On November 4, 1979 the American embassy was taken over by students in Tehran and thus began a long hostage crisis. The seeds of mistrust were sewn back in 1925 when the CIA via Kermit Roosevelt started a coup and replaced a 200 year old dynasty with a new shah. Fast forward a decade or so,and the Brits & Germany had that first shah replaced at the beginning of WWII with his more youthful and inexperienced son. The Allies needed a caretaker they could count on for the oil fields. After awhile, the new and latest puppet shah asked the US and Great Britain for Iran to have a better financial split and stake in the oil revenues since - gasp - the oil fields belonged to Iran. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company said an unequivocal no.

In 1951, Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq (from the 200 year old dynasty that had been displaced) became the figure many Iranians rallied around as he straight out nationalized the oil industry. Time Magazine recognized the in your face boldness to Allied hegemony and promptly named him Man of the Year. His UN speech was a barn burner. The Anglo-Iranian Company refused to lose another country's resource that made them vasts sums of money so President Eisenhower & Prime Minister Churchill authorized a plot to harass Mossadeq and support the youthful shah and dress it up as a rescue from Mossadeq's power. CIA's Kermit Roosevelt was the go-between. The agreement would be to protect the oil but make it seems as if the shah was in control, but everybody knew who were the puppet masters. Over time the shah became ruthless and seen as a tool of America.

By the end of WWII, according to James Bamford, NSA expert and author of Body of Secrets, the US had already broken all of the Iranian codes. Gary Powers even flew over Iran in U-2 flights on the way into Russia. The NSA had a listening post in Northern Iran in the 50's and 60's but it was managed by the CIA. During the 1980 hostage rescue attempt, the NSA was shut down to assist because of the bureaucratic warfare between the CIA & NSA typified by Admiral Turner of the CIA and Admiral Bobby Ray Inman of the NSA. In 1985, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, went to the NSA as a member of the National Security Council (NSC) staff to procure special laptops that had the best encryption systems so he and his "posse" could communicate their plans with one another. He got the laptops and we know what happened, Iran-Contra. Signals intelligence collected during this time was in some measure given to Iraq during their war with Iran. Then Saddam invaded Kuwait.

At the start of the hostilities for the First Gulf War Bamford uses the following 1998 quote of Gerecht from the CIA on page 474, "Not a single Iran desk chief during the eight years that I worked on Iran could speak or read Persian. Not a single Near East Division chief knew Arabic, Persian or Turkish..." It should seem that the lessons of 1979 were internalized, but alas they were not. The first take over of the US embassy in Iran was February 14,1979. Ayatollah Khomeini returns to Iran from an exile in Najaf February 1, 1979.

Mark Bowden writes beautifully of what transpired in the takeover of the US embassy on November 4, 1979. The very pregnant pause between February and November of 1979 was not used as productively as it might in light of the situation. Bowden's Guests of the Ayatollah: The First Battle in America's War with Militant Islam is crafted as a deeply personal non-fiction story with amazing detail and insights. The embassy has both state department and CIA personnel. The State Department group were the group with the most fluent speakers and contacts throughout the country. The CIA group had the longest serving person with 4 months in the country. The CIA mission was to get the listening site back up to monitor Soviet missile activity. They had no agents or insights into the student movement or activities because there were simply no agents. President Carter asked his team early after the first embassy incident what would happen if they did it again. No one believed it would possibly happen again. They couldn't imagine it. President Carter was also told that allowing the shah into the United States for medical reasons would not be a case celebre for the Iranian student movement which had a vast hatred of the CIA.

What makes America so anxious to repeat modus operandi that clearly didn't work on earlier efforts? Iran seems to hold a hypnotic affect and the powers that be in charge of policy seem not to be well read. The policy wonks seem to have lots of ideas but knowledge of the practical is deemed impractical at critical times, especially with Iran. The skies are filled with satellites and the NSA is on the job in full SIGINT collection mode, but that does not replace whether there is a network of humans (HUMINT) willing to pass along critical information to America. After all, America has done things based on bad intel to incredible reverberating effects in the past.

