LiberalPro

TYT-Prism is Just the Beginning

2013-06-18T16:39:00.002-05:00

50% of Americans are Cowards

2013-06-18T16:37:00.001-05:00

The Fascist State of America

2013-06-18T00:51:00.001-05:00

By Dr. Glen Barry

16 June, 2013
Ecoearth.info

“We the People" are not enemies of the state and deserve and need to know what our government is doing. The truth matters – particularly when human freedom is at stake, and our shared environment is collapsing, with both at risk of being lost forever. America’s civil liberties have been trampled on, and sadly, most don’t seem to care, failing to understand the full implications of big brother’s ascendancy. Defending freedom from government tyranny is not a left-or-right, conservative-or-liberal matter; it is the difference between right and wrong, truth and lies, liberty and enslavement, life and death.

Edward Snowden has revealed the extent to which America has become a total surveillance police state – with wholesale spying upon its own citizens – adding to revelations since 9/11 of the murder of U.S. citizens as well as torture, indefinite detention, and pursuit of drone perma-war, terrorizing entire nations. All of these acts are occurring upon the basis of suspicion alone – without due legal process, violating international law and the U.S. Constitution – in an unprecedented expansion of government powers in the name of a war on terror, when in fact they are being used to control dissent and access oil.

President Barack Obama is a profound epic failure, in many ways worse than Über-fascist Bush, just a new black face on the American oil oligarchy’s long history of tyranny and warmongering. What a feeble, sellout, murdering, cynical disappointment Barack Obama has turned out to be. After killing a million Arabs and Muslims, Bush policies continued with vigor under Obama, has the U.S. avenged 9/11 yet? Or does America need to spy, torture, falsely imprison, and wage perma-war for years longer? Perhaps forever?

America is poised upon the precipice of becoming a totalitarian police state overseeing final global environmental collapse. As America is at risk of becoming a third-rate police state, all lovers of liberty – from the Tea Party to progressives – must come together to resist oppression, remain free, embrace justice and equity for all, and sustain our shared global environment. One can feel a libertarian–progressive alliance building to stop big nanny government from enslaving us while destroying our environment. A commitment to Green Liberty is the human family’s only path to sustained well-being.

What has America become? It is well past time for the U.S. to reexamine its incautious, militaristic and totalitarian response to 9/11 and re-embrace liberty, justice, and freedom. The U.S. corporate-owned government threatens global liberty and human rights, making global equity, justice, and sustainability impossible. Big nanny government is in bed with the oil oligarchy and corporate elite to threaten American and global liberty and ecosystems.

What other unethical, illegal, violent and unauthorized acts have the U.S. government carried out in secret to keep us "safe"? 9/11 trauma does NOT justify spying, torture, murder, and perma-war – along with corporate rule, the textbook definition of fascism. Real Americans who honor the Constitution and American values understand that withstanding occasional acts of random terror and minimizing their frequency is the price of freedom.

America folded like a wet towel after the 9/11 crimes – lashing out militaristically and murdering hundreds of thousands of innocents – as it needlessly gave up Yankee liberties acquired over hundreds of years in what had been the biggest expansion of personal and political freedoms ever. Instead, the United States should be engaging with the world to address justified grievances, weaning itself from its oil addiction, demobilizing the military and police state, and strengthening international criminal courts to charge and imprison terrorists.

Do we want the executive branch of government to know every detail of each citizen’s life? Never has a government been granted powers that don’t end up being expanded and misused. The slippery slope of good intentions guarantees that spying as a shortcut for security means dissidents, oddballs, artists, and ordinary citizens who resist the political and economic elite will be targeted next. The military-industrial-Congressional complex has morphed to include the National Security Agency and Homeland Security’s fascist state of perma-war and spying.

What Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama have done to roll back civil liberties may not at first sight seem so terrible, but what will subsequent Presidents do with these powers to spy, torture, imprison, and murder at will? What further will be lost the next time criminal terrorists strike? President Barack Obama took our hunger for hope and change and gave us a totalitarian police state in what can only be characterized as an epic failure, a grand bait and switch, which is the most recent fascist coup waged upon American liberty.

A truly great nation refuses to falsely trade liberty for security, which assures neither and only enslaves people in pervasive terror.

With torture, spying, murder, and perma-war, all three branches of the U.S. government – the President, Congress, and courts – have abused the Constitution and lost all legitimacy. From this point forward, it is only a hop, skip, and jump to an iron-fisted authoritarian dictatorship. The entire American citizenry – and soon global humanity – is now assumed to be guilty and data-mined for evidence, on the presumption that everyone is a terrorist until proven innocent.

Something has gone terribly wrong with the American project – the greatest expansion of liberty and well-being in history (although it always existed upon a shaky economic and ecological basis). Meaningless American political rhetoric’s reference to liberty, exceptionalism, and equality are at odds with the reality of spying and murdering in the name of security.

Edward Snowden is an American patriot who has further revealed the extent to which America has become a fascist police state that systematically violates civil liberties to keep us "safe." His observation that “the government has granted itself power it is not entitled [to]” is spot-on. Whistleblowers against militarism, civil liberty abuses, and ecocide are global heroes – and acting upon their courageous disclosures provides humanity’s last chance for a just, free, equitable and sustainable future.

A technological security state has been established that fundamentally threatens civil liberties and environmental sustainability. The protest and regime change necessary to address fossil fuel addiction and abrupt climate change – and other social changes necessary to bring about a just, equitable, sustainable, and universally free world – are being violently suppressed by the police state, as social change of any sort that threatens the oppressive and unjust status quo is labeled terrorism.

Who protects us from the government? America has become a two-party fascist state. President Obama's message of progressive hope has collapsed into a totalitarian nightmare – as the government he leads spies on and murders its own citizens; while torturing, falsely imprisoning, and waging drone based perma-war terrorizing innocents. Critics are harassed by the IRS, as the media are bullied into silence. This failed Presidency has further laid the groundwork for final collapse of U.S. liberty under the guise of security, while ignoring immediate threats posed by abrupt climate change and ecosystem collapse.

President Barack Obama's drone perma-war is terrorism, traumatizing innocent populations, murdering thousands to keep the oil flowing and America overconsuming its unfair share of global resources. The absence of major terrorist attacks since 9/11 is due more to the small number and weakness of terrorist wackos than the incautious American military and antidemocratic response.

Now that President Obama has set the precedent of murdering U.S. citizens without trial, what can we expect from successors? Given the steady erosion of civil liberties by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, how long until drones circle U.S. cities murdering citizens on suspicion alone? It's not as unlikely as it once seemed.

Social media and the Internet in general fundamentally threaten the system of coercion and misinformation upon which the ruling oligarchy depend to stifle dissent so that they may continue to plunder the planet. That is why President Obama and many other dictators seek to monitor and control it.

Until now the Chinese government has set the standard for repressive, tyrannical, and ecocidal regimes. Now it is clear that when President Obama and Chinese President Xi next meet, they can compare and share citizen spying and repression tools, ways to avoid cutting emissions to urgently limit abrupt climate change, and how best to control and murder opponents of their police states.

Collapsing ecosystems and the inability of the perpetual growth paradigm to meet ever-growing population’s consumption demands are leading to fascism to prop up the system. A surveillance-free Internet is key to humanity's chance to remain free, achieve equity and justice, and avoid global ecosystem collapse. In an age of democratic police states – where speaking freely and calling for regime change are thought crimes – it is hard to imagine a way to full spectrum sustainability sufficient to avoid ecosystem collapse.

There is NEVER any justification in a democratic society to spy on, torture, murder, or wage perma-war upon citizens and sovereign nations to keep us “safe.” Free speech and privacy are human rights that must be made universal and defended at all cost. Without the liberty required for the people to change governments as necessary, there is no path to avoid global ecosystem collapse.

The United States must repeal the Patriot Act and other post-9/11 rollbacks of civil liberties, dismantle the nascent police state including the NSA, stop spying upon and murdering citizens, end the state of perma-war terrorizing the world while killing innocents, and address abrupt climate change and ecosystem collapse, the real and immediate security threat to us all. Otherwise there is going to be a revolution.

America and the world must never give up its hard-fought freedom because of terrorists, inside or outside of government. It is time for the U.S. and the world to recommit to justice, liberty, peace, equity, ecological sustainability, and the rule of law.

Dr. Glen Barry is the President and Founder of Ecological Internet (EI). He is recognized internationally by the environmental movement as a leading global visionary, ecological policy critic and public intellectual committed to communicating the severity of global ecological crises - and related justice, rights and equity issues - while actively organizing with others sufficient solutions

Edward Snowden Q and A: NSA Whistleblower Answers Your Questions

2013-06-17T15:32:00.000-05:00

EDUCATE! NSA SPYING, PRIVACY, SURVEILLANCE
By Glenn Greenwald, www.guardian.co.uk
June 17th, 2013

The whistleblower behind the biggest intelligence leak in NSA history answered questions about the NSA surveillance revelations.

Some highlights:

- The US Government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an unforgivable crime. That’s not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it.

- The public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the “consent of the governed” is meaningless.

- The US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

- More detail on how direct NSA’s accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want.

- The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as “incidental” collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications.

