• Just before 9-11, Bush ignored warnings of a coming Osama bin Laden terror attack, but it was Reagan who, as part of his campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan, boosted fanatical jihadists and gave bin Laden his start.⁴¹⁴²⁴³

• Bush, on his first week in office, planned for carving up the oil fields after an Iraq invasion, but it was Reagan who took the solar panels off the White House and returned the nation to its oil-guzzling ways.⁴⁴⁴⁵

• To muster support for invading Iraq, Bush published phony intelligence reports, like those claiming that Iraq was working with al-Qaeda.⁴⁶ In that he followed the lead of Reagan, who, to gain support for aid to brutal regimes in Latin America, set up “The Office of Public Diplomacy” to use CIA propaganda techniques against the American people, and who, to gain support for his military build up, edited radio transcripts to give the false picture that the Soviets willfully shot down civilian flight KAL-007.⁴⁷⁴⁸

• Bush, in his “Global War on Terror”, pursued torture of captives and dragged the nation’s honor into the muck, but he was just bringing home the policy of Reagan, who supported torture by Latin American regimes fighting leftist rebellions.⁴⁹⁵⁰

• Bush broke laws with programs such as his domestic warrantless wiretapping, just like Reagan, with programs such as the Iran-Contra caper, which secretly bypassed Congress’s ban against aiding the brutal Contra rebels against the people of Nicaragua.⁵¹⁵²

• Bush pushed corporate deregulation and slowed anti-fraud enforcement during a time of massive Wall Street fraud, which helped bring about the Bush Economic Crash — putting millions out of work and causing trillions in bank bailouts, but he was riding out the deregulation wave started by Reagan, who signed the deregulation law that brought about the huge Savings and Loan Crash in the 80’s.^53545556

• Bush fiddled for eight years while global warming climate change mindlessly marched ahead, and, like Reagan, ignored and cut enforcement of environmental standards.⁵⁷⁵⁸

Now, President Obama has just signed a law to plan remembrances for Reagan on the 100th anniversary of his birth (on Feb 6, 2011).⁵⁹ Let’s take the occasion to do more than honor Reagan with a postage stamp — let’s honor our country by teaching a factual history of his regime and its effects to our children.

Sources

⁴⁰ ‘‘Bush’ sewage plant proposal makes ballot’ – AP, July 18, 2008

A measure seeking to commemorate President Bush’s years in office by slapping his name on a San Francisco sewage plant has qualified for the November ballot.

…

“We think that it’s important to remember our leaders in the right historical context,” said McConnell, a member of the group that was formed after friends came up with the renaming idea.

“In President Bush’s case, we think that we will be cleaning up a substantial mess for the next 10 or 20 years,” he said. “The sewage treatment facility’s job is to clean up a mess, so we think it’s a fitting tribute.”

⁴¹ ‘The Bush-Bin Laden Symbiosis’ By Robert Parry, August 11, 2006

The CIA tried to warn Bush about the threat with the hope that presidential action could energize government agencies and head off the attack. On Aug. 6, 2001, the CIA sent analysts to Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, to brief him and deliver a report entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”

Bush was not pleased by the intrusion. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, “All right, you’ve covered your ass,” according to Suskind’s book.

Then, ordering no special response, Bush returned to a vacation of fishing, clearing brush and working on a speech about stem-cell research.

⁴² ‘Ronald Reagan: Worst President Ever?’ By Robert Parry, June 3, 2009

[The Afghanistan] war was dramatically ramped up under Reagan, who traded U.S. acquiescence toward Pakistan’s nuclear bomb for its help in shipping sophisticated weapons to the Afghan jihadists (including a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden).

⁴³ ‘Pakistan and the ‘Global War on Terrorism’‘ by Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 8, 2008

In December 1984, the Sharia Law (Islamic jurisprudence) was established in Pakistan following a rigged referendum launched by President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq. Barely a few months later, in March 1985, President Ronald Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 166 (NSDD 166), which authorized “stepped-up covert military aid to the Mujahideen” as well a support to religious indoctrination.

…

“ … the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.

“The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system’s core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, …” (Washington Post, 23 March 2002)

⁴⁴ ‘Bush’s Belated Accountability Moment’ By Nat Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, November 12, 2006

In Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, O’Neill described the first NSC meeting at the White House only a few days into Bush’s presidency. An invasion of Iraq was already on the agenda, O’Neill said. There was even a map for a post-war occupation, marking out how Iraq’s oil fields would be carved up.

O’Neill said even at that early date, the goal of invading Iraq was clear. The message from Bush was “find a way to do this,” according to O’Neill, who was forced out of the administration in December 2002.

⁴⁵ ‘Prodigal Sun’ – Mother Jones, March 2000

The [DOE’s Solar Energy Research Institute] study, a yearlong investigation by some of the nation’s leading scientists, provided a convincing blueprint for a solar future. It showed that alternative energy could easily meet 28 percent of the nation’s power needs by 2000. The only thing that solar and wind and other nonpolluting energy sources needed was a push, the study concluded — the same research funding and tax credits provided to other energy industries, and a government committed to lead the way to reduced reliance on fossil fuels. … [Reagan’s] Energy Secretary Jim Edwards killed the study, all right, but not before it had been published in the Congressional Record.

… The budget for the solar institute — which President Jimmy Carter had created to spearhead solar innovation — was slashed from $124 million in 1980 to $59 million in 1982. Scientists who had left tenured university jobs to work under Hayes were given two weeks notice and no severance pay. The squelching of the institute — later partly re-funded and renamed the National Renewable Energy Laboratory — marked the start of Reagan’s campaign against solar power. By the end of 1985, when Congress and the administration allowed tax credits for solar homes to lapse, the dream of a solar era had faded. The solar water heater President Carter had installed on the White House roof in 1979 was dismantled and junked. Solar water heating went from a billion-dollar industry to peanuts overnight; thousands of sun-minded businesses went bankrupt. “It died. It’s dead,” says Peter Barnes, whose San Francisco solar- installation business had 35 employees at its peak. “First the money dried up, then the spirit dried up,” says Jim Benson, another solar activist of the day.

⁴⁶ ‘Pentagon Officer Created Phony Intel on Iraq/al-Qaeda Link’ By Matt Renner, t r u t h o u t, Friday 06 April 2007

Newly released documents confirm that a Pentagon unit knowingly cooked up intelligence claiming a direct link between Iraq and al-Qaeda in order to win support for a preemptive strike against the country.

A report prepared by the Defense Department’s Inspector General for Carl Levin, the Democratic Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, explicitly shows how former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith used his Defense Department position to cook intelligence claiming a connection between the terrorist organization and Saddam Hussein’s regime.

…

But according to the IG’s declassified report, “a Senior Intelligence Analyst working in the Joint Intelligence Task Force-Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT) countered point-by-point, each instance of an alleged tie between Iraq and al-Qaida …”

⁴⁷ ‘Iran-Contra’s ‘Lost Chapter’‘ – By Robert Parry, June 30, 2008

That chapter — which we are publishing here for the first time — was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.

…

The American people thus were spared the chapter’s troubling finding: that the Reagan administration had built a domestic covert propaganda apparatus managed by a CIA propaganda and disinformation specialist working out of the National Security Council.

“One of the CIA’s most senior covert action operators was sent to the NSC in 1983 by CIA Director [William] Casey where he participated in the creation of an inter-agency public diplomacy mechanism that included the use of seasoned intelligence specialists,” the chapter’s conclusion stated.

“This public/private network set out to accomplish what a covert CIA operation in a foreign country might attempt — to sway the media, the Congress, and American public opinion in the direction of the Reagan administration’s policies.”

However, with the chapter’s key findings deleted, the right-wing domestic propaganda operation not only survived the Iran-Contra fallout but thrived.

⁴⁸ ‘GOP & KAL-007: ‘The Key Is to Lie First’‘ By Robert Parry

One of the baldest — and now admitted — lies was the case of Korean Air Lines flight 007. On the night of Aug. 30, 1983, the KAL 747 jumbo jet strayed hundreds of miles off-course and penetrated some of the Soviet Union’s most sensitive air space, by flying over military facilities in Kamchatka and Sakhalin Island.

Over Sakhalin, KAL-007 was finally intercepted by a Soviet Sukhoi-15 fighter. The Soviet pilot tried to signal the plane to land, but the KAL pilots apparently did not see the repeated warnings. Amid confusion about the plane’s identity — a U.S. spy plane had been in the vicinity hours earlier — Soviet ground control ordered the pilot to fire. He did, blasting the plane out of the sky and killing all 269 people on board.

The Soviets soon realized they had made a horrendous mistake. U.S. intelligence also knew from sensitive intercepts that the tragedy had resulted from a blunder, not from a willful act of murder (much as on July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes fired a missile that brought down an Iranian civilian airliner in the Persian Gulf, killing 290 people, an act which Reagan explained as an “understandable accident”).

