Caller Donald Wonders Who Really Pulls The Strings In Washington

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – I’ve got a question for you.  I don’t know if you guys saw it in the articles about Snowden, but he said that the NSA had the ability to even spy on the President of the United States.  I guarantee you that if they had the ability to do it, you know they probably monitored some calls, looked through his emails.  Obama has to know that now.  I just don’t understand why he’s not even upset about that.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Donald is in Taxachusetts next on The Mike Church Show.  Hello, Donald.

Caller Donald:  Good morning, Mike.  I’ve got a question for you.  I don’t know if you guys saw it in the articles about Snowden, but he said that the NSA had the ability to even spy on the President of the United States.  I guarantee you that if they had the ability to do it, you know they probably monitored some calls, looked through his emails.  Obama has to know that now.  I just don’t understand why he’s not even upset about that.  Where I work, if I spied on my boss, I’d probably lose my job, if I went through his emails and stuff.  My question is, who do these people, who do these agencies really work for?  All this transcends over administration.  Who are they really working for?  Is the president really in charge of anything or is he just a public relations man that’s backed by a whole bunch of interest groups?  That’s what I wonder sometimes.

Mike:  Well, the companies that make the spying equipment, the people that are in the employ and the unions to which they belong.  The fact that there is a super-secret surveillance state means that there are going to be consequences to that.  There are going to be military consequences to that.  People that make military hardware that have to arm the soldiers and ships and arm and make the planes, they all benefit from the spyfare state.  As a matter of fact, there are a couple columns at the American Conservative Magazine website that deal with this.  Patrick J. Buchanan asks “Who Can Check the Surveillance State?”  He wonders, if we’re stuck with a surveillance state, and it seems that we are, then what is there to do about it?  Here’s what he says in part:

Mike Church Show Transcript: Kevin Gutzman Interview – NSA, IRS, And American Apathy

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Congress is not going to pass a law telling the NSA that it may not coordinate with AOL, Apple or Google to access information that might prevent a terrorist attack. And if a terrorist attack hits this country, and our security agencies say their hands were tied in trying to protect us, all bets would be off as to what intrusions upon their freedom Americans might accept.

In the end, we ourselves are going to have to strike the balance between freedom and security.

But the question lingers.

If Big Brother is our guardian angel now, could he become Lucifer?

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Mike:  I’d say he already has become Lucifer.  Then there is this, “How State Secrecy Leads to War,” by Chase Madar…

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The prosecution of Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ source inside the U.S. Army, will be pulling out all the stops when it calls to the stand a member of Navy SEAL Team 6, the unit that assassinated Osama bin Laden. The SEAL (in partial disguise, as his identity is secret) is expected to tell the military judge that classified documents leaked by Manning to WikiLeaks were found on bin Laden’s laptop. That will, in turn, be offered as proof not that bin Laden had internet access like two billion other earthlings, but that Manning has “aided the enemy,” a capital offense.

Think of it as courtroom cartoon theater: the heroic slayer of the jihadi super-villain testifying against the ultimate bad soldier, a five-foot-two-inch gay man facing 22 charges in military court and accused of the biggest security breach in U.S. history.

Mike Church Show Transcript: NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden On The Run, Seeking Political Asylum

But let’s be clear on one thing: Manning, the young Army intelligence analyst who leaked thousands of public documents and passed them on to WikiLeaks, has done far more for U.S. national security than SEAL Team 6.

The assassination of Osama bin Laden, the spiritual (but not operational) leader of al-Qaeda, was a fist-pumping moment of triumphalism for a lot of Americans, as the Saudi fanatic had come to incarnate not just al-Qaeda but all national security threats. This was true despite the fact that, since 9/11, al-Qaeda has been able to do remarkably little harm to the United States or to the West in general.

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Mike:  The guy that did the leaks or leaked the information to the Guardian and the Washington Post, who we now know was Edward Snowden, is being called by some a traitor and by others a hero.  As I said earlier in the day, we’ve always praised those who practice civil disobedience, especially when their civil disobedience leads to a change in policy.  No one demonizes or vilifies those that practiced civil disobedience during the civil rights era, do we?  We build statues to them, name schools and streets and bridges after them, do we not?

What makes Bradley Manning, or what makes Edward Snowden, who are accused of contravening U.S. law any different, especially in the case of Snowden?  When Snowden says specifically: Look, I could have leaked all kinds of stuff out.  I only leaked the stuff out that I thought was just blatantly unconstitutional and that someone had to know about.  Somebody had to do this.  As I said earlier, you can expect that if this is what has been leaked out, there’s an awful lot more that’s going on.  There are probably levels that even Snowden or Manning weren’t able to access, I would imagine.  Thanks for the phone call.  I bet if the NSA could spy on the president, don’t you think they can spy on members of Congress and the United States Senate?

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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