- [Regarding Google and Facebook,] Their denials went through several revisions as it become more and more clear they were misleading and included identical, specific language across companies. As a result of these disclosures and the clout of these companies, we’re finally beginning to see more transparency and better details about these programs for the first time since their inception.

- Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are.

- Binney, Drake, Kiriakou, and Manning are all examples of how overly-harsh responses to public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers. If the Obama administration responds with an even harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they’ll soon find themselves facing an equally harsh public response.

Edward Snowden Q&A

It is the interview the world’s media organisations have been chasing for more than a week, but instead Edward Snowden is giving Guardian readers the exclusive.

The 29-year-old former NSA contractor and source of the Guardian’s NSA files coverage will – with the help of Glenn Greenwald – take your questions today on why he revealed the NSA’s top-secret surveillance of US citizens, the international storm that has ensued, and the uncertain future he now faces. Ask him anything.

Snowden, who has fled the US, told the Guardian he “does not expect to see home again”, but where he’ll end up has yet to be determined.

He will be online today from 11am ET/4pm BST today. An important caveat: the live chat is subject to Snowden’s security concerns and also his access to a secure internet connection. It is possible that he will appear and disappear intermittently, so if it takes him a while to get through the questions, please be patient.

To participate, post your question below and recommend your favorites. As he makes his way through the thread, we’ll embed his replies as posts in the live blog. You can also follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #AskSnowden.

We expect the site to experience high demand so we’ll re-publish the Q&A in full after the live chat has finished.

11.07am ET

Question:

Guardian staff

GlennGreenwald

17 June 2013 2:11pm

Let’s begin with these:

1) Why did you choose Hong Kong to go to and then tell them about US hacking on their research facilities and universities?

2) How many sets of the documents you disclosed did you make, and how many different people have them? If anything happens to you, do they still exist?

Answer:

1) First, the US Government, just as they did with other whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an unforgivable crime. That’s not justice, and it would be foolish to volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than in it.
Second, let’s be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems crash. Congress hasn’t declared war on the countries – the majority of them are our allies – but without asking for public permission, NSA is running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent people. And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a country we’re not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a government does in its name, or the “consent of the governed” is meaningless.
2) All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.

11.13am ET

Question:

Guardian staff

ewenmacaskill

17 June 2013 3:07pm

I should have asked you this when I saw you but never got round to it……..Why did you just not fly direct to Iceland if that is your preferred country for asylum?

Answer:

Leaving the US was an incredible risk, as NSA employees must declare their foreign travel 30 days in advance and are monitored. There was a distinct possibility I would be interdicted en route, so I had to travel with no advance booking to a country with the cultural and legal framework to allow me to work without being immediately detained. Hong Kong provided that. Iceland could be pushed harder, quicker, before the public could have a chance to make their feelings known, and I would not put that past the current US administration.

11.17am ET

Question:

ActivistGal

17 June 2013 2:15pm

You have said HERE that you admire both Ellsberg and Manning, but have argued that there is one important distinction between yourself and the army private…

“I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”

Are you suggesting that Manning indiscriminately dumped secrets into the hands of Wikileaks and that he intended to harm people?

Answer:

No, I’m not. Wikileaks is a legitimate journalistic outlet and they carefully redacted all of their releases in accordance with a judgment of public interest. The unredacted release of cables was due to the failure of a partner journalist to control a pass phrase. However, I understand that many media outlets used the argument that “documents were dumped” to smear Manning, and want to make it clear that it is not a valid assertion here.

11.20am ET

Question:

D. Aram Mushegian II

17 June 2013 2:16pm

Did you lie about your salary? What is the issue there? Why did you tell Glenn Greenwald that your salary was $200,000 a year, when it was only $122,000 (according to the firm that fired you.)

Answer:

I was debriefed by Glenn and his peers over a number of days, and not all of those conversations were recorded. The statement I made about earnings was that $200,000 was my “career high” salary. I had to take pay cuts in the course of pursuing specific work. Booz was not the most I’ve been paid.

11.23am ET

Question:

Gabrielaweb

17 June 2013 2:17pm

Why did you wait to release the documents if you said you wanted to tell the world about the NSA programs since before Obama became president?

Answer:

Obama’s campaign promises and election gave me faith that he would lead us toward fixing the problems he outlined in his quest for votes. Many Americans felt similarly. Unfortunately, shortly after assuming power, he closed the door on investigating systemic violations of law, deepened and expanded several abusive programs, and refused to spend the political capital to end the kind of human rights violations like we see in Guantanamo, where men still sit without charge.

11.27am ET

Question:

Anthony De Rosa

17 June 2013 2:18pm

1) Define in as much detail as you can what “direct access” means.

2) Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?

Answer:

1) More detail on how direct NSA’s accesses are is coming, but in general, the reality is this: if an NSA, FBI, CIA, DIA, etc analyst has access to query raw SIGINT databases, they can enter and get results for anything they want. Phone number, email, user id, cell phone handset id (IMEI), and so on – it’s all the same. The restrictions against this are policy based, not technically based, and can change at any time. Additionally, audits are cursory, incomplete, and easily fooled by fake justifications. For at least GCHQ, the number of audited queries is only 5% of those performed.

Updated at 11.41am ET

11.40am ET

Anthony De Rosa

17 June 2013 2:18pm

1) Define in as much detail as you can what “direct access” means.

2) Can analysts listen to content of domestic calls without a warrant?

2) NSA likes to use “domestic” as a weasel word here for a number of reasons. The reality is that due to the FISA Amendments Act and its section 702 authorities, Americans’ communications are collected and viewed on a daily basis on the certification of an analyst rather than a warrant. They excuse this as “incidental” collection, but at the end of the day, someone at NSA still has the content of your communications. Even in the event of “warranted” intercept, it’s important to understand the intelligence community doesn’t always deal with what you would consider a “real” warrant like a Police department would have to, the “warrant” is more of a templated form they fill out and send to a reliable judge with a rubber stamp.

Glenn Greenwald follow up: When you say “someone at NSA still has the content of your communications” – what do you mean? Do you mean they have a record of it, or the actual content?

Both. If I target for example an email address, for example under FAA 702, and that email address sent something to you, Joe America, the analyst gets it. All of it. IPs, raw data, content, headers, attachments, everything. And it gets saved for a very long time – and can be extended further with waivers rather than warrants.

11.41am ET

Question:

HaraldK

17 June 2013 2:45pm

What are your thoughts on Google’s and Facebook’s denials? Do you think that they’re honestly in the dark about PRISM, or do you think they’re compelled to lie?

Perhaps this is a better question to a lawyer like Greenwald, but: If you’re presented with a secret order that you’re forbidding to reveal the existence of, what will they actually do if you simply refuse to comply (without revealing the order)?

Answer:

Their denials went through several revisions as it become more and more clear they were misleading and included identical, specific language across companies. As a result of these disclosures and the clout of these companies, we’re finally beginning to see more transparency and better details about these programs for the first time since their inception.
They are legally compelled to comply and maintain their silence in regard to specifics of the program, but that does not comply them from ethical obligation. If for example Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple refused to provide this cooperation with the Intelligence Community, what do you think the government would do? Shut them down?

11.55am ET

Question:

MonaHol

17 June 2013 4:37pm

Ed Snowden, I thank you for your brave service to our country.

Some skepticism exists about certain of your claims, including this:

I, sitting at my desk, certainly had the authorities to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the President if I had a personal email.

Do you stand by that, and if so, could you elaborate?

Answer:

Yes, I stand by it. US Persons do enjoy limited policy protections (and again, it’s important to understand that policy protection is no protection – policy is a one-way ratchet that only loosens) and one very weak technical protection – a near-the-front-end filter at our ingestion points. The filter is constantly out of date, is set at what is euphemistically referred to as the “widest allowable aperture,” and can be stripped out at any time. Even with the filter, US comms get ingested, and even more so as soon as they leave the border. Your protected communications shouldn’t stop being protected communications just because of the IP they’re tagged with.
More fundamentally, the “US Persons” protection in general is a distraction from the power and danger of this system. Suspicionless surveillance does not become okay simply because it’s only victimizing 95% of the world instead of 100%. Our founders did not write that “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all US Persons are created equal.”

12.04pm ET

Question:

Guardian staff

Spencer Ackerman

17 June 2013 4:16pm

Edward, there is rampant speculation, outpacing facts, that you have or will provide classified US information to the Chinese or other governments in exchange for asylum. Have/will you?

Answer:

This is a predictable smear that I anticipated before going public, as the US media has a knee-jerk “RED CHINA!” reaction to anything involving HK or the PRC, and is intended to distract from the issue of US government misconduct. Ask yourself: if I were a Chinese spy, why wouldn’t I have flown directly into Beijing? I could be living in a palace petting a phoenix by now.

12.10pm ET

Question:

Kimberly Dozier @KimberlyDozier

US officials say terrorists already altering TTPs because of your leaks, & calling you traitor. Respond? http://www.guardiannews.com #AskSnowden

Answer:

US officials say this every time there’s a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM.
Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicionless surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to acheive that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.
Further, it’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

Updated at 12.11pm ET

12.12pm ET

Question:

Mathius1

17 June 2013 2:54pm

Is encrypting my email any good at defeating the NSA survelielance? Id my data protected by standard encryption?