But in 1983, the truth about KAL-007 didn’t fit Washington’s propaganda needs. The Reagan administration wanted to portray the Soviets as wanton murderers, so it brushed aside the judgment of the intelligence analysts. The administration then chose to release only snippets of the taped intercepts packaged in a way to suggest that the slaughter was intentional.

⁴⁹ ‘Report: Torture started with Bush’ By Mark Benjamin, Salon.com

“The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive (interrogation) techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.” That is one of the raw conclusions of a two-year Senate investigation into torture.

…

According to the report, the torture ball started rolling with the president and his Feb. 7, 2002, memorandum stating that the Geneva Conventions didn’t apply to al-Qaida or the Taliban. The CIA and the Department of Defense began scurrying to establish their brutal interrogation regimes, while the White House and top Bush administration officials brushed aside legal hurdles and approved specific, horrifying techniques.

⁵⁰ ‘Lost History: ‘Project X’ & School of Assassins’ By Robert Parry © 1996

For years, human rights activists have accused the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas of teaching torture and assassination techniques to military officers from around the Western Hemisphere. For just as long, the Pentagon has denied the charge.

Then, late on Friday afternoon, Sept. 20, the Pentagon released a report admitting that some of those concerns were well-founded. From 1982-91, the School of the Americas used seven U.S. Army intelligence training manuals, written in Spanish, which advocated executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion, including the kidnapping of a target’s family members.

…

… In winning the election in 1980, President Reagan had publicly renounced President Carter’s strong emphasis on human rights.

In the months immediately after Reagan’s election, right-wing Salvadoran “death squads” went on a rampage of political slaughter, including the rape-murder of four American churchwomen. In 1981-82, the “death squads,” often consisting of plain-clothes soldiers, butchered thousands of perceived leftists with little criticism from a White House that was drawing a line against communism. In December 1981, a U.S.-trained Salvadoran battalion swept through the remote village of El Mozote and massacred about 800 men, women and children.

The Reagan administration also warmed up to the Guatemalan army as it launched extermination campaigns against suspected leftist strongholds among that country’s Indian population. Most controversial of all, the CIA began organizing the Nicaraguan contra rebel army to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government. The contras, too, gained a quick reputation for human rights atrocities during raids into northern Nicaragua.

⁵¹ ‘Spying on the Nation’ – Frontline, PBS

Although the president told the nation that his NSA eavesdropping program was limited to known Al Qaeda agents or supporters abroad making calls into the U.S., comments of other administration officials and intelligence veterans indicate that the NSA cast its net far more widely. AT&T technician Mark Klein inadvertently discovered that the whole flow of Internet traffic in several AT&T operations centers was being regularly diverted to the NSA, a charge indirectly substantiated by John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the official legal memos legitimizing the president’s warrantless wiretapping program. Yoo told FRONTLINE: “The government needs to have access to international communications so that it can try to find communications that are coming into the country where Al Qaeda’s trying to send messages to cell members in the country. In order to do that, it does have to have access to communication networks.

⁵² ‘Weinberger, Bushes & Iran-Contra’ By Robert Parry, March 29, 2006

In the early-to-mid 1980s, Ronald Reagan had sought to avoid a head-on clash with Congress by taking his foreign policy underground, using cutouts like Israel to ship missiles to Iran and White House aide Oliver North to funnel supplies to the contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua.

After those operations were exposed in 1986, Congress also tried to avert a constitutional showdown by papering over the illegal presidential actions and accepting the cover story that top officials, such as Reagan and Bush, were mostly out of the loop.

But those unresolved constitutional questions exploded back to the surface after Sept. 11, 2001, when George W. Bush asserted virtually unlimited presidential authority to override or ignore federal law as Commander in Chief. In effect, the younger George Bush was staking out power openly that Reagan and the elder George Bush had exercised only in secret.

⁵³ ‘Bush and Ken Lay: Slip Slidin’ Away’ By Sam Parry, February 6, 2002

Other parts of the Bush energy plan tracked closely to recommendations from Enron officials. Seventeen of the energy plan’s proposals were sought by and benefited Enron, according to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., ranking minority member on the House Government Reform Committee. One proposal called for repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, which limits the activities of utilities and hindered Enron’s potential for acquisitions.

⁵⁴ ‘Bush II Slowed SEC During Financial Fraud Fury’ – The Paragraph, June 18th, 2009

⁵⁵ ‘An Inside Story of Wall Street Bank Crashes’ – The Paragraph, December 26th, 2008

⁵⁶ ‘Reagan Did It’ By PAUL KRUGMAN, May 31, 2009

“This bill is the most important legislation for financial institutions in the last 50 years. It provides a long-term solution for troubled thrift institutions. … All in all, I think we hit the jackpot.” So declared Ronald Reagan in 1982, as he signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act.

…

The immediate effect of Garn-St. Germain, as I said, was to turn the thrifts from a problem into a catastrophe. The S.& L. crisis has been written out of the Reagan hagiography, but the fact is that deregulation in effect gave the industry — whose deposits were federally insured — a license to gamble with taxpayers’ money, at best, or simply to loot it, at worst. By the time the government closed the books on the affair, taxpayers had lost $130 billion, back when that was a lot of money.

But there was also a longer-term effect. Reagan-era legislative changes essentially ended New Deal restrictions on mortgage lending — restrictions that, in particular, limited the ability of families to buy homes without putting a significant amount of money down.

These restrictions were put in place in the 1930s by political leaders who had just experienced a terrible financial crisis, and were trying to prevent another. But by 1980 the memory of the Depression had faded. Government, declared Reagan, is the problem, not the solution; the magic of the marketplace must be set free. And so the precautionary rules were scrapped.

⁵⁷ ‘The four global warming impact studies Bush tried to bury in his final days’ by Joseph Romm, Grist, 21 Jan 2009

… For eight years [the Bush administration] have avoided their statutory obligation to detail the impacts of climate change on this country. And they have systematically muzzled government climate scientists from discussing those impacts with the public or the media.

It was easier to find people in the Bush administration to talk about torture or warrantless wiretaps, than it was to get someone to speak on (or off) the record on the likely impact of Bush’s policy of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions on Americans.

On Friday January 16, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program actually released four major Synthesis and Assessment reports. You may remember the last report the CCSP released — U.S. Geological Survey stunner: Sea-level rise in 2100 will likely “substantially exceed” IPCC projections, SW faces “permanent drying” by 2050. I was told by scientists knowledgeable about the CCSP process that all of the major impact reports were slowed down in the review process to make sure they came out after the election.

…

These are all substantive and comprehensive studies, almost on a par with the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment.

⁵⁸ ‘A look back at Reagan’s environmental record’ Grist, 10 Jun 2004

“The Reagan administration adopted an extraordinarily aggressive policy of issuing leases for oil, gas, and coal development on tens of millions of acres of national lands — more than any other administration in history, including the current one [Bush II],” said the Wilderness Society’s David Alberswerth.

Before delving further into Reagan’s track record, it’s worth recalling his infamous public statement that “trees cause more pollution than automobiles do,” and that if “you’ve seen one tree you’ve seen them all.” This is not, in other words, a president who demonstrated much ecological prowess.

…

The list of rollbacks attempted by these administrators is as sweeping as those of the current [Bush II] administration. Gorsuch tried to gut the Clean Air Act with proposals to weaken pollution standards “on everything from automobiles to furniture manufacturers — efforts which took Congress two years to defeat,” according to Clapp. Moves to weaken the Clean Water Act were equally aggressive, crescendoing in 1987 when Reagan vetoed a strong reauthorization of the act only to have his veto overwhelmingly overridden by Congress. Assaults on Superfund were so hideous that Rita Lavelle, director of the program, was thrown in jail for lying to Congress under oath about corruption in her agency division.

The gutting of funds for environmental protection was another part of Reagan’s legacy. “EPA budget cuts during Reagan’s first term were worse than they are today,” said Frank O’Donnell, director of Clean Air Trust, who reported on environmental policy for The Washington Monthly during the Reagan era. “The administration tried to cut EPA funding by more than 25 percent in its first budget proposal,” he said. And massive cuts to Carter-era renewable-energy programs “set solar back a decade,” said Clapp.

Topping it all off were efforts to slash the EPA enforcement program: “The enforcement slowdown was staggering,” said a staffer at the House Energy and Commerce Committee who helped investigate the Reagan administration’s enforcement of environmental laws during the early ’80s. “In the first year of the Reagan administration, there was a 79 percent decline in the number of enforcement cases filed from regional offices to EPA headquarters, and a 69 percent decline in the number of cases filed from the EPA to the Department of Justice.”

⁵⁹ ‘Obama designates day for Reagan’ By Michael Collins June 2, 2009

… [Nancy Reagan] stood with her hand on Obama’s shoulder as he signed the Ronald Reagan Centennial Commission Act into law.

The bill will create an 11-member panel that will recommend and carry out plans to celebrate Reagan’s 100th birthday, such as special stamps or commemorative coins. No federal money can be spent on the commission or its activities.

