Former NSA and CIA boss Michael Hayden went on Face the Nation Sunday and told America the NSA’s Fourth Amendment busting surveillance program is “lawful, effective, and appropriate.” He made it clear Obama did not say during a Friday news conference he would implement “operational changes” to the NSA program.
The former Air Force General, now a consultant with the folks who brought us naked body porno scanners at airports around the country, the Chertoff Group, said oversight of NSA surveillance is “already quite good” and “there have been no abuses under him or under his predecessor,” although Obama “does have this issue of confidence, this issue of transparency.”
“The president is trying to take some steps to make the American people more comfortable about what it is we’re doing,” Hayden continued. “That’s going to be hard” because “some steps to make Americans more comfortable will actually make Americans less safe,” he said. In other words, if the government decides to obey the Constitution it will result in terrorism.
Hayden was confident the “left” would not stop the NSA surveillance program. He said “folks from the so-called left, are a bit uneasy” about rampant NSA surveillance and constitutional violations. “They don’t want a little more transparency with regard to the metadata program. They want the program stopped. I don’t think it will be.”
Meanwhile, supporters of the forever war on mostly illusory terrorism are criticizing Obama’s call for NSA “reform,” in reality an effort to make Americans comfortable with the idea of ditching the Fourth Amendment.
Rep. Peter King, the New York Republican who dreams of becoming president one day, said Obama’s announcement on Friday is a “monumental failure in presidential wartime leadership and responsibility.”
King’s use of the word “wartime” is inaccurate due to the fact Obama and his predecessor did not bother to legally declare war as required under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.
“These programs are legal, transparent and contain the appropriate checks and balances among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government. These intelligence tools keep Americans safe every single day,” said King, who is chairman of House Homeland Security Committee’s Sub-Committee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence.
As a proponent of the forever war against largely delusional would-be terrorists choreographed by the FBI, King said widespread NSA surveillance of the communications of all Americans is mandatory. “America is at war with Islamist terror groups that kill and maim innocent civilians,” he said, adding without evidence that the “current threat to the Homeland is just as high as it was before 9/11″ when terrorists trained on U.S. military bases allegedly attacked New York and Washington D.C.
The government’s propaganda war in America received a momentary boost after the government claimed earlier this month it had detected an unspecified terrorist “threat stream” and moved to close embassies in Jordan, Egypt, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Libya, Madagascar, Burundi, Djibouti, Sudan, Rwanda, Mauritius, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The unsubstantiated threat dominated corporate media headlines for days. It played into the government’s assertion NSA surveillance is in fact detecting and shutting down terrorist threats.