Saturday, June 29th, 2013 | Posted by Kevin Barrett

NSA spy scandal: It’s even worse than Snowden says

Press TV

Like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden is a media-trumpeted whistleblower hero. Like Assange, Snowden has striking, TV-star good looks. Like Assange, Snowden is involved in a dramatic TV-style chase across countries and continents.

It’s almost like Assange and Snowden are starring in their own reality-TV shows.
With all the hoopla about Snowden (and before him, Assange), it’s easy to forget all of the other whistleblowers who have revealed even more explosive information.
Consider two other NSA whistleblowers: Russ Tice and James Bamford.
Russ Tice is a former NSA intelligence analyst who has also worked for the US Air Force, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was a real US intelligence insider, many pay grades above rookie contractor Edward Snowden.
In 2005, Tice blew the whistle on the NSA’s illegal spying on Americans. Tice and other NSA sources revealed that the NSA’s computerized spy program ECHELON was reading and filtering over 100,000 emails and phone calls per second. That is an even worse abuse of Americans’ Constitutional rights than the programs that Snowden has revealed, which store copies of emails and phone calls but (allegedly) do not read them except when legally authorized to do so.
Worse yet, Tice’s revelations raise even more troubling issues. Tice and his NSA whistleblower colleagues revealed that the NSA’s massive, illegal spy-on-Americans program began in February, 2001 – seven months BEFORE the 9/11 attacks! As Andrew Harris reported for Bloomberg in July, 2006:

“The US National Security Agency asked AT&T Inc. to help it set up a domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, lawyers claimed June 23 in court papers filed in New York federal court… ‘The Bush Administration asserted this became necessary after 9/11,’ plaintiff’s lawyer Carl Mayer said in a telephone interview. ‘This undermines that assertion.”’

The illegal NSA spy-on-Americans program apparently “became necessary” several months before 9/11, not after 9/11. Why?
In an interview entitled “NSA Whistleblower Russ Tice Alleges NSA Wiretapped Barack Obama as Senate Candidate” Russ Tice recently explained to FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds the real purpose of the NSA’s illegal spying on Americans: To collect blackmail material and other information that can be used to control influential citizens.
In short: The whole purpose of the NSA spy program was to enable 9/11, protect the perpetrators, and maintain the 9/11-triggered covert dictatorship.
Before 9/11, the neoconservatives of the Bush-Cheney Administration needed to ensure that no influential Americans would dare to stand up against the coming coup d’état. So they directed the NSA to begin wiretapping the American people.
From the billions of intercepted communications, the 9/11 plotters focused on those of extremely influential Americans: Politicians, wealthy people, military and intelligence officers, media figures, and other well-connected individuals. All of these people were profiled: Were they likely to resist the coming 9/11 operation? If so, how could they be stopped?
In some cases, blackmail material was collected. In others, more intensive surveillance was instituted.
Two “actionable threats” to the 9/11 coup were Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. After 9/11, they received US government anthrax in the mail. Frightened, Daschle and Leahy quickly stopped questioning 9/11 and opposing the Constitution-shredding USA Patriot Act.
If any influential Americans wanted to expose 9/11, and could not be blackmailed or controlled, they would have to be assassinated. The most illustrious victim was Senator Paul Wellstone, who was murdered, along with his family members and campaign staff, on October 25th, 2002, shortly after being threatened by then-Vice President Dick Cheney.
Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) spoke out against the murder of Senator Wellstone, calling it “a message to us all.” She added that if quoted, she would deny her statement. Apparently she was not anxious to get anthrax in the mail, or to have herself and her family members murdered.
Another Senator from Minnesota, Mark Dayton, was also threatened by the 9/11 perpetrators. Senator Dayton fled Washington, DC and evacuated his entire staff to Minnesota in August 2004 – then announced his retirement from national politics – after receiving death threats due to his speech on the Senate floor attacking the 9/11 Commission Report as a pack of lies.
So as far back as 2005, Russ Tice and his colleagues revealed that the NSA spy program was used to murder almost 3,000 Americans in an act of bloody treason, and to kill or terrorize anyone who stood in the way. Compared to that, Edward Snowden’s revelations are relatively tame.
Another NSA whistleblower is James Bamford, the Agency’s quasi-official biographer. Bamford alerted Americans back in 2001 to a plot called Operation Northwoods. Like 9/11, Operation Northwoods was a fake “attack on America” designed to brainwash Americans into marching off to war. And like 9/11, it involved the murder of large numbers of Americans.
Operation Northwoods was designed to trigger war against Cuba and Russia in 1962. It called for US forces to bomb American cities and sink American ships. The CIA-controlled “Operation Mockingbird” mainstream media would blame Cuba for these murders.
Operation Northwoods was planned by Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Every member of the Joint Chiefs signed off on the proposal. It was one month away from happening, when President John F. Kennedy and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara vetoed it.
In his book Mary’s Mosaic, author Peter Janney discusses evidence that the Operation Northwoods plan was not just aimed at Cuba. Its deeper purpose was to trigger a pre-emptive US nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Such a strike would have led to tens of millions of Russian and American deaths.
Every member of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 wanted to murder thousands of Americans in a false-flag operation designed to trigger a war that would have killed millions. In 2001, it finally happened.
So the truth is much worse than Edward Snowden is telling us. Our rulers are not just criminals – they are madmen, psychopathic liars and mass murderers of the worst imaginable sort.
If the mainstream media publicized the most dangerous whistleblowers, the American National Security State would come crashing down.
Let us hope and pray that Edward Snowden’s example will inspire other whistleblowers to come forward…and that the most powerful and dangerous truths will finally be revealed.