Sewage pipe image found HERE.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

Obama victory party at White House — Jotman

Sources

¹⁰ ‘At the White House, an Obama Party’ By Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, November 5, 2008

Amid a cacophony of car horns honking and chants of “Yes We Can” and “O-ba-ma,” there were taunts directed at the current occupant of the White House, chants of “No More Bush” and “Nah-nah, Good-bye.”

…

George W. Bush will not get the impeachment that he has so thoroughly earned, but at least there will be the scene of ecstatic young Americans wishing him to be gone from the White House that he illegitimately claimed in the stolen election of 2000.

As I walked among the young crowd that packed into Pennsylvania Avenue and reveled in the area around Lafayette Park, I was reminded of a very different moment nearly eight years earlier when I went with two of my sons, Sam and Nat, to a spot a few blocks away.

We stood in the chilly rain on Jan. 20, 2001, as protesters chanted angrily against Bush’s ascension to the presidency, a position he claimed with the unprecedented help of five Republican allies on the U.S. Supreme Court.

That day was a dark and ominous beginning to what has proven to be a catastrophic eight years.

¹¹ ‘Bush Adds Another Gem to Lie Log’ The Paragraph, December 15th, 2007

¹² ‘Bush administration cronyism and incompetence’ SourceWatch

¹³ ‘Bush Impeachment Crimes Will Not Be Buried’ The Paragraph, June 23rd, 2008

¹⁴ ‘Bunny Greenhouse Faced Halliburton War Profits Express’ The Paragraph, October 22nd, 2006

¹⁵ ‘Daily Weather Maps, 2008-11-05’ – U.S. Hydrometeorological Prediction Center

¹⁶ Transcript of Barack Obama’s victory speech, 2008-11-04

But above all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you. It belongs to you.

I was never the likeliest candidate for this office. We didn’t start with much money or many endorsements. Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and the front porches of Charleston. It was built by working men and women who dug into what little savings they had to give $5 and $10 and $20 to the cause.

It grew strength from the young people who rejected the myth of their generation’s apathy who left their homes and their families for jobs that offered little pay and less sleep.

It drew strength from the not-so-young people who braved the bitter cold and scorching heat to knock on doors of perfect strangers, and from the millions of Americans who volunteered and organized and proved that more than two centuries later a government of the people, by the people, and for the people has not perished from the Earth.

This is your victory.

And I know you didn’t do this just to win an election. And I know you didn’t do it for me.

You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead. For even as we celebrate tonight, we know the challenges that tomorrow will bring are the greatest of our lifetime — two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century.

¹⁷ ‘McCain Neck-Deep in K Street Sewer’ The Paragraph, August 23rd, 2008

¹⁸ ‘Election Day’ – Blue at bluelightful, bluelicious, bluelovely

… then we were off, in the rain, me wrapped in my friend’s coat, giving hugs and high fives to strangers, all the cars stopping to let us pass through, to the White House where there were drums and cheering and singing and a giant cardboard Obama cutout being passed from hand to hand as if he were there crowdsurfing with us (‘cause you know he would) — and then we saw, unbelievably, in the crowd of 4,000, more people we knew, and we all hugged and took photos and jumped up and down and cried and then the lights in the White House went out and we said that the next day for sure Jon Stewart would talk about how President Bush tried to get all those damn kids off his lawn.

The most amazing thing was how peaceful it was. No one got hurt. No one got in any fights. (I checked the crime reports the next day.) We were all excited and many of us were drunk, but it was so joyous. Even when the crowd started singing together that “na na na na, hey hey, goodbye” song, even that was good-spirited. It was the very definition of peaceable assembly.

¹⁹ ‘Lights Out, George’ Cape Cod Today

The president who has been MIA for all these last weeks, lest he be blamed for John McCain’s fortunes, did what only he would do in this instance. He turned out the lights at the White House.

Shortly after midnight, the celebration that had been taking place in the ambient light of the White House faded to dark, while figures continued dancing in the shadows.

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

…

Wake up America. This is not a call for you to take a new direction from right to left.

This is call for you to go from down to up.

Up with the rights of workers.

Up with wages.

Up with fair trade.

Up with creating millions of good paying jobs rebuilding our bridges, ports and water systems.

Up with creating millions of sustainable energy jobs to lower the cost of energy, lower carbon
emissions and protect the environment.

Up with health care for all.

Up with education for all.

Up with home ownership.

Up with guaranteed retirement benefits.

Up with Peace.

Up with Prosperity.

Up with the Democratic Party

Up with Obama – Biden

…

Kucinich speech at 2008 Democratic National Convention

Dems enjoy Kucinich’s speech:

Action

Petition Congress to to impeach Bush: Rep. Kucinich is trying to get one million signatures by September 10th to move his impeachment bill. He will deliver your petition and message to your Congressman.

Sources

Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, 2008-08-26 – VIDEO | TEXT

Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s web site

By Quinn Hungeski – Posted at G.N.N. & TheParagraph.com

Leadership wants to bury it, but this is one resolution that will be coming back from the dead. … We’ll come back and many of us will be reading this [on the House floor], and we’ll come back with 60 articles, not 35.x³⁶

So, many of Bush’s crimes are now on an official, historical record. And each Congressman has the chance to sign-on and show that one stood for the Constitution and the Republic.

Kucinich introduces articles of impeachment – CSPAN

Sources

³⁰ Links to each article of impeachment with full text and video of Kucinich reading it – kucinich.us

‘ARTICLES OF IMPEACHMENT FOR PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH’ – introduced by Rep. Kucinich, 2008-06-09, PDF file with full text

³¹ ‘Kucinich presents Bush impeachment articles’ by David Edwards and Mike Sheehan, The Raw Story, Monday June 9, 2008

³² ‘Mainstream media yawns as Kucinich offers impeachment’ by Muriel Kane, The Raw Story, Tuesday June 10, 2008

³³ ‘Kucinich’s Articles of Impeachment: A Three-Part Guide’ By Elizabeth de la Vega, The Public Record, June 14, 2008

‘Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush – U.S. and International Violations Alleged’ – a table by Elizabeth de la Vega, The Public Record

‘Articles of Impeachment for President George W. Bush’ – a table by Elizabeth de la Vega, The Public Record

³⁴ ‘House votes to send impeachment resolution to Judiciary Committee’ By Nick Juliano, The Raw Story, 11 June 2008

³⁵ ‘Tricky Republicans Give Cheney Impeachment New Life’ The Paragraph, November 11th, 2007

³⁶ ‘Kucinich Vows to Keep Up Impeachment Fight’ – Capitol Briefing by Ben Pershing, The Washington Post, June 11, 2008

• Bush has put in place a warrantless wiretapping program, where the NSA is hooked into phone company data switches.x⁴¹ So the investigation could have started with a phone call or email turned up by that program, rather than a bank routinely notifying the feds of a suspicious money transfer, as has been reported.x⁴²

• The FBI has charged the prostitution ring operators under the notorious Mann Act, a law against taking a woman across state lines for illegal sexual activity.x⁴³ That musty law has a history of use for political hits, such as in 1944 when the feds prosecuted Charlie Chaplin for having an affair, in an attempt to run that politically progressive movie maker out of the country.

• Instead of targeting crime, such as the unsolved September 2001 anthrax attack on Congress, the Bush Justice Department has targeted persons.x⁴⁴ Bush fired department prosecutors who did not prove themselves “loyal Bushies” by rushing prosecutions of Democrats before the 2006 election.x⁴⁵x⁴⁶

• The Spitzer case came from a full-blown investigation by the Justice Department’s tainted Public Integrity Section. During the Bush era, when Republican cronies have wasted many billions of taxpayer dollars, that division has opened six cases against Democrats for every one against a Republican.x⁴⁷x⁴⁸

• Before notching Spitzer, the Bush regime had already brought down a Democratic governor, Don Siegelman of Alabama. On election night 2002, Siegelman went to bed thinking he was re-elected governor, but some Republicans officials stayed up, found a “glitch” in the voting machinery, and flipped 6,000 votes to the Republican candidate, putting him on top. Siegelman proclaimed the election stolen.x⁴⁹x⁵⁰ Then in 2006, while running to reclaim the governorship, federal prosecutors got a loyal Bushie judge to take flimsy bribery charges (based on false evidence), and run Siegelman straight into federal prison, where he sits today.x⁵¹

• Spitzer, who made his reputation as the “Sheriff of Wall Street”, fighting big-time financial fraud, tied the Bush regime to the the sub-prime mortgage crisis.x⁵² Last month he wrote: “The [sub-prime lending] tale is still unfolding, but when the dust settles, [the Bush administration] will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders who went to any lengths in their quest for profits. So willing, in fact, that it used the power of the federal government in an unprecedented assault on state legislatures, as well as on state attorneys general and anyone else on the side of consumers.“x⁵³

• One day after the sex scandal broke, and effectively silenced Spitzer, the government turned another page in the sub-prime mortgage scandal.x⁵⁴ The Federal Reserve Board pledged to lend out 200 billion dollars of U.S. taxpayer money to banks, taking shaky mortgages as collateral.x⁵⁵

So, weighing this evidence, which was the bigger story last week: “Politician Caught with Pants Down” or “Bush Gang Cuts Down Sheriff of Wall Street”?

