''Is it just me, or is secret blanket surveillance obscenely outrageous?''

[Octafish]

33. Outgoing FBI director uses fear-mongering to defend spying programs

By Thomas Gaist
World Socialist Web Site, wsws.org 23 August 2013

FBI Director Robert Mueller alleged that new terrorism threats were emerging in Tunisia, Libya, Mali, Algeria, Syria, and Egypt, as well as in the United States during an interview with cable channel CNN on Thursday. The purpose of Mueller’s statement is to stoke fear and apprehension in the American population to justify the police state surveillance programs set up by the government.

“You have al Qaeda growing in countries like Somalia, but most particularly in Yemen. And there’s still substantial threat out of Yemen,” said Mueller. “And now you have the countries in the Arab Spring: Tunisia, Libya, Syria, Mali; Egypt most recently, where they’re breeding grounds for radical extremists … you have, within the United States, the growth of homegrown, radicalized extremists who are radicalized on the Internet and then get their instructions for developing explosives on the Internet, as well.”

Mueller provided no facts to support his claims. Of course, even accepting this were all true, no American media interviewer would ask why so many in the Middle East hated and wanted to attack the US and whether or not that anything to do with predatory American military and foreign policy in the region.

Overall, the FBI director’s comments to CNN were a series of lies and distortions. For example, Mueller asserted that the NSA surveillance programs developed since the 2001 attacks could have prevented the 9/11 events by allowing the government to identify the individual plotters in advance: “I think there’s a good chance we would have prevented at least a part of 9/11. In other words, there were four planes. There were almost 20—19 persons involved. I think we would have had a much better chance of identifying those individuals who were contemplating that attack.”

The claim that NSA spying might have prevented 9/11, which is not original to Mueller, is contradicted by an entire body of evidence. Many, if not all, of the perpetrators were well known to the FBI and the CIA, who monitored and tracked the plotters for many months. The CIA and FBI ignored repeated warnings from local agents and agents abroad of the threat of an impending attack, including the use of aircraft against buildings. The preponderance of the evidence strongly suggests, in fact, that the Bush administration permitted some sort of terrorist attack to proceed, in order to provide it the pretext for the launching of wars in the Middle East and the passage of anti-democratic, repressive legislation.

CONTINUED...

http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/08/24/muel-a23.html

As for NSA spying possibly stopping 9-11, Mueller must've missed last year's release which indicated NSA did warn Smirko to no avail:

New NSA docs contradict Bush Administration 9-11 claims