by Watchful Citizen » Tue Nov 01, 2005 6:46 am
(This 1972 Ramparts article on the then-new topic of the world-wide communications monitoring by the previously hidden National Security Agency along with an employee interview claims that NSA's data at the time revealed exactly how the Nixon administration's justifications for the Vietnam War were lies. The article claims that Nixon and company ignored the NSA intel because it didn't jibe with their intended war ambitions. Sound familar? The article's warning about American's inability to face up to what its government really does is timeless.)<br><br><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK START--><a href="http://jya.com/nsa-elint.htm">jya.com/nsa-elint.htm</a><!--EZCODE AUTOLINK END--><br><br>>snip<<br><br>Note: The article begins with commentary on information provided by an anonymous former analyst of the National Security Agency followed by the full interview. The analyst was later named as Perry Fellwock, at the time using the pseudonym Winslow Peck.<br><br>Ramparts, Vol. 11, No. 2, August, 1972, pp. 35-50<br><br>U.S. Electronic Espionage:<br>A Memoir<br><br>>snip<<br><br><br>"...All of this information NSA has passed on systematically to the political authorities who, equally systematically, have ignored it.<br><br>Nixon's military objective -- halting supplies to the South through bombing and mining of North Vietnamese ports -- turns out to be as bogus as his political rationale. Military supplies for the DRV and the NLF are stored along the Ho Chi Minh trail in gigantic underground staging areas know as bamtrams. These are capable of storing supplies for as long as twelve months, at normal levels of hostilities, according to NSA estimates. Even at the highly accelerated pace of the recent offensive, it would take several months (assuming 100 percent effectiveness) before our bombing and mining wold have any impact on the fighting.<br><br>Taken together, the experience of our informant in Europe, in the Middle East, and in Indochina bears witness to the aggressive posture of the United States in the late 1960s. It is hard to see anything defensive about it. Our policy makers are well-informed by the intelligence community of the defensive nature of our antagonists' military operations. The NSA operations here described reflect the drive of a nation to control as much of the world as possible, whose leaders trust no one and are forced to spy on their closet allies in violation of the treaties they initiated themselves; leaders, moreover, for whom all nations are, in the intelligence idiom, "targets," and who maintain the U.S. imperium around the world in large part through threat of actual physical annihilation.<br><br>At home, however, the favored weapon employed is ignorance rather than fear. Like NSA headquarters itself, the United States is surrounded by barriers -- barriers of ignorance that keep its citizens prisoners of the cold war. The first obstacle is formed by the myths propagated about communism and about its aggressive designs on America. The second, and dependent for its rationale on the first, is the incredible barrier of governmental secrecy that keeps most of the questionable U.S. aggressive activities hidden nor from our "enemies," who are the knowledgeable victims, but from the American people themselves. The final barrier is perhaps the highest and is barbed with the sharpest obstacles of all. It is nothing less than our reluctance as Americans to confront what we are doing to the peoples of the world, ourselves included, by organizations like the National Security Agency. <br><br>>snip<<br><br>much more... <p></p><i></i>