Front Page, 2008-03-13, The Queens Chronicle

lalomagne.blog50.com

An employee of a major investment bank, who requested anonymity, said the company chef had been instructed to break out bottles of champagne so that the staff could party and swap jokes about “client No. 9” (i.e. Spitzer). New York Post

Sources

⁴⁰ ‘Spitzer Resigns, Citing Personal Failings’ By Michael M. Grynbaum, The New York Times, Wednesday 12 March 2008

⁴¹ ‘Big Brother Bad Idea Still Breathing’ footnote 25 The Paragraph 2007-10-28

⁴² ‘The Reports That Drew Federal Eyes to Spitzer’ By DAVID JOHNSTON and STEPHEN LABATON, New York Times, March 12, 2008

⁴³ ‘Century-old law tied to Spitzer scandal — Old Law Tied to Eliot Spitzer Scandal Has Been Used Against Famous Men, Sometimes Questionably’ by MARCUS FRANKLIN, AP News, Mar 16, 2008 11:47

⁴⁴ ‘The Unsolved Case Of Anthrax’ By Tom Daschle, October 15, 2006, The Washington Post

While the FBI has made gains in its scientific capabilities and understanding of anthrax, its slowness to move and its lack of direction in the early stages of the investigation led to missed opportunities. In this age when we face a new kind of enemy, we need to be able to adapt our counterterrorism and law enforcement strategies to meet the threat.

We ought to use this fifth anniversary of the attack to rededicate ourselves to solving the crime and ensuring that we are better prepared to confront similar attacks.

First, the FBI and the Justice Department must treat this investigation with urgency. Solving the crime would send an important message to the perpetrator(s), to those who are contemplating similar attacks and to the American people.

⁴⁵ ‘Justice Dept. Would Have Kept ‘Loyal’ Prosecutors’ By Dan Eggen and Paul Kane, Washington Post, March 16, 2007

[Future chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, D. Kyle] Sampson wrote, “we would like to replace 15-20 percent of the current U.S. Attorneys — the underperforming ones . . . The vast majority of U.S. Attorneys, 80-85 percent, I would guess, are doing a great job, are loyal Bushies, etc., etc.”

⁴⁶ ‘PURGEGATE FISHINESS SUMMARY’ by Kevin Drum, Washington Monthly, March 24, 2007

Five of the eight [fired federal prosecutors] were either aggressively prosecuting Republicans or else failing to prosecute Democrats to the satisfaction of local politicians.

⁴⁷ ‘The Spitzer Sex Sting: A Few More Questions’ BY Scott Horton, Harper’s Magazine, March 10, 2008

Note that this prosecution was managed with staffers from the Public Integrity Section at the Department of Justice. This section is now at the center of a major scandal concerning politically directed prosecutions. During the Bush Administration, his Justice Department has opened 5.6 cases against Democrats for every one involving a Republican. Beyond this, a number of the cases seem to have been tied closely to election cycles. Indeed, a study of the cases out of Alabama shows clearly that even cases opened against Republicans are in fact only part of a broader pattern of going after Democrats.

⁴⁸ The Bush Administration: A Culture of Cronyism and Corruption — Cronyism in the Bush Administration is Systemic: a Look at the Rogue’s Gallery’ BUZZFLASH, 2005-09-28

⁴⁹ ‘Noel Hillman and the Siegelman Case’ BY Scott Horton, Harper’s Magazine, July 13, 2007

A … key figure from the Alabama clan of [Jack] Abramoff associates is Dan Gans, … a Republican “voting technology expert” who played a mysterious role in the 2002 gubernatorial election—he was in Republican controlled Bay Minette, Alabama, when 6,000 votes inexplicably shifted from Siegelman’s column to Riley’s due to a “computer glitch.” Now this is significant for a number of reasons. The likelihood that this was an innocent “computer glitch” in which only one single candidate—Don Siegelman—lost votes is approximately zero.

⁵⁰ ‘How To Rig a Republican Election (or Two)’ by Brad Friedman, Brad Blog, 12/22/2007

… [Siegelman] describes having gone to bed on Election Night after having been declared the victor by 6,000 votes following the publicly-counted results. But then, he was then awoken at about 4:30am with the shocking news that the numbers had magically been flipped after the all-Republican Election Board in Baldwin County had “re-counted” the results, illegally, by themselves, after midnight.

Seigelman’s only guess about what could have happened: “Somebody electronically manipulated the election results.”

The results were then certified immediately by the Republican AG who denied a legally requested hand-count, and the votes were then immediately sealed and locked away beyond reach.

“This elections was stolen,” Seigelman alleges in the video, “There is no other kind, or sugar-coated way to say it.”

⁵¹ ‘First Monday: The Siegelman Case — A Political Prosecution Exposed’ By Scott Horton, FireDogLake, March 3, 2008

Last Sunday, CBS aired its long-awaited feature on the prosecution and imprisonment of former Alabama Governor Don E. Siegelman.

The CBS piece, … came through on its promise to deliver several additional bombshells. The most significant of these was the disclosure that prosecutors pushed the case forward and secured a conviction relying on evidence that they knew or should have known was false, and that they failed to turnover potentially exculpatory evidence to defense counsel. The accusation was dramatically reinforced by the Justice Department’s failure to offer a denial.

⁵² ‘The Sheriff Of Wall Street — Eliot Spitzer Takes On The Brokers And Wins’ CBS News, May 25, 2003

⁵³ ‘Predatory Lenders’ Partner in Crime — How the Bush Administration Stopped the States From Stepping In to Help Consumers’ By Eliot Spitzer, The Washington Post, February 14, 2008

⁵⁴ The $200 billion bail-out for predator banks and Spitzer charges are intimately linked’ by Greg Palast, Global Research, March 14, 2008

⁵⁵ ‘Fed pumps up liquidity in tandem with other central banks’ – AFP, March 11, 2008

The Government appears to argue here that, … particularly because the President is designated Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, he has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution, itself. We must first note that the Office of the Chief Executive has itself been created, with its powers, by the Constitution. There are no hereditary Kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution. …

A catch-22 is a bureaucratic double-bind. The term comes from the title of a novel.x²² In Catch-22, the character Orr is a bomber pilot based in Italy during World War II. Orr is believed to be crazy. The rulebook says that a crazy person does not have to fly bombing missions. So Orr could ask not to fly. But, Catch-22 says that asking not to fly shows concern for one’s own safety, which is proof of sanity. So …

Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to.

The U.S. courts reason similarly: U.S. persons are being wiretapped without a warrant by the government. The Fourth Amendment says that a person cannot be wiretapped without a warrant. So persons can sue and stop the government from wiretapping them. But, Catch-22 says that only persons who can prove they are wiretapped can sue — yet a person cannot prove that, because the government keeps any such wiretap lists secret. So … If wiretapped persons sue to stop the wiretapping, they must prove they’re on a secret wiretap list, but they can’t prove it. If wiretapped persons don’t sue, then the government keeps wiretapping them.

While the lawsuit against the Bush regime has failed, lawsuits against AT&T and Verizon for aiding the government’s illegal spying are pending.x²³ These lawsuits could reveal details of reports that the Bush regime tapped into telecom data switches and sucked up communications, not just of certain persons, but of everyone, and that it began illegal wiretapping, not after September 11, 2001, but in February 2001, shortly after taking office.x²⁴ As the House now considers changes to the foreign intelligence surveillance law (FISA), Bush and House Republicans are pressing for retroactive immunity for telecoms — which would shut down the lawsuits.x²⁵ But the House Democratic leadership has so far held firm against such immunity.

Sources

²⁰ ‘Supreme Court rejects domestic wiretap appeal’ – by Anne Broache, C|Net News.com, February 19, 2008

²¹ ‘UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN SOUTHERN DIVISION, Case No. 06-CV-10204 opinion’ by Hon. Anna Diggs Taylor, pdf file

²² Catch-22 by Joseph Heller — borrow buy

²³ ‘NSA Spying’ – Electronic Frontier Foundation

²⁴ ‘Big Brother Bad Idea Still Breathing’ – The Paragraph, 2007-10-28 — source 23 source 24 source 25

²⁵ ‘Republicans Shun Wiretap and Telecom Amnesty Compromise Meeting’ By Ryan Singel, Wired, February 21, 2008

I name the tree the Tree of the Great Long Leaves. Under the shade of this Tree of the Great Peace we spread the soft white feathery down of the globe thistle as seats for you, Adodarhoh, and your cousin Lords.

… there beneath the shade of the spreading branches … shall you sit and watch the Council Fire of the Confederacy of the Five Nations, and all the affairs of the Five Nations shall be transacted at this place before you … by the Confederate Lords of the Five Nations.

Roots have spread out from the Tree of the Great Peace, one to the north, one to the east, one to the south and one to the west. The name of these roots is The Great White Roots and their nature is Peace and Strength.