Answer:

Encryption works. Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on. Unfortunately, endpoint security is so terrifically weak that NSA can frequently find ways around it.

12.24pm ET

Question:

Jacob Appelbaum @ioerror

Do you believe that the treatment of Binney, Drake and others influenced your path? Do you feel the “system works” so to speak? #AskSnowden

Answer:

Binney, Drake, Kiriakou, and Manning are all examples of how overly-harsh responses to public-interest whistle-blowing only escalate the scale, scope, and skill involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers. If the Obama administration responds with an even harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they’ll soon find themselves facing an equally harsh public response.
This disclosure provides Obama an opportunity to appeal for a return to sanity, constitutional policy, and the rule of law rather than men. He still has plenty of time to go down in history as the President who looked into the abyss and stepped back, rather than leaping forward into it. I would advise he personally call for a special committee to review these interception programs, repudiate the dangerous “State Secrets” privilege, and, upon preparing to leave office, begin a tradition for all Presidents forthwith to demonstrate their respect for the law by appointing a special investigator to review the policies of their years in office for any wrongdoing. There can be no faith in government if our highest offices are excused from scrutiny – they should be setting the example of transparency.

12.28pm ET

Question:

Ryan Latvaitis

17 June 2013 2:34pm

What would you say to others who are in a position to leak classified information that could improve public understanding of the intelligence apparatus of the USA and its effect on civil liberties?

What evidence do you have that refutes the assertion that the NSA is unable to listen to the content of telephone calls without an explicit and defined court order from FISC?

Answer:

This country is worth dying for.

12.34pm ET

Question:

AhBrightWings

17 June 2013 2:12pm

My question: given the enormity of what you are facing now in terms of repercussions, can you describe the exact moment when you knew you absolutely were going to do this, no matter the fallout, and what it now feels like to be living in a post-revelation world? Or was it a series of moments that culminated in action? I think it might help other people contemplating becoming whistleblowers if they knew what the ah-ha moment was like. Again, thanks for your courage and heroism.

Answer:

I imagine everyone’s experience is different, but for me, there was no single moment. It was seeing a continuing litany of lies from senior officials to Congress – and therefore the American people – and the realization that that Congress, specifically the Gang of Eight, wholly supported the lies that compelled me to act. Seeing someone in the position of James Clapper – the Director of National Intelligence – baldly lying to the public without repercussion is the evidence of a subverted democracy. The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.

12.37pm ET

Follow-up from the Guardian’s Spencer Ackerman:

Regarding whether you have secretly given classified information to the Chinese government, some are saying you didn’t answer clearly – can you give a flat no?

Answer:

No. I have had no contact with the Chinese government. Just like with the Guardian and the Washington Post, I only work with journalists.

12.41pm ET

Question:

So far are things going the way you thought they would regarding a public debate? – tikkamasala

Answer:

Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.

12.43pm ET

Final question from Glenn Greenwald:

Anything else you’d like to add?

Answer:

Thanks to everyone for their support, and remember that just because you are not the target of a surveillance program does not make it okay. The US Person / foreigner distinction is not a reasonable substitute for individualized suspicion, and is only applied to improve support for the program. This is the precise reason that NSA provides Congress with a special immunity to its surveillance.

Ron Paul on Obama's Syria WMD Claim

2013-06-17T15:20:00.002-05:00

NSA Copies All Internet Data, Creates Dossiers on Every User

2013-06-17T15:11:00.002-05:00

By J.P. Hicks
June 16, 2013 "Information Clearing House - The Associated Press dropped a bombshell report yesterday that claims the NSA's secret Internet spy program Prism is just a small part of a much more "expansive and intrusive" digital spying effort.

According to the AP, the NSA copies ALL INTERNET traffic in and out of the United States for analysis by hoovering all data that passes through fiber lines.

"Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light," AP reports.

Prism was originally thought to be a program to force Internet companies to hand over private user data to the government. But it turns out that Prism is actually a filtering tool to "make sense of the cacophony of the Internet's raw feed...Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information."

It then manages those strands of data by creating dossiers on every Internet user, providing the government with "names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes."

And, of course, all of this data is collected and kept on innocent people without a warrant or any probable cause.

This explosive report comes the same day that the NSA held a classified briefing for members of Congress where they admit to listening to phone calls within the United States without a warrant.

CNET reports:

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

If the NSA wants "to listen to the phone," an analyst's decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. "I was rather startled," said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.

Nadler told CNET that the "same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages."

In other words, the NSA claims the authority to listen to any call or read any email based on the whims of an analyst, not a court order based on probable cause.

This is precisely the power Edward Snowden, as an analyst working for the private NSA contract Booz Allen Hamilton, claimed to have in his interview with The Guardian.

All of these recent revelations seem to confirm the worst fears of civil liberties groups. The American government is indeed listening to our phone calls and reading our emails without a warrant and little to no oversight to how this information is accessed or used.

What's even worse, they're building dossiers on all Americans to be tapped whenever one of the hundreds of thousands of analysts decides to, and all of it occurs in secret.

This is perhaps the most egregious breach of the public's trust in the history of the United States. The government operates with complete secrecy while knowing all private information about its citizens.

Weren't we supposed to have a transparent government with individual privacy for citizens?

J.P. Hicks is an entrepreneur, info-activist, pro blogger, editor of BlogTips.com and author of Secrets to Making Money with a Free Blog. Follow @ Twitter, or like on Facebook.

Sources:

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/secret-prism-success-even-bigger-data-seizure

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57589495-38/nsa-admits-listening-to-u.s-phone-calls-without-warrants/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-video

This article was originally published at Blog Tips

Iran to Send 4,000 Troops to Aid President Assad Forces in Syria

2013-06-17T15:08:00.000-05:00

By Robert Fisk
June 16, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "The Independent" -- Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.

For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.

The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years. Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the Golan Heights against Israel.

In years to come, historians will ask how America – after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 – could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed’s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor – a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala – continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants”.

America’s alliance now includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile British-created monarchy in Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan – flooded, like so many neighbouring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees – may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian battle. Up to 3,000 American ‘advisers’ are now believed to be in Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria ‘no-fly zone’ – opposed by Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries – will turn a crisis into a ‘hot’ war. So much for America’s ‘friends’.

Its enemies include the Lebanese Hizballah, the Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus and, of course, Iran. And Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America ‘liberated’ from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has – against all US predictions – itself now largely fallen under Tehran’s influence and power. Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad’s forces.

Washington’s excuse for its new Middle East adventure – that it must arm Assad’s enemies because the Damascus regime has used sarin gas against them – convinces no-one in the Middle East. Final proof of the use of gas by either side in Syria remains almost as nebulous as President George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

For the real reason why America has thrown its military power behind Syria’s Sunni rebels is because those same rebels are now losing their war against Assad. The Damascus regime’s victory this month in the central Syrian town of Qusayr, at the cost of Hizballah lives as well as those of government forces, has thrown the Syrian revolution into turmoil, threatening to humiliate American and EU demands for Assad to abandon power. Arab dictators are supposed to be deposed – unless they are the friendly kings or emirs of the Gulf – not to be sustained. Yet Russia has given its total support to Assad, three times vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that might have allowed the West to intervene directly in the civil war.

In the Middle East, there is cynical disbelief at the American contention that it can distribute arms – almost certainly including anti-aircraft missiles – only to secular Sunni rebel forces in Syria represented by the so-called Free Syria Army. The more powerful al-Nusrah Front, allied to al-Qaeda, dominates the battlefield on the rebel side and has been blamed for atrocities including the execution of Syrian government prisoners of war and the murder of a 14-year old boy for blasphemy. They will be able to take new American weapons from their Free Syria Army comrades with little effort.

From now on, therefore, every suicide bombing in Damascus - every war crime committed by the rebels - will be regarded in the region as Washington’s responsibility. The very Sunni-Wahabi Islamists who killed thousands of Americans on 11th September, 2011 – who are America’s greatest enemies as well as Russia’s – are going to be proxy allies of the Obama administration. This terrible irony can only be exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adament refusal to tolerate any form of Sunni extremism. His experience in Chechenya, his anti-Muslim rhetoric – he has made obscene remarks about Muslim extremists in a press conference in Russian – and his belief that Russia’s old ally in Syria is facing the same threat as Moscow fought in Chechenya, plays a far greater part in his policy towards Bashar al-Assad than the continued existence of Russia’s naval port at the Syrian Mediterranean city of Tartous.

For the Russians, of course, the ‘Middle East’ is not in the ‘east’ at all, but to the south of Moscow; and statistics are all-important. The Chechen capital of Grozny is scarcely 500 miles from the Syrian frontier. Fifteen per cent of Russians are Muslim. Six of the Soviet Union’s communist republics had a Muslim majority, 90 per cent of whom were Sunni. And Sunnis around the world make up perhaps 85 per cent of all Muslims. For a Russia intent on repositioning itself across a land mass that includes most of the former Soviet Union, Sunni Islamists of the kind now fighting the Assad regime are its principal antagonists.

