NSA And Congress Aren’t Too Happy With The Peasantry Knowing The Truth

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Why do we have members of Congress, like Mike Rogers, why are they giving these vainglorious speeches and grandstanding and basically pulling the congressional pom-poms out and cheerleading this stuff?  It is Congress’s job, it is their duty, to oversight this, to oversee it and look for where it is not functioning as it is supposed to, where there are abuses, and to correct it.  They seem to be in this pattern now of: Uh oh, some of the people are smart enough to have figured this out.  They got us!  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

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Vice President Joe Biden: If it’s true that 200 million Americans’ phone calls were monitored, in terms of not listening to what they said but to whom they spoke and who spoke to them, I don’t know, the Congress should investigate this.

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Mike:  That was Joe Biden back in 2006.  Of course, Bush was president then and Dennis Hastert was Speaker of the House and Republicans were in control of Congress.  There was then a different tide that was running through Mordor on the Potomac River.  People had different attitudes towards this.  The more I study this and the more I learn about this, the more troublesome this becomes.  As Dana Milbank points out today in the Washington Compost, now Congress is basically becoming a rubber stamp for an intelligence agency called the NSA.

Why do we have members of Congress, like Mike Rogers, why are they giving these vainglorious speeches and grandstanding and basically pulling the congressional pom-poms out and cheerleading this stuff?  It is Congress’s job, it is their duty, to oversight this, to oversee it and look for where it is not functioning as it is supposed to, where there are abuses, and to correct it.  They seem to be in this pattern now of: Uh oh, some of the people are smart enough to have figured this out.  They got us!  In order to soften the future opinions of other people, what Congress is doing, as Milbank points out, is basically becoming the world’s biggest cheerleader for the world’s biggest spy racket.  Of course, the spy racket now is focused solely or almost exclusively on citizens of the United States.

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The other thing that ought to trouble you about this, and still continues to trouble me, when they come out and say: We foiled this terror plot and we used this data to do it.  The one case they point out, they had incoming phone calls from outside the country.  I don’t have an issue with that, especially if the call is suspected to have come from a member of Al-Qaeda or one of these groups that has been tagged as a terrorist outfit in one of those Middle Eastern countries.  I don’t think anyone has an issue with that.  Did you have to cull the records of 200 million people to get the incoming transmission from Yemen or Afghanistan?  Speaking of Afghanistan, tragically four soldiers yesterday killed in action in Afghanistan, as Obama continues to drag his feet.  Are we in or are we out, Mr. President…

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This is how Milbank puts it.  Now, if you read today’s Pile of Prep, what I have jokingly said is that what Congress and the NSA are saying is that we can do all these things, and we have done — they’ve admitted they’ve culled all these metadata records from phone calls and email transactions and what have you — this is what has helped us to thwart all these terror attacks.  We can only tell you about a few of them, but this was beneficial for us to stop this attack or that attack or whatever the terminology is.  None of it is very certain.  None of it seems to be concrete.  As I point out jokingly, you guys are playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with NSA data.  Why, because someone used the same intercontinental telephone trunk and the branch split off somewhere near where their branch split off?  That then makes the connection and that’s how you go: That’s why we had to tap it, because it came in here.  Really, that’s your excuse?  Here’s Milbank on the same subject.

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The Founders created a system of checks and balances. Those overseeing the nation’s spying have switched to a system of cheers and bouquets.

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Mike: Any moment, ladies and gentlemen, I expect Michele Bachmann or Mike Rogers to throw some flowers out onto the witness table at a Congressional hearing.  I expect one of them to stand up, maybe put their hand over their heart and begin to weep and say: Thank you for all that you have done for us!

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This was the impression given by members of the House intelligence committee [Mike: Is that an oxymoron or what? Congress, intelligence committee, do those two go together in the same paragraph without a giant stretch of laughter placed in between?] as they held an open-to-the-public hearing Tuesday on the National Security Agency’s snooping into Americans’ phone and Internet records.

“That’s a patriot!” Chairman Mike Rogers said of Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director. [Mike: Speaking of patriots, do you know what the importance of June 19 is on the founding fathers calendar? I’ll tell you later.]

“Your leadership in NSA has been outstanding,” added Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (Md.), the committee’s ranking Democrat. [Mike: They love to glad-hand one another, do they not?]

Only his spymaster’s cool kept Alexander from blushing. “Thank you for the kind words,” he replied. “As you noted, we have extraordinary people doing great work.”

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Mike:  Let me ask you people a question: Do you believe that there are any extraordinary people who work for the Internal Revenue Service?  If they are extraordinary, why aren’t they working for Apple Computer or Cisco Systems, name your Fortune 500 company where performance and the actual elevation of raw materials into something worth more than they were when you found them — it’s called profit — is the goal and can be shared in?  Oh, but Mike, they want to serve.  Okay, got it.

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The hearing was really a pep rally, as lawmakers praised the officials involved in the surveillance programs and then yielded the floor for an hour so the officials could make statements about how responsible and restrained they’ve been. [Mike: (mocking) “Look, we only got 110 million people’s lines from the FISA order to get Verizon. We did leave almost 100 million out there that we left unobserved.”] The congressional overseers of the intelligence agencies quite clearly are captivated by — if not captives of — the people they are supposed to be supervising. [Mike: In other words, they’re all drunk with the power that they all share over us, the peasants, the hoi polloi.]

Rogers, in fact, seemed irritated by the notion of letting the public in on their little secret, a disclosure made necessary by Edward Snowden’s leaks. Rogers spoke disapprovingly of being “forced into the position of having so publicly discussed intelligence programs due to irresponsible criminal behavior.”

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Mike:  In other words, [mocking] “Nothing to see here, citizen, move along.  Trust me, even though I was a peanut farmer before I went to Congress, I am now a mighty member of Congress.  I am smarter, wiser, more erudite, and more learned in the ways of the world than you will ever be, you sniveling peasant.  I have combed through this intelligence data on your behalf and you can trust me when I say your life, your livelihood, your children’s lives have all been spared thanks to me.”  So modest are they, members of Congress, are they not?

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Deputy FBI director Sean Joyce, one of the witnesses, joined in the complaint that the “egregious leaks” have hurt national security because “now here we are talking about this in front of the world.”

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Mike:  In other words, now that the rest of the planet knows what it is that the United States of America does for cyber recreation, which is to gather all the data of the entire planet, plant it in a silo somewhere out in the middle of the Utah hinterland, and store it away for future safekeeping, the fact that people know about this is the problem, not the fact that you’re actually doing it?  Am I the only person that understands the backwards nature of the implication?  What the problem is then is that we have learned what our government is doing.  By the bye, the government is supposed to be us.  We’re the ones that are supposed to be represented by all this.  Now that we’ve learned what they’re doing and we’re suspicious of them, that’s a horrible thing.  You shouldn’t be suspicious of us, or should it be why are you doing these things?  Your explanations do not comport with the facts or, as they love to say, the conditions on the ground.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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