Edward Snowden interview

[uebermann]

[Bauce]

So do you believe the government should not be allowed to classify documents?

[exploited]

Of course they should. And in most cases, people who leak classified documents need to be punished. But there are exceptions to every rule, and Snowden is one of them.

[Bauce]

[Professor]

[exploited]

That what he exposed affected enough people and was clearly illegal under the primary law of your country. That there were no other routes from him to go. That he did not release unrelated classified information.

[Professor]

[exploited]

[exploited]

http://rt.com/usa/nsa-obama-whistleblowers-letter-337/

“Surely you intuit that something is askew when NSA Director Keith Alexander testifies to Congress that NSA’s bulk collection has ‘thwarted’ 54 terrorist plots and later, under questioning, is forced to reduce that number to one, which cannot itself withstand close scrutiny. And surely you understand why former NSA Director and CIA Director Michael Hayden protests too much and too often on Fox News and CNN, and why he and House Intelligence Committee Mike Rogers publicly suggest that whistleblower Edward Snowden be put on your Kill List.”

“Does a blind loyalty prevail in your White House to the point where, 40 years after Watergate, there is not a single John Dean to warn you of a “cancer on the presidency?” Have none of your lawyers reminded you that “electronic surveillance of private citizens … subversive of constitutional government” was one of the three Articles of Impeachment against President Richard Nixon approved by a bipartisan 28 to 10 vote of the House Judiciary Committee on July 27, 1974?”

The VIPS letter indicates the combined insight and expertise of these respected intelligence analysts - all ridiculed and some prosecuted after calling attention to NSA abuses years before anyone had heard of former NSA contractor and leaker Edward Snowden - can be important in the face of an establishment community in Washington seeking to shelter the mass surveillance programs in question.

“Given the closed circle surrounding you, we are allowing for the possibility that the smell from these rotting red herrings has not yet reached you – even though your own Review Group has found, for example, that NSA’s bulk collection has thwarted exactly zero terrorist plots,” they write, referring to an Obama-appointed panel that was tasked with reviewing NSA procedures."

“The sadder reality, Mr. President, is that NSA itself had enough information to prevent 9/11, but chose to sit on it rather than share it with the FBI or CIA. We know; we were there. We were witness to the many bureaucratic indignities that made NSA at least as culpable for pre-9/11 failures as are other U.S. intelligence agencies.”

The VIPS revisit much of the information already reported, including the case of NSA senior executive Drake’s attempts to convince agency heads that a program developed by Binney should have been used for crucial intelligence gathering. THINTHREAD, produced for a relatively small amount of money shortly before the 9/11 attacks, sorted information without violating the Fourth Amendment or NSA’s privacy standards, the VIPS write.

But instead, then-NSA director Michael Hayden chose a different program, STELLARWIND, produced by defense contractors that cost billions of dollars while violating Fourth Amendment and privacy rights. Drake sounded the alarm, continuing to push for THINTHREAD use even after all its developers left the NSA in October 2011. In his steady support for the discarded program, he found out how much actionable intelligence the NSA had legally gathered that could have thwarted the 9/11 attacks, he says.

Upon being asked to prepare a report at the request of Congress on the NSA’s knowledge of the 9/11 plot and hijackers before September 11, 2001, Drake says the agency decided to balk at taking any responsibility.

“After a couple of weeks [SIGINT chief Maureen] Baginski rejected my draft team Statement for the Record report and removed me from the task,” Drake writes. “When I asked her why, she said there was a ‘data integrity problem’ (not further explained) with my draft Statement for the Record. I had come upon additional damaging revelations. For example, NSA had the content of telephone calls between AA-77 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar in San Diego, CA, and the known al-Qaeda safe house switchboard in Yemen well before 9/11, and had not disseminated that information beyond NSA.”

“In short, when confronted with the prospect of fessing up, NSA chose instead to obstruct the 9/11 congressional investigation, play dumb, and keep the truth buried, including the fact that it knew about all inbound and outbound calls to the safe house switchboard in Yemen. NSA’s senior leaders took me off the task because they realized – belatedly, for some reason – that I would not take part in covering up the truth about how much NSA knew but did not share.”

[Professor]