When Susan Rice Is Right, She’s Right!
From the No Kidding Files, courtesy of Jason Leopold, comes this gem from vaunted National Security Advisor Susan Rice:
“Let’s be honest: at times we do business with govts that do not respect the rights we hold most dear”
Well, hello there Susan, I couldn’t agree more. Especially on days when I see things like this from the Glenn Greenwald and Pierre Omidyar Snowden file monopoly err, Barton Gellman at the Washington Post:
The National Security Agency is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world, according to top-secret documents and interviews with U.S. intelligence officials, enabling the agency to track the movements of individuals — and map their relationships — in ways that would have been previously unimaginable.
….
The number of Americans whose locations are tracked as part of the NSA’s collection of data overseas is impossible to determine from the Snowden documents alone, and senior intelligence officials declined to offer an estimate. “It’s awkward for us to try to provide any specific numbers,” one intelligence official said in a telephone interview. An NSA spokeswoman who took part in the call cut in to say the agency has no way to calculate such a figure.
It is thoroughly loathsome that Americans must do business with a government that does this, and insane that it is their own government.
It is “awkward” to determine how many innocent Americans are rolled up in the latest out of control security state dragnet the United States government is running globally. Actually, that is not awkward, it is damning and telling. Therefore the American citizenry must not know, at any cost.
Susan Rice is quite right, we are forced to “do business” with a government that does “not respect the rights we hold most dear”
[Here is the full text of the Susan Rice speech today that the above quote was taken from. It is a great speech, or would be if the morals of the United States under Barack Obama matched the lofty rhetoric]
An NSA spokeswoman who took part in the call cut in to say the agency has no way to calculate such a figure.
Why don’t they know? Isn’t part of collecting all that data keeping track of what they have? Or do they just keep collecting, hoping that one of those pieces will be a needle glowing with a bright blue light?
How odd.
In relationship to the normal flow of NSA related information posted on this blog, I just came here to comment on this article:
http://apps.washingtonpost.com/g/page/national/how-the-nsa-is-tracking-people-right-now/634/
I should have known. bmaz had it covered. As much as I hate the term..KUDO’s to you bmaz.
The only question left now is…when are you going come to grips with the fact, that to the USG, your words don’t mean a goddamn thing. Neither do mine.
So, notwithstanding the risk of being arrested for inciting violence…when do words cease being of use, when the entire world is being subjugated by a ruthless non stop assault on humanity.
That is the question.
well sooprise sooprise sooprise…
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/
If this revelation doesn’t start waking this nation up to the reality..they don’t deserve the 2nd Amendment.
Govt. morals and rhetoric rarely match, but the USG must be the frontrunner in making the gap between them as wide as any defile from an Indiana Jones film. This administration’s hypocritical chutzpah outguns even Karl Rove’s. But no worries: that can’t be having an impact on the recruitment and commitment of those who wish the US ill.
A very good article well worth reading by Janet Reitman of Rolling Stone – Snowden and Greenwald: The Men Who Leaked the Secrets – http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/snowden-and-greenwald-the-men-who-leaked-the-secrets-20131204
Strange …
@prostratedragon: Wait, is that the girl from the James Bond movie??
@bloodypitchfork:
Or, as one of the other commenters at SFGate said, if you believe that they only ‘incidentally’ collected the information on US citizens, he has a bridge for sale. In New York.
“Let’s be honest: at times we do business with govts that do not respect the rights we [don’t give a damn about]”
Edited for clarity, and “honesty.”
@bloodypitchfork:
Interesting:
The Task Force asked Woods to clarify how prison authorities would distinguish “between detainees who engage in hunger strikes to protest their indefinite detention and detainees who have been found to have links to Al Qaeda and the Manchester Manual.” The answer he gave was, “We consider anyone undertaking hunger strikes to be continuing the fight against the US government
So, anyone who protests their treatment is at war with us.
Joseph Heller, meet Franz Kafka.