Iranian sources say they liaise constantly with Moscow, and that while Hizballah’s overall withdrawal from Syria is likely to be completed soon – with the maintenance of the militia’s ‘intelligence’ teams inside Syria – Iran’s support for Damascus will grow rather than wither. They point out that the Taliban recently sent a formal delegation for talks in Tehran and that America will need Iran’s help in withdrawing from Afghanistan. The US, the Iranians say, will not be able to take its armour and equipment out of the country during its continuing war against the Taliban without Iran’s active assistance. One of the sources claimed – not without some mirth -- that the French were forced to leave 50 tanks behind when they left because they did not have Tehran’s help.

It is a sign of the changing historical template in the Middle East that within the framework of old Cold War rivalries between Washington and Moscow, Israel’s security has taken second place to the conflict in Syria. Indeed, Israel’s policies in the region have been knocked askew by the Arab revolutions, leaving its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, hopelessly adrift amid the historic changes.

Only once over the past two years has Israel fully condemned atrocities committed by the Assad regime, and while it has given medical help to wounded rebels on the Israeli-Syrian border, it fears an Islamist caliphate in Damascus far more than a continuation of Assad’s rule. One former Israel intelligence commander recently described Assad as “Israel’s man in Damascus”. Only days before President Mubarak was overthrown, both Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called Washington to ask Obama to save the Egyptian dictator. In vain.

If the Arab world has itself been overwhelmed by the two years of revolutions, none will have suffered from the Syrian war in the long term more than the Palestinians. The land they wish to call their future state has been so populated with Jewish Israeli colonists that it can no longer be either secure or ‘viable’. ‘Peace’ envoy Tony Blair’s attempts to create such a state have been laughable. A future ‘Palestine’ would be a Sunni nation. But today, Washington scarcely mentions the Palestinians.

Another of the region’s supreme ironies is that Hamas, supposedly the ‘super-terrorists’ of Gaza, have abandoned Damascus and now support the Gulf Arabs’ desire to crush Assad. Syrian government forces claim that Hamas has even trained Syrian rebels in the manufacture and use of home-made rockets.

In Arab eyes, Israel’s 2006 war against the Shia Hizballah was an attempt to strike at the heart of Iran. The West’s support for Syrian rebels is a strategic attempt to crush Iran. But Iran is going to take the offensive. Even for the Middle East, these are high stakes. Against this fearful background, the Palestinian tragedy continues.

US to Supply "Rebels" in Syria with Weapons

2013-06-13T22:45:00.002-05:00

It seems that our corrupt, lying leaders in Washington are at it again. Just moments ago, the Administration said that Syria “Has crossed the Red Line” by using chemical weapons against the opposition. That isn’t what is driving this train.

According to international sources, the opposition is swiftly folding against the Army of Bashir al-Assad and this is unacceptable to the U.S. and its proxy Israel. You can read about the rebel fallback here on OEN.

This is also obfuscating the current news about the unwarranted NSA spying on all American citizens. Obama seems to be losing his credibility with his Progressive base over what they feel are their loss of privacy and 1^st Amendment as well as 4^th Amendment rights.

Americans are being railroaded into another lose/lose situation in the Middle-east to stop the political hemorrhaging here in America. This is unacceptable and Americans should see this as just what it is. War in order to keep dissent to a minimum is an old trick. People need to look at this for what it really is, something thrown into the mix to keep our eyes off the ball.

Senator John McCain was on CNN recently and was very satisfied that America was now going to send heavy weapons into Syria. We should not feel as pleased. Tensions will be getting even higher in the region and it could erupt into another World War. That would take the American peoples mind off of how badly their government has failed them.

Watch all of the Mainstream pundits use this as an opportunity to deflect the focus of Americans off of the political firestorm that is raging on the streets and on social media. See how “loyal” Democrats rally around the same leader that has done everything he can to strip them of their rights. Can it get any worse?

Western Emperors Have No Clothes

2013-06-13T13:03:00.002-05:00

By Finian Cunningham

June 12, 2013 "Information Clearing House - The military victory for Syria’s government forces in the strategic central town of Qusayr last week was a watershed event for several reasons. But of the crucial turning points heralded by this event, one is inimitably clear - the Western powers, the would-be emperors of Syria, stand naked in their failed criminal conspiracy to destroy that country.

These would-be emperors - Washington and the region’s former - has been colonial powers, Britain and France - have been shown demonstratively to have not a shred of credibility. The emperors have no clothes and they are running for cover.

The Syrian army now has the upper-hand and the momentum towards outright victory in a conflict that has ransacked large swaths of the Levantine nation, resulting in up to 80,000, mainly civilian, deaths, and causing 4-5 million internal and external refugees.

Western-backed insurgents are being destroyed or routed from villages and towns across Syria as the Syrian army moves swiftly on to its next objective of freeing the country’s second major city, Aleppo, in the north. That clash may prove a more bloody and protracted fight than the three-week campaign to retake Qusayr. But, given their withering loss of fighters and the severance from key supply routes through Qusayr, the eventual defeat of insurgents in Aleppo looks all but assured.

The recapture of Aleppo, and shutting off the NATO weapons supply line from Turkey in the north, would then prove to be the last stand for the foreign-backed mercenaries. These mercenaries have been terrorizing Syria since March 2011 at the behest of NATO powers and their regional allies, including Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Western agenda of regime change to oust President Bashar al-Assad is therefore, in a word, a dead letter.

But perhaps a more telling repercussion from the victory in Qusayr is the stripping bare of the ugly face of Western imperialism in Syria and the wider region.

The routing of the mercenaries who had laid siege to Qusayr for the past year showed more clearly than even the largely foreign component of the so-called Free Syrian Army and the minimal support among the Syrian population for this outfit of Al Qaeda-linked extremists. The FSA should henceforth be known as the Foreign Supplied Army. Without foreign supplies, there is no FSA, and there never would have been one in the first place.

Why were the 30,000 inhabitants of Qusayr obliged to hide in their homes for the past year while gangs of Libyan, Egyptian, Tunisian, Saudi, Chechen, Yemeni, French and British self-styled jihadists and, yes, local Syrian criminal opportunists, roamed the streets, looting and brutalizing?

When these Western-backed killers and bandits were eventually run out of Qusayr last Wednesday, why did the inhabitants greet the Syrian army and their Lebanese Hezbollah comrades with relief and gratitude? Why have street celebrations been held in Qusayr feting the restoration of civilian life?

Why did thousands of Qusayr’s residents flee the town over the past year? Of course, it was to escape from the Western-backed so-called “rebels” who imposed their draconian, twisted fundamentalist tyranny that they have adopted from their Saudi and Qatari paymasters. This is the same kind of tyranny that is being imposed on the suffering communities of Aleppo still under the control of the mercenaries.

This week, reports emerged of a 14-year-old boy in Aleppo who was executed in a public square by foreign gunmen because he allegedly blasphemed over a cup of coffee. He was sentenced to death by a kangaroo court before being shot twice in the head in front of his mother and father.

Why is it that now those inhabitants who had fled Qusayr - Muslim, Sunni, Shia, Alawite, Christian alike - are returning to the resumed safety of their town to pick-up their hitherto peacefully co-existing lives?

None of these questions are being asked in the mainstream Western media, or off Western politicians, since the fall of Qusayr. Incredibly, the Western media coverage on Syria seems stricken by a sudden muteness over the past week, as if crippled by a huge spanner tossed into its wheels. Conveniently, the news agenda seems to have inexplicably moved on to other matters.

At this juncture, what Western governments and their media propaganda system want most to avoid is for the Western public to see the naked, glaring truth: that these governments and media have been lying for the past two years about what is going on in Syria. This country is not undergoing a pro-democracy uprising, supported by Syrian people and benevolent Western powers. Rather, Syria has been subjected to a criminal covert war of aggression by Western powers for selfish strategic interests in the oil and gas-rich Middle East. This kind of conspiracy is what war criminals at Nuremburg were hanged for.

Qusayr has made Western government crimes in the Middle East abundantly clear. And that is why the story is being discarded down the Western media memory hole.

So let’s drag it out of the memory hole. To achieve their illicit objectives, Western governments have secretly funneled weapons, money, Special Forces and networks of foreign cutthroat killers into a sovereign country to terrorize its people into submitting to their agenda for regime change. The blood of 80,000 Syrian people is on the hands of Western presidents, prime ministers and their foreign diplomats: Barack Obama, David Cameron, Francois Hollande, John Kerry, William Hague and Laurent Fabius. They all stand accused and should be tried before a war crimes tribunal.

When Syrian army forces retook the bombed-out, sabotaged town of Qusayr, the façade of Western pretense and propaganda was demolished forever.

Now, as with the dregs of the retreating insurgents, Western governments are running scared from the damning exposure. This week the White House is to hold a series of emergency meetings on Syria. US Secretary of State John Kerry has had to cancel a tour of the Middle East in order to attend those meetings. On the cards for discussion is the US moving towards sending weapons and other lethal aid openly to its Foreign Supplied Army in Syria - a desperate move that probably won’t happen because the Western criminal agenda has already been defeated. The Obama administration - assailed by other scandals and imploding legitimacy among the American people and the wider world - is in no position to step up criminality in the Middle East.

The Associated Press reports, “[Syrian] opposition leaders [that is, Western stooges] have warned Washington that their rebellion could face devastating, irreversible losses without greater support.”

That one sentence says it all. The emperors have no clothes.

