4um: Senator Frank Church: The NSA could enable a dictator to impose total tyranny

Title: Senator Frank Church: The NSA could enable a dictator to impose total tyranny
Source: Bella Ciao
URL Source: http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=10903
Published: Mar 16, 2006
Author: Ben Frank
Post Date: 2006-03-16 11:29:59 by Zipporah
Keywords: dictator, Senator, Church:
Views: 40
Comments: 7

Senator Frank Church chaired the Senate Hearings on the FBI’s Cointelpro operation, which spied upon & attempted to INFILTRATE, DISRUPT & DISCREDIT the peace movement, even Martin Luther King Jr.

if a dictator ever took over, the NSA “could enable [him] to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”

From James Bamford’s NSA, the agency that could be Big Brother, Senator Church:

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.”
He added that if a dictator ever took over, the NSA “could enable [him] to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.”
At the time, the agency had the ability to listen to only what people said over the telephone or wrote in an occasional telegram; they had no access to private letters. But today, with people expressing their innermost thoughts in e-mail messages, exposing their medical and financial records to the Internet, and chatting constantly on cellphones, the agency virtually has the ability to get inside a person’s mind...
“I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge,” Senator Church said. “I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

MLK had informants on his staff. I wonder who has informants on their staff, travelling with them today...

NOW a PDF Flyer

slightly modified for flyer (262kb)

BushCo is trying to bury the significance of their illegal spying, why aren’t the Democrats “screaming to the rafters”?

show rant

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hmmm- just read this on PDA, “John Conyers (D-MI), a leader in the Watergate and Iran-Contra investigations”... interesting to note that NO Accountability came out of those.

He also led the election fraud investigation in 2004 which concluded there was reasonable doubt of fraud, but nothing came of it... and Conyers led the Downing Street Memo investigation, McGovern’s testimony alone (mp3) should have been enough to force impeachment... yet Conyers focused on collecting signatures asking Bush for more information...

If I were Bush or Cheney, I would certainly be pushing for Conyers to be the lead “investigator” as long as possible.

Think about it- after the explosive DSM hearing, there was no action until mid July when Barbara Lee introduced a Resolution of Inquiry on the DSM, which has to be acted on in 14 working days, but she introduced it “too late” and shucks, they had to wait til after vacation in Sept to deal with it... and by then Katrina had it and it was buried. It’s like they were stalling for Bush...

“The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.” J. Edgar Hoover

http://benfrank.net/blog/2006/01/08/frank_church/

(March 20, 1962) - A recorded lecture in which the author of Brave New World discusses using terrorism to create willing slaves out of the population.

I heard that recording already. Everyone should down-load it. It is an incredible historical document. Aldous Huxley said that at a university in so- cal back in 1962.

I guess we're lucky this NSA snooping is presently being managed by an incompetent lying idiot. Maybe that will be enough to discredit the whole scheme before a more dangerous man occupies the presidency.

LOL! .. Yeah that's one thing in our favor.. It does seem that the tide is turning.. let's hope something happens before there is any way for us to recover.. Who wouldve thought this could happen in this short of time?

great post Zipp - I've never been a democrat. but this frank church fellow is quite a figure in history IMHO because the hearings he orchestrated were very significant in our history. That was like a strong effort to turn back tyranny. it was unsuccessful. There were a number of congressmen & senators who did investigations back in those days, late 70's early 80's, and let me list some that ended up dead - larry McDonald a republican died in 83 or so, a democrat who died down in Jim Jomes massacre in 1979, John Tower a republican and this Heinz fellow a democrat both died 3 days within each other, both plane crashes around 1988. all these people asked questions publicly and pushed that they weren't supposed to do. and they died. this is our history. these are the brave souls who resisted.

Not to mention the strange death of CIA Director Colby, almost straight of of Norman Mailer's Opus about the CIA with an Angleton figure, Harlot's Ghost.

And I do wonder about the "suicide" of Porter Goss's COS exCIAtype, in a motel, summer of 2001.

"I want the American people to know that our dreams are gone, our work was in vain. There will be no future for our children and our grandchildren in the new Iraq. The future is for the clerics. This is not the democracy we dreamed of. "--Dr. Raja Kuzai