Monthly Archives: April 2009

NSA Wiretap Reveals Harman’s Completed Crime

Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) was reportedly overheard on an NSA wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would get involved in reducing espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) while the suspected Israeli agent lobbied soon-to-be-named House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to give Harman chairmanship of the House Intelligence Committee.

Harman’s squalid history towards Americans she is supposed to represent is disgraceful. Harman authored the egregious Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007, giving us another example of her total disregard for her constituents. The NSA’s wiretap of Harman promising to intervene for the AIPAC shows exactly where her loyalties lie.

A 2006 probe of Harman’s activities was halted — unlike previous reports saying an FBI investigation of Harman was dropped due to a ‘lack of evidence’ — by then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales because he needed Harman’s help selling the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program. Basically Harman was being blackmailed, forcing her to support Bush’s illegal wiretapping activities in exchange for dropping all charges and stopping all investigations.

It also explains why Harman never chaired the House Intelligence Committee and failed to land a top job under the Obama administration at the CIA or the Department of Homeland Security. Instead of serving jail time for her conniving and treasonous actions, investigations were dropped by Gonzales when Harman publicly supported Bush’s illegal wiretapping activities.

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NSA ‘Overcollected’ Domestic Communications

What many of us were well aware would happen when Congress blatantly passed an illegal and unconstitutional piece of FISA ‘legislation’ last year — after being bought off by the Telecoms — that virtually removed all oversight from the FISA law and granted retroactive immunity to those telecoms who were paid millions of taxpayers dollars to spy illegally on U. S. citizens, as demanded by then-President Bush has come to fruition: the National Security Agency (NSA) reportedly abused their ‘authority’ and illegally spied on U.S. citizens and possibly at least one Congress person.

According to Eric Lichtblau and James Risen from The New York Times, the NSA intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in ‘recent months’ on a broader scale than the legal limits established by Congress last year, engaging in ‘overcollection’ of domestic communications of Americans. The problems with the NSA’s surveillance operation have allegedly been ‘fixed.’

Questions are still unanswered and Intelligence officials say they’re examining the scope of the NSA’s surveillance practices. The Senate is allegedly probing the wiretapping violations as well. The extent of the surveillance techniques by the NSA isn’t clear.

New details have also emerged about the earlier Bush authorized domestic-surveillance activities, including the NSA’s attempt to wiretap a member of Congress without court approval. Members of the Congressional intelligence committees have been notified in the past weeks that the NSA had encountered operational and legal problems in complying with the new wiretapping law that was passed by Congress last summer.

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Washington’s Fraudulent Fiscal Follies

Timothy Geithner reportedly says “we’re having a major financial crisis in part because of failures of supervision” — despite the fact that he ‘regulated’ major U.S. banks before becoming the U.S. Treasury Secretary. Now Geithner allegedly wants to clean up the mess he helped create.

In September 2005, Geithner started a process that helped streamline an antiquated  system that threatened Wall Street’s boom. Billions of dollars worth of credit derivatives were being traded daily as banks and investors worldwide tried protecting themselves from losses on increasingly complex and risky financial bets.

Geithner, then head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, pressed 14 major financial firms to build an electronic network that would make the market easier to monitor. By the Fall of 2006, the new system helped the derivatives trade become more efficient. During this streamlining process, clear signs of a catastrophe in the making were missed.

Once the housing market collapsed, derivatives stoked the fires that ignited inside some of the biggest banking companies that failed to assess an array of risks they were taking that emerged as a key element in the multitrillion-dollar meltdown of the global financial system.

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