Finian Cunningham, is a prominent expert in international affairs. The author and media commentator was expelled from Bahrain in June 2011 for his critical journalism in which he highlighted human rights violations by the Western-backed regime. He is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For many years, he worked as an editor and writer in the mainstream news media, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. He is now based in East Africa where he is writing a book on Bahrain and the Arab Spring.He co-hosts a weekly current affairs programme, Sunday at 3pm GMT onBandung Radio

This article was originally published at Press TV

Desperate Times Call for Desperate Measures

2013-06-10T21:39:00.004-05:00

During the Nuremberg Trials after WWII, the Allies and the American People scoffed at the men convicted of “War Crimes” when they used the excuse “I was only following orders”. Following orders was no excuse for committing atrocities during a war they claimed.

Now we are witnessing a dramatic reversal of that thinking. We are actively involved in another war, “The War on Terror”. This is a misnomer of course, you really can’t declare war on “terror”, but try telling that to the people that have declared this and who now uphold it. To these people, the American people are now threatened by an unseen enemy beyond their capabilities to understand. Terror is lurking around every corner and we are all at risk. The “Homeland” is under attack by these forces and we must take “precautions”.
The truth is that the American people are being feed the worst kind of radical bullshit than at any time since the end of World War II. Now, everyone that takes a job in the military or in the defense industry must “follow orders” whether they are right or wrong.

The simple truth is that people are pleased that this information has been brought to their attention. They might want to shoot the messenger, but they relish the message. It appears that many of us that have been warning about the unwanted influence of the military industrial complex have been right all along, the people in power cannot be trusted.
The question before us is what are we as a nation going to do about it? How long has our government been spying on us and when did it start? Most importantly, what can we do about it? Can we bring all of the people involved to trial? Of course not, this will be just another blip on the radar for the government. From now on, they will be more careful in the future. A few heads will roll, but they will be relatively minor characters and the punishment will be light.

Unless, of course, you are “traitors” like PFC Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden. Just forget about what we claimed at Nuremburg, today, things have changed. Now, the concept of “following orders” is a sound one. We are the “good guys”, right? We must forget that we faced the Nazi’s and the USSR without spying on the entire nation, this enemy is different. These people are really, really scary. It takes a trade-off between our civil liberties and our national security to see this trough, according to the President (A constitutional law scholar).
This nation will probably say little when the two aforementioned people are handed out their punishment for “not following orders”. They have broken “their oaths”, so to speak. It didn’t matter that most military men convicted at Nuremberg had taken a personal oath to Adolph Hitler though, they should have known better. When the German people were asked (by me) how they let it all happen, they replied that by time they understood what was happening, it was too late.

The question I would like to ask here is just how much are we willing to abide by? If we are not a democracy than why do we portray ourselves as one? If we have no actual civil liberties, why do we pretend that we do? Here are some of the things our government has done to “the people”.

CoIntelPro: According to attorney Brian Glick in his book War at Home, the FBI used four main methods during COINTELPRO:
1. Infiltration: Agents and informers did not merely spy on political activists. Their main purpose was to discredit and disrupt. Their very presence served to undermine trust and scare off potential supporters. The FBI and police exploited this fear to smear genuine activists as agents.
2. Psychological warfare: The FBI and police used myriad "dirty tricks" to undermine progressive movements. They planted false media stories and published bogus leaflets and other publications in the name of targeted groups. They forged correspondence, sent anonymous letters, and made anonymous telephone calls. They spread misinformation about meetings and events, set up pseudo movement groups run by government agents, and manipulated or strong-armed parents, employers, landlords, school officials and others to cause trouble for activists.
3. Legal harassment: The FBI and police abused the legal system to harass dissidents and make them appear to be criminals. Officers of the law gave perjured testimony and presented fabricated evidence as a pretext for false arrests and wrongful imprisonment. They discriminatorily enforced tax laws and other government regulations and used conspicuous surveillance, "investigative" interviews, and grand jury subpoenas in an effort to intimidate activists and silence their supporters.
4. Illegal force: The FBI conspired with local police departments to threaten dissidents; to conduct illegal break-ins in order to search dissident homes; and to commit vandalism, assaults, beatings and assassinations. The object was to frighten, or eliminate, dissidents.

The Patriot Act which foreshadowed all that has followed it. The John Warner Defense Bill that authorized Federal troops to be used for peacekeeping purposes and allows the President to federalize a State’s National Guard and deploy them in another State (removes “Posse Comitatus”). The FISA Acts, the NDAA, it goes on and on.
Of course, nobody cared yesterday and not that many will care tomorrow. The gut-wrenching loss of our rights will continue to happen, more frequently now, however. The truth is that if we allow this march towards a police-state to continue, it will consume us. The time to take desperate measures was yesterday. I am not saying that it is too late to change the course of history though. We can still do it today, but we might not be able to do it tomorrow.

My opinion on losing my civil liberty is this; I would rather face the threat of terrorism by so-called “Muslim radicals” than face the threat of being “disappeared” by my own government. I would like any surviving Germans from the Hitler era if they were American now, would they resist?

Rape in the military, Exposing Susan Rice, Secrets of Bilderberg

2013-06-08T02:59:00.002-05:00

Outside Agitators

2013-06-08T02:48:00.003-05:00

By Patrick J. Buchanan

June 07, 2013 "Information Clearing House - A Cairo court has convicted 43 men and women of using foreign funds to foment unrest inside Egypt in connection with the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak.

Sixteen of those convicted were Americans. All but one, Robert Becker of the National Democratic Institute, had already departed. Becker fled this week rather than serve two years in an Egyptian prison.

And U.S. interventionists are in an uproar.

“Appalling and offensive,” said Sen. Pat Leahy of the verdicts.

“The 2011 revolution was supposed to end the repressive climate under Mubarak,” said The Wall Street Journal of our ally of 30 years whom Hillary Clinton called a family friend.

This “crackdown,” decries The Washington Post, was defended with “cheap nationalism and conspiracy theories.” As for Egypt’s proposed new law for regulating foreign-funded groups promoting democracy, it is “based on … repressive and xenophobic logic.”

Yet the questions raised by both the Cairo and Moscow crackdowns on U.S.-funded “democracy” groups cannot be so airily dismissed.

For these countries have more than a small point.

While U.S.-funded democracy promotion is portrayed as benign, the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, DNI and Freedom House have been linked to revolutions that brought down regimes in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, and nearly succeeded in Belarus.

People who pride themselves on bringing about revolutions should not whine when targeted regimes treat them like troublemakers.

And who directs these “pro-democracy” groups?

Before 2011, Freedom House was headed by ex-CIA Director Jim Woolsey, who says we are in “World War IV.” The IRI is chaired by John McCain, who pushed for U.S. intervention in the Russia-Georgia war and is clamoring for air strikes on Syria.

The DNI chairman is ex-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who says: “We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.”

Is it not understandable to patriots of the original “Don’t Tread on Me” republic that foreigners might resent paid U.S. agents operating inside their countries to alter the direction of their politics?

We have a right to advance our democratic values, we say.

But for the United States to push, for example, for freedom of speech, press and assembly in the People’s Republic of China is to promote political action that must lead to the fall of Beijing’s single-party state. Do we not understand why that might be seen by the Chinese Communist Party of Xi Jinping as subversive?

In the Cold War Americans learned that not only was the Communist Party U.S.A. a wholly owned subsidiary of Joseph Stalin’s Comintern, that party had deeply infiltrated the U.S. government and Hollywood. In the late ’40s and early ’50s, America was convulsed over communist penetration of our institutions.

Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped by J. Edgar Hoover at the direction of JFK and Attorney General Robert Kennedy because he refused to dump an adviser, Stanley Levison, who was a communist and thought to be a Soviet spy.

Were the Kennedys being “repressive and xenophobic”?

If we were apoplectic that Soviet-funded communists were seeking to influence our culture and politics, why ought not other countries, with cultures and institutions far different from our own, react even as we did?

In the stricter societies of the Islamic world, governments have enacted laws regarding alcohol, premarital sex, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, gay marriage and religious conversions different from any such laws in the U.S.A.

In some of those countries, such activities can produce floggings, amputations, stonings and beheadings. In many of these countries, children are indoctrinated in the Islamic faith in government-supported schools. Not here.

We may deplore this, but where do we get the right to intervene in the internal affairs of these countries if they do not threaten us?

And are we really consistent in our democracy promotion?

How many U.S.-funded agents of Freedom House, NED, IRI and NDI are in Bahrain demanding elections that would permit the Shia majority to dump the king and oust our 5th Fleet from its Persian Gulf base?

How would we react if Riyadh funneled billions of petrodollars into organizations and agents to finance Wahhabi madrassas and assist local Muslim communities in the U.S.A. with their efforts to enact sharia law?

What lies behind U.S. interventions in the internal affairs of countries all over the world?

There is, first, the residual Cold War mindset. What we did for Solidarity in Poland was right and successful, and we cannot give up this tool of democracy just because the Cold War is over.

Second, there is the arrogance of power, the End-of-History babble about democracy being the last, best hope of earth to which all nations should aspire — and if they don’t, give them a kick in that direction.

Once the most admired of nations, America is no longer so.

Why not? Because of our compulsive interventions, military and political, in the internal affairs of nations that are none of our business.

Defund the American Comintern, and bring the outside agitators home.

