Are Members of Congress (and Maybe Even the President) Being Blackmailed?
Tue, 04/21/2009 - 21:07 - dlindorff
http://www.thiscantbehappening.net/?q=node/302
For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the elected
body that the nation's Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of liberty, could
have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of challenging the
dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution wrecking campaign of
the Bush/Cheney administration.
There has been speculation on both the far left and the far right, and even
among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political spectrum, that
somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been blackmailing at least
the key members of the Congressional leadership, most likely through the use
of electronic monitoring by the National Security Agency (NSA).
I'll admit that I considered the idea of blackmail a bit far out. But now
suddenly there is at least some evidence that such seemingly wild
speculation may not have been off the mark, with reports that the NSA was
indeed monitoring Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), and that the Bush Administration
used the evidence it had obtained of her improper conversations with and
promises to assist agents of the Israeli government and its lobby here in
the US, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), to blackmail
her into supporting the NSA's warrantless spying program-the very kind of
spying that led to her being caught on tape plotting with an agent of a
foreign power.
At the time of the taping of Harman's incriminating phone conversations, the
administration was trying desperately (and ultimately successfully) to get
the New York Times to hold off on publishing a shocking investigative report
by journalist James Risen about a massive campaign of warrantless tapping of
Americans' phone and internet communications.
According to a
report by Jeff Stein, published in the latest issue of Congressional Quarterly
, the NSA in 2006 recorded Rep. Harman negotiating
with an alleged Israeli agent about helping Israel win a reduction in the
espionage charges filed by the US in 2005 against two members of the AIPAC
lobby accused of providing US intelligence information to the Israeli
government (the case against AIPAC's Stephen Rosen and Keith Weissman is
still waiting to go to trial). According to the transcript, a copy of which
was obtained by CQ, the Israeli agent offered to have AIPAC lobby, and more
specifically to have a it arrange for a wealthy Jewish pro-Israel donor in
California donate money to Rep. Nancy Pelosi, in order to get her, once she
became House Speaker, to name Harman as chair of the House Intelligence
Committee. At the end of the phone conversation, Rep. Harman, who offered to
help, was heard to say, "This conversation doesn't exist."
According to reports in CQ and in the New York Times, which ran a story on
the scandal as its lead news item on Tuesday, then Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales subsequently intervened with the FBI to prevent any prosecution of
Harman, a key member of Congress on whom the administration was relying to
help it persuade the Times to withhold its NSA wiretapping exposé until
after the 2006 election. In the event, Rep. Harman did later make calls to a
Times, editor, the paper did hold its story until after the election, and
Harman later was a leading backer of the administration's controversial
(and, according to a federal district judge, illegal) NSA spying program.
There are several serious issues here. One is the extraordinary glimpse it
offers into the extent to which Israel has penetrated the centers of power
in Washington. It is illegal for foreign governments to directly lobby and
to offer to arrange financial contributions for members of the US
government, but here, clearly, Israeli agents were doing just that. The role
of AIPAC as a front for the Israeli government in Washington, as exposed
here, is simply stomach-turning, and should make it a toxic organization to
politicians. Instead, they flock enmasse to its annual meetings, as
President Obama did almost immediately upon winning the November election,
and a large proportion of both houses from both parties happily accept its
campaign largesse.
A second, even bigger, issue is the NSA's spying activities themselves.
According to CQ, the particular wiretap that caught Rep. Harman inflagrante
with an Israeli agent was a court-approved tap-part of an investigation into
Israeli government spying activities. But even if this is true-and at this
point, we're relying on what the government is telling us about it-it shows
how dangerous the broader unwarranted monitoring program of the NSA has
been, and remains. Back in 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act FISA) in direct response to the disclosure during the
Watergate hearings and subsequent investigations that the Nixon
Administration had been using the NSA to conduct illegal monitoring of the
communications of anti-war activists, and of members of Congress. To prevent
such police-state outrages in the future, Congress passed the FISA
legislation, establishing a secret court staffed by a panel of
top-security-cleared federal judges, whose sole responsibility was to
consider and grant requests from the NSA for warrants to conduct secret
electronic surveillance within the US or involving American citizens abroad.
President Bush used the pretext of the 9-11 attacks to secretly order the
NSA to begin a massive compaign of surveillance without going through the
FISA Court for warrants, even secretly soliciting the cooperation of the
nation's several telecom companies in splicing in routers at their switching
hubs to make it possible to monitor all conversations moving across the
wires and the internet. It seemed to some observers, myself included, that
the only reason the administration could have had for bypassing the FISA
court (which over 30 years of operation has been incredibly accommodating of
government spying requests) was that it was planning to engage in spying
that would outrage the public and the Congress and even the FISA judges. It
also seemed likely, given the Bush/Cheney administration's public stance
that everyone was either "with us or against us," and that critics of the
administration's "War on Terror" or of its plans to invade Iraq, were
"unpatriotic" or "soft on terror," that congressional opponents of the
administration would be obvious-and indeed irresistible--targets of that
surveillance.
Now that we have seen proof that the administration was not above using its
NSA-acquired knowledge to pressure a member of Congress, it becomes
absolutely essential that Congress and the Justice Department investigate to
see whether other members of Congress were also victims of agency spying,
and whether others besides Rep. Harmon were similarly extorted or otherwise
compromised.
The American public can, at this point, have zero confidence in the
integrity of the Congress or of their own representatives, knowing that
politicians and government officials may be acting not in the public
interest but rather under duress in the interest of those who control the
National Security Agency. We can have zero confidence either in the
integrity of the president, who likewise may well have been compromised by
NSA surveillance conducted on him before he became president.
The only possible position for the public to adopt as of today is to be
suspicious of any politician who opposes a full and public investigation
into the NSA's seven-year-long campaign of sweeping, warrantless electronic
eavesdropping, since opposition to such an investigation, in the wake of the
Harman episode, could well be an indication that the political figure in
question is afraid she or he has been monitored, or worse, that she or he
has been threatened by those who have the records. Every citizen concerned
about the fate of American democracy should demand that his or her senators
and representative promptly call for such a public probe.
It is no longer a wild idea at all to imagine that our Congress has been
reduced to the status of a Potemkin legislature because of real or imagined
spying by the NSA.
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