Most of the information in this part is from the documentary United States of Secrets
Watergate revealed, that the NSA (National Security Agency) had been spying on Americans and the FISA court (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) was established - as a watchdog.
A series of reforms were set up under which the NSA could spy all they wanted outside the US – but could only conduct surveillance inside the US if FISA issued a warrant.
I wrote about 9/11 in part 16 - and pointed out that in June 1997 a neoconservative Think Tank, which numbers included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Jeb Bush, Dov Zakheim, and Paul Wolfowitz released their report entitled: REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENCES
Quote from the report:
[…] the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.End
NSA was created after WWII to prevent another surprise attack – like Pearl Harbor.
My focus in part 16 was that 9/11 wasn’t a terrorist attack, it was a Cabal-attack.
It was the excuse they needed to invade Afghanistan.
But as we shall see, it was also the excuse they used to start spying on private citizens.
All the high-ranking people in the NSA – interviewed in this documentary - obviously believed that 9/11 was a terrorist attack. They were indignant and wanted to prevent anything like that from happening again. Some of them were completely unaware that they were being played by Bush, Cheney, and other Cabal puppets.
Cheney, who was VP under Bush, kept asking, after 9/11: “What powers do we have?”
The NSA director, General Hayden asked his staff “How can we prevent this from happening again?” – and the feedback he got was to monitor all communications in the world.
He was called to a meeting in the Oval Office and presented a program – but pointed out that it probably wasn’t legal.
Bush told him: “Mike, I understand your concern – but there are some things we’re going to have to do, and I think I have the authority to authorize you to do the things you have outlined.”
And then he said “Go! I want you to go develop a Program. We’ve got the lawyers working on it. You have my order. We’re going to do this.”
On October 4th in a secret signing with Cheney, the president officially authorized the PROGRAM.
This order was one of the most closely kept secrets in the Bush/Cheney administration for four years.
Well, besides what really happened 9/11.
Hayden’s lawyer doubted it was legal. But he concluded that when the president had signed it, it was made legal – so he signed it as did two other lawyers at the NSA.
So, the NSA started collecting data under a law that had never existed before - and only a handful of people in the NSA knew what the president had authorized.
Thomas Drake, who was hired as a senior executive in the NSA after 9/11, started digging and found a program named ThinThread. It was developed by William Binney and his team. It had built-in privacy protections that anonymized who was being listened in on – unless there was a court warrant that made the identity of that person clear.
Drake liked this program and wrote a two-page recommendation which he sent to his superior, Maureen Baginski. It took a while before he got a response – which was a refusal to see him! Nevertheless, he kept trying - sending her memos and finally, he got a handwritten reply: “We are going with a different program.”
When Binney and the three other men who had designed ThinThread discovered that they used this program – but had removed the part that had blocked the identity of American citizens – they left the agency.
Blake stayed behind, confronted Baginski once more, and then went to the AG who said: “We are working under emergency conditions. All the lawyers have confirmed it is legal.” And: “Don’t ask any more questions!”
Binney decided to take matters to Congress. He found an ally in Diane Roark, who was a House Intelligence Committee staffer in charge of oversight of the NSA.
When Binney told her that they now spied on Americans, she said “They’ve gone rogue!” She was absolutely aghast and stated that what they did went against the law.
She sent memos to the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee, describing the situation.
Quote Roark
I argued very strongly that they needed to have the protections restored.
What Roark didn’t know was, that in October a select group of Congressional leaders had been invited to a secret meeting in the VP's office. They were not allowed to bring staff with them, and they were not allowed to talk about what they were briefed on.
I haven’t dug into which congressional leaders we talk about here, so I don’t know if any of them were Cabal puppets or just useful idiots. But they knew about the PROGRAM and said nothing.
And no matter what Roark said to convince them to act, they didn’t.
Quote Roark
I told them it was unethical, immoral, politically stupid, illegal, and unconstitutional. When this comes out, all Hell is going to break loose.
At some point, her boss, Porter Goss, had enough. He told her, that the Program was known to him, and she didn’t have clearance to know about it. He told her to talk to General Hayden.
She got a meeting with Hayden and kept asking him, why they had removed the protection, the encryption, and the automatic tracking? She recalls that she asked the same question five times before he finally answered – without looking her in the eye: “We have the power. We don’t need them” – and he made clear that the power he was referring to was the commander in chief’s wartime authority.
As she says, this made her even more worried. He didn’t want her talking to House Committees. He wanted her to shut up – to put it bluntly.
In the Spring of 2003, DOJ appointed attorney Thomas Tamm to lead a small group whose purpose was to try to develop intelligence about people who they thought were foreign agents or terrorists.
He would work with FISA – preparing warrants for the FISA court.
He also worked on terrorist cases and discovered evidence of the PROGRAM – i.e. information that hadn’t gone through FISA.
He realized that hardly anyone in the DOJ knew anything about what was going on. He asked his supervisor who said that she assumed that what they were doing was legal.
