NSA Spying: What Did Pelosi Know?

consortiumnews.com
NSA Spying: What Did Pelosi Know?
By Ray McGovern October 15, 2007

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has admitted knowing for several years about the Bush
administration’s eavesdropping on Americans without a court warrant. She said
she was briefed on it when she was ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence
Committee. But was she told that the illegal surveillance began well before
9/11?
Referring to her briefing in an apologia-sans-apology Washington Post
op-ed on Jan. 15, 2006, she wrote: “This is how I came to be informed of
President Bush’s authorization for the NSA to conduct certain types of
surveillance.”
Demonstrating her unconstitutionally subservient attitude
toward the Executive Branch, Pelosi wrote:
“But when the administration
notifies Congress in this manner, it is not seeking approval. There is a clear
expectation that the information will be shared by no one, including other
members of the intelligence committees. As a result, only a few members of
Congress were aware of the president’s surveillance program, and they were
constrained from discussing it more widely.”
How did the American people
react upon learning in December 2005 of this glaring infringement on their
Constitutional rights. Most reacted as they have been conditioned to act—out of
the old fear-factor shibboleth: “After 9/11/2001, everything changed.”
Yes,
just as after 2/27/1933, the night of the burning of the German Parliament
(Reichstag) in Berlin, everything changed.
As a German attorney there at the
time put it:
“What one can blame them [German politicians and populace] for,
and what shows their terrible collective weakness of character, is that this
settled the matter. With sheepish submissiveness the German people accepted
that, as a result of the fire, each one of them lost what little personal
freedom and dignity was guaranteed by the Constitution; as though it followed as
a necessary consequence. If the Communists burned down the Reichstag, it was
perfectly in order that the government took ‘decisive measures.’” [Defying
Hitler, A Memoir, by Sebastian Haffner, p. 121]
And if the terrorists
attacked on 9/11, it was perfectly in order that the Bush administration took
“decisive measures”—Patriot Act and illegal measures. In reaction to the PR
offensive to manipulate and exploit the trauma we all felt from 9/11, far too
many of our politicians and fellow citizens exhibited sheepish submissiveness.

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IMHO: We always wondered why the Germans did nothing about Hitler, know we know.
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