TYT-Cenk: Obama IS Big Brother

2013-06-08T02:26:00.002-05:00

21st Century Slavery

2013-05-29T19:56:00.003-05:00

Listen to internet radio with Tim Gatto Unedited and Uncut on BlogTalkRadio

The Monsanto Revolution

2013-05-28T13:51:00.001-05:00

The Monsanto Revolution

By Timothy V. Gatto

The protests against the Monsanto Protection Act were not covered by the corporately run news media in the United States. This treacherous act itself has not been discussed by the majority of people and the information about what it really means to us is being hidden by those charged to provide this information.

The very fact that the corporate media has tried to minimize the coverage of the protests, and the fact that they hid the role of Congress in protecting a company that has the potential to damage our lives is something that is actually criminal. The fact that most Americans still don’t know about the potential effects of GMO seeds to the American people cannot be defended.

It was the alternative and social media that brought this matter to the public. The marches and the gathering of concerned Americans demonstrated the power of this new way of communication. The effectiveness and coordination in over 250 cities in the United States was absolutely remarkable and a demonstration of how democracy works.

It was also remarkable how the commercial media downplayed and censored the protests of the people. The importance of the information that the demonstrators were trying to present to the American public and the effect of what Monsanto's policies will have on the public is of significant importance.

Even though people demonstrated in almost every city in the United States, the commercial media still managed to keep the purpose and the import of the demonstrations quiet, the suppression of that information was done masterfully.

What Else are they hiding from the People?

It appears that our government has morphed into something that would be unrecognizable to those that designed and formed it. In the period of time during the American Revolution, many people in the government were indeed rich and powerful, but many were not. Today most Senators and Congressman are rich and powerful and those that are not will by the time they leave office. The majority of those in Congress are controlled by corporate money and this is what funds their campaigns.

The Monsanto debacle has proven, beyond any shadow of a doubt that the commercial media is in the hands of the rich and powerful. Information they don’t want known does not escape from the media cloud that is dispersed to the people. The importance of what Monsanto plans to do, and the effect it would have on all of the people in the United States proves that even a subject that affects us so deeply can be hidden from the people.

This should cause a seismic shift in our understanding of who and what controls the American people. The importance of The Monsanto Protection Act and the potential damage to the health and economic welfare of American citizen's cannot be understated. What Congress has done was not done in the name of the American people; it was done to shield a corporation and thus was essentially an act of treason.

Again I’m asking the question; what else are they hiding from us? Whether it is because of corporate interests or because of what they feel is "national security", these questions should and must be asked and the government should be compelled to answer.

The simple facts are, the people don't work for the government in America, the government, under our law, works for the people! When they passed "The Monsanto Protection Act", they passed a law that literally protected a corporation from the American people! Again, this is treason! Treason perpetrated against the American people is a capital offense! This may sound extreme, but every lawmaker that voted for this bill should be impeached and charged with treason against the people of the United States. The bill should be declared treasonous and overturned by The Supreme Court.

Of course, in today's political climate, and with the perpetrators being the ones that hold power in Congress, this won't happen at this particular time, but it can and will happen. It must happen! If the American people want control of the government instead of the government having control over them, they must take this issue to its logical conclusion.

As has happened many times in the past, it is happening here and now in the United States of America. The government has acted against the welfare of its own people for the personal gain of a corporation. This display of corporate power is contrary to our Declaration of Independence and against our Constitution.

Anyone who really cares about the welfare of their fellow man should take notice. It is apparent that one day of marches and demonstrating in the streets just isn't enough. The only way forward is to continue to raise hell; more marches, more demonstrations, more people posting articles and more people raising awareness using any means possible. This is the only hope of stopping treason against the people.

US Makes Syria an ‘Offer it Can't Refuse’ – again

2013-05-27T18:43:00.002-05:00

US Makes Syria an ‘Offer it Can’t Refuse’ – again
Finian CUNNINGHAM | 25.05.2013 | 07:45

In Mafia terms, it’s called «making an offer that can’t be refused». The «offer» is not one of free choice between options that may benefit the object party. In reality, it is about setting up a scenario of duress, under which the object party is coerced to capitulate to detrimental terms of extreme prejudice determined cynically by the other party.

This is the scenario that Washington and its NATO allies are contriving for the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad…

The so-called international peace conference that may take place in the coming weeks, at the behest of Washington and Moscow, is ostensibly aimed at finding a negotiated end to the conflict in Syria that is now in its third year and which has resulted in up to 80,000 deaths. At least half of these deaths are believed to be civilian.

Russian officials have confirmed that the Syrian government is willing to participate, in principle, in the conference with factions of the Syrian «opposition» – provided, says Damascus, that the latter participants do not have «blood on their hands».

That criterion may yet turn out to make the forthcoming conference a non-runner since the main opposition group – the Western-backed Syrian National Coalition (SNC) – is entwined with a host of mercenary forces on the ground that are drenched in blood from a relentless campaign of terrorism and sabotage.

However, it is not even clear if the fractious and mainly exile-based SNC has any authority over the motley crew of militant groups – more than 75 per cent of whom are foreign self-styled jihadi extremists that emanate from 30 or more Arab and other countries, according to United Nations reports.

Chief among these groups that comprise the so-called Free Syrian Army is the Al Nusra Front, the main fighting force, which is aligned with the Al Qaeda-affiliated network that stretches from Russia’s Caucus region, through Afghanistan and Iraq, to Libya, Mali and Niger.

It has to be said that Russia’s intentions for a negotiated peace settlement seem to be honourable – and based on the principle of arriving at some kind of internal Syrian consensus. To that end, Russia maintains the position of not setting preconditions about the political fate of the incumbent President Assad. Russia is supported in this view by Iran and China. It is not, they say, for foreign governments or their regional allies and proxies to determine the outcome of the conference and in particular the political future of Assad.

Contrast that with the position of the other broker – Washington. At a preliminary meeting in Jordan this past week, the US Secretary of State John Kerry insisted, along with NATO allies, Britain, France, Italy and Germany, as well as the Persian Gulf Arab sheikhdoms, that Assad «must go».

Kerry told the assembled «Friends of Syria» that the US was not dictating the outcome of the planned peace conference, but then contradicted himself flatly by repeating the assertion that President Assad would not be part of any Syrian political transition.

«Can a person who has used artillery shells and missiles and Scuds and tanks against women and children and university students – can that person possibly be judged by any reasonable person to have the credibility and legitimacy to lead that country in the future?» asked Kerry.

The veracity of these allegations against the Assad regime is more than a moot point. There is substantial evidence that the violations Kerry was attributing to Syrian government forces, such as the rocket attack on Aleppo University in January that resulted in more than 80 deaths, were in fact committed by Western-backed militants. The use of chemical weapons near Aleppo in March has also been shown recently by Russian RTR journalists to be the work of Western-backed militants, not the regime, as Western governments have been insinuating.

But that aside, the immediate point here is that Kerry and his «Enemies of Syria» coalition are very much trying to dictate terms on the anticipated political process. That same Western intransigence was largely why the Geneva accord reached last June by the UN Security Council came unstuck – and tens of thousands more Syrian deaths followed.

Adding to the warped framework of negotiations, the US, Britain and France are also insisting – in contrast to Russia and China – that Iran should not be permitted to take part in the process. Of course, the NATO powers can rely on their Sunni allies among the Persian Gulf monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar to endorse that stipulation. Why the Western powers and their Arab dictator friends have any more right than Iran – an ally of Syria with vital interests at stake in the conflict – is beyond their permitted rationale or discussion.

So, the upshot is that Assad is being offered a poisoned political chalice. On one hand, he is being told to forfeit the sovereign rights of his people to have him as their leader, and by all accounts a leader with a popular mandate, to give way to a negotiation with «opposition» parties who are solely designated, funded and patronised by foreign powers.

The SNC’s Ghassan Hitto, a Texas-based Syrian businessman, is designated by Washington, London and the former colonial power Paris as Syria’s premier-in-waiting. It is fair to say that Hitto, as with many other American-accented members of the SNC, has negligible popular support within Syria. That is, without any mandate from the Syrian population, these exiles are being foisted to negotiate the political future of Syria – a future that is extremely prejudicial in favour of Western geopolitical interests.

On the other hand – and this is where the Mafia analogy takes hold – the Western powers are making thinly veiled threats that if Assad does not conform to the warped political framework, that is, drink from the poisoned chalice, then all hell will break lose on this country with an even greater escalation of Western-backed violence.

«The United States is lobbying European governments to back a British-led call to amend [lift] the EU arms embargo on Syria,» reported the British Guardian this week, as Washington and its friend were gathering in Jordan.

Up to now, Washington has at least been maintaining the fiction that it is not arming the anti-Assad militants. It has, of course, been plying the mercenaries covertly with weaponry and logistics, along with its NATO allies and the Gulf Arab dictatorships.

Militant commander Brigadier General Salim Idriss has been pleading for Washington to begin openly supplying anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles – not just the assault rifles and explosives that have come so far through the clandestine CIA/MI6 conduits of Turkey, Jordan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

Since last month, Washington officials have begun briefing media outlets, such as the Washington Post and the New York Times, that the Obama administration is moving towards more direct military intervention in aid of the militants in Syria. «We’re clearly on an upward trajectory,» a senior US official said somewhat cryptically on 30 April. «We’ve moved over to assistance that has a direct military purpose.»