If any man or any nation outside the Five Nations shall obey the laws of the Great Peace …, they may trace the Roots to the Tree and … they shall be welcomed to take shelter beneath the Tree of the Long Leaves.

We place at the top of the Tree of the Long Leaves an Eagle who is able to see afar. If he sees in the distance any evil approaching or any danger threatening he will at once warn the people of the Confederacy.

The people of the five nations — the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca — handed the Great Law of Peace down through the generations by reading it aloud from wampum belts. They made the wampum belts with strings of beads formed from lake shells. The beads formed symbols and relations that conveyed meaning to the reader, and lit his memory so that he could tell the law fully and rightly. Knowledge of the Great Law of Peace lasted into the 20th century, when in 1915, Arthur C. Parker, Archaeologist of the State Museum in New York, wrote much of it down into the document we use here.

The Five Nations wampum belt

The Iroquois were one of several tribal confederacies that lived up and down the eastern seaboard.x² The Founders and Framers of the United States knew their neighbors’ form of government — self-ruled nations united under a common law, where the authority to govern came from the people. And the Founders and Framers soon adopted that form — federal democracy. At the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia, they gave a delegation of 21 Iroquois a floor of Independence Hall to stay in, and seats at the discussions about American independence and government.x³ And the Onondaga leader gave John Hancock, the president of the congress, an Indian name — Great Tree. As the old tribal democracy lived its last days, the world’s first modern liberal democracy was born. Here are some features of the Iroquois Confederacy’s constitution that you might like to compare — for the better or worse — with those of your own national government:

The Confederate Council

Government officials take an oath to uphold the constitution:

When a candidate Lord (council member – QH) is to be installed he shall furnish four strings of [wampum] … Such will constitute the evidence of his pledge to the Confederate Lords that he will live according to the constitution of the Great Peace and exercise justice in all affairs. (Great Law of Peace article 28)

Two houses of the Confederate Council decide issues, and a third group ratifies — all unanimously:

… when the Mohawk and Seneca Lords have unanimously agreed upon a question, they shall report their decision to the Cayuga and Oneida Lords who shall deliberate upon the question and report a unanimous decision to … The Firekeepers (Onondaga Lords – QH), who shall render a decision as they see fit in case of a disagreement by the two bodies, or confirm the decisions of the two bodies if they are identical. (10)

… the Firekeepers may veto a decision, but the veto can be overriden:

If through any misunderstanding or obstinacy on the part of the Fire Keepers, they render a decision at variance with that of the Two Sides, the Two Sides shall reconsider the matter and if their decisions are jointly the same as before they shall report to the Fire Keepers who are then compelled to confirm their joint decision. (11)

The groups are further divided into smaller councils, which hand decisions up. While two sides discuss an issue, a judge watches to ensure that a decision follows the law:

The Council of the Mohawk shall be divided into three parties … The third party is to listen only to the discussion of the first and second parties and if an error is made or the proceeding is irregular they are to call attention to it, and when the case is right and properly decided by the two parties they shall confirm the decision of the two parties … (5)

Elections

Each nation of the Iroquois Confederacy is composed of the same clans, which are composed of families, which follow the female blood line:

The lineal descent of the people of the Five Nations shall run in the female line. Women shall be considered the progenitors of the Nation. They shall own the land and the soil. Men and women shall follow the status of the mother. (44)

The women of certain families hold the titles to choose members of the Confederate Council, who serve for life:

When a Lordship title becomes vacant through death or other cause (impeachment – QH), the Royaneh (title-holding – QH) women of the clan in which the title is hereditary shall hold a council and shall choose one from among their sons to fill the office made vacant. … (54)

… and the men, sister clans and council confirm the choice:

If the choice is unanimous the name is referred to the men relatives of the clan. If they should disapprove [they] shall … select a candidate from among their own number. If then the men and women are unable to decide [between] the two …, then … the Confederate Lords in the Clan … shall decide … If the men and the women agree to a candidate his name shall be referred to the sister clans for confirmation. If the sister clans confirm the choice, they shall refer their action to their Confederate Lords who shall ratify the choice and present it to their cousin Lords, and if the cousin Lords confirm the name then the candidate shall be installed … (54)

A Lord must put the people’s welfare, and that of future generations, ahead of his own:

“We now do crown you with the sacred emblem of the deer’s antlers, the emblem of your Lordship. You shall now become a mentor of the people of the Five Nations. The thickness of your skin shall be seven spans — which is to say that you shall be proof against anger, offensive actions and criticism. Your heart shall be filled with peace and good will and your mind filled with a yearning for the welfare of the people of the Confederacy. … In all of your deliberations in the Confederate Council, in your efforts at law making, in all your official acts, self interest shall be cast into oblivion. Look and listen for the welfare of the whole people and have always in view not only the present but also … those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground — the unborn of the future Nation.” (28)

Petitioning the Government

For each nation there is a War Chief (elected in the same way as a Lord), whose duty is to bring the people’s issues to that nation’s Lords:

There shall be one War Chief for each Nation and their duties shall be to carry messages for their Lords and to take up the arms of war in case of emergency. … in case of an erroneous action by a Lord they shall receive the complaints of the people and convey the warnings of the women to him. The people who wish to convey messages to the Lords in the Confederate Council shall do so through the War Chief of their Nation. It shall ever be his duty to lay the cases, questions and propositions of the people before the Confederate Council. (37)

Any man can become a Pine Tree Chief — an advisor to the Confederate Council:

Should any man of the Nation assist with special ability or show great interest in the affairs of the Nation, if he proves himself wise, honest and worthy of confidence, the Confederate Lords may elect him … and he may sit in the Confederate Council. He shall be proclaimed a ‘Pine Tree sprung up for the Nation’ …

… and title-holding women may also attend the Confederate Council:

The Royaneh women … shall, should it be necessary, correct and admonish the holders of their titles [when those women] attend the Council … (52)

On a matter of great consequence, the Confederate Council must hear and follow the voice of the people:

Whenever a … matter affects the entire body of the Five Nations, threatening their utter ruin, then the Lords of the Confederacy must submit the matter to the decision of their people [which] shall affect the decision of the Confederate Council. This decision shall be a confirmation of the voice of the people. (93)

Within each nation clan councils decide issues to be brought to the Confederate Council:

The women of every clan of the Five Nations shall have a Council Fire ever burning in readiness for a council of the clan. When in their opinion it seems necessary for the interest of the people they shall hold a council and their decisions and recommendations shall be introduced before the Council of the Lords by the War Chief for its consideration. (95)

~ ~ ~

The men of every clan of the Five Nations shall have a Council Fire ever burning … This council shall have the same rights as the council of the women. (94)

Clan councils may unite into a national council or a five-nation council.

All the Clan council fires of a nation or of the Five Nations may unite into one general council fire, or delegates from all the council fires may be appointed to unite in a general council for discussing the interests of the people. (96)

The people have the right to a voice at council:

The people shall have the right to make appointments and to delegate their power to others of their number. When their council shall have come to a conclusion on any matter, their decision shall be reported to the Council of the Nation or to the Confederate Council (as the case may require) by the War Chief or the War Chiefs. (96.)

Rights of the People

Each person has the right to make contracts:

Any of the people of the Five Nations may use wampum as the record of a pledge, contract or an agreement entered into and the same shall be binding as soon as shell strings shall have been exchanged by both parties. (23)

… and the right to privacy:

A certain sign shall be known to all the people of the Five Nations which shall denote that the owner or occupant of a house is absent. A stick or pole in a slanting or leaning position shall be the sign. Every person not entitled to enter the house by right of living within it upon seeing such a sign shall not approach the house either by day or by night but shall keep as far away as his business will permit. (107)

The Great Law of Peace ensures religious freedom to each nation:

The rites and festivals of each nation shall remain undisturbed and shall continue as before because they were given by the people of old times as useful and necessary for the good of men. (99)

A More Perfect Union

The Great Law of Peace calls for periodic renewal of the union, and it has never been dissolved:

Every five years the Five Nations Confederate Lords and the people shall assemble together and shall ask one another if their minds are still in the same spirit of unity for the Great Binding Law and if any of the Five Nations shall not pledge continuance and steadfastness to the pledge of unity then the Great Binding Law shall dissolve. (55)

The Great Law of Peace discourages aristocracy by mixing the clans:

People of the Five Nations members of a certain clan shall recognize every other member of that clan, irrespective of the Nation, as relatives. Men and women, therefore, members of the same clan are forbidden to marry. (43)

… and allows adoption between families and nations:

Should any member of the Five Nations, a family or person belonging to a foreign nation submit a proposal for adoption into a clan …, he or they shall furnish a string of shells … as a pledge to the clan into which he or they wish to be adopted. The Lords of the nation shall then consider the proposal and submit a decision. (68)

Any member of the Five Nations who through esteem or other feeling wishes to adopt an individual, a family or number of families may offer adoption to him or them and if accepted the matter shall be brought to the attention of the Lords [who] must confirm adoption. (69)

