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Some have mentioned: Why bring up NSA Spying now and not back in 2006?
Well, some on DU tried:
Know your BFEE: Like a NAZI
Did the NSA help Bush hack the vote?
Know your BFEE: Lies are the Currency of their Realm
Analysis from 2008:
Frank Church and the Abyss of Warrantless Wiretapping
News for too many from 2005:
Know your BFEE: The Secret Government
JFK Would NEVER Have Fallen for Phony INTEL!
I notice that many DUers at the time were labled "Conspiracy Theorists" for pointing it out.
135 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
there are no tool sheds in Manhattan.
I wouldn't have put it so charitably.
Republicans are "great" on national security issues so they know what they're doing. Media therefore cannot question them. 
Ya mean people who consider the possibility that two or more individuals planned and executed a crime, and even stranger, that aspects of the crime were covered up??
Where do people get such silly ideas? It couldn't possibly ever happen. Why are people so paranoid and, well, nutty?
He quintupled the oversight!
It's led by Professor Droney.
?1360594247
"massive oversight and monitoring within the NSA"
That is a good one...
From DU in January...
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy believed President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy.
That's what his son and daughter, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Rory Kennedy, reported in an interview with Charlie Rose last weekend in Dallas.
It's also what author and Salon founder David Talbot reported, when he called Robert F. Kennedy the "first conspiracy theorist" in 2007.
Here's why the news from Robert and Rory is so important:
Those are the facts we learned Friday, Jan. 11, 2013. It's called history.
As far as I know, that Charlie Rose interview has never aired.
PS: The hatred some expressed reminded me of a conditioned reflex I have often heard when bringing up the subject of liberal politics in general, the Kennedys in particular, with very conservative individuals and groups over the last 40 years. To see it on DU has been saddening, if not eye-opening.
PPS: It's like a garage, there's so much room and everything. Not much in the First-Aid kit, unfortunately, besides an IOU from some guy named Milo Minderbinder made out to Kid Snowden.
PPPS: Very much appreciate that you remember those kind of Democrats, Cerridwen, the ones that cared about democracy, justice, peace, prosperity, equal rights, and a better tomorrow for all.
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy believed President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy.
That's what his son and daughter, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Rory Kennedy, reported in an interview with Charlie Rose last weekend in Dallas.
It's also what author and Salon founder David Talbot reported, when he called Robert F. Kennedy the "first conspiracy theorist" in 2007.
Here's why the news from Robert and Rory is so important:
The important issue is that he and his sister reported their father -- the president's principal counselor and the nation's chief law enforcement officer -- privately thought a conspiracy was behind the assassination of President Kennedy.
RFK called the Warren Commission report "shoddy workmanship."
Attorney General Kennedy knew about the Ruby-Mafia connections immediately, which is vital when considering the Mafia were hired by Allen Dulles and the CIA during Eisenhower's administration to murder Fidel Castro -- an operation which the CIA failed to inform the president and attorney general.
The interview with Charlie Rose marked the first time members of the immediate Kennedy family have voiced the attorney general's doubts about the Warren Commission and its lone gunman theory.
RFK called the Warren Commission report "shoddy workmanship."
Attorney General Kennedy knew about the Ruby-Mafia connections immediately, which is vital when considering the Mafia were hired by Allen Dulles and the CIA during Eisenhower's administration to murder Fidel Castro -- an operation which the CIA failed to inform the president and attorney general.
The interview with Charlie Rose marked the first time members of the immediate Kennedy family have voiced the attorney general's doubts about the Warren Commission and its lone gunman theory.
Those are the facts we learned Friday, Jan. 11, 2013. It's called history.
As far as I know, that Charlie Rose interview has never aired.
PS: The hatred some expressed reminded me of a conditioned reflex I have often heard when bringing up the subject of liberal politics in general, the Kennedys in particular, with very conservative individuals and groups over the last 40 years. To see it on DU has been saddening, if not eye-opening.
PPS: It's like a garage, there's so much room and everything. Not much in the First-Aid kit, unfortunately, besides an IOU from some guy named Milo Minderbinder made out to Kid Snowden.
PPPS: Very much appreciate that you remember those kind of Democrats, Cerridwen, the ones that cared about democracy, justice, peace, prosperity, equal rights, and a better tomorrow for all.
.... I was here on DU when all this was exposed. No one listened. NOW they're listening. 
A lot of long-missed colorful names in those threads....
his right hand.
Uncle Jed, I told Mr. Drysdale I was going to be a double-naught spy!
The Professional Paranoid
Why NSA whistle-blower Russ Tice may be right.
