Yet Another Monumental Failure for the NSA

Our Rulers’ favorite excuse for their panopticon is that monitoring everything everyone anywhere says, does or thinks is the only way they can protect us. (From what, exactly? Certainly not from the greatest threat any citizen faces: his own government.) Yet the NSA has yet to produce a single example in which its spying protected anything but its own backside and budget. Meanwhile, the India Times highlights yet another failure of 24/7 surveillance: the attack in Mumbai in 2008 that killed 166 people.

In one of the most glaring intelligence failures, the report said Indian and British intelligence agencies [N.B.: Britain’s spies march in lockstep with the NSA. Actually, they’re too busy kissing the NSA’s butt to march anywhere, but you get the idea…] monitored online activities of a key 26/11 planner Zarrar Shah, the technology chief of Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terror group, “but couldn’t connect the dots” before the attacks… While the US was unaware of the two agencies’ efforts, it had picked up signs of a plot through other electronic and human sources, and warned Indian security officials several times in the months before the attack, the report said. The report quoted former National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon as saying that “no one put together the whole picture,” referring to the intelligence gathered by the US, Indian and British agencies months before the attacks. “Not the Americans, not the Brits, not the Indians…only once the shooting started did everyone share” what they had, largely in meetings between British and Indian officials, and then “the picture instantly came into focus,” said Menon, who was the foreign secretary at the time of the attacks.

Well, heck, the “picture instantly comes into focus once the shooting starts” even for us mere serfs who aren’t governmental spooks. Prompting the question of what purpose these sponging spooks serve.

Furthermore, even neocons who worship “national security” should ask why American taxpayers are footing the bill to spy on Asian criminals, especially when so many homeowners have lost their property to the rapacious IRS while others ponder whether to buy food or pay the medical insurance  Obummer now requires. But given the billions the NSA steals from us, allegedly to stop just such atrocities as that in Mumbai…well, we’re getting zilch for our money, that’s certain.

Abolish and disband the ineffective, incompetent, and utterly evil NSA. Now.

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12:15 pm on December 22, 2014