Thriller Political-War Movie Becomes Reality

Update III: Greenwald: So if I understand this correctly -- and I'm pretty sure I do -- when the U.S. Government eavesdropped for years on American citizens with no warrants and in violation of the law, that was 'both legal and necessary' as well as 'essential to U.S. national security,' and it was the 'despicable' whistle-blowers (such as Thomas Tamm) who disclosed that crime and the newspapers which reported it who should have been criminally investigated, but not the lawbreaking government officials. But when the U.S. Government legally and with warrants eavesdrops on Jane Harman, that is an outrageous invasion of privacy and a violent assault on her rights as an American citizen, and full-scale investigations must be commenced immediately to get to the bottom of this abuse of power. Behold Jane Harman's overnight transformation from Very Serious Champion of the Lawless Surveillance State to shrill civil liberties extremist."

Update II: Prosecutors Considering Dropping Espionage Charges Against Former AIPAC Lobbyists

Update: The new neocon think tank Foreign Policy Initiative's launch was attended by Rep Jane Harman who served on a panel on March 31, 2009 and said, "(W)hat Washington does need is thoughtful people coming together to think about the issues. And many people in this new organization are people I have known for many years and interact with regularly."

If Robert Ludlum were alive today, he could not make this story up.

A small religious, fundamentalist state—whose most prominent power centers view its people as being in most-favored spiritual league with a supreme metaphysical force, is the fifth largest nuclear power in the world, and wants to wage war with its neighbor that is run by a rival religious sect a few hundred miles to the east—regularly spies on the United States, its historical ally, and two of the religious state's major lobbyists subsequently get caught by the FBI after receiving classified U.S. documents from a former Pentagon employee and are indicted for espionage.

Now word comes that the current House Chair of the Homeland Security Committee’s Intelligence Subcommittee and former member of House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has been overheard in a National Security Agency's court-approved surveillance of a conversation in which a U.S. citizen (an accused spy) urges the congresswoman to intervene and halt the Justice Dept (DOJ)'s espionage prosecution of the two lobby spies for the small religious state in exchange for the powerful lobby working to get the congresswomen the chairmanship of the House Intelligence committee.

“This conversation doesn’t exist,” said the congresswoman not knowing that she was being bugged by the NSA.

A journalist covering the story writes:

That's not even the most significant part. Back in October, 2006, Time (Magazine) reported that the DOJ and FBI were investigating whether [the Congresswoman] and [the religious state’s main lobby] 'violated the law in a scheme to get [the Congresswoman] reappointed as the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee' and 'the probe also involves whether, in exchange for the help from [the religious state’s main lobby], [the Congresswoman] agreed to help try to persuade the [Republican] Administration to go lighter on the [the religious state’s main lobby] officials caught up in the ongoing investigation.' So that part has been known since 2006.

[The journalist breaking the NSA story] adds today that [the Congresswoman] was captured on an NSA wiretap conspiring with [the religious state’s] agent to apply pressure on DOJ officials to scale back the [prosecution against the religious state’s main lobby]. But the real crux of journalist's scoop is that [the] then-Attorney General ... intervened to kill the criminal investigation into [the Congresswoman] -- even though DOJ lawyers had concluded that she committed crimes -- because top [administration] officials wanted [the Congresswoman's] credibility to be preserved so that she could publicly defend the ... administration's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program.

The religious state's (as well as that of the US Republican administration's] allies include millions of Americans of another complex religious sect who believe that an unavoidable great battle of Armageddon is upon us and will begin in the region and the specific religious state for whom the spies are working, as well as a small but influential group of nihilistic war mongers who seek to wage the same war as the religious state.

Informed observers and activists working for peace note that should the nuclear-powered religious state strike its rival sect, the "reaction to the bombing of ...will be the blocking of [the] Strait [where massive oil-exporting occurs].

[The rival religious state] dominates the whole length of the Strait. They can seal it hermetically with their missiles and artillery, both land based and naval.

If that happens, the price of oil will skyrocket - far beyond the 200 dollars-per-barrel that pessimists dread now. That will cause a chain reaction: a world-wide depression, the collapse of whole industries and a catastrophic rise in unemployment in America, Europe and Japan.

The peace activist wrote that last July when economic times seemed better. The activist assumes rational economic state actors, and could have added that several rival religious sects' governments could fall (including another nuclear-powered state) and a more deadly serious worldwide depression would result if the US-allied religious state struck its rival sect. Today a depression would seem a near certainty.

For more information see:

- Jeff Stein in CQ.com.
- Gleen Greenwald
- Juan Cole
- Timeline of MegaScandal (Talking Points Memo)
- Lawmaker Is Said to Have Agreed to Aid Lobbyists (Lewis and Mazzetti, NYT)
- Exclusive: Feds Probe a Top Democrat's Relationship with AIPAC (Burger, Oct. 20, 2006,Time)