He kept asking questions up the chain of command – and didn’t get answers. So he headed to a contact in Congress and asked what this program was about? Again, he got no answer – to which he said that he would head to the press. To this, she replied: “Whistleblowers don’t frequently end up very well.”
Then Jack Goldsmith became the new head of the Office of Legal Council – and was therefore called to a meeting with Addington, Bush’s lawyer, in his office. He was presented with classified programs and counter-terrorism programs.
The PROGRAM was in a red folder, with a label that said
“Top Secret SI/Comet/Stellarwind”.
When he read this folder, he realized that this was a clear violation of both the First and the Fourth Amendments – spying on millions of Americans.
Goldsmith told Addington, that the DOJ would pull back the endorsement of the legality of this program.
Addington: “If you do that, the blood of 100,000 people killed in the next attack will be on your head.”
The President had ordered it and the Attorney General had signed on that it was lawful – so Goldsmith became quite a threat.
James Comey
At the justice department, they prepared for a fight with the White House.
James Comey, Goldsmith’s boss, delivered the news to AG Ashcroft that they didn’t see this program as legal.
Ashcroft had signed a re-authorization every 45 days for two and a half years. A few hours after his meeting with Comey he collapsed and was taken to the hospital with severe pancreatitis.
Comey was now Acting AG.
Goldsmith and Comey rushed to the hospital and were there ahead of Andrew Card (WH Chief of Staff) and David Addington (Bush’s lawyer) - who told Ashcroft they had brought the re-authorization document for him to sign.
He gave them a two-minute talk, in which he pointed out what the issues were and why he would not approve the PROGRAM. And then he pointed out that he was not the AG now – Comey was.
Back in the WH, Cheney insisted that the President should act on his own and re-authorize the PROGRAM.
Cheney and Addington then drafted a new order. They simply dropped the page where the AG signed off.
NSA director Hayden was asked if he was willing to continue the Program without the DOJ signing off? He said yes – and explained in the documentary that he made that decision because of the ‘terrorist’ attack the previous day in Madrid, March 11, 2004.
I highly doubt that ‘terrorists’ were behind that attack. This was the work of another arm of the Cabal, IMO.
Jack Goldsmith, James Comey, and two dozen other top executives decided to resign – including FBI Director Mueller.
It would seem that Bush was standing on the edge of a cliff …
… but: The next morning he called Comey to a private meeting in the Oval Office
… and: The day after that, he sent for a meeting with FBI Director Mueller – also private.
And they didn’t resign.
After those two meetings, Bush rescinded the order – but he and his backing group were determined to resume it. So, they were sifting through FISA laws and through the Patriot Act to find a loophole – or someone gullible enough to support their plan, I suspect.
They sent Hayden to the FISA court - and Judge Colleen Kollar-Cotelly ruled that it was legal! (in the Fall of 2004)
They kept the ruling secret. Her ruling relied on …
Quote
a controversial interpretation of a 25-year-old Supreme Court case. It was a huge stretch. The idea that you could use this to justify the collection of trillions of pieces of internet metadata surprised a lot of people when it came out in the Snowden Archives.
Bush went out on the Campaign trail and said “When we talk about chasing down terrorists we’re talking about getting a court order”.
Thomas Tamm had tried asking questions up the chain of command and had gotten no answers. He had told his chief that he might go to the press – and she had replied that whistleblowers “don’t end very well.”
But he couldn’t let it go. He didn’t sleep well. He got closer and closer to contacting the press. As he says:
Quote
I certainly was conscious of the fact that I was going to be found out – and I did think I would be found out actually, eventually, that there would be serious ramifications – but I thought it was important.
And then he contacted Lichtblau at the New York Times.
Another reporter, James Rison, had also heard about the PROGRAM – and wrote about the violation of both the FISA and the Constitution.
As Lichtblau says:
Quote
They were doing things without authorization from the court and without the knowledge of most of Congress. They were doing this on the authority of the White House – which is what made the story.
Rison contacted the NSA and tried to get through to Hayden to “talk about a sensitive matter.” Hayden immediately called back. Rison read him a few lines of the story. He caught Hayden off-guard and he started confirming – but then hung up.
Hayden sounded the alarm: The New York Times was preparing to expose the existence of the PROGRAM in the middle of an election year.
The WH demanded a series of meetings with the Times.
At the meeting, they confirmed nothing outright – but said things like “if we had such a Program, the government would request that the New York Times didn’t publish anything about it.”
The journalist was not permitted to take notes.
As Rison says, the whole thing only confirmed that the story was correct.
They sat in meeting after meeting and the WH dropped the hypotheses narratives and stated flat out that there was no doubt of its legality.
The reporters knew that the WH was misleading them – but the editors were not sure the story should run.
Condoleezza Rice
In the Fall of 2004 the WH called the Times’ top editors to a close-door meeting.
