House Agrees to Rare Secret Session on Spy Bill
March 14th, 2008The following passage is from, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer:
“What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
…
“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.
Via: Reuters:
The House of Representatives abruptly postponed a vote on a spy bill on Thursday after Democrats agreed to a Republican request to hold a rare secret session to discuss classified security matters.
The vote was reset for Friday.
The bill would revamp a 1978 surveillance law and reject President George W. Bush’s demand that phone companies that participated in his warrantless domestic spy program begun after the September 11 attacks be immunized from lawsuits.
House Republican Whip Roy Blunt said he wants to privately inform colleagues how the Democratic measure could disrupt anti-terrorism efforts.
Blunt said several lawmakers with high-security clearance already had access to the information, but wanted to make sure all were aware of it.
“There are a significant number of elements of how the (1978) Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act works and … specific examples of how their proposed changes would prevent it from working that I think can only be disclosed in a secret session,” Blunt said.
Several Democrats voiced skepticism, with some suggesting Republicans were merely trying to delay action on the bill that Bush has threatened to veto.
But Democrats ultimately agreed for the House to hold its first secret session since 1983 on Thursday night. The session was set to last an hour and begin after authorities cleared and secured the chamber.
Heaven forbid should I stray off topic here but the transcript of all the wire-tapped calls, text messaging and back door keys to hidden pages on the call girl website leaves me conclude that Spitzer was the target and the pro-ring was caught in the net. Reading between the lines in the affidavit, it reveals a couple of anomolies that suggest Spitzer got set up. The first call recorded in the affidavit is dated Feb. 11, 2008. Barely a month ago and the only detail which set the hounds off was the Mann Bill which makes the transportation of prostitutes over a state line illegal and of course, money laundering which makes the transfer of money to shell companies doing illegal business a no no. The facts as presented indicate that Spitzer wired $400.00 and paid the hooker over $4,800 in cash when she arrived in the room. Hardly a case for the feds to be tracking money laundering but their claim is that the phones (several) were already being tapped. Of course they were. Everybodies phone is tapped. It was just a matter of going back over the records to pre-date Spitzer’s big adventure to justify moving in for the bust with less than a month of data required so as not to implicate the innocent aka anyone on their side of the war on terror.
It has been suggested that Spitzer was being groomed for a shot at the presidency and that he was investigating 911 as a plank to that end. Since all of the presidential hopefuls are implicated in one way or another to 911, it’s no surprise that Spitzer had to be taken out as soon as possible. I wonder if it’s possible to upset a person’s libido by putting testosterone in his drink.
Spitzer investigate 9/11? That would conflict sharply with his record.
http://winterpatriot.blogspot.com/2008/03/peeling-onion-again-eliot-spitzer-and.html
http://www.nymegaphone.com/node/24 (linked in above post)