The lengthy interview was considered friendly enough to the intelligence community that the full transcript is posted on the DNI website. Mitchell does an admirable job of seeming to ask the tough questions while avoiding holding Clapper accountable. She established this pattern at the beginning, first expressing concern for the intelligence community feeling "besieged" by "all these leaks" and then asking: "How has it hurt American intelligence?"
She doesn't ask, "Has it hurt American intelligence," she asks how. Now that really is a when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife construction that assumes a fact not in evidence -- that American intelligence was actually damaged. Even Clapper doesn't go there. He only says, "it potentially has" and Mitchell seeks no further clarification. That's how a safe interview works.
On June 7, President Obama used a familiar meme in talking about the NSA's data storing:
"When it comes to
telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That's not what
this program is about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is
doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking
at people's names, and they're not looking at content."
Regarding the central issue of data storage on everyone, the President would have been just as responsive had he denied the NSA was painting American children blue.
And while it may be true that "they are not looking" at names or content now, it's misleading -- because they could do that any time they want to.
Four-star General Keith Alexander not only runs the NSA, he is also the commander of the U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), which includes elements of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and became fully operational October 31, 2010. USCYBERCOM is designed to have "full spectrum military cyberspace" capability.
NSA expert James Bamford on Democracy NOW! expressed a dark view of Gen. Alexander:
-- he's a very mysterious person, but he's the most powerful person that's ever existed in the American intelligence community. First of all, he runs the largest intelligence agency and the most secret intelligence agency on Earth, probably, which is the NSA, in charge of enormous numbers of people that do just amazing electronic spying, as we could see in the revelations just in the last week.
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