America; The Not So Free

by Sami Jamil Jadallah

 
As Americans we should not be surprised to wake up one day and soon and wake up to discover that our country is taken over by a Bolsheviks Politburo with tens of millions of secrete informers, no different from the former Soviet Union or East Germany with informers at home, in the office, in the sport club and in the markets and malls. The fight against terrorism is turning into a fight against America and Americans.
With no more freedoms to worry about, former President George Bush should not worry about the “terrorists” hating our freedoms as he declared on September 20, 2001 in a speech to the nations.
“ They hate what they see right here in this chamber; democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed (not a typo); they hate our freedoms: freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, and our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other”. We have no more freedoms to worry about.
Many of these freedoms are no longer available in the US. We are living the first stages of political and military dictatorship, a government run by “intelligence agencies” no different from Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania, Saddam of Iraq, Assad of Syria, Erich Honecker of East Germany and Stalin of the Soviet Union.
It was not surprising that Barack Obama like his predecessor George Bush adopted the same approach to the National Security. In the words of Azra Klein and Evans Soltas
“ rather than dismantling Mr. Bush approach to national security, Mr. Obama has to some extent validated it and put it on a more sustainable footing”.
PRISM is the code word for the extensive surveillance that have been on going for over six years now tapping into email, documents, and videos of nine US companies the likes of Google, Microsoft, Verizon, Apple, Facebook among others as part of the unpatriotic “ Patriot Act” that was put in place back in 2001.
The disclosure by the Washington Post forced the director of national intelligence to come out and defend the top secrete government surveillance program, forcing private companies to try and explain the extent of intrusion to the private accounts of hundreds of millions of customers and clients.
The program was put in place with the full support of all three branches of government, executive, legislative and judicial, and as explained by the director of national intelligence James R. Clapper Jr, PRISM as
“An internal government computer system used to facilitate the government’s statutorily authorized collection of foreign intelligence information from electronic communication service providers under court supervision.”
What is not being discussed in the national media is the extent and active role of the Israeli Mossad and Israeli companies in the extensive surveillance program.
According to an article in the American technology magazine “WIRED” dated April 2012, two Israeli companies Verint and Narus which according to “Wired” have close ties with the Israeli security community.
With the two Israeli companies involvement in the extensive surveillance program, Israel through its extensive security and intelligence cooperation with the United States no doubt is also gathering information on hundreds of millions of US citizens
“Verint, which took over its parent company Comverse Technology earlier this year, is responsible for tapping the communication lines of the American telephone giant Verizon, according to a past Verizon employee sited by James Bamford in Wired. Neither Verint nor Verizon commented on the matter.
Natus, which was acquired in 2010 by the American company Boeing, supplied the software and hardware used at AT&T wiretapping rooms, according to whistleblower Mark Klein, who revealed the information in 2004. Klein, a past technician at AT&T who filed a suit against the company for spying on its customers, revealed a “secret room” in the company’s San Fransisco office, where the NSA collected data on American citizens’ telephone calls and Internet surfing.
Klein’s claims were reinforced by former NSA employee Thomas Drake who testified that the agency uses a program produced by Narus to save the personal electrical communications of AT&T customers.
Both Verint and Narus have ties to the Israeli intelligence agency and the Israel Defense Forces intelligence-gathering unit 8200. Hanan Gefen, a former commander of the 8200 unit, told Forbes magazine in 2007 that Comverse’s technology, which was formerly the parent company of Verint and merged with it this year, was directly influenced by the technology of 8200. Ori Cohen, one of the founders of Narus, told Fortune magazine in 2001 that his partners had done technology work for the Israeli intelligence.
The question of whether intelligence communities outside the United States were involved has been raised. According to The Guardian, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain’s intelligence agency, secretly collected intelligence information from the world’s largest Internet companies via the American program PRISM. According to a top secret document obtained by The Guardian, GCHQ had access to PRISM since 2010 and that it used the information to prepare 197 intelligence reports last year. In a statement to the Guardian, GCHQ, said it “takes its obligations under the law very seriously.”
According to The Guardian, details of GCHQ’s use of PRISM are set out in a 41-page PowerPoint presentation prepared for senior NSA analysts, and describe a “snooping” operation that gave the NSA and FBI access to the systems of nine Internet giants, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo and Skype.
Given the close ties between U.S. and Israeli intelligence, the question arises as to whether Israeli intelligence, including the Mossad, was party to the secret. “
The question that all of us Americans have to ask who is spying on whom and whether the US intelligence and national security community have decided to subcontract our national security and our privacy to Israel, a country well known to have deliberate killed our sailors spied on our country passing massive critical and damaging secret documents to Israel and the former Soviet Union (Jonathan Pollard) and whether such cooperation amount to acts of treason on the part of key officials of our national security.
America as we known it the land of the free and the home of the brave no more. We are now living in a country that is far distant from the visions of its founding fathers. Both Bush and Obama once more prove that the “terrorists” are winning and America is loosing.
While the story of PRISM will not die any time soon, for sure the Israeli involvement with such surveillance will not see much coverage in the national media.

Sami Jamil Jadallah

Sami, a Palestinian-American and a US Army Veteran (66-68), recipient of the “soldier of the month award and leadership award from the 6th Army NCO Academy, is an international legal and business consultant with over 40 years of international experience, in construction, hospitality services, conservation, and defense, in the Middle East, Europe, and North Africa. Sami is a holder of BA, MPA in Public and Environmental Affairs, Jurist Doctor from Indiana University. While at IU he was elected class president, student government president and chairman of the Indiana Students Association,

Active in peace movement as a co-author of the pre-amble for the One State for All of its people and voluntary service program SalamNation. A frequent contributor on national and international affairs. He resides in the United States.