David Edwards and Muriel Kane - ABC News / Raw Story
The Bush administration has repeatedly defended its warrantless surveillance of Americans as being directed only against "people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations."
Now two intercept operators who worked for the National Security Agency at Fort Gordon in Georgia have come forward to tell ABC News that isn't true.
David Murfee Faulk described to ABC's Brian Ross how he had listened to "personal phone calls of American officers, mostly in the Green Zone [in Baghdad], calling home to the United States, talking to their spouses and sometimes their girlfriends."
"Co-workers of mine were ordered to transcribe these calls," Faulk stated. "When one of my co-workers went to a supervisor and said, 'But sir, these are personal calls,' the supervisor said, 'My orders were to transcribe everything.'"
Adrienne Kinne, who like Faulk is an Arab linguist, said she had received the same orders and had listened to hundreds of Americans in the Middle East simply calling home. She emphasized that these were "Americans who are not in any way, shape, or form associated with anything to do with terrorism. It was just personal conversations that really nobody else should have been listening to."
When asked about President Bush's statement that the intercepts were directed only at known al-Qaeda suspects, Kinne stated, "That is completely a lie." She said that military officers, journalists, and Red Cross workers were among the people whose calls she transcribed.
Faulk told ABC that certain calls were even passed around among the intercept operators like office jokes. "I was told, 'Hey, check this out, there's some good phone sex.' ... It was there, stored the way you'd look at songs on your iPod."
"I feel that was something the people should not have been doing, including me," Faulk acknowledged.
Both whistleblowers' stories are included in a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford, The Shadow Factory. Bamford told ABC that although Americans were told the surveillance program was needed to keep us safe, "What it turns out to be is for a more prurient reason, listening for the sake of listening and then laughing."
CIA Director Michael Hayden, who was previously head of the NSA, has issued a statement saying that "any suggestion General Hayden sanctioned or tolerated illegalities of any sort is ridiculous on its face."
By JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS – Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The top congressional budget analyst says pension plans have lost as much as $2 trillion in the past 15 months.
Peter Orszag told a House panel on Tuesday that the losses are likely to force many workers to hold off on major purchases and delay their retirements.
The panel was investigating how the housing, credit and financial troubles battering the economy have affected retirement savings.
More than half the people surveyed in a recent Associated Press-GfK poll said they worry that they will have to work longer because the value of their retirement savings has declined.
By Robert Parry, Consortium News / Alternet
Palin may not even understand the significance of her baseless attacks on Obama that are straight out of the neocon playbook.
Sarah Palin's charge that Barack Obama is "palling around with terrorists" may mark the descent of Campaign 2008 into the sewer that has marked so many other recent U.S. elections. But her comments operate on another level, too, continuing to brand anyone who criticizes George W. Bush’s neoconservative foreign policy as un-American.
The Alaska governor's larger point -- made in her Oct. 2 debate and on the campaign stump since then -- is that Obama is a person who dares to find fault with U.S. policies overseas and thus deserves to have his patriotism questioned.
"Our opponent," Palin told Republican supporters during a post-debate speech in Colorado, "is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."
Palin added about Obama, "This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America. We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism."
It's unclear if Palin understood the full significance of her reference to American "exceptionalism," the theory preached by the neoconservatives who led her debate prep. They argue that the United States has the exceptional right to operate outside international law. But Palin does grasp the political usefulness of smearing an opponent in the style of Jeane Kirkpatrick, who in 1984 famously defined critics of Ronald Reagan's aggressive foreign policy as people who would "blame America first."
Palin is, in effect, labeling Obama a blame-America-firster. In the vice presidential debate, Palin twisted Obama's 2007 analysis of U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan -- which called for more troops on the ground to reduce reliance on air strikes that had killed civilians -- into him condemning everything the U.S. military has done in Afghanistan.
"Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians," Palin said. "And such a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause." With the blessings of John McCain's campaign, Palin then expanded on this "character" assault against Obama by citing his tenuous connection to former Vietnam War-era radical William Ayers as well as recalling the controversy over Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Though McCain has in the past decried this sort of personal smear tactic -- especially when he was the victim in 2000 -- his campaign has announced, rather openly, its intent to go negative on Obama in a guilt-by-association barrage in the weeks before Nov. 4.