Condoleezza Rice, General Hayden, Alberto Gonzales (the next FBI Director), and others insisted that revealing the existence of the PROGRAM would endanger national security.
The pressure and the fearmongering worked. The Times editor decided not to run the story.
It’s amazing to see how the Cabal has used Hegelian Dialectic for decades with success. Problem – Reaction – Solution.
They painted a picture of National security at risk – and probably painted it in bloody detail to get the emotional reaction they planned. And it worked. The editors ‘chose’ the Solution the Cabal-puppets desired.
Same tactic that Addington had used to stop Goldsmith: “If you do that, the blood of 100,000 people killed in the next attack will be on your head.”
Left to right: Congress’s Diane Roark, next three are the ThinThread Group: Loomis, Wiebe, and Binney – and Drake far right.
This group had tried everything they could do and started contemplating going to the press.
It had been one year since the New York Times backed down – and didn’t publish their story. And the program had expanded during that time.
The reporter on the Times – who had been stopped by his editor – decided to write a book. When the editor found out, he reconsidered if the Times should run the story. The WH called him to a meeting once more and tried to scare him, trying to make him see that if terrorists blew up the Brooklyn Bridge it would be his responsibility. But this time he didn’t let himself be cowed.
The Times brought the story.
After it was published, Bush faced a group of reporters and lied about the program, minimizing how it was used. Hayden did the same – and further stated that everyone at the NSA was in agreement.
Then Drake had enough. He was still at the NSA, and he contacted a reporter, under cover, who then wrote about the PROGRAM.
Gonzales was now the Director of the FBI and in December 05 he sent agents to Binney, Loomis, Wiebe – and Roark. They took all electronic devices.
Half a year later it was Drake’s turn.
The group now faced decades in prison and thousands of dollars in legal bills.
It’s almost unimaginable that seven years had passed and so little had been revealed to the public. In November 2008, Obama ran for president and campaigned on promises like: “No more secrecy” and “no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens”.
Some of the officials we have followed now had hope for change.
But as we saw in Part 37
Quote
on February 3, 2009 (which was two weeks after Obama was sworn in) Brennan and Clapper moved The HAMMER to Washington and used it against the American people.
I recommended this article in part 37. It is not only revealing Obama’s nefarious actions but revealing Comey and others as well.
During his last weeks in office, Bush tried to convince Congress to make the PROGRAM legal – and thereby give the NSA unprecedented power.
And he succeeded. A bill was presented – and Obama voted for it.
So now it was legal to do what they had done illegally for 7 years – which had no repercussions.
Obama had now not only one spy program – but two. And the NSA now spent more than a billion dollars a year to spy on citizens around the world.
They hired a lot of programmers and engineers to run the growing amount of data. Edward Snowden was one of them.
Snowden was 28-years-old when he started working for the NSA in Japan.
He soon realized that the PROGRAM was much more comprehensive than he had imagined. The surveillance of ordinary people was far greater than the American public had been able to debate.
One of the key documents Snowden discovered was a classified Inspector General report, detailing the history of the PROGRAM. It outlined everything I have described here – and more.
Snowden was astonished to see all their lies, crimes, and manipulation – and probably resentful that they had not been held accountable.
When Obama boasted about ‘no more secrets’ on the campaign trail, Snowden probably hoped that Obama would be a force of transparency. And when that didn’t happen it was one step closer for Snowden to exposing the whole history of the PROGRAM.
Obama had very forcefully proclaimed that leaking classified information would be punished hard.
Thomas Drake was the first to be arrested and charged with violating the Espionage Act.
They had taken a declassified document from his home – and classified it! “Framing him” as Binney said.
Days before the trial against him should begin, the charge against him was dropped.
None of the other suspects in the leak investigation were ever charged.
Quote
It had been more than ten years. Despite the revelations of insiders like Drake and the news report about the PROGRAM there was little public outrage and few congressional critics.
The PROGRAM was continuing to grow.
But at a secret bunker in Hawaii, Snowden was now working for a new NSA contractor. Snowden was initiating his own move to expose the PROGRAM.
To be continued …
Part 2: About Snowden
Part 3: About Pegasus
Part 4: CIA spying
Links
United States of Secrets - documentary
Article about The Hammer
https://theamericanreport.org/2019/05/12/comey-launched-trump-russia-investigation-day-after-general-exposed-the-hammer/
Neocon Report
https://archive.org/details/RebuildingAmericasDefenses?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Very good explanation of this! So much illegal activity hides behind 'classified' or 'national security'. All they have to do is claim one of those 2 things and it seems they can do whatever they want. 🤬 Thank you for all your time researching and revealing these things Jytte! I look forward to your next article about Snowden because I know so little about him.
Now I understand how Snowden fits into the picture. It's been a blur to me every since 9/11 when I knew were lost our personal freedom in the US and in the world. All these security check points. Nothing made sense to me. Thanks for all you do in your dogged research to find out the truth!