Saturday, 11 October 2014, FORT GEORGE G. MEADE, MARYLAND - The Ninth Amendment's quote of the night was made by former football team equipment manager General William C. Hayden retired USAF Air Force four-star General, Commander of the Air Intelligence Agency (AIA), Director of the Joint Command and Control Center, 15th Director of the National Security Agency (NSA) and Chief of the Central Security Service at Fort George G. Meade, Principal Deputy Director of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), 20th Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and who also served in a lengthy list of various other military/intelligence/informal legal positions. He is credited with authorizing wholesale wiretapping of U.S. citizens in directing the creation of an NSA "domestic call telephone database" despite his alleged earlier Constitutional concerns as well as the later "Trailblazer Project" criticized by many staffers of the NSA who previously had created the model for it but now criticized the project as not providing adequately for the protection of privacy of U.S. citizens and being a "waste of money" before they quit the NSA and Trailblazer then was shut down by the NSA Inspector General, the DOD Inspector General and Congress.
General Hayden during his later tenure also authorized violation of Legislative Branch congressional initiated statutes intended to protect U.S. citizens against unlawful searches and seizures and invasions of privacy including FISA requiring warrants for special secret foreign intelligence proceedings. General Hayden having majored in American History at Duquesne University also made informal legal determinations that the statutes including the FISA need not be followed by the Executive Branch under Article II of the Constitution and that in any case "probable cause" for warrants for searches and seizures was "not included in the Fourth Amendment" under his legal analysis as informed by not the U.S. Supreme Court nor any other official judicial body of the Judicial Branch but rather private White House counsel of the Executive Branch who refused to share its legal opinion on these controversial subjects but instead kept them locked in a safe in counsel's office down the street from the White House only allowing the opinion to be read once by the NSA Director with no copies made nor kept nor read again by anyone before returning them to the safe. The General's interpretation of the lack of Fourth Amendment inclusion of "probable cause" and related protections against illegal searches and seizures concerned Senator Dianne Feinstein of the Senate Intelligence Committee which she predicted as likely to lead to a "major confrontation".
The General also was a supporter of "enhanced interrogation techniques" and later lobbied to allow "drone" strikes "purely on the basis of ground vehicles, with no evidence of connection to terrorism". It is not known if this exhortation included for example domestic commuter traffic such as NSA employees driving home from work back to their families in the Washington, D.C.metropolitan area. Upon his retirement from the military his former national security, military and informal legal national service work earned him a pile of medals and decorations as well as lucrative jobs as a principal of the security consultancy Cherthoff (rhymes with . . . . ) Group, election to the Board of Directors of Motorola Solutions and service as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Mason University School of Public Policy. General Michael Hayden also had a big highway stretch in Pittsburgh named after him. Interested readers who wish to learn more of the General's career which may have been omitted here as well as his other interests, family members and a picture of his decorations and him perhaps from a while ago may wish to consult Wikepedia by entering Michael Hayden (general) in its search box feature in the right sidebar or following the link below the posts on this page.
General Michael Hayden was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania ironically the same state in which the Founding Fathers drafted the United States Constitution noted especially for its creation of a federal government of three distinct branches of government intended to safeguard the People from federal government abuses through a system of "checks and balances" among the three branches and including the Bill of Rights largely based on the principle of "due process of law" which was ratified by the original thirteen colonies of what was to become the United States of America two and a quarter centuries ago.
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