New Assault
Several top Republicans told the Washington Post that "McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama's character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat's judgment, honesty and personal associations."
McCain aides also left no doubt that the strategy would have a McCarthyistic tinge by highlighting Obama's limited connections to Ayers, who as a young man in the late 1960s and early 1970s, veered off into violent radicalism in protest of the slaughter going on in the Vietnam War. Ayers became a leader of an extreme faction, known as the Weathermen, that planted bombs at the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. After years of living underground, Ayers surfaced and escaped a prison sentence in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct in his case.
Though never disavowing his rationale for reacting to the Vietnam War violence by trying to bring a small measure of that violence back home, Ayers expressed regret for some of his actions and quietly built a life as a Chicago-based college professor focusing on educational issues.
Possibly because Ayers came from a family with deep ties in the Chicago establishment -- his father had served as chief executive of Commonwealth Edison -- the ex-student radical was given a kind of second chance to turn his expertise to the good of his community.
One of Ayers's defenders now is Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, whose father had run the city at the time of infamous clashes in 1968 between anti-war activists and police. "He's done a lot of good in this city and nationally," Daley told the New York Times in a front-page article on Oct. 4.
Daley also urged people to view Ayers's radicalism four decades ago in the context of the time when the brutality of the Vietnam War had torn apart the nation's social fabric. "This is 2008," Daley said. "People make mistakes." History also shows that the mistakes were not just made by anti-war activists, but by the nation's leaders who intervened with a half-million U.S. troops and massive firepower in what amounted to a local civil war. The record reveals that President Lyndon Johnson's decisions were driven by fear that he would be blamed for "losing Indochina" and by the erroneous belief that communism was a monolith.
Johnson and his advisers failed to appreciate the emerging Sino-Soviet split or the nationalism that inspired much of the Vietnamese resistance to French and then American domination. As Johnson pushed forward into the bloody Vietnam quagmire, the American people also splintered into angry factions, some backing the war and some doing what they could to end it. In 1967, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. threw his moral weight on the anti-war side, calling the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."
A few young Americans reacted to the violence in Vietnam -- and to the refusal of the U.S. government to stop the war -- by turning to anarchy or trying to "bring the war home" through violent acts within the United States. William Ayers was such a person.
Clearly, however, Obama had nothing to do with Ayers's behavior during the Vietnam War when Obama was still a child. It's also a stretch to suggest that a tenuous connection to Ayers implicated Obama in either Ayers's actions during the Vietnam War or his lack of remorse for some of his decisions.
Establishment Connections
Ironically, it was the Chicago establishment that put Obama -- a bright, young community organizer working with churches on Chicago's South Side -- into contact with Ayers, who served on philanthropic boards seeking to improve educational opportunities in the city.
The Obama campaign says the two men first met in 1995 through an educational project known as the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which was part of a $500 million national program for school improvement funded from the fortune of Walter Annenberg, a pro-Republican publisher (and close personal friend of Ronald Reagan).
Ayers also hosted a small political gathering for Obama's first state senate campaign; their terms overlapped as members of board for the Woods Fund, another community-oriented philanthropy; and they lived in the same Hyde Park neighborhood, seeing each other occasionally on the street, the Times reported in the Oct. 4 story.
Though Palin cited the publication of the Times article to justify her new attacks linking Obama to Ayers's Vietnam-era "terrorism," the article actually cites no evidence to support Palin's charge that Obama was "palling around with terrorists," with its suggestion that Obama and Ayers were close friends. The article concludes that the two appear to have been only casual acquaintances and that Ayers had little to do with Obama's political development.
According to the Times article, even conservative Republicans who knew Obama in that time period said he showed no radical tendencies. "I saw no evidence of a radical streak, either overt or covert, when we were together at Harvard Law School," said Bradford Berenson, who worked with Obama on the Harvard Law Review and later became an associate White House counsel to George W. Bush.
Berenson called Obama a "pragmatic liberal" whose moderation frustrated others at the law review who held more leftist views. Nevertheless, McCain and Palin appear determined to make this guilt-by-association theme work in the final weeks of the campaign, hoping that it will raise doubts about Obama that might scare off white working-class voters, so-called Reagan Democrats.
