Snowden and Snooping

Speech by Amb. Chas W. Freeman at MIT, Dec. 12, 2013

Freeman is one of the best and brightest. Read the speech and see why his tenure in 2009 as Deputy Director of National Intelligence/Director of the National Intelligence Council was unusually short – five hours! The Israel Lobby got the White House to “un-appoint” him because of his bad knees (he could not jerk them quickly enough at the word “Israel”).

Chas Freeman on Snowden and snooping

For the play by play on Freeman’s remarkably short-lived appointment, see:

http://consortiumnews.com/2009/031109a.html

 

Syria…

Sy Hersh’s latest is a must-read: Syria: Whose SARIN?

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2013/12/08/seymour-m-hersh/whose-sarin

It is extremely telling that Sy could not find anyone in this country to publish this investigative piece so embarrassing to the powers that be (as well as to lazy journalists). Like Mearsheimer and Walt when they did their major piece on the Israel Lobby, Sy had to go to the London Review of Books.

Consortiumnews.com, however, is always ready to post VIPS memos – and especially those like this one (link below) – on a priority basis, when needed. So VIPS was already on record with some of the basics of Sy’s story two months ago.

We did catch a lot of heat for posting this one (below) but, in order to be relevant, we had to move very quickly, since it appeared that Congress was going to vote in the next day or two on whether to attack Syria. (This was before the Russians came to our rescue and threw Obama a lifeline.)

Obama Warned on Syria Intelligence
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), Sept. 6, 2013

Obama Warned on Syrian Intel

And why did Obama change his mind about attacking Syria? It could be, as Sy suggests, that someone was able to get to him and warn him that folks like John Brennan were trying to start another war.

It seems at least equally likely that Gen. Martin Dempsey got to Obama on Aug. 30, after Kerry told a press conference, 35 times, that “we know” the Syrian government was behind the chemical attacks on Aug 21. VIPS has good reason to believe that its memo to Dempsey (see below) got into the right hands early on the afternoon of Aug. 30 and may actually have had some impact. (Needless to say, this does not happen with every such memo!) On Aug. 31, Obama said this:

“Our military has positioned assets in the region. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs has informed me that we are prepared to strike whenever we choose. Moreover, the Chairman has indicated to me that our capacity to execute this mission is not time-sensitive; it will be effective tomorrow, or next week, or one month from now. And I’m prepared to give that order.” (Emphasis added)

U.S. Government Shutting Down a Key News Source

By Elizabeth Murray, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)

US Shutting Down a Key News Source

This cuts us hoi polloi out of a very rich – indeed, invaluable – source of raw, unadulterated information to analyze. I’ll bet that the hoi aristoi – the favored journalists, newspapers, and academics – will still get the feed, as long as they remain “cooperative,” apply the approved spin, and don’t act up. That may be why there is no hue and cry this time from the usual quarters. Have they ALL been co-opted?

For the rest of us, it will now be much harder convincingly to expose distortion and spin, since we shall lack access to the original raw material being spun. For example, we will no longer be able to prove that senior Iranian leaders never threatened to “drive Israel into the sea,” or “wipe Israel off the map.”

Perhaps it is the case that one has to have had deep experience working in the political science sub-discipline of media analysis to realize what lucrative intelligence it can yield – today just as much as in the past. Proper analysis of a foreign leader’s remarks is often of far more intelligence value than the hundred million conversations that NSA collects every day and adds to the haystack against the day one or two might come in handy. Or as Dick Cheney has put it, “You never know when you might need it.”

The loss of access to original open sources is a major blow to those of us who know what a fertile field open media is to plow. This decision will be very bad news if it is not reversed.