By Patrick Radden Keefe|Posted Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2006, at 5:15 PM
If the congressional hearings on domestic spying have anything like a star witness when they get under way next month, it will probably be a 43-year-old intelligence officer named Russ Tice. Until last May, Tice worked at the National Security Agency, on what are known as Special Access Programs—the umbrella designation for "black world" operations that includes the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping. In December, Tice said he was willing to testify about "probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts" by the NSA, and he has since acknowledged that he was one of the sources for James Risen's original scoop in the New YorkTimes.
This appears to be great news for Congress: Because current NSA officials are likely to stonewall when asked about "sources and methods," arguing that even closed-session testimony could jeopardize national security, a chatty insider like Tice might save the investigation. But there's a catch. Shrill, twitchy, and Manichaean, your average whistle-blower often comes off as more crazy than confidence-inspiring. And when the whistle-blower happens also to be a professional eavesdropper—which is effectively to say, a professional paranoid—the weird factor can be especially pronounced. It may be tempting to write Tice off. But that would be a mistake. His intimate knowledge of America's surveillance apparatus might make him a little paranoid. In this case, however, it might also make him right.
Advertisement
Whenever a whistle-blower parts rank with a government agency or a major corporation, it's in the interests of the betrayed employer to depict the whistle-blower as unhinged. This skillfully plays on the public's preconceptions. If there's one naysayer in an institution of thousands, we're more apt to believe that she's nuts than that she's the only one who hasn't drunk the Kool-Aid. So far, the NSA hasn't responded to Tice. But if he holds forth before Congress about spying abuses, the agency will reply that he was dismissed last year after a pair of psychiatric evaluations deemed him "mentally unbalanced." In 2001, while he was working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Tice became convinced that an Asian-American woman he was working with was a Chinese spy. He reported his suspicions and was told they were unfounded. When he transferred to NSA the following year, he continued to report his concerns to DIA. Learning of his persistence, NSA administered the psychiatric evaluations, which led to what is known as "red badge" status, or suspension of security clearance, a stigma that in Tice's secretive business can be professionally debilitating.
So, Tice's departure from the agency had nothing to do with the misgivings about domestic eavesdropping that he now professes. This isn't unusual. In the eavesdropping business, which relies for its survival on a code of silence more entrenched than anything the Mafia ever came up with, defectors seem to simmer in silence for years and then suddenly—and perhaps opportunistically—to blow their tops, detailing every infraction and violation they observed throughout their careers.
Tice's bid for credibility isn't helped by some whistle-blowers who have come before him. In 1988 a recently fired NSA contractor, Margaret Newsham, went public with an alarming story. Newsham had worked at Menwith Hill, the biggest eavesdropping base on the planet, located in England's Yorkshire moors but home to 1,400 American spies. One day, she said, a colleague handed her a pair of headphones and let her listen to a conversation in Washington. One voice sounded familiar and when Newsham asked who it was, her colleague told her the speaker was Sen. Strom Thurmond. But Newsham did not protest this violation of protocol at the time. She waited until she'd been fired and was embroiled in a wrongful termination suit. Then she blew the whistle with such promiscuity—alleging not only privacy violations, but also over-charging by contractors and sexual harassment—that she accomplished little. It didn't help that Newsham seemed like a textbook paranoid: She lived alone with a 120-pound guard dog named Mr. Gunther and once told a reporter she sleeps with a gun under her pillow for fear of government reprisals.
Another recent eavesdropper-turned-whistle-blower was Canadian spy Mike Frost, who was featured on 60 Minutes II in 2000. He made news by claiming that the United States and Canada were working together to wiretap civilians as part of the Echelon eavesdropping network. Frost related an alarming story about a soccer mom who ended up on a terrorist watch-list because she telephoned a friend to describe how her son had "bombed" in the elementary school play. But experts soon poked holes in this story. Frost tended to describe surveillance systems as all-powerful and omniscient; like Newsham, he sounded a little paranoid. And also like Newsham, he had held his tongue about his reservations until he parted ways with his agency for an unrelated reason. (In this case the reason was alcoholism—Frost's tell-all book reveals that he and his ghostwriter first met in AA.)
CONTINUED...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2006/01/the_professional_paranoid.html
PS: Thank you, sabrina1. You have carried a lot of the load over the years, alone, on DU, and with our fellow Democrats. Words can't adequately express what your presence and friendship have meant to me. So, I haul out Jethro, my Doppelgänger.
The Professional Paranoid
Why NSA whistle-blower Russ Tice may be right.
