Wired: Echelon Furor Ends in a Whimper

[John Young]

Owen Lewis writes:

>It also needs saying from time to time that in the last half century and in
>terms of his relations with 'friendly' states, Uncle Sam has, beyond doubt
>(unless your name is Khomeini or Pinter) been more sinned against than
>sinning.

This astonishes. Only a biased understanding of US foreign policy, 
especially that exercised by way of US intelligence agencies, could produce 
such a patent falsehood. The small amount of information that come
from secret archives and the greater amount that has come from
targets of covert operations belies this claim of disproportinately sinned 
against. A prime argument the intelligence industry uses to resist
full disclosure of sustained perfidy is that "means and methods"
must be protected. It is these means and methods which are the
shame of governments, and not only the US, but it is the US with
help from its friends who are by far the investors, inventors,
promulgators and users of the technologies of political control.

The Wassnaar Agreement and a host of other treaties describe
in minute detail what vile means and methods have been wrought 
to sin against others while denying compensatory access to 
defenses against predation.

Further, it is spill over from these "national security" control 
technologies that is now flooding internal police organizations
to treat citizens as though foreign threats, and while the US
leads the way in this, UK and the Echelon puppies are happy 
to contribute.

It cannot be too strongly stated that the great number of former
members of intelligence agencies and their supporters are
working feverishly to build markets for their skills and tools
for internal defense, thus the dramatic invocation of the
threat of homeland terrorism pretty muchly aping that once
invoked for foreign foes. And, as ever, pretending blamelessness.

The best and brightness are alive and well selling self-enriching
shinola as if in the national interest.

The 1951 Longley-Cook report by the UK Director of Naval
Intelligence warning of the threat of US preventive war is
highly instructive on how intelligence is warped to fit black
agendas. That Churchill saw Longley-Cook as someone to 
keep an eye on for telling the truth about US warmongering 
is further indicative of sucking up by ambitious national
leaders and their pocket intelligence courtiers.

It can't come too soon to indict national leaders for war crimes
and compel them to reveal what they were told by their spooks, 
and, better, vice versa.

To make myself clear, the United States over the past 50 years
of intelligence guiding foreign and now domestic policy has
become extremely dirty-handed and extremely adept at
camouflaging underhandedness. Nothing has so corrupted
US culture as has secret government and its spread to
other nations under guise of open democracy.

Examples abound, just ask if you don't know them or believe
them secret.

Echelon is a mild diversion, and the technology so far revealed
of global surveillance and intelligence mongering for political
control -- see Steven Wright's 1997 STOA report -- has been 
cloaked by Echelon hand-wringing. When all the means and
methods Wright describes gets the attention Echelon has
gotten, a bit of progress will be made. Until then, as the EP
report demonstrates, it's all blowing of smoke and, in
Owen's case, of sunshine. 

These whitewashes of black deeds are the favorite means 
and methods to shape public opinion in the age of spook-led 
and -fed government/commerce.