Bill Van Auken

"...because the CIA requires a certain speed, agility and
tactical responsiveness that differs from other agencies..."

The report Thursday of a CIA-AT&T operation exposes a whole new layer of state-corporate spying on the people of the United States and the world.

Details of the operation, first published by the New York Times, make clear that AT&T, the largest US telecommunications provider, is allowing the CIA to sift through its vast call database, not in response to any subpoena or court order, but rather as part of a voluntary contract under which the company is being paid more than $10 million a year by the intelligence agency.

In addition to its millions of customers, the company also handles connections between long distance carriers and local telephone networks all over the world, with tens of billions of minutes of voice calls per year passing through its facilities around the globe.

The CIA-AT&T operation duplicates some of the massive data-mining and domestic spying operations carried out by the National Security Agency, details of which have been exposed in recent months through documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The Times report cited a senior "intelligence official” who argued that this overlap was justified because the CIA requires “a certain speed, agility and tactical responsiveness that differs from other agencies. The need to act without delay is often best met when the CIA has developed its own capabilities to lawfully acquire necessary foreign intelligence information.”

Acting “without delay” in the CIA’s case increasingly involves launching drone missile attacks to assassinate perceived enemies of Washington, while killing significant numbers of innocent civilians.

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Stephen Lendman

Suha Arafat and late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat attend
a conference in the Gaza Strip on April 5, 1995. (N. Judah)

On November 11, 2004, Arafat died in a Paris hospital. He was 75. He was hospitalized for an undiagnosed illness. It developed in April. It got worse. He deteriorated badly. He needed special care. On November 3, he slipped into a coma. Days later he died.

Previous articles discussed his death. It wasn't accidental. It wasn't natural. Credible evidence points to assassination. Israel wanted him eliminated. He became more liability than asset. His former aide, Hani al-Hassan, said he personally witnessed 13 attempts on his life.

Arafat said he survived 40 attempts. In 1985, he narrowly escaped an Israeli air attack on his Tunisian headquarters. It killed 73 people. He went jogging shortly before Israel struck. In December 2001, Israeli missiles struck his Ramallah compound. He was rushed to safety shortly before the attack. An Israeli military spokesman called the strike a warning. It sent a message. Arafat was marked for death.

At the time, he was a virtual prisoner inside his presidential compound (the Mukataa). Medical reports showed him in good health. Close associates said Ariel Sharon wanted him dead. As defense minister in 1982, he failed trying to kill him during Israel's siege of Beirut. He let Phalangist fascists do his dirty work. He called slaughtering Palestinians "ridding the world of international terrorism." Evidence suggests Sharon succeeded. He killed Arafat.

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Paul Craig Roberts

“No legal issue arises when the United States responds to a challenge to its power, position, and prestige.” ~ Dean Acheson , 1962, speaking to the American Society of International Law.

Dean Acheson declared 51 years ago that power, position, and prestige are the ingredients of national security and that national security trumps law. In the United States democracy takes a back seat to “national security,” a prerogative of the executive branch of government.

National security is where the executive branch hides its crimes against law, both domestic and international, its crimes against the Constitution, its crimes against innocent citizens both at home and abroad, and its secret agendas that it knows that the American public would never support.

“National security” is the cloak that the executive branch uses to make certain that the US government is unaccountable. Without accountable government there is no civil liberty and no democracy except for the sham voting that existed in the Soviet Union and now exists in the US.

There have been periods in US history, such as President Lincoln’s war to prevent secession, World War I, and World War II, when accountable government was impaired. These were short episodes of the Constitution’s violation, and the Constitution was reinstated in the aftermath of the wars. However, since the Clinton regime, the accountability of government has been declining for more than two decades, longer than the three wars combined.

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