By Patrick Radden Keefe|Posted Tuesday, Jan. 17, 2006, at 5:15 PM
If the congressional hearings on domestic spying have anything like a star witness when they get under way next month, it will probably be a 43-year-old intelligence officer named Russ Tice. Until last May, Tice worked at the National Security Agency, on what are known as Special Access Programs—the umbrella designation for "black world" operations that includes the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping. In December, Tice said he was willing to testify about "probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts" by the NSA, and he has since acknowledged that he was one of the sources for James Risen's original scoop in the New YorkTimes.
This appears to be great news for Congress: Because current NSA officials are likely to stonewall when asked about "sources and methods," arguing that even closed-session testimony could jeopardize national security, a chatty insider like Tice might save the investigation. But there's a catch. Shrill, twitchy, and Manichaean, your average whistle-blower often comes off as more crazy than confidence-inspiring. And when the whistle-blower happens also to be a professional eavesdropper—which is effectively to say, a professional paranoid—the weird factor can be especially pronounced. It may be tempting to write Tice off. But that would be a mistake. His intimate knowledge of America's surveillance apparatus might make him a little paranoid. In this case, however, it might also make him right.
Advertisement
Whenever a whistle-blower parts rank with a government agency or a major corporation, it's in the interests of the betrayed employer to depict the whistle-blower as unhinged. This skillfully plays on the public's preconceptions. If there's one naysayer in an institution of thousands, we're more apt to believe that she's nuts than that she's the only one who hasn't drunk the Kool-Aid. So far, the NSA hasn't responded to Tice. But if he holds forth before Congress about spying abuses, the agency will reply that he was dismissed last year after a pair of psychiatric evaluations deemed him "mentally unbalanced." In 2001, while he was working for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Tice became convinced that an Asian-American woman he was working with was a Chinese spy. He reported his suspicions and was told they were unfounded. When he transferred to NSA the following year, he continued to report his concerns to DIA. Learning of his persistence, NSA administered the psychiatric evaluations, which led to what is known as "red badge" status, or suspension of security clearance, a stigma that in Tice's secretive business can be professionally debilitating.
So, Tice's departure from the agency had nothing to do with the misgivings about domestic eavesdropping that he now professes. This isn't unusual. In the eavesdropping business, which relies for its survival on a code of silence more entrenched than anything the Mafia ever came up with, defectors seem to simmer in silence for years and then suddenly—and perhaps opportunistically—to blow their tops, detailing every infraction and violation they observed throughout their careers.
Tice's bid for credibility isn't helped by some whistle-blowers who have come before him. In 1988 a recently fired NSA contractor, Margaret Newsham, went public with an alarming story. Newsham had worked at Menwith Hill, the biggest eavesdropping base on the planet, located in England's Yorkshire moors but home to 1,400 American spies. One day, she said, a colleague handed her a pair of headphones and let her listen to a conversation in Washington. One voice sounded familiar and when Newsham asked who it was, her colleague told her the speaker was Sen. Strom Thurmond. But Newsham did not protest this violation of protocol at the time. She waited until she'd been fired and was embroiled in a wrongful termination suit. Then she blew the whistle with such promiscuity—alleging not only privacy violations, but also over-charging by contractors and sexual harassment—that she accomplished little. It didn't help that Newsham seemed like a textbook paranoid: She lived alone with a 120-pound guard dog named Mr. Gunther and once told a reporter she sleeps with a gun under her pillow for fear of government reprisals.
Another recent eavesdropper-turned-whistle-blower was Canadian spy Mike Frost, who was featured on 60 Minutes II in 2000. He made news by claiming that the United States and Canada were working together to wiretap civilians as part of the Echelon eavesdropping network. Frost related an alarming story about a soccer mom who ended up on a terrorist watch-list because she telephoned a friend to describe how her son had "bombed" in the elementary school play. But experts soon poked holes in this story. Frost tended to describe surveillance systems as all-powerful and omniscient; like Newsham, he sounded a little paranoid. And also like Newsham, he had held his tongue about his reservations until he parted ways with his agency for an unrelated reason. (In this case the reason was alcoholism—Frost's tell-all book reveals that he and his ghostwriter first met in AA.)
CONTINUED...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2006/01/the_professional_paranoid.html
PS: Thank you, sabrina1. You have carried a lot of the load over the years, alone, on DU, and with our fellow Democrats. Words can't adequately express what your presence and friendship have meant to me. So, I haul out Jethro, my Doppelgänger.
...and we are again.
But many people didn't want to know then, and many don't want to know now.
Not knowing or acknowledging the TRUTH is denial of the first order and an indication of the level of FEAR that people live under.
And they've accepted this FEAR as ''normal.''
So they turn themselves into compliant sheeple.
- But they -- and ALL OF US -- will soon have to decide if we want to continue to live in FEAR or in TRUTH.
K&R
