Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Offensive Information Warfare

Sibel Edmonds now has her own radio show / podcast called Boiling Frogs, with Peter B. Collins. On Thursday, she will publish an interview with Russ Tice.

Last month, Sibel got the scoop that while at the NSA and DIA, Tice “worked as an Intelligence Analyst & Capabilities Operations Officer specializing in all aspects of OFFENSIVE INFORMATION WARFARE (O-IW).”

Sibel adds:
"I had a meeting with James Bamford and got a ‘real’ education on how alarming this really is."
The fact that Tice worked on the 'offensive' side of the equation sheds new light on some of his concerns, although I doubt that we'll learn too much about his actual work, given that he has previously said that "there's no way the programs I want to talk to Congress about should be public ever, unless maybe in 200 years they want to declassify them. You should never learn about it." Sibel says that the interview includes "the latest NSA related developments, US Congress, his Kafkaesque journey as a whistleblower, and more."

On the other hand, the fact that he worked on the 'offensive' side ought to put an end to the speculation that Tice was merely talking about the domestic implementation of Echelon - a point that I tried to emphasize here.

Relatedly, when Sibel offered to tell her story to a mainstream outlet, some people said that she should make a youtube video outlining the crimes that she is aware of. Sibel argued that if she did that, she would be subjecting herself to various sanctions without any likelihood of any justice or accountability for the criminals. Russ Tice, obviously itching to tell his story, appeared on the Keith Olbermann show the day after Obama's inauguration, to tell the world that the US government was spying on all citizens, with a particular focus on journalists, and his story was completely ignored, even by journalists. Sibel's decision to avoid the youtube route is completely vindicated - even as her offer to do even a mainstream media interview looks increasingly like even that might not have had the desired impact.

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