If we are to believe the Times, the NSA engages in “some eavesdropping inside the country,” when it is a documented fact the mega-spy organization has snooped millions of Americans for years. “In June 1970 Nixon met with Hoover [FBI], Helms [CIA], NSA Director Admiral Noel Gaylor, and Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) representative Lt. Gen. Donald V. Bennett and told them he wanted a coordinated and concentrated effort against domestic dissenters,” writes Verne Lyon, a former CIA undercover operative. This confab of spooks engaged in “black bag operations,” wiretapping, and a mail-opening program, according to Lyon, and ultimately became known as Operation CHAOS. “Given the power granted to the office of the presidency and the unaccountability of the intelligence agencies, widespread illegal domestic operations are certain. We as a people should remember history and not repeat it.” Unfortunately, “as a people,” we Americans are a somnolent lot, more interested in football games and the escapades of Paris Hilton than remaining vigilant about the behavior of the government.

Of course, singling out the NSA is like picking between oranges and apples—it is all fruit. As we know, since nine eleven, Rumsfeld’s military is more or less in charge of snooping on Americans deemed a threat to national security, that is to say a possible threat against the neocons. “On May 2, 2003, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz signed a memorandum directing the military to collect and report ‘non-validated threat information’ relating to U.S. military forces, installations or missions,” writes William M. Arkin. “His memorandum followed from the establishment of the Domestic Threat Working Group after 9/11, the intent of which was to create a mechanism to share low-level domestic ‘threat information’ between the military and intelligence agencies.” The Department of Forever War has something called Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), “one of the more mysterious Pentagon agencies … that also has authority to investigate crimes within the United States such as treason, foreign or terrorist sabotage or even economic espionage,” as Arkin cites Walter Pincus of the Washington Post. CIFA “constitutes the greatest threat to U.S. civil liberties since the domestic spying days of the 1970’s,” Arkin continues, and all it will take is a “military gumshoe or over-zealous commander” to violate the formerly constitutionally protected liberties of Americans. It is important to note that the Pentagon’s CIFA is not only a “counter-intelligence” (re counter First Amendment) operation but also considers itself the “law enforcement arm of the Pentagon,” in other words the Posse Comitatus Act, designed to prevent the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement, is a dead letter.

Back in 1952, as Truman went about constructing the now ominous national security state, the mission of the NSA was to collect intelligence on “foreign governments,” not U.S. citizens per se. Of course, as any student of history will tell you, government invariably considers its own citizens as the enemy and directs massive resources into snooping activity and technology (think Echelon) and “counter intelligence,” that is to say subverting the liberty of the people and, in many instances, directing violence and even assassination against opponents, as all fascists are wont to do.

Thus when the Washington Post tells us “President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying,” we can only laugh—if sardonically—because history is replete with documented instances of the NSA doing the exact opposite, regardless of meaningless “legal prohibitions.”

But then the Washington Post and the New York Times, the latter having “broke” this story (because the government wants us to know they are snooping us), were long ago folded into the CIA’s sprawling propaganda unit under Operation Mockingbird, so it should be no surprise they would attempt to tell us there are “legal prohibitions” when in fact various intelligence agencies—now centralized under the Pentagon and internationalized with spook and black op operations and outfits elsewhere in the world—are free to run wild, subverting both indigenous political movements and foreign resistance efforts against the neocon-neolib version of reality, which is in fact a global slavery and death camp engineered to service a miniscule corporate and banking elite.