… “Now you of our nation, be informed that such a person … [has buried] their birth nation’s name … in the depths of the earth. Henceforth let no one of our nation ever mention the original name or nation of their birth. …” (70)

It allows for emigration:

When any person or family belonging to the Five Nations desires to abandon their birth nation and the territory of the Five Nations, … the Confederate Council of the Five Nations shall take cognizance of it. (71)

… and immigration (which the Tuscarora did around 1715 to become the sixth nation):

When any alien nation or individual is admitted into the Five Nations the admission shall be understood only to be a temporary one. Should the person or nation create loss, do wrong or cause suffering of any kind to endanger the peace of the Confederacy, the Confederate Lords shall order one of their war chiefs to reprimand him or them and if a similar offence is again committed the offending party or parties shall be expelled from the territory of the Five United Nations. (74)

When a member of an alien nation comes to the territory of the Five Nations and seeks refuge and permanent residence, the Lords of the Nation to which he comes shall extend hospitality and make him a member of the nation. Then shall he be accorded equal rights and privileges in all matters except [he shall not be chosen for Council]. (75)

The Great Law of Peace restricts lobbying:

No individual or foreign nation interested in a case, question or proposition shall have any voice in the Confederate Council except to answer a question put to him or them by the speaker for the Lords. (15)

…

… It shall be a serious wrong for anyone to lead a Lord into trivial affairs, for the people must ever hold their Lords high in estimation out of respect to their honorable positions. (27)

… and allows for change with amendments:

If the conditions which shall arise at any future time call for an addition to or change of this law, the case shall be carefully considered and if a new beam seems necessary or beneficial, the proposed change shall be voted upon and if adopted it shall be called, “Added to the Rafters”. (16)

… and lists nine national holidays:

The recognized festivals of Thanksgiving shall be the Midwinter Thanksgiving, the Maple … Thanksgiving, the Raspberry Thanksgiving, the Strawberry Thanksgiving, the Cornplanting Thanksgiving, the Corn Hoeing Thanksgiving, the Little Festival of Green Corn, the Great Festival of Ripe Corn and the complete Thanksgiving for the Harvest.

Peace & War

The Iroquois Confederacy was founded on peace:

I, Dekanawida, and the Union Lords, now uproot the tallest pine tree and into the cavity thereby made we cast all weapons of war. Into the depths of the earth, down into the deep underearth currents of water flowing to unknown regions we cast all the weapons of strife. We bury them from sight and we plant again the tree. (65)

The Great Law of Peace notes that all men are created equal and are entitled to their land:

The soil of the earth from one end of the land to the other is the property of the people who inhabit it.

…

The Great Creator has made us of the one blood and of the same soil he made us and as only different tongues constitute different nations he established different hunting grounds and territories and made boundary lines between them. (73)

The power to declare war rests with the Confederate Council:

When the Confederate Council of the Five Nations has for its object the establishment of the Great Peace among the people of an outside nation and that nation refuses to accept the Great Peace, then by such refusal they bring a declaration of war upon themselves … Then shall the Five Nations seek to establish the Great Peace by a conquest of the rebellious nation. (80)

… but talks must first occur:

When the proposition to establish the Great Peace is made to a foreign nation it shall be done in mutual council. The foreign nation is to be persuaded by reason and urged to come into the Great Peace. If the Five Nations fail to obtain the consent of the nation at the first council a second council shall be held and upon a second failure a third council shall be held and this third council shall end the peaceful methods of persuasion. At the third council the War Chief of the Five nations shall address the Chief of the foreign nation and request him three times to accept the Great Peace. If refusal steadfastly follows the War Chief shall let the bunch of white lake shells drop from his outstretched hand to the ground and shall bound quickly forward and club the offending chief to death. War shall thereby be declared and the War Chief shall have his warriors at his back to meet any emergency. War must continue until the contest is won by the Five Nations. (88)

… and any nation at any time can accept the Great Peace and live peacefully with the Iroquois Confederacy:

Whenever a foreign nation is conquered or has by their own will accepted the Great Peace their own system of internal government may continue, but they must cease all warfare against other nations.

One of the Confederate Council seats also carries the role of commander-in-chief:

Skanawatih shall be vested with a double office, duty and with double authority. One-half of his being shall hold the Lordship title and the other half shall hold the title of War Chief. In the event of war he shall notify the five War Chiefs of the Confederacy and command them to prepare for war and have their men ready at the appointed time and place for engagement with the enemy of the Great Peace. (79)

Impeachment

A citizen may ask for correction of an official’s errant behavior:

If either a nephew or a niece see an irregularity in the performance of the functions of the Great Peace and its laws, in the Confederate Council or in the conferring of Lordship titles in an improper way, through their War Chief they may demand that such actions become subject to correction and that the matter conform to the ways prescribed by the laws of the Great Peace. (98)

… after which the case goes to the general council of women, then to the men:

This string of wampum vests the people with the right to correct their erring Lords. In case a part or all the Lords pursue a course not vouched for by the people and heed not the third warning of their women relatives, then the matter shall be taken to the General Council of the women of the Five Nations. If the Lords notified and warned three times fail to heed, then the case falls into the hands of the men of the Five Nations.

… who purge the official, one way or the other:

Should it happen that the Lords refuse to heed the third warning, then two courses are open: either the men may decide in their council to depose the Lord or Lords or to club them to death with war clubs.

…

Should the men in their council adopt the second course, the War Chief shall order his men to enter the council, to take positions beside the Lords, sitting between them wherever possible. [Then] the War Chief holding in his outstretched hand a bunch of black wampum strings shall say to the erring Lords: “So now, Lords of the Five United Nations, harken to these last words from your men. … Since you are determined to resist and to withhold justice from your people there is only one course for us to adopt.” At this point the War Chief shall let drop the bunch of black wampum and the men shall spring to their feet and club the erring Lords to death. Any erring Lord may submit before the War Chief lets fall the black wampum. Then his execution is withheld. (59)

The Onondaga leader gave John Hancock, the president of the Second Continental Congress, an Indian name — Great Tree. Illustration by John Kahionhes Fadden.

Sources

¹ ‘The Constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy’ as written by Arthur C. Parker, with introduction by Gerald Murphy

² ‘Exemplar of Liberty: Native America and the Evolution of Democracy’ By Donald A. Grinde, Jr., Rupert Costo Professor of American Indian History, University of California at Riverside, and Bruce E. Johansen, Associate Professor of Communication University of Nebraska at Omaha; Chapter 2

All along the Seaboard, Indian nations had formed confederacies by the time they encountered European immigrants, from the Seminoles in what is now Florida (Crevecouer called them “a federated republic”), to the Cherokees and Choctaws in the Carolinas, to the Iroquois and their allies, the Hurons in the Saint Lawrence Valley, and the Penacook federation of New England, among many others. Wallace found that “Ethnic confederacies were common among all the Indian tribes of the Northeast.

³ ibid, Chapter 8

In the midst of this debate on government and independence, twenty-one Iroquois Indians came to meet with the Continental Congress in May of 1776. At the Albany Conference of 1775, the Iroquois had expressed concern about the nature of the executive in the Continental Congress. For over a month, the Iroquois would observe the operations of the Continental Congress and its president, John Hancock, as they lodged on the second floor of the Pennsylvania State House (later called Independence Hall), just above the chambers of the Continental Congress. On May 27, 1776, Richard Henry Lee reported that the American army had a parade of two to three thousand men to impress the Iroquois with the strength of the United States. “4 tribes of the Six Nations” viewed the parade, and Lee hoped “to secure the friendship of these people.” Newspaper accounts stated that Generals Washington, Gates and Mifflin, “the Members of Congress . . . and . . . the Indians . . . on business with the Congress” reviewed the troops.

On June 11, 1776 while the question of independence was being debated, the visiting Iroquois chiefs were formally invited into the meeting hall of the Continental Congress. There a speech was delivered, in which they were addressed as “Brothers” and told of the delegates’ wish that the “friendship” between them would “continue as long as the sun shall shine” and the “waters run.” The speech also expressed the hope that the new Americans and the Iroquois act “as one people, and have but one heart.” After this speech, an Onondaga chief requested permission to give Hancock an Indian name. The Congress graciously consented, and so the president was renamed “Karanduawn, or the Great Tree.” With the Iroquois chiefs inside the halls of Congress on the eve of American Independence, the impact of Iroquois ideas on the founders is unmistakable. History is indebted to Charles Thomson, an adopted Delaware, whose knowledge of and respect for American Indians is reflected in the attention that he gave to this ceremony in the records of the Continental Congress.

• “We are doing everything we can to avoid war in Iraq.“ (2003-03-08)x⁶⁵ Bush spoke that to the nation two weeks before launching the invasion of Iraq, and after spending a half-year beating the war drum. The Bush regime planned for an Iraq invasion on its first week in office, and conjured up intelligence that was “being fixed around the policy.“x⁶⁶x⁶⁷ A month and a week before that statement, Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and told him that the start of bombing was “penciled in” for March 10th.x⁶⁸

• “We gave him (Saddam Hussein) a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn’t let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.“ (2003-07-14)x⁶⁹ Actually, Hussein was complying with the UN resolution and weapons inspectors were making good progress, when Bush warned them to get out just before he launched the “shock and awe” attack.x⁷⁰ In the years since, Bush has often repeated this false history.