Tomorrow on Sunday June 4, Mark Bowden will be Live on C-SPAN speaking about the hostage crisis of 1979. It would do us well to listen to the past to inform the future.

http://www.booktv.org/indepth/

is not known or even guessed at by most Americans. The NSA is an abstract construct that does not fit into the conceptual framework of the ordinary lives of Americans trying to live or get their share of the American Dream. The current lying leader of the American national security pipedream states humbly that it is for our protection from the vicissitudes of the world and the NSA assets and resources are securing us from more harm. That is much easier to swallow than the truth, especially since it can be stated in one easy McSoundbite. The NSA inhabits the dark recesses of the planet AND space far away from the latest conventional wisdom or those without an unfettered imagination.

The premise of the NSA takes a scope of imagination that is exceedingly rare. Regular folks use the constructs of their normal everyday lives to try and conceptualize. The current Bush regime relies on that type of limited thinking to the world's detriment. Condi said "mushroom clouds" -we couldn't imagine the planes..., Powell said "UN, Iraq has WMD's" - holds up vial, Bush and Cheney tied their war agenda to 9/11, all of which are visual constructs that the average American can relate to and not have to stretch or do hard work to imagine. The NSA is exponenetially more powerful than your worst imagination and fears, ever. Now, it is without oversight because Bush, "The Decider", has decreed he's personally watching the watchers.

The NSA is oft written about, but James Bamford remains without peer in trying to understand its scope. He was summarily sued by the NSA when The Puzzle Palace debuted in the early 80's because it contained classified material about them. Today, it is required reading for NSA new hires. The Body of Secretsfrom May 2001, draws back the curtain a very tiny bit more with the assistance of Lieutenant General Michael V. Hayden who is the first to be acknowled by Bamford. General Hayden, NSA Director 1999 - 2005, received his fourth star while working at the NSA. It hasn't dawned on most people that the NSA, the most powerful SPY AGENCY of them all, has consistently been under the direction of military officers. The NSA began as the Armed Forces Security Agency in 1949 and became the the NSA in 1952. Mainly, the Director of the NSA has been an Admiral of the US Navy or a General of the US Air Force. Sea and sky are vital to the NSA.

In any enterprise who is hired matters to the long term success of the operation. Take an organization with unlimited funds, the best technology and offer the very best and brightest a chance to work on their pet projects with the only catch being it has to remain a secret you take to your grave and don't share with your family, ever. Allow them their vivid imaginations, fully armed and educated IQ's and set before them the challeneges of cryptology, linguistics, technology, science, math, and counterintelligence so that you pit the very best against the very best. The secrecy is beyond paranoid at the NSA. They have their own private freeway offramp and once leased an entire building in Maryland so no one could accidentally take pictures. Welcome to the NSA, you are amongst tens of thousands employees the world over.

If you have heard of an NSA program chances are its now obsolete and several generations past its original conception. Think about how fast innovation in technology moves from a brick-like cell phone to one that takes pictures or video today and fits in a shirt pocket. Echelon allowed America and some pals (UK, Canada, Austrailia, New Zealand)to intercept phone calls and email and share it with each other. Echelon tied to a "dictionary" program that allows the UKUSA pals to almost instantaneously sort and categorize phones and email with key words or numbers determined to be of interest. That was the brick cell phone version of Echelon from many years ago.

The book Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping by Patrick Radden Keefe takes you through the people who are doing the listening and how many NSA installations are within the US and globally. He writes of Echelon's offspring, Echelon II & Carnivore and traces the perilous journey of several people from the NSA stationed in the US and globally. General Hayden appears in this book as well. But in his last paragraphs he writes this; "In December 2003, the NSA won the authority to automatically turn down requests by citizens, pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act, for records on the Agency. The agency argued that this was a "'labor saver'", because agency officials were wasting too much time processing requests about the NSA's operations, only to reject them anyway."

