Glenn Greenwald Slams NSA Backer Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger Over ABC Interview, Defense Industry Ties

Watch the full interview with Glenn Greenwald on Democracy Now! at On Sunday, Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald appeared on ABC's "This Week" to discuss his latest article, "Members of Congress denied access to basic information about NSA." After speaking with him, the host, Martha Raddatz, asked House Intelligence Committee member Democratic Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger to respond to his report. Democracy Now! gets reaction from Greenwald to the claims made by Ruppersberger.

GLENN GREENWALD: I hope Dutch Ruppersberger takes a much more prominent role in the political debate, because he's basically the embodiment of the rotted soul that has become the Democratic Party. Not only does his district encompass Fort Meade, which is the headquarters of the NSA, which explains in part why he is this stalwart, steadfast NSA loyalist, but he is almost drowning in cash from the defense and intelligence industries. He's the second leading recipient in the entire United States House of Representatives of money from those industries. And he then gets placed on the very committee that the Church Committee created in the mid-1970s to exercise oversight over the agency and the community that basically ensures that his coffers are stuffed full of cash. So of course he becomes the leading spokesperson for that agency and then goes around defending it and saying they've done nothing wrong and they're vital and indispensable to our national security. That's the leading Democrat on that committee.

But the thing that he was asked about, in terms of members of Congress being blocked from information, basic information, isn't my claim. Members of Congress came to me with his grievance and asked me to write about it. And they gave me correspondence between themselves and the Intelligence Committee. And what they were asking for was not very sensitive information; they were asking for the most basic things, things they read about in media accounts, such as the ruling by the FISA court in 2011 that much of what the NSA has been doing, spying on Americans domestically, is a violation of the Constitution and the law. There really is, Amy, an 85-page, 86-page ruling issued by the FISA court that says the government has been systematically breaking the law and violating the Fourth Amendment in how it spies on us. And not only can we not see that ruling, because it remains a secret at the insistence of the Obama administration, even our elected representatives in Congress, who we're told are exercising robust oversight, are blocked from seeing it. And that's the correspondence that we published that was given to me by various House members. So, yeah, they do get meetings with General Alexander where they get to raise their hand and ask questions, and General Alexander says, "We're violating — we're not violating the law, and we are strictly adhering to what our guidelines are." He can say whatever he wants. They want to get the actual documents. That's how you exercise oversight. And they're being denied it, about the most basic information about both the NSA and the FISA court.

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