Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
June 25, 2013
Congress insisted it be kept in the dark on the NSA
surveillance programs recently revealed by Edward Snowden, according to
Dick Cheney, who approached lawmakers with an invitation for them to
provide more oversight back in 2004 but was told, “absolutely not”.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Speaking at a Washington think tank on U.S.-Korean
affairs, the former Vice-President bragged about his involvement in
setting up NSA programs shortly after 9/11 that snooped on email and
phone records.
Cheney also revealed that when he approached
Congressional leaders about whether they wished to provide oversight for
the program three years after it began, they were “unanimous” that it
should continue.
“I said, ‘Do you think we ought to come back to the
Congress in order to get more formal authorization?’ and they said,
‘Absolutely not.’ Everybody, Republican and Democrat, said, ‘Don’t come
back up here, it will leak’,” Cheney said.
Cheney’s claim that Snowden’s revelations have caused significant damage to US national security has been rejected by other top security experts,
who assert that terrorists already assume their communications are
under surveillance and are therefore unaffected by the information
released by the whistleblower.
“The argument that this sweeping search must be kept
secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this
sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were
blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing,” said top
counter-terrorism czar under Presidents Clinton and Bush – Richard
Clarke.
The former head of the NSA’s global digital data gathering program, William Binney, also highlighted how mass NSA surveillance did nothing to prevent terrorism.
