Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
June 25, 2013
Congress insisted it be kept in the dark on the NSA
surveillance programs recently revealed by Edward Snowden, according to
Dick Cheney, who approached lawmakers with an invitation for them to
provide more oversight back in 2004 but was told, “absolutely not”.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Speaking at a Washington think tank on U.S.-Korean
affairs, the former Vice-President bragged about his involvement in
setting up NSA programs shortly after 9/11 that snooped on email and
phone records.
Cheney also revealed that when he approached
Congressional leaders about whether they wished to provide oversight for
the program three years after it began, they were “unanimous” that it
should continue.
“I said, ‘Do you think we ought to come back to the
Congress in order to get more formal authorization?’ and they said,
‘Absolutely not.’ Everybody, Republican and Democrat, said, ‘Don’t come
back up here, it will leak’,” Cheney said.
Cheney’s claim that Snowden’s revelations have caused significant damage to US national security has been rejected by other top security experts,
who assert that terrorists already assume their communications are
under surveillance and are therefore unaffected by the information
released by the whistleblower.
“The argument that this sweeping search must be kept
secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this
sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were
blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing,” said top
counter-terrorism czar under Presidents Clinton and Bush – Richard
Clarke.
The former head of the NSA’s global digital data gathering program, William Binney, also highlighted how mass NSA surveillance did nothing to prevent terrorism.
In addition, the claim that the program prevented terror attacks on targets such as Wall Street and the New York subway has also been debunked.
Cheney’s revelation that Congress was completely
uninterested in learning about the PRISM program and other NSA snooping
initiatives nine years before they caused a global scandal underscores
how lawmakers are continually willing to give the federal government a
blank check to abuse Constitutional rights.
Given the fact that Congress is not only failing to
perform its duty of acting as a check and balance in providing oversight
of federal government activity, but actually demanding its role be the
opposite – a green light for unrestrained spying – is it any wonder that
the Congressional job approval has been on a continual slide since 9/11?
A recent Rasmussen Reports survey found
that just one percent of Americans think Congress is doing an excellent
job and 5 percent think it’s doing a good job, figures that are well
deserved given that lawmakers, besides a notable few, have completely
abrogated their responsibility to keep the executive branch under
scrutiny.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.
This article was posted: Tuesday, June 25, 2013 at 6:29 am
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