The Catskill Chronicle

By Mort Malkin

A report has emerged, though unconfirmed as yet, that the NSA and Britain’s GCHQ have been snooping into the Vatican’s phone calls and emails. The Gadfly Revelry & Research (GRR) team is now double checking the sources.

Edward Snowden, has followed in the tradition of whistle-blowers Daniel Ellsberg, Coleen Rowley, Thomas Drake, and Bradley Manning, much to the dismay of  the White House and many in Congress. He has backed up his charges that the NSA has monitored the phone calls and emails of every American by releasing thousands of documents, and now he has revealed that the Anglo-American Spying Partners have tapped the communications of: Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, and France’s President Francois Hollande, among others. The precedent was set back in 2004 when the Bush-Cheney administration secretly recorded the phone calls of Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the whole United Nations.

So, why not the Vatican? A few conservative Bishops, who say that Pope Francis is under suspicion for refusing to condemn folks with queer sexual orientations, may have suggested that the NSA check what the Pope is saying in private. But, the NSA is after much bigger game. They know the Pope must have a direct line to the Almighty, and to tap into his communications with the Lord might reveal actionable intelligence of great import re: the entire Planet, and even beyond the Solar System. What a coup that would be. Actually, the spying on the Vatican predates Pope Francis. Pope Benedict was the first target. It was felt at the time that a conservative Pope would cooperate with an agency like the NSA. Benedict naively thought that NSA stood for National Security Agency, while the spooks therein were in the employ of a de facto National Surveillance Agency. But, as it turned out, Benedict was too tight lipped for them to pick up anything intelligible.

Now, however, they had a Pope who was willing to opine on a number of previously forbidden subjects, and today they have advanced, high resolution zoom lenses with X-Ray capability mounted on Pentagonesian satellites. They could penetrate the walls of the Pope’s bedroom. Was he asking God to lower His Terrible Swift Sword upon the terrorists in Yemen or Somalia? Or maybe God was telling the Pope that Hurricane Sandy in the US and Typhoon Haiyan (Yolanda, if you prefer) in the Philippines are merely additions to the latest plagues of heat waves, droughts, forest fires, and floods that are meant to be a warning for the whole human race to stop polluting the atmosphere with CO2 and methane, the principal greenhouses gases.

Well, the raw data from the surveillance of Pope Francis have now gone through  statistical analysis and we have astounding results. Pope Francis and the Lord have been talking about the poor and the hungry the world over, and how to change the consciences of the CEOs of the Wall Street investment banks and hedge fund managers to where they will accept a small transaction fee on every purchase & sale in the $4 quadrillion derivative market, to be earmarked for soup kitchens and homeless shelters in the US, fair trade coffee and chocolate in Africa, paying off the debt that farmers in India owe Monsanto, micro-finance loans for entrepreneurs in third world countries, and in general lessening the disparity between the have-nots and have-lots.

Now, if the NSA will only declassify the secret report.