General Alexander Lied to Congress About Success of Phone Spying
We called him on his suspicious claim, but the media didn't Aug 16 2013Much has happened in the last few days, especially the Washington Post report that the NSA broke its privacy rules thousands of times in 2012 alone ("inadvertently", they say, but inadvertent just doesn't cut it).
But let's first roll back lest one fundamental point is not lost in the fusillade of news:
A month ago, we challenged the statement by Gen. Keith Alexander, head of the NSA, about his testimony before the House Select Intelligence Committee that more than 50 terrorist attacks had been disrupted by the NSA program that has been collecting the phone records of every American for years.
He had pledged to come up with "a list" in a matter of days that would support his claim. But he never did. At least we can find no further mention of it in the media, which took him at his word and moved on.
But because of no sign of his ever providing proof of those 50 plus terrorist plots, we said, in the article "Why We Can't Trust Our Government" that we've left on this page (below), we found it suspicious that the government hadn't trumpeted these success stories, rushing to the podium to announce to television cameras their latest rescue of the American people, as it has done in the past. We finally asked, "does the list that never showed up tell us there are nowhere near 50 true cases of plots foiled by the phone and Internet dragnets? Is Alexander leaving us with only bluster?"
Sen Patrick Leahy (D-Vt), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was apparently handed such a list — classified of course, as is virtually everything this government does. At a hearing August 1, Leahy blew the cover off Alexander's vastly overblown justification for spying on American phone activity, saying the list does not show that “dozens or even several terrorist plots” had been thwarted. Leahy was "not convinced by what I've seen" and “if this program is not effective it has to end" by reason of its “massive privacy implications”.
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