I read your response and thought for a good long bit and didn’t like what I saw in me.

I am sad to see that – rather than seeing you as someone with shared values and a potential partner in ideas – I saw you as a threat.

I see that I judged you because of (what appeared to be – and is) your work in the national security world. As a result, I assumed you were participating in this discussion with ill intent, and acted accordingly. I apologize for my actions, and for my discourtesy.

My “bilge” comment and any other notes of ad hominem snark toward you as a human being are all my mistakes, and I apologize for them.

Nothing justifies my rudeness.

The following does not justify my rudeness.

I fear your (former?) bosses do not care for democracy or freedom.

You worked (or work) for a part of our government accountable to no one in the non-classified world.

I read that – via Echelon – NSA has long shared overseas intercepts (from listening in on the UK and Australia/New Zealand) with the UK and Australia/New Zealand, who kindly shared their real-time intercepts of US communications.

Echelon is designed to allow national security services to defy domestic political authority. Who cares if the legislative branch bans domestic wiretaps by the local intelligence services like NSA, and the President signed the bill into law?

With Echelon, the executive branch can, has, and does defy Congressional intent and statute and monitor US residents in America via the Brits, Aussies, and Kiwis. Our spies monitor the Brits and Aussies and Kiwis and help their prime ministers defy their duly constituted legislative authorities.

Kind of a white spy-man’s burden thing, I guess.

The secret illegal listening program Echelon was in place years before 2001. The secret illegal kidnapping, torture, murder, and other war crimes started after Sept. 11, and our most senior leaders proudly and defiantly insist the crimes will continue.

So when I meet someone – even in the cyber world – from my government’s national security world, I am afraid.

How can I distinguish national security professionals who will defend the Constitution from those who endorse and/or commit massive domestic spying, abductions, torture, secret imprisonment, and murder?

How can anyone in America know?

[PS - again, none of the above justifies or excuses my own lack of courtesy.]

Negroponte is suspected by some commentators to have known of human rights abuses carried out by CIA-trained operatives in Honduras in the 1980s. Records also show that a special intelligence unit (commonly referred to as a “death squad”) of the Honduran armed forces, Battalion 3-16, trained by the CIA and the Argentine 601st Intelligence Battalion and Army Intelligence Service, kidnapped, tortured and killed hundreds of people, including U.S. missionaries. Critics charge that Negroponte knew about these human rights violations and yet continued to collaborate with the Honduran military while lying to Congress.

In May 1982, a nun, Sister Laetitia Bordes, who had worked for ten years in El Salvador, went on a fact-finding delegation to Honduras to investigate the whereabouts of thirty Salvadoran nuns and women of faith who fled to Honduras in 1981 after Archbishop Óscar Romero’s assassination. Negroponte claimed the embassy knew nothing about the nuns. However, in a 1996 interview with The Baltimore Sun, Negroponte’s predecessor, Jack Binns, said that a group of Salvadorans, among whom were the women Bordes had been looking for, were captured on April 22, 1981, and savagely tortured by the DNI, the Honduran Secret Police, and then later thrown out of helicopters alive.

In early 1984, two American mercenaries, Thomas Posey and Dana Parker, contacted Negroponte, stating they wanted to supply arms to the Contras after the U.S. Congress had banned further military aid. Documents show that Negroponte brought the two together with a contact in the Honduran armed forces. The operation was exposed nine months later, at which point the Reagan administration denied any U.S. involvement, despite Negroponte’s introductions of some of the individuals. Other documents detailed a plan of Negroponte and then-Vice President George H. W. Bush to funnel Contra aid money through the Honduran government. (from wikipedia, but Noam Chomsky has quite a bit to say about this also…)

I was a teenager during those years, and I went to a catholic church with a congregation made primarily of college students and their families. The priest there used to focus much attention on the plight of the Salvadoran people, and he left no doubts in my mind that their suffering was largely due to the actions of the American government (thank you, Ronnie, for all your hard work).anyhow. Father Grothwell used to talk a lot about the “School of the Americas” in Georgia, which is where the leaders of these Death Squads were trained… Of course it’s still active at Fort Benning, and imagine my surprise when I saw wahat techniques were taught there:

From a review at Amazon
The U.S. Army maintains a center at Fort Benning, Ga., formerly known as the School of the Americas. It has reportedly trained 60,000 South and Central American military elites since the end of WWII and reportedly counts among its graduates former dictators Manuel Noriega of Panama and Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina. Curricular materials involving torture techniques were found at the school in the early ’90s, resulting in a small scandal that apparently led to a name change (to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) and a fight over the school’s existence that continues. Though she doesn’t catch anyone learning about the various uses of nudity and black hoods, American University anthropologist Gill (Precarious Dependencies) was able to examine the school’s folkways and rhetoric, thanks to glasnost-like levels of administrative cooperation. Lessons in thinking in terms of how to “kill and maim” opposition and to “dehumanize” those who persist. Gill then traces the paths of various graduates of the school and links their activities directly to the torture and death of “Latin American peasants, workers, students [and] human rights activists”—i.e., “opposition.”
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The rabbit hole is deep, my friends… and all of these bastards already have blood on their hands.

In regards to Porter Goss: he was forced to resign for something serious, most likely the Cunningham sex scandal with hookers at the Watergate hotel, as well as failing to curb Ray McGovern from humiliating Rumsfeld a few days ago! Unfortunately as Goss himself said his resignation might remain a mystery?

I may be totally wrong on Hayden and he may be an agent of the devil like some seem to think. That’s usually the way I feel about Bush appointees too. In this case though, I think he’s just a career soldier who’s in over his head (kind of like Powell was). Call that a “load of bilge” if you must. Says more about you than it does me.

Rumsfeld isn’t winning that battle. DoD is. Because they are credible… much moreso than the politically motivated civilians.