Privacy, Smivacy, Part 4 0

According to news reports,

US Vice President Richard Cheney suggested Sunday that the September 11 attacks could have been averted, if the government could have ordered surveillance of phone calls and emails without warrants.

This report dates from 12/20/2005.

Nevertheless, even without any of the NSA data, the FBI had information in hand far enough ahead of 9/11 to act, if it had paid attention not to intercepted communications, but to its own staff.

Now comes Slate to inform us that

A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president’s now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a “data-mining” operation, which might eventually cull “millions” of individual calls and e-mails.

It is clear that the Bush spy machine was not put in motion by 9/11–it was already in motion.

It is clear that, even though the current Federal Administration had enough traditionally-obtained, lawfully-obtained evidence that something was afoot, it failed to act.

It is also clear that Messrs Cheney and Bush’s claim that they need to sneak around Americans’ backs, in contravention of the law, in reaction to 9/11 in order to protect those backs is so much horse-hockey.

They had already started the spying in motion. They were not spying to protect the American people from an Al Qaeda threat–there is ample evidence they discounted the Al Qaeda threat until about 9:00 a. m. on the morning of 11 September 2001.

They were spying because they wanted to. They have grabbed 9/11 as a horrifying pretext to justify the intrusion into American privacy and the violation of American rights that they had already started.

It is sad that persons so morally pathetic can also be so dangerous.