• “If there is a leak out of my administration, I want to know who it is. And if the person has violated law, the person will be taken care of.“ (2003-09-30)x⁷¹ Bush was playing dumb about the leak that blew the cover of covert CIA agent Valeri Plame. Actually, Bush had authorized such leaks in a vain try at smearing Plame’s husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, who had publicly undermined one of Bush’s false bases for invading Iraq — that the country was developing nuclear weapons.x⁷² But one could say that part of Bush’s statement was true: one of the leakers, Cheney’s top aide I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, who was convicted of lying to FBI agents about the leak program, was “taken care of” when Bush commuted his jail time.x⁷³

• “By the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.“ (2004-04-20)x⁷⁴ At the time Bush spoke this, he had the National Security Agency (NSA) tapping into phone and internet communications at the data switches of AT&T and Verizon — all without a court order.x⁷⁵x⁷⁶

• “Both those men are doing fantastic jobs, and I strongly support them.“ (2006-11-1)x⁷⁷ Bush said this about Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and went a step further, as the reporter wrote: “[Bush] replied in the affirmative when asked if he wanted Messrs. Rumsfeld and Cheney to stay with him until the end.” But Bush had already decided to oust Rumsfeld, and three days later did so. While this lie is not as weighty as the others, it is special in that Bush admitted he was lying. After ousting Rumsfeld, he told the same reporter: “The reason why is I did not want to make a major decision in the final days of the campaign. The only way to answer that question, and get it on to another question, was to give you that answer.“x⁷⁸

Further Reading

‘Log of lies from the Bush-Cheney administration’ – Unknown News

‘George W. Bush IS a Liar’ by Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, 2006-04-14

Sources

⁶⁰ ‘Press Conference by the President’ 2007-12-04

Q Mr. President, thank you. I’d like to follow on that. When you talked about Iraq, you and others in the administration talked about a mushroom cloud; then there were no WMD in Iraq. When it came to Iran, you said in October, on October 17th, you warned about the prospect of World War III, when months before you made that statement, this intelligence about them suspending their weapons program back in ’03 had already come to light to this administration. So can’t you be accused of hyping this threat? And don’t you worry that that undermines U.S. credibility?

THE PRESIDENT: David, I don’t want to contradict an august reporter such as yourself, but I was made aware of the NIE last week. In August, I think it was Mike McConnell came in and said, we have some new information. He didn’t tell me what the information was; he did tell me it was going to take a while to analyze. Why would you take time to analyze new information? One, you want to make sure it’s not disinformation. You want to make sure the piece of intelligence you have is real. And secondly, they want to make sure they understand the intelligence they gathered: If they think it’s real, then what does it mean? And it wasn’t until last week that I was briefed on the NIE that is now public.

⁶¹ ‘National Intelligence Estimate: Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities’ November 2007

⁶² ‘Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in Iran NIE’ By Gareth Porter, IPS, 2007-11-08

⁶³ ‘Press Conference by the President’ 2007-10-17

⁶⁵ ‘War on Terror – President’s Radio Address’ 2003-03-08

⁶⁶ ‘Will Bushies Sell Iran War ‘Product’?’ source 75 the Paragraph 2007-09-08

⁶⁷ ‘America Puts Brakes on Drive for More War’ source 103 The Paragraph 2006-11-30

⁶⁸ ‘Bush Was Set on Path to War, British Memo Says’ By DON VAN NATTA Jr., March 27, 2006

“Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,” David Manning, Mr. Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

“The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,” Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. “This was when the bombing would begin.”

⁶⁹ ‘President Reaffirms Strong Position on Liberia – Remarks by the President and United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan in Photo Opportunity The Oval Office’ 2003-07-14

⁷⁰ ‘Bush’s Favorite Lie’ by Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, 2007-11-09

⁷¹ ‘President Discusses Job Creation With Business Leaders’ University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, 2003-09-30

⁷² ‘George W. Bush IS a Liar’ by Robert Parry, ConsortiumNews.com, 2007-11-09

Bush had included the bogus Niger claim in his State of the Union Address in January 2003. But Wilson’s first-hand account of his assignment in 2002 to check out the Niger suspicions – and his conclusion that the evidence was weak – represented the first major assault on Bush’s pre-war intelligence from a mainstream government figure.

The White House struck back, organizing anti-Wilson leaks to friendly reporters. Privately, Bush declassified information that tended to bolster his Niger claim – even though by then its truthfulness had been discredited by U.S. intelligence agencies.

With President Bush’s clearance, Vice President Dick Cheney dispatched his chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, to leak information to Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward on June 27, 2003. Libby approached New York Times correspondent Judith Miller on July 8 and Time magazine reporter Matt Cooper on July 12.

⁷³ ‘Bush Commutes Libby’s Prison Sentence’ By Amy Goldstein, Washington Post Staff Writer, Tuesday, July 3, 2007

⁷⁴ ‘President Bush: Information Sharing, Patriot Act Vital to Homeland Security – Remarks by the President in a Conversation on the USA Patriot Act’ Kleinshans Music Hall, Buffalo, New York, 2004-04-20

⁷⁵ ‘Big Brother Bad Idea Still Breathing’ source 25, The Paragraph 2007-10-28

⁷⁶ ‘A Simple Censure is Warranted’ The Paragraph 2006-04-03

⁷⁷ ‘Bush Stands By Cheney, Rumsfeld’ By TERENCE HUNT, Associated Press, November 2, 2006

⁷⁸ ‘VIDEO: Bush Admits He Lied About Rumsfeld For Political Purposes’ – Think Progress, 2006-11-08

Recent reports indicate that the Vice President is attempting to shape the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran to conform to his misperceptions about the threat Iran actually poses. Much like his deceptive efforts in the lead up to the Iraq war, the Vice President appears to be manipulating intelligence to conform to his beliefs.

If the reports are true, they add additional weight to the case for impeachment. I believe impeachment remains the only tool Congress has to prevent a war in Iran. This information relates directly to the Article III charges in the resolution. I urge your timely consideration.

Seven of 24 Democratic Judiciary Committee members have declared support for the impeachment bill so far, and 14 voted against killing it.x³⁷ Outside the D.C. beltway, 76% of Democrats, 17% of Republicans, and 54% of all adult Americans support the move to impeach Cheney, as shown in a July 2007 poll.x³⁸ If the citizenry and the Democratic fighters prevail, the Judiciary Committee would begin impeachment hearings, as it would dawn on House Republicans that their tricky vote had backfired. And Congress would begin to choose rightly between, as Kucinich put it, “Constitutionally proscribed justice and recourse, and the alternative: Constitutional abuse and dictatorial power.“x³⁹

Sources

³⁰ ‘House Resolution 333 Impeaching Richard B. Cheney’ – pdf

³¹ ‘Backstory: An impeachment vote turnaround stuns Washington’ by Nick Juliano, Raw Story, Wednesday November 7, 2007

³² ‘House GOP tests Democrats with impeachment resolution’ By Sean Lengell and Eric Pfeiffer, The Washington Times, November 7, 2007

³³ ‘Conyers’ Report Newly Updated: ‘Constitution in Crisis’‘ 2006-08-01

³⁴ ‘Reps Conyers/Ellison/Waters Discuss Impeachment’ by Jennifer Umolac of ImpeachforPeace.org

³⁵ ‘Congressman Kucinich writes letter to Judiciary Committee head supporting impeachment of Vice President Cheney’ RAW STORY, Saturday November 10, 2007

³⁶ ‘Wexler (FL-19) v. Wasserman Schultz (FL-20) on Impeachment’ by Meteor Blades, Daily Kos, Thu Nov 08, 2007

³⁷ ‘Judiciary Hearing Cheney Impeachment’ Thursday, November 08, 2007 – FreeMarketNews.com

³⁸ American Research Group poll

“Question: Do you favor or oppose the US House of Representatives beginning impeachment proceedings against Vice President Dick Cheney?

Based on 1,100 completed telephone interviews among a random sample of adults nationwide July 3-5, 2007. The theoretical margin of error is plus or minus 3 percentage points, 95% of the time. Of the total sample, 933 interviews were completed among registered voters.

³⁹ ‘It’s Time to Impeach Cheney’ by by Dennis Kucinich, November 5, 2007,

So what is the status of the surviving TIA core program? The data collection part of it could be going very well. Shortly after taking office, the Bush regime started another NSA program — the illegal warrantless wiretapping at telecommunications companies.x¹⁴x²³x²⁴ In that program the agency taps into the data switches of AT&T and Verizon to watch and gather telephone and internet communications.x¹⁵x²¹x²⁵ That information — who you call and email, the content of your calls and emails, what websites you visit, and so on — could be feeding the TIA database. But the terrorist identification part of TIA is likely going very poorly. Experts say the computer program would have to track 1000 false hits for one true hit — and would likely give many false positives.x¹⁶ Already, data from the NSA warrantless wiretapping has flooded the FBI with bum leads wasting agents’ time.x¹⁷ But, while it is hard to get a good terrorist suspect out of the database, it would be easy to identify a political opponent. The executive branch could use that capability to out-maneuver, embarrass, blackmail, harass or arrest such persons. The Bush executive has already used NSA data for spying on U.S. government officials, companies and news reporters.x¹⁸x¹⁹x²⁰ So, having the will and the way, the Bush regime seems to be building the “is watching” part of the Big Brother society.

image Electronic Frontier Foundation

Action

Petition your congressmen to stop warrantless wiretapping: click HERE.