Clinton Oppo
The McCain-Palin ticket is helped by the fact that during the latter stages of the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton's campaign injected the Ayers issue into the race under the guise that the Republicans would use it -- and therefore it was best to raise it in time for Democrats to deny Obama the nomination.
The Ayers issue was part of the Clinton "oppo" research on Obama dating back at least to December 2007 when I was briefed on it by a close Clinton associate. The Clinton campaign pushed the Ayers theme during the spring 2008 primaries in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Key media personalities helped, such as George Stephanopoulos of ABC News, a former Bill Clinton adviser.
During a key prime-time debate before the Pennsylvania primary, Stephanopoulos said about Ayers that "in fact, on 9/11 he was quoted in the New York Times saying, 'I don't regret setting bombs; I feel we didn't do enough.'" Obama was left protesting this pejorative guilt-by-association.
"The notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was 8 years old, somehow reflects on me and my values doesn't make much sense, George," Obama responded. "So this kind of game, in which anybody who I know, regardless of how flimsy the relationship is, is somehow -- somehow their ideas could be attributed to me -- I think the American people are smarter than that. They're not going to suggest somehow that that is reflective of my views, because it obviously isn't."
By referring to the fact that Ayers's comments were published on Sept. 11, 2001, Stephanopoulos led viewers to believe that Ayers had either hailed the 9/11 attacks or used the 9/11 tragedy as a ghoulish opportunity to suggest that more bombings were desirable. But that wasn't true.
The comment, which was from an interview about a memoir that Ayers published earlier in 2001, was included in a New York Times article that appeared in the newspaper's Sept. 11, 2001, edition, which went to press on Sept. 10, hours before the 9/11 attacks.
In other words, the Ayers comment had no relationship to the 9/11 attacks. During the debate, in response to Sen. Clinton's piling on about Ayers, Obama pointed out that her husband had done more for ex-members of the Weather Underground than he had.
"By Sen. Clinton's own vetting standards, I don't think she would make it, since President Clinton pardoned or commuted the sentences of two members of the Weather Underground, which I think is a slightly more significant act" than knowing Ayers, Obama said. [For more details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Are the Clintons Playing Joe McCarthy?'] But now the Ayers issue is back, thanks to Republican operatives, the New York Times front-page article on Oct. 4 -- and Sarah Palin's new role as the attack dog for John McCain's campaign.
By Robert Scheer, Truthdig / Alternet
McCain is not a perfect replica of George W. Bush. But neither man seems to have any sense of how we actually live or what we need from government.
I am not a conventionally religious man, or even a very superstitious one, but I do wish George Bush would stop asking God to bless America. Every time he does, we seem to be visited with another plague, suggesting divine wrath over our president's evil ways. How else to explain the persistent calamity that has marked this administration: a pointless but very costly war over nonexistent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the devastating New Orleans flood, the betrayal of the nation by the money-changers -- from Enron to Goldman Sachs -- that Bush welcomed into the temple of the White House?
What's next? Pestilence, frogs, locusts or incurable boils? Dare we risk four more years of catastrophic misrule by a "W" alter ego? For those indifferent to the serious implications of that question, I recommend Oliver Stone's new bio-flick, which brilliantly captures the "banality of evil" that has controlled our political life these past eight years. This phrase from Hannah Arendt's characterization of the mundane cruelty that so marked the daily experience of European fascism has a frightening applicability to the Republican leadership that has done so much damage to this nation's reputation for democratic integrity.
Cynicism rules even as ritualistic prayer breaks, as depicted in the film W, abound. The pretense of piety earns the president and his accomplices a get-out-of-jail-free card; at no point in the film do any in the top ranks of this administration -- captured so accurately and depressingly -- accept one iota of accountability for how much damage they have wrought. Unrepentant, the same Republican apparatchiks are employing the familiar Rovian tactic of divide and conquer in seeking to continue their hold on power. Once again, they seek to focus attention on hot-button social issues and patriotic litmus tests to draw attention from the fact that family values are being destroyed by the loss of job and home.