Days later, in the first week of May, US Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel hosted a press conference at the Pentagon with his British counterpart, Philip Hammond. «Arming the rebels, that’s an option,» said Hagel, indicating an apparent reversal of White House policy of ostensibly only sending «non-lethal aid».

And this week a US Senate committee voted in favour of Washington arming the «rebels» in Syria.

Secretary of State John Kerry is adding to this increasingly articulated threat. Voice of America reported from the Jordanian meeting last week: «Kerry says the Obama administration hopes President Assad ‘will understand the meaning of that’ [shift in US military policy towards Syria].»

This latent threat of greater aggression against Syria by the US, if it does not toe the political line as ordained by Washington, is not a new tactic in America’s underlying objective of regime change.

Last month, the Iranian FARS news agency reported that Syrian envoy to Iran, Adnan Mahmoud, disclosed that as far back as March 2011 – when the conflict was kicking off in Syria – that the then US Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates, had starkly told the Damascus government that it faced «a choice».

The Syrian envoy to Iran was quoted by FARS as saying: «Of course, in the very first weeks of the conflict in Syria, the US Secretary of Defence [Robert Gates] sent a message to the Syrian government, and said we should have cut our ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran if we wanted to stop the war, and stressed that if we did so, they [the US] would provide us with whatever we want». In other words, Washington was making Syria back then «an offer it couldn’t refuse». Well, Syria did refuse back in early 2011 to comply with US demands to cut its strategic ties with Iran, and as time has shown Damascus has since paid a heavy price in terms of human lives and the destruction of the country.

Now again, as the American-backed «peace conference» is being dangled in front of Damascus, Washington is replaying that same cynical offer. Either, drink from this poisoned political chalice – or «we’ll send the boys around to do their worst».

Yes Mr. President, This is Who We Are

2013-05-26T15:10:00.001-05:00

More at The Real News

Why Alex Jones is Being Attacked!

2013-05-26T00:57:00.001-05:00

Alex Jones is in the spotlight now. The PTB are focusing on him and branding Jones as a conspiracy theorist and an all-around nut job. This is not because of his beliefs which I admit are sometimes over the top, they are really attacking him because he is a danger to them.

Alex Jones is becoming very popular. They brand him as a "right-wing conservative". The facts do not support this. I am an admitted Socialist and I find much of what he says to be sound. Most of what Alex Jones says might be pure theatre, but the views he expresses about our civil liberties and the manipulation of the American people by the corporate and military industrial complex are amazingly correct. Alex Jones is not a NeoCon nor is he a right winger. Jones may be many things but he is not wrong about the two political parties that are currently in power.

The facts are this; Jones has a huge following and he is saying the things that the powers that be don't want us to hear. He understands the practice of using labels to divide us. He understands the Left-Right paradigm that they use to keep us fighting amongst ourselves. He understands the consequences of the type of "Globalism" that is being used to enrich the few and enslave the many.

Alex Jones understands that these "Free-Trade" agreements brokered by both the Republicans and Democrats don't benefit anyone but those in who reap the benefits of corporate profits. He understands that the wars and foreign interventions perpetrated by the American government do nothing to enhance security, they only allow those that profit from war and those that plunder the resources of other nations to enhance their wealth.

Alex Jones and his website "InfoWars" educates those who otherwise may never know the extent of the fraud being orchestrated by the Powers that Be. It's true that Jones sells many things on his site and that it is a commercial operation. It is also true that Alex Jones sees a conspiracy behind every locked door. This makes him an easy target for ridicule, and that is exactly what his detractors are doing.

Still, before castigating Jones for hawking his products on InfoWars, think about Rachel Maddow's show. MSNBC hawks corporations with commercials for BP, Natural Gas, Bank of America, other banks and many other corporations. The truth is that people such as Maddow not only attack those that don't fit neatly into the current political plan, they also shamelessly hawk services and products that are produced by corporations that are some of the worst corporations on the planet! Before people like Maddow throw stones at Jones for making money on his website, they should look at the corporation's that support them. (Maddow should also realize that one of the biggest manufacturer of armaments, General Electric, is the Parent company of MSNBC and they are responsible for her huge paycheck for hawking the current political structure. GE was also the largest manufacturer of nuclear weapons)!

While some of Jones's conspiracy theories are based on conjecture, some of them are rooted in fact. There are many people besides Jones that don't accept the official 9/11 report. The same goes for the bombing in Oklahoma and now, the Boston Bombing. If one were to suppose that the two brothers were influenced by Federal Agents, why would that be hard to believe? How many accused "Muslim Jihadist's" were financed and directed by the FBI who supplied money and instructions for making bombs and then actually suggested where to plant them! The bombs were made up of inert explosives, but the Feds got their collar and the PTB got their publicity so that they could keep Americans afraid of terrorist attacks, thereby bolstering the reasoning for propagating this security state that has emerged in America.

It is not a stretch to believe that Federal agents might just have overreached and actually give a couple of entrapped individuals real bombs. It isn't a stretch to imagine that after the coaxing and directions, the brothers just might have used ingredients of their own to construct the bomb. The scenario is plausible because Federal agents have admitted to doing it before!

There are many issues that Alex jones speaks about. First and foremost, one must realize that like Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, he is primarily an entertainer. He makes many suppositions and his radio show attracts many listeners. Sometimes he makes suppositions that are in left field, but on core issues he is passionate about, he is right on the money. Sometimes he has Glenn Beck on, but sometimes he has people such as Gerald Celente and Paul Craig Roberts on too. Infowars has even published some of my articles!

All this publicity will do nothing but swell Alex Jones's audience. The true facts are that people like Jones and people like Paul Craig Roberts and Gerald Celente scare the hell out of those in power. They are showing Americans just how they are being duped by buying into the two-party propaganda machine. People are seeing right through the mainstream media. They are waking up to the truth behind the Liberal/Conservative, Left/Right nonsense that is being shamelessly promoted by FOX and MSNBC and the PTB are scared.

This is some material they conveniently left out of the Alex Jones interview on MSNBC;

How the Government Targeted Occupy

2013-05-25T01:01:00.004-05:00

Demonstrators take part in an Occupy Wall Street protest march in New York City's Financial District on September 26, 2011. (Paul Stein, Flickr/Creative Commons)

From: In These Times

WEB ONLY// FEATURES » MAY 21, 2013
How the Government Targeted Occupy

A new report reveals the U.S. spent millions spying on Occupiers and other anti-corporate activists.
BY LISA GRAVES

Little evidence has emerged, in the years since the horrific violence of 9/11, of any widespread threat from al-Qaeda within the United States. Nevertheless, politicians have used that potent memory to fund an enormous domestic surveillance infrastructure.

Freedom of conscience is one of the most fundamental human freedoms. This freedom is not merely about one’s ability to choose to believe or not believe in religion or a particular philosophy. In a democracy, freedom of conscience is about the ability to be critical of government and corporations, and to be free from the chilling fear that being critical will subject you to government surveillance.

Freedom of conscience is not fully realized in isolation. Without the ability to share one’s thoughts, to speak out about injustice, or to join with others in peaceably assembling to petition for redress of grievances, this core freedom is not truly free. Americans should be able to exercise these most sacred rights in free society without worry of being monitored by the government.

In our new report, “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation's Counter Terrorism Apparatus, in Partnership with Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street,” written by Center for Media and Democracy contributor and DBA Press publisher Beau Hodai, we detail several ways in which our tax dollars are being squandered on law enforcement—or so-called “homeland security”personnel monitoring Americans who dare to voice dissent against the extraordinary influence that some of the world's most powerful corporations have on on our elected officials.

Through this investigation we have documented:

How U.S. Department of Homeland Security-funded “fusion center” personnel have spent endless hours gleefully monitoring their fellow Americans though Facebook and other social media, and how fusion centers nationwide have expended countless hours and tax dollars in the monitoring of Occupy Wall Street, bank activists and civil libertarians concerned about national security powers.
How some of these “counter terrorism” government employees applied facial recognition technology, drawing from a state database of driver's license photos, to photographs found on Facebook in the effort to profile citizens believed to be associated with activist groups.
How corporations have become part of the “information sharing environment” with law enforcement/intelligence agencies through various public-private intelligence sharing partnerships—and how, through these partnerships, the homeland security apparatus has been focused on citizens protesting these corporations.
How private groups and individuals, such as Charles Koch, Chase Koch (Charles' son and a Koch Industries executive), Koch Industries, and the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have hired off-duty cops—sometimes still armed and in police uniforms—to perform the private security functions of keeping undesirable people (reporters and activists) away from them. As was the case in an incident involving protests of ALEC, off-duty officers working on behalf of ALEC and the resort in which an ALEC conference was being held, led riot-gear-clad officers in the pepper spraying and arrests of several peaceful, law abiding protestors.
How law enforcement agencies in Phoenix, Arizona dispatched an undercover officer to infiltrate activist groups organizing both ALEC demonstrations and the launch of Occupy Phoenix—and how the work of this undercover infiltrator officer benefited ALEC and the private corporations that were the subjects of these activist demonstrations.
How “counter terrorism” personnel monitored the protest activities of citizens opposed to the “indefinite detention” language contained in National Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (which CMD has filed an amicus brief against).
How the FBI applied “Operation Tripwire,” an initiative originally intended to apprehend domestic terrorists through the use of private sector informants, in their monitoring of Occupy Wall Street groups.
Even if the amount of money being wasted were small—and it’s not, we're talking millions of dollars heaped into the coffers of local law enforcement agencies annually—the notion that we the people should tolerate the deployment of police, ostensibly hired to protect us, to spy on us without any criminal predicate is an outrage. The money spent spying on Americans could be spent strengthening our public schools, providing access to life-saving medicine for our neighbors or helping to achieve the Constitution’s promise of forming “a more perfect union.”