Sources

¹⁰ ‘Bush’s Secret Spying on Americans’ By Robert Parry, August 2, 2007

Bush knows he could run into trouble if he doesn’t keep the American people in the dark. In 2002, for instance, when the Bush administration launched a project seeking “total information awareness” on virtually everyone on earth involved in the modern economy, the disclosure was met with public alarm.

The administration cited the terrorist threat to justify the program which involved applying advanced computer technology to analyze trillions of bytes of data on electronic transactions and communications. The goal was to study the electronic footprints left by every person in the developed world during the course of their everyday lives – from the innocuous to the embarrassing to the potentially significant.

The government could cross-check books borrowed from a library, fertilizer bought at a farm-supply outlet, X-rated movies rented at a video store, prescriptions filled at a pharmacy, sites visited on the Internet, tickets reserved for a plane, borders crossed while traveling, rooms rented at a motel, and countless other examples.

…

Despite the administration’s assurance that political abuses wouldn’t happen, the capability would be a huge temptation for political strategists like Karl Rove who have made clear that they view anyone not supporting Bush’s war on terror as a terrorist ally.

In 2002, the technological blueprint for this Orwellian-style project was on the drawing board at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s top research and development arm. DARPA commissioned a comprehensive plan for this electronic spying – and did so publicly.

“Transactional data” was to be gleaned from electronic data on every kind of activity – “financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary, country entry, place/event entry, transportation, housing, critical resources, government, communications,” according to the Web site for DARPA’s Information Awareness Office.

The program would then cross-reference this data with the “biometric signatures of humans,” data collected on individuals’ faces, fingerprints, gaits and irises. With this knowledge at its fingertips, the government would have what it called “total information awareness” about pretty much everyone.

The Information Awareness Office even boasted a logo that looked like some kind of clip art from George Orwell’s 1984. The logo showed the Masonic symbol of an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid peering over the globe, with the slogan, “scientia est potentia,” Latin for “knowledge is power.”

Though apparently unintentional, DARPA’s choice of a giant white pyramid eerily recalled Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, “an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air.” The all-seeing Masonic eye could be read as “Big Brother Is Watching.”

…

Besides the parallels to 1984, the administration’s assurances about respecting constitutional boundaries were undercut by its provocative choice of director for the Information Awareness Office. The project was headed by President Reagan’s former national security adviser John Poindexter, who was caught flouting constitutional safeguards and federal laws in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s.

Poindexter was the White House official who approved the transfer of profits from the sale of missiles to Iran’s Islamic fundamentalist government to Nicaraguan contra rebels for the purchase of weapons, thus circumventing the Constitution’s grant of war-making power to Congress. Under U.S. law at the time, military aid was banned to both Iran and the contras.

In 1990, Poindexter was convicted of five felonies in connection with the Iran-Contra scheme and the cover-up. But his case was overturned by a conservative-dominated three-judge appeals court panel, which voted 2-1 that the conviction was tainted by congressional immunity given to Poindexter to compel his testimony to Congress in 1987.

¹¹ Amid furor, Pentagon kills terrorism futures market’ – CNN, Wednesday, July 30, 2003

¹² ‘Poindexter to Head Department of Bad Ideas’ – The Borowitz Report,

¹³ ‘TIA Lives On’ By Shane Harris, National Journal, Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006

¹⁴ ‘Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts’ by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, The New York Times, December 16, 2005

¹⁵ ‘NSA Whistleblower Alleges Illegal Spying’ By BRIAN ROSS, Jan. 10, 2006

President Bush has admitted that he gave orders that allowed the NSA to eavesdrop on a small number of Americans without the usual requisite warrants.

But [longtime insider at the National Security Agency, Russell] Tice disagrees. He says the number of Americans subject to eavesdropping by the NSA could be in the millions if the full range of secret NSA programs is used.

“That would mean for most Americans that if they conducted, or you know, placed an overseas communication, more than likely they were sucked into that vacuum,” Tice said.

¹⁶ Total Info System Totally Touchy’ by Ryan Singel, Wired, 12.02.02

“The kind of things they are looking for are hard to find,” said Herb Edelstein, president of data-mining company Two Crows. “Terrorism is an adaptive problem. It’s pretty unlikely the next terrorist attack will be people hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings.

“The project is not going to have near-term contributions to the war on terrorism. It’s not clear this is an economically valuable way to fight terrorism.”

Simson Garfinkel, author of Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century, also has doubts.

“Data mining is good for the purpose of increasing sales and figuring out where to place products in stores,” he said. “This is very different from figuring out if these products are going to be used for terrorist activities.”

“With meaningful pattern recognition, the order of magnitude of errors from inferences is huge, something like ten to the third (power),” said Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce and the chairman of information mapping software company Groxis. “There would be an incalculable expense to monitor a thousand wrong hits for one correct inference.”

In fact, Hawken said, Groxis spurned, on principle, an offer from Poindexter’s group to get involved in the project.

“We make tools for people to make sense of the information in the world, not for the world to make more information out of people,” Hawken said.

Hawken is skeptical about the project’s ability to attract top industry names. He said he knows other people, including those who have worked for the National Security Agency, who refused to work on it for ethical reasons.

“I don’t know how you profile resentment and anger, but I don’t think you do it from how many times someone goes to Wal-Mart,” he said.

And the project faces other problems.

Database fields are not standardized, and the data they contain isn’t always reliable. Names get misspelled, digits are transposed, addresses are outdated or incorrect, and few names are unique.

“The data quality problem is enormous, but what’s alarming is the danger of false positives based on incorrect data,” Edelstein said. “Think of the number of people who get in trouble with the law because they have the same name as somebody else.”

¹⁷ Spy Agency Data After Sept. 11 Led F.B.I. to Dead Ends’ By LOWELL BERGMAN, ERIC LICHTBLAU, SCOTT SHANE and DON VAN NATTA Jr., The New York Times, January 17, 2006

But the results of the program looked very different to some officials charged with tracking terrorism in the United States. More than a dozen current and former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials, including some in the small circle who knew of the secret eavesdropping program and how it played out at the F.B.I., said the torrent of tips led them to few potential terrorists inside the country they did not know of from other sources and diverted agents from counterterrorism work they viewed as more productive.

¹⁸ ‘Bush Acts as Dictator During Endless “War”’ The Paragraph, 2006-01-09 source 11

¹⁹ ‘Bush Acts as Dictator During Endless “War”’ The Paragraph, 2006-01-09 source 12

²⁰ ‘First Fruits’ by Wayne Madsen, 2006-05-15

WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies — including the CIA and DIA — and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices.

²¹ ‘NSA has massive database of Americans’ phone calls’ By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY, 5/11/2006

²² ‘Congress’s Orwellian Compromise’ By Nat Parry, Consortium News, August 15, 2007

Although public outrage and congressional opposition supposedly killed the TIA program in 2003, the National Journal revealed in February 2006 that the project was ended in name only, kept alive within NSA’s secret budget.

One TIA component, called the Information Awareness Prototype System, was renamed “Basketball” at NSA, but still provided the basic architecture tying together information extraction, analysis and dissemination tools developed under TIA.

Another part of TIA, called Genoa II, was shifted to NSA and re-titled “Topsail.” It builds information technologies to anticipate and pre-empt terrorist attacks.

Meanwhile, the NSA’s own data-mining program seeks to construct the largest database in the world, according to a report by USA Today. It ultimately would store the records of every phone call made in the United States and apply “social network” models to the calling patterns of Americans supposedly to match them up with patterns of known terrorists.

²³ ‘NSA Domestic Surveillance Began 7 Months Before 9/11, Convicted Qwest CEO Claims’ by Ryan Singel, Wired, October 11, 2007

²⁴ ‘Qwest CEO Not Alone in Alleging NSA Started Domestic Phone Record Program 7 Months Before 9/11’ By Ryan Singel, Wired, October 12, 2007

²⁵ ‘AT&T whistleblower: I was forced to connect ‘big brother machine’‘ by David Edwards and Jason Rhyne, Wednesday November 7, 2007’

Whistleblower Mark Klein told Keith Olbermann that a copy of all internet traffic passing over AT&T lines was copied into a locked room at the company’s San Francisco office — to which only employees with National Security Agency clearance had access — via a cable splitting device.

“My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room,” said Klein. “And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those internet cables into the secret room — and we’re talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the internet.”