by Wayne Madsen, Strategic Culture:
Retired National Security Agency (NSA) chief technology officer William Binney is being branded as a “conspiracy theorist” by corporate media outlets, most notably, the Comcast-owned National Broadcasting Corporation, for co-authoring a controversial memo issued this past summer by a group of former intelligence officers – Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
The memo opined that the leak of Democratic National Committee e-mails during the 2016 presidential campaign were not the result of Russian state-sponsored hacking but the result of an inside job by a DNC staffer who loaded the purloined e-mails onto a thumb drive. That view is contrary to an assessment made in a 2017 intelligence assessment by 17 US intelligence agencies. That assessment claimed that Russian government-sponsored hackers broke into the email servers of the DNC and then provided the emails to WikiLeaks. However, the assessment was not the unanimous view of 17 US intelligence agencies, but merely four – the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It was provided a chapeau of legitimacy by the Director of National Intelligence. Contrary to news reports, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research, and intelligence elements of the military services did not provide input to the assessment.
Binney was also accused by NBC “national security reporter” Ken Dilanian of pushing the “conspiracy theory” that the “NSA is collecting and storing nearly every US communication.” Far from being a conspiracy theory, NSA’s unconstitutional eavesdropping program, code-named STELLAR WIND and officially known as the “President’s Surveillance Program,” was proven in classified documents revealed by NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden and, earlier, by Justice Department prosecutor Thomas Tamm. A metadata-capturing program called PRISM ensnared the personal data of millions of Americans from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and AOL.
What raised the hackles of Dilanian and other media shills for the intelligence community is that Binney was invited to a meeting with Central Intelligence Agency director Mike Pompeo on the “hallowed” 7th floor executive level at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Pompeo, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, had two CIA technology experts sit in on the meeting.
Pompeo was reportedly urged to meet Binney by President Trump after the president saw one of Binney’s interviews on Fox News and suggested that Pompeo meet with the retired NSA official. Dilanian wrote that although Binney “has been feted in Europe and elsewhere as a truth-telling whistleblower . . . American officials of all political persuasions say his allegations about the NSA are false.” Dilanian offered up pure uninformed conjecture. Many current and former NSA, CIA, Justice Department, FBI employees, of all political persuasions, have confirmed that Binney’s statements about illegal NSA eavesdropping are correct. And, they have been proven correct by deliberations of the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
Dilanian is nothing more than a CIA embedded reporter at NBC News. While Dilanian was the Tribune Washington bureau national security reporter, he was accused of submitting his stories to the CIA in advance of publication. Tribune owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. In one email, Dilanian wrote to the CIA press officer: “I’m working on a story about congressional oversight of drone strikes that can present a good opportunity for you guys.” In other cases, the CIA made significant re-edits of Dilanian’s stories. Dilanian left Tribune in May 2014 for the Associated Press. While the Tribune Washington bureau chief later called Dilanian’s e-mail exchanges with the CIA a violation of the newspaper chain’s news policy, the AP had no problem with Dilanian’s e-mail pen pals at the CIA. Dilanian later moved to NBC News.
NBC News, which has had a long relationship with the CIA since the agency’s implementation of the news media infiltration project called MOCKINGBIRD in the early 1950s, apparently has had no problem with Dilanian’s shilling for the CIA. The NBC attack on Binney appears to have been coordinated by Dilanian and his copy editors at the CIA who were not happy about Pompeo’s meeting with the NSA whistleblower. Pompeo has been all over the map on accepting the US Intelligence Community’s assessment on Russian hacking of the DNC computers, first accepting the assessment, then agreeing that it had no impact on the presidential election, and wavering back and forth to please Trump.
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