Little evidence has emerged, in the years since the horrific violence of 9/11, of any widespread threat from al-Qaeda within the United States. Nevertheless, politicians have used that potent memory to fund an enormous domestic surveillance infrastructure. The result of this trough of money and excess capacity—the turning of “counterterrorism” resources against law-abiding American citizens—was utterly predictable.

It has been more than 30 years since Congress acted with deep skepticism regarding government agents deployed to spy on Americans. The last thorough and truly independent investigation was after Watergate, when the Church and Pike Committees spent months intensively investigating the ways in which prior administrations had violated Americans' privacy and trampled civil liberties under the guise of national security.

In 1976, then-Attorney General Edward Levi promulgated the “Levi Guidelines,” investigative guidelines developed in response to domestic surveillance abuses, such as COINTELPRO, perpetrated by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Since the Carter administration, however, there has been an accelerating erosion of protections from domestic surveillance. The “Levi Guidelines” were later largely countermanded through changes by John Ashcroft and his successors at the Justice Department.

With the post-9/11 shift from enforcing the law to “intelligence gathering,” numerous public rules as well as secret guidelines were altered to maximize the gathering of information about Americans without requiring any criminal predicate. The new rule appears to be that almost everything is fair game without probable cause, except for home searches and phone taps (but even the rules for electronic surveillance and the acquisition of intelligence information are now subject to enormous loopholes due to changes pushed into law in 2008 by Director of National Intelligence-turned-Booz Allen Hamilton Vice Chairman Mike McConnell, with help from AT&T, Verizon, and others).

It was a stroke of misfortune that, on 9/11, then-Vice President Dick Cheney served as the de facto head of the national security hierarchy. Cheney's “dark side” approach created a climate in which longstanding rules intended to protect basic rights were replaced with array of questionable, if not absurd, interpretations of domestic and international law.

As President Ford’s chief of staff, Cheney, with the aid of then-Deputy Attorney General Laurence H. Silberman, tried to thwart essential reforms of surveillance agencies. Silberman was later appointed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and, at the urging of his former law clerk, then-Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, helped facilitate legal opinions instrumental to the George W. Bush administration's expansion of domestic surveillance activities by redefining Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights.

Unfortunately, much of this backsliding has been embraced and further entrenched by the Obama administration.

The federal government, in general, claims to abide by a long-standing rule that a person will not be investigated based “solely” on protected First Amendment activity. But what does that amount to in reality? In Arizona, it appears fusion center personnel used the prospect of anarchist involvement in protests of banks, other corporations, and/or ALEC as a hook for dispatching at least one undercover officer to infiltrate groups of Americans organizing peaceful protests. Fusion center personnel even cited past instances of “violent tactics” perpetrated against ALEC in other states, when, in reality, there had only been one prior incident of graffiti (spray paint) at an ALEC event.

Quite frankly, there is no way to know if groups of American anarchists have been infiltrated by law enforcement or intelligence agents acting as agent provocateurs, urging more aggressive action. It is worth noting that, in the case of the Phoenix infiltration, the undercover officer apparently claimed to be affiliated with an alleged Mexican anarchist group that claimed to have committed acts of arson.

The idea that the prospect of graffiti can trigger months of infiltration and surreptitious surveillance of citizens exercising their freedom of conscience exposes that the idea our government will not monitor citizens based solely their exercise of First Amendment rights is little more than a joke. And that joke is on us.

Read the full report on SourceWatch.

Read the full report and view document archive on DBA Press.

ABOUT THIS AUTHOR

Lisa Graves is the Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy and formerly served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice and as the Senior Legislative Strategist for the American Civil Liberties Union on national security issues. She has been called to testify before Congress as an expert witness on national security and civil liberties issues.

Glaring Contradictions in DC

2013-05-23T22:39:00.002-05:00

My radio broadcast of 5/29 Tim Gatto Unedited and Uncut

Listen to internet radio with Tim Gatto Unedited and Uncut on BlogTalkRadio

Psychopaths

2013-05-23T19:26:00.001-05:00

Source:
www.opednews.com

http://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Defense-Against-the-Psycho-in-Life_Arts-130523-79.html

Chomsky on RT

2013-05-22T22:38:00.001-05:00

Interview With Chris Hedges "Why Are We Not Calling This Fascism?"

2013-05-22T22:21:00.002-05:00

Gerald Celente "Leading Into Disaster" - (5/14/13)

2013-05-21T20:43:00.003-05:00

America's Greatest Challenge

2013-05-21T00:20:00.003-05:00

I've been reading a few articles on the “alternative” media which really have me thinking. One, by Chris Hedges entitled “Rise Up or Die” made me think about just how bad things really are nowadays here in the USA. The other article by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, “You are The Hope” was also a particularly dark piece.

It’s not that I don't agree with what the two have said…I do; still, I don’t think they quite accurately reflect the growing disconnect between what many Americans and the mainstream media, along with the Powers That Be would have us believe.

At this moment in time (I reserve the right to change my mind at a moment’s notice), from talking to people I have been meeting in my travels, there really isn't much support for the President or the Congress. People don’t seem to be buying what they are selling on the corporate media. I heard today (mostly from the Democrat megaphone on MSNBC) that the President’s approval rating is actually up this week. I'm starting to wonder who exactly was really polled.

Contrary to what the MSM tells us, most people are not idiots. I think that most Americans can look at their lives and pretty much come to this conclusion; they are not living as well as their parents did. There are many Americans who really don't believe that the new American “normal” of working two part-time jobs with no health benefits isn't a “be all, end all” situation. Young people graduating from colleges and universities, saddled with huge student debt, aren't exactly bowled over with their job prospects.

There are also very real problems that have yet to make their mark on our much-touted American society. The treatment the government has given our Veterans is a blemish on our nation. Our government, fighting this over-hyped “War on Terror”, has demanded that not only active duty soldiers been required to fight multiple combat deployments, but National Guard and Reserve soldiers too. Suicides, PTSD, broken marriages, sexual trauma (in the case of rape) and backlogs for disability claims have been the other “new normal”. The phrase “Thank you for your service” does not make up for the abysmal treatment they are getting from the government that has used and abused them. The truth is…millions of disgruntled veterans have made life difficult, not only in this nation, but other nations, throughout history.

There is something going on in this country, and it is not good. Everyone in government, Wall Street and in the corporate boardrooms think they have a handle on the economy. The truth is, they have over-looked the most important part of the equation, once they have raped the American Middle Class and have lined their pockets with the assets they have stolen from us, who is going to buy their products?

Ask yourself some questions: How many people do you know have lost their once good credit ratings? How many people are paying a mortgage that is higher than the home is worth? Who do you know that has recently moved back in with Mom and Dad or vice-versa? When was the last time anyone you know took a two-week vacation? When was the last time you heard someone bragging about their “portfolio”? I could go on, but I bet you get my drift.

The simple truth is that this great nation of ours can’t keep spending over 50% of our discretionary budget on the military, while spending only 6% on education and another 6% on social programs! The simple truth is that we get no return on our buck for spending on the military! All we get in return are more enemies that wish the worst for us. Still, they keep selling us this “Superpower” rhetoric. What’s the good of being a superpower when 22% of Americans are living under the poverty level?

We have the power to change this country for the better.

The first thing Americans need to do is to get off this label kick that the PTB want us on. It should be apparent to most Americans that there is very little difference between the two corporately controlled political parties. In reading this article I would like people to understand one thing; they want us to fight amongst ourselves. The more we fight with each other, the more divided we are, the more power they have over us.

This is the game that the Republicans and Democrats are playing. The more we focus on differences they foster, the less we focus on how we are being screwed. We all know who controls the GOP, but where were the Democrats when they cut food stamps? Where were the Democrats when they smashed Occupy? Where were the Democrats when they passed and signed the NDAA? Where were the Democrats when they sent whistleblowers to prison? Again, I can go on and on. The point is, stop supporting these two political parties. As George Carlin once said; “It’s a big club, and you ain't in it. It’s the same club they hit you over the head with.”

We need to talk to our friend and relatives’. We need to sit down and write articles and call in to talk shows. Those that can need to start their own radio show on the internet or small community radio or host a show on public access TV. We all need to share articles on Facebook and Twitter. If we all could just spend one hour of our day doing these things we could make profound changes.

"Though [the people] may acquiesce, they cannot approve what they do not understand." --Thomas Jefferson

It is our duty as citizen’s to educate those who are currently ignorant in the present situation. There is no free lunch when it comes to this. Either we will rise to the occasion or give away our freedom and prosperity to those who will take it from us. This is the challenge we as Americans face.