The techonology of the NSA defies imagination. An intelligent computer that can process 64,000,000,000 individual instructions per second is par for the course. The in-house NSA innovations are for the use of communication and cryptography for the military and certain elected officals. They leave the guns and daggers to the CIA while they just exist to collect as much data as possible and turn those bright folks loose on what to do with it all for either a miltary reason or a high level political request. Now back to the Uniform Military Code of Justice and lawful orders. If you receive an order and it is deemed lawful, then you are obliged to follow it. Where do you go when Congress has abdicated its oversight duties, you work for the Commander in Chief and you are bound by the UMCJ, just who do you take issues up with? Who determines when the line has been crossed from security into civil liberties? There is no one watching the watchers, now let your imagination soar.

national security apparatus report directly to the president of the United States. The group that was created is called the National Security Council or the NSC in Washington-ese. That group under law can be configured as the president chooses. The NSC has a group of people called principals. They are the President, the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense. This same Act created the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was amended two years later.

The NSC can exist of many groups or undersecretaries and other cabinet members. The NSC has staff(huge budget issue) appointed by the president. The National Security Advisor (NSA) is appointed by the president to run the staff and the principals meetings. The NSA's assistant works to head up the undersecretary and national security portfolios assigned to the staff. The NSC has ABSOLUTELY NO OVERSIGHT BY CONGRESS as mandated by the 1947 Act.

Each president can remake the NSC ,once elected, in their own image with no fear of Congress. The president may choose who serves on which committees of the NSC and who receives which classified materials. Each president from 1947 has remade the NSC and the chief of staff of the president is sometimes also appointed onto the NSC.

To move from concept to real world, when you look at presidential power and its use, many of the dumbest mistakes from 1947 forward can be laid at the NSC's doorstep. Because it is insular there are many people who play a part in both Democratic or Republican presidencies. The club is small and has gotten into great historical debacles like: Iran Contra, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, and the most current WHIG, White House Iraq Group to put together Iraq response and crush opposition (Plame/Wilson), appointed by the president with no legal reason to share anything the group does with Congress.

To read more, the first book about the NSC is Running The World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power, by David Rothkopf. He is the first to examine in a scholastic fashion the effects of the NSC on American foreign and national security policy. It is actually quite an excellent read and speaks to the clubby atmosphere and its relationships at the NSC.

IWR aye voters knew exactly what they were voting for and to claim to be misled is to be ironically enshrined in the "too stupid to be president" club. They failed America on conceptual and practical levels by hitching their wagons to W's tail pipe. All they got was the mind-numbing CO2 exhaust and they breathed it in liberally. To this day some of the presidential wannabes, won't admit how wrong they are. Those that don't have the necessary intestinal fortitude to admit it, don't deserve the votes of patriotic Americans who believe in Freedom, Justice and Liberty for All.

Those morally culpable for their IWR Aye votes, know intrinsically it was abjectly wrong. To defend it is lunacy because it is defending the actions of weak people making political calculations and not doing what was right on behalf of their constitutionally sworn oaths. Those Aye IWR voters should be speaking to We The People and shouting from the rooftops and mountaintops that Bush's outrageous and felonious lies have compromised America. They are OBLIGATED to consistently and continuously call for investigation and oversight into the conduct of the administration.

To state that IWR Aye voters were misled is being mealy mouthed and dishonoring again every single person who has been hurt by this War. They knew bush was declaring war - and when he went why was not one of them shouting that this was a misuse of the authorization and wholly unsanctioned by the Congress. They didn't because those IWR Aye voters are complicit in the death and destruction of the US Constitutional way of life. The IWR aye voters wanted to be president or support a future president, more than they wanted to do the right thing and be amongst the humble and noble in the pantheon of historical great leaders.

Go George Go - that is the hallmark of a leader - speaking up when it is unpopular and standing strongly in the in the face of overwhelming crticism. That's classy Courage!