T.D.: With no jail time or fines. That was on my terms. Unfortunately the government has other avenues they could have used to take the wind out of what was at that time white hot media attention as to what was going to happen to me and those single days leading up to the, my scheduled public trial, and they could have, the government, as they exercised in the Jeffrey Sterling case involving Risen when they didn't like the judge's opinion, and kicked it upstairs for interlocutory review where it sat for almost two years before they actually rendered an opinion.
R.K.: From what I have reviewed of your case, the government repeatedly and routinely abused their powers, abused privacy and secrecy rules to manipulate the courts.
T.D.: Right, but remember, and this is important distinction and I know we don't have time to go into it, but it's crucial particularly to parse, you have to actually parse, every single word that Obama said in his speech, you also have to look at the directive and you also have to look at the press secretary's release which was their fact sheet, which is the other phrase to describe that it's a set of talking points.
You actually, those words are not just thrown on a piece of paper. It is extraordinarily influential in terms of how the government not only sees itself but how they're managing expectations for those who actually read the language. You can't just read it as plain language. There is the political speak or the double speak or the new speak in every thing that is released and provided. The present administrations do it in the modern era, some do it better than others.
This particular administration has honed this to an extraordinarily fine art. It doesn't matter what reality is, it doesn't matter. It's only what they think reality is and what they want reality to be, so for them the fact sheet is the truth. Even if it isn't. For them the directive, even if it's full of presidential pixie dust that's sufficient enough because hey, it's a PRESIDENTIAL directive. Hey, I can reinterpret that at will and then you have got what you make available as fodder or feed for the public, and that's his actual speech.
It's really a cautionary note here. I hope people fully appreciate when a president commands the stage as he did today at eleven a.m., those words mean something. Okay? They're not just words and you have to parse them very very carefully because they're doing very very, it's deconstructed framing, it's deconstructed assembling, and if you don't know what the real secrets are or what the mindset is behind the other activities, because all of this is just a reflection. It's part of the mirage of mirrors, frankly.
R.K.: Okay, so Obama said, and I am going to quote, "nothing in that initial review and nothing that I have learned since indicated that our intelligence community has sought to violate the law or is cavalier about the civil liberties of their fellow citizens."
T.D.: He's lying. Okay? He is lying. Because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court itself, from what has been actually declassified completely, contradicts that statement alone. That the NSA willfully and deliberately and on a large scale violated the Law.
We're not talking about the internal administrative stuff, we're talking about how NSA itself was basically in contempt of even the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance orders. They have admitted they couldn't verify, they admitted they couldn't follow up but it's for the record.
That's, to me that's the primary example that the secret court itself stands in contradiction to that in the President's statement. So what is he referring to? Some other legal regime? I mean that denies the very mechanism that was in fact supposed to be the exclusive means, and that exclusive means was saying the NSA was in violation.
R.K.: Alright another quote from Obama. He was discussing Obama and it describes how Snowden's actions resulted in "revealing methods to our adversaries that could impact our operations in ways that we might not fully understand for years to come." Has Snowden revealed operations to our adversaries?
T.D.: No. They'll argue that because they'll argue, see what's happening here, this has been unprecedented, there's no question that NSA has been under withering public attention for seven plus months. It's never happened in their history.
They've have blips here and there. Obviously there was quite a bit of attention after 2005, 2006 with the revelations of Risen and Lichtblau, but even that was just the tip of the iceberg and although there were follow-on articles and investigative journalism, more of that it was a much bigger program.
It was all put back under, in part, a much larger, a much larger secret court box with the passage of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 preceded, by the way, by the Protect America Act of 2007 so as you go into 2008 it's now been legalized, right? Now if there's been no abuse, this is my counter argument. If that's the case then why did you have to pass legislation to make legal what obviously must have been other than legal even by your own definition?
R.K.: Okay. Well, I just want to be clear though. Has Snowden revealed operations to our adversaries?
T.D.: No. But here's the threat. See, if you cannot stand the heat in the kitchen, and there's been a lot of heat, then what happens is they're going to defend their traditional strength, which is foreign intelligence, that somehow that's now under threat because of the abuses of those traditional instruments of national power being used for other than the purpose for which they were created.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
1
1
