hurt the security of a very close ally unless the British government intervenes into a court process to suppress evidence of US torture. In a critical test of the Obama administration, the demand that such evidence be suppressed was reiterated. (I don't know by whom. Panetta isn't in place yet. Brennan? Clinton?) And that's how illegal torture spreads throughout a legal and military system to undermine alliances as well as the rule of law. The poison of Cheney is still in the system. And it will be for a long time. That was the point: the crimes and blunders they committed were such that their successors find themselves, willy nilly, implicated in them.

Afshin Rattansi Interviews Ray McGovern, Former CIA Official, re: Leon Panetta, Torture, Rendition

Information Clearing House
February 6, 2009

Afshin Rattansi talks to former CIA official Ray McGovern about the consequences for the new head of the CIA and for the United States after Leon Panetta condemns torture, extraordinary rendition and those that were involved in it all. Also, will Cheney go to jail and what about David Miliband who denies that the UK secret services do not engage in torture despite evidence to the contrary for decades of British illegal activity, from Ireland to Gibraltar?