BE-ish:how could we have known?

[Michael Alan]

"Do you hold yourself then for some god in the manger?...by sloughing off
my hope and tremors while we all swin together in the pool of Sodom?"

Guilt indeed.

"He was always...in his mind a petty, timorous, and stupid deed, (for
actually, who knows, the later antlers might have been sent right then,
with green lamps greening green growths before the hotel where the
Vinelanders stayed...)"

None.

"One week they encounter a strange tribal sect..."

Moral, not guilty.  More observational than devotional.

On Tuesday, August 12, 2014, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Return with me to the innocent days before Snowden, servers and
> smartphones. Once upon a time there was this pushy, wisecracking Jewish
> broad from the Upper West Side, who was poking into intelligence agency
> hijinx:
>
> "[During the 1975 Church and Pike committee investigations] Over on the
> House side of the Capitol, feisty Bella Abzug of New York, eyeing a run
> against Senator James Buckley in 1976, publicized two government
> surveillance projects, code-named “SHAMROCK” and “MINARET,” run by a
> government bureau that was so secret most Americans didn’t even know it
> existed. “With a reputed budget of some $1.2 billion and a manpower roster
> far greater than the CIA,” the Associated Press explained, the National
> Security Agency had been “established in 1952 with a charter that is still
> classified as top secret.” (Its initials, the joke went, stood for “No Such
> Agency.”) It had also, Abzug revealed, been monitoring both the phone calls
> and the telegrams of American citizens for decades. President Ford had
> persuaded Church not to hold hearings on the matter. Abzug proceeded on her
> own. At first, when she subpoenaed the private-sector executives
> responsible for going along with the programs, the White House tried to
> prevent their testimony by claiming that each participating private company
> was “an agent of the United States.” When they did appear, they admitted
> their companies had voluntarily been turning over records and cables to the
> government at the end of every single day for more than forty years. The
> NSA said the programs had been discontinued. Abzug claimed they still
> survived, but under different names. At that, Church changed his mind: the
> contempt for the law here was so flagrant, he decided, he would initiate
> NSA hearings, too.
>
> Conservative members of his committee issued defiant shrieks: “People’s
> right to know should be subordinated to the people’s right to be secure,”
> said Senator John Tower. It would “adversely affect our
> intelligence-gathering capability,” said Barry Goldwater. Church replied
> that this didn’t matter if the government was breaking the law. He called
> the NSA’s director to testify before Congress for the first time in
> history. Appearing in uniform, Lieutenant General Lew Allen Jr. obediently
> disclosed that his agency’s spying on Americans was far vaster than what
> had even been revealed to the Rockefeller Commission. He admitted that it
> was, technically, illegal, and had been carried out without specific
> approval from any president. But he declined to explain how it worked. He
> added that thanks to such surveillance, 'We are aware that a major
> terrorist attack in the United States was prevented...'”
>
> Rick Perlstein, _The Invisible Bridge_
>
> If you think the lessons learned this time around will stick any more than
> those of 1975, I have a first edition of Pynchon's Civil War novel to sell
> you.
>
>
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