Perhaps John McCain is not a perfect replica of George W. Bush, but the parallels go beyond the senator's enthusiastic support for the toxic mix of Bush's imperial foreign policy and his arrogant indifference to the travails of our domestic existence. Neither man seems to have any sense of how we actually live or what we need from government. How else to explain their common antipathy to Social Security and Medicare, which, after public education, represent the nation's most successful programs? Can you imagine the panic today if McCain and Bush had succeeded in tying Social Security to investments in the stock market? They view government as nothing more than a proud sponsor of the military-industrial complex while ignoring the threat to homeland security from corporate pirates.
Don't say we weren't warned. Bush came into office believing fervently that what was good for Enron and its CEO, Kenneth "Kenny Boy" Lay, Bush's top financial sponsor, was good for the country. So, too, McCain, who chose Phil Gramm as co-chair of his presidential campaign, ignoring the huge loophole in Gramm's Commodity Futures Trading Act, which allowed Enron, where his wife, Wendy Gramm, was on the board of directors, to so shamelessly game the energy market.
Trumpeting the benefits of the legislation he tacked onto an omnibus spending bill the day before the 2000 Christmas recess, then-Sen. Gramm stated: "It protects financial institutions from over-regulation. It provides legal certainty for the $60 billion market in swaps." Those swaps created the toxic investments that U.S. taxpayers are now stuck with as the nation struggles to save those unregulated financial institutions from bankruptcy.
McCain, who should have learned the cost of radical deregulation from his own involvement in the savings and loan scandal as one of the infamous "Keating Five," totally bought Gramm's line. McCain was the chair of Gramm's 1996 presidential bid and up until major Wall Street firms collapsed continued to echo the insistence of the former-Texas-senator-turned-banker that there was no real crisis in the financial markets.
McCain evidences the underlying motivator attributed to Bush in Stone's movie: the distorted priorities of a son of privilege doing battle with the legacy of more gifted and responsible family ancestors. Both grew up as spoiled screw-ups repeatedly bailed out of trouble by their highly accomplished fathers, in McCain's case an admiral, and both assume, as a matter of legacy, that they have a right to rule. What they ignored in their legacy was a Christian's obligation to make the economic system that handsomely rewarded their kin at least minimally responsive to the needs of ordinary folk.
Nico Pitney - Huffington Post
Joe Biden lashed out at Sarah Palin on Wednesday, calling her recent rhetoric "ugly" and "mildly dangerous," and expressing shock that the Alaska Governor did not interrupt recent rallies when supporters shouted hateful attacks about Barack Obama, including "treason!" and "kill him!"
"I watched the news and I heard a couple people hollering from the audience semi-vile things about 'terrorists,' things like that," Biden said on NBC's Today show. "The idea that a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop mid-sentence and turn and condemn that -- it's just a slippery slope, it's a place that we shouldn't be going."
Biden repeated the sentiment on ABC's Good Morning America:
"I think it goes way too far. Look, this really is a case where, when you don't have anything to talk about, attack -- and it gets really over the edge," he said. "I mean, some of the stuff she's saying about Barack Obama and the stuff that people are yelling from the crowd, if she hears it, she should be at least be saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's overboard. But this is volatile stuff."
A Secret Service spokesperson said on Tuesday that agents were trying to track down more information about the individual who yelled "kill him" during the Palin event in Clearwater, Fl., on Monday.
ThinkProgress
During a recent interview with Marie Claire, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) wife Cindy suggested that her husband has never had PTSD symptoms because “he was trained.” She also added that symptoms such as “cold sweats in the middle of the night” are reserved for the “the 18-year-olds who were drafted”:
Q: You met your husband after his POW days. To what extent is that still with you - or is it a part of history?
McCAIN: My husband will be the first one to tell you that that’s in the past. Certainly it’s a part of who he is, but he doesn’t dwell on it. It’s not part of a daily experience that we experience or anything like that. But it has shaped him. It has made him the leader that he is.
Q: But no cold sweats in the middle of the night?
McCAIN: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. My husband, he’d be the first one to tell you that he was trained to do what he was doing. The guys who had the trouble were the 18-year-olds who were drafted. He was trained, he went to the Naval Academy, he was a trained United States naval officer, and so he knew what he was doing.
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