I’ve got Countdown on… and I’m going to live blog the interview as best I can, so, bear with me.
I’ve got my drink, my cigarettes, and ready to go… and I’m just waiting on the interview.
8:16 pm
Olbermann says that reporter James Risen from the NYT was targeted by the NSA, and he knew it… more to come on that…
8:27 pm
For some background, this isn’t the first time Russell Tice has spoken out. He was the source for the NYT story on the warrantless wiretapping back in Dec 2005. He had to go into silence, and did so, until Bush left office.
8:33 pm
The interview begins…
McConnell was knee deep in it.
Olbermann: Information collected on journalists was more than phone, emails?
Tice: Financial transactions were included in the collection.
Olbermann: What was the goal in including all that information?
Tice: You’d want to know where a potential terrorist was spending their money, but, we are talking about tens of thousands of innocents caught up in this trap. If they got put on the no-fly list, they wouldn’t know why.
8:37 pm
Tice: It was all done through algarithms, so, they could get anyone in their data mining.
Olbermann: Do you know or can guess who authorized this?
Tice: I have a guess, I think it was developed out of the DoD and was the Total Information Awareness program.
Olbermann: Were there targets of leaks?
Tice: I don’t know. They sucked in everybody.
Olbermann: Who saw the data, was there cherry picking?
Tice: I started looking into it at that point and that is when they started the retaliations.
Short interview!
Geez!
Looks like the James Risen interview is going to be better than the second Tice interview.
I’ll do the Risen interview too since the Tice interview wasn’t that great this time.
Risen: I know that the Bush admin got into my phone records.
Risen: The NSA has far greater capability than has ever been made public.
Risen talks about the Ashcroft hospital scene.
Olbermann asks about suppression of reporting.
Risen: It is to have a chilling effect on whistleblowers, not so much the reporters.
That’s it…
2 comments
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after this commercial break… lol
in watching the real thing to be doing anything else.
Olberman is right on the money; and if you’ve read any of my stuff on Kos, I keep quoting Abraham Joshua Heschel
I haven’t been able to shake that, and it shames and shakes my foundations to think that this country dare even try to wash this thing away or forget it.
We’re the one country in the world who can elect anyone we want; we chose Bush. I’m one of those who believe he was never elected, and yet even with all of our freedoms, somehow it was Ukraine that overthrew their election while we let ours stand and just blamed the exit polls.
We’re one of the few countries in the world who could have removed any leader without so much as a single shot fired; we prosecuted lies about a blow job, but not lies that led to war crimes.
And if to prove how obnoxious we are, we were so proud of our country and our Constitution, our president used the largest military force in the history of mankind to cram democracy down the throat of a country that didn’t ask for it; yet we did not have the courage to admit Bush/Cheney betrayed that very same Constitution we are so proud of in order to do it.
History is going to look at us without mercy.
This country has no idea how much damage we’ve done, and I’m hoping somehow that Obama has something planned but he’s clever enough to deal with the real emergencies first so as to not look vindictive as a distraction from our current miseries .
But we have to show we have the courage to prosecute our own; If you can find the segment that Olbermann did with John Dean, Dean was the first one I have heard who publically said that the country will pay a price for turning our back on what Bush/Cheney et. al have done in our name.