Gilad Atzmon

"If the UN wants to prevent future Israeli crimes, we better grasp, once and for all, what kind of needs the massacre was there to satisfy. We better understand once and for all why it is that Israeli politicians believe that providing their followers with fresh blood is translated into electoral power?"

Israel faces another disastrous report as an 'Independent and impartial' fact-finding team appointed by the UN Human Rights Council will look into Israel's 'violations of international law' during her commando raid on the Gaza-bound Turkish ship.

Seemingly the UN Human Rights Council wasn’t overwhelmingly impressed by Israel's own ‘truth finding’ missions. I guess that this is understandable. The Israelis should accept the UN concerns. It is very uncommon to let the murderer or the rapist investigate himself.

The UN team is expected to travel to Israel, Turkey and Gaza in August to interview witnesses and gather information before reporting back to the Council in September.

I guess that in order to complete its job satisfyingly, the UN mission should consider taking advice from some Old Testament experts who can elaborate on the cultural and spiritual heritage that led to the current state of Israeli barbarism. As I've mentioned many times before, Zionism , is an attempt to revive the ancient Israelite nation. Hence it shouldn’t take us by surprise to discover that this has created a contemporary Israeli who follows the most sinister possible interpretation of the Judaic text.

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International Solidarity Movement

Sammah Eid El-Massry, 9, in a 'semi-critical' condition in hospital

“She came in through the front door and it wasn’t clear she was injured. Suddenly a lot of blood came from her nose and she vomited. All of the family saw this – her little brothers were very scared. She had just been playing in the front of the house.”

This is a mother describing to us her daughter, 9-year-old Sammah as she came in to her home at 4pm after the Israeli army reportedly shelled and fired four bombs into and around a residential area in Beit Hanoun, Northern Gaza. She is now in a semi-critical condition in hospital, suffering extensive blood loss and very low haemoglobin. She was hit by shrapnel and ‘flechettes’ from a nail bomb that landed 100m away, causing internal bleeding to the chest, severe head trauma and nails embedded in her body. Shells containing flechettes are illegal under international law if fired into densely populated civilian areas and SamahEid El-Massry is one of four children injured in the attack yesterday, July 21st.

Two young men were killed: Mohammad Al-Kafarneh, 23, from severe shrapnel injuries in his back and chest and Kasim Al-Shinbary, 19, caused by injuries from nails embedded in his skull and shrapnel wounds to the back. It was unclear earlier whether they were resistance fighters or if they were civilians – the Israeli Occupation Force called them ‘militants’ – just as they called the four children, aged between 4 and 11, who were left hospitalised by their injuries ‘militants’. Their parents could be found weeping over their loved ones in Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City last night.

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Les Visible
Smoking Mirrors

Ben Stein says that the unemployed are people with unpleasant personalities. He didn’t say anything about how Zionist Bankers are responsible for the majority of the unemployed. He sees no irony in the fact that he himself is one of the most unpleasant people in an unpleasant system that survives by military adventures abroad and cannibalism at home. It can’t be mere accident or coincidence that the authors of all recent assaults on foreign nations have been engineered by Zionists in critical positions in the American government; media, war profiteering corporations and well funded lobby groups.

It’s no accident or coincidence that 9/11 was orchestrated by Zionist, dual nationals in Israel and the U.S., with the help of rogue elements in the intelligence services, military and government leadership. It’s a straight shot from 9/11 to all of the recent assaults in foreign nations and the collapse of the economic system. Now, those responsible for the awful state of the American dream machine being turned into a nightmare, are migrating to India, Brazil and other locations in order to do it all over again.

For some of us, there is no greater misfortune than to live a lie. For most of us, lies and impossible hopes are a comfort zone against the inconvenience of the truth. The truth is not just what is. It contains a cosmic moral code which says that certain methods and means are unacceptable to a human being. It also contains the understanding of where these means and methods lead; to the loss of one’s humanity and one’s destruction. No one engaged in living a lie and performing injustices upon one’s fellows can bear what the truth affirms. They willingly accept their own destruction rather than to be hampered in the pursuit of selfish ends for temporary gain. It seems insane and it is insane but it is how it is for so many in these times.

I can now see how lucky I was to have been born into terrible circumstances. It made finding the truth an all compelling drive. I was able to see through the illusion of the world and its false promises so that none of these things attracted me for very long. Disappointment was swift and final. I have not yet discovered the truth about myself but I do not believe it can be denied to anyone who is determined in their search.

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Stephen Lendman

This article follows an earlier UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Special Report titled, "The Impact of the Barrier on Health," accessed through THIS link

StoptheWall.org (STW) is a "Palestinian movement against the (Separation) Wall and the settlements under Israeli repression," calling for it to be stopped, portions built dismantled, all confiscated lands returned, and compensation paid for losses.

On July 9, it released a report titled, "People versus Oppression," a March - June 2010 account of Israeli repression, including

"large scale violations of the civil, political and human rights of activists and communities active against the Wall that compounds the dispossession brought upon them by (its) illegal construction."

In defiance of the International Criminal Court (ICJ) ruling it illegal, calling for it to be dismantled and reparations paid for lost homes, businesses, farmland, orchards, olive groves, and other immovable property seized, construction continues unabated, committing human rights violations against many thousands affected.

Over the past year alone, harsh repression included killings, targeted assassinations, mass arrests, travel bans, raids against Stop the Wall's offices, and other Palestinian organizations and international activists, notably Freedom Flotilla ones, up to 15 murdered in cold blood in international waters delivering humanitarian aid to besieged Gazans.

From March - June 2010, the "extent of violence and dehumanization (has been) staggering."

The past year "marked (a) quantitative shift in....Israel('s) overall policies and strategies," its ongoing deterrence and oppression agenda, punctuated by daily violence against defenseless civilians, including women and children, endangering their struggle for justice, self-determination and peace, notions Israel spurns, preferring conflict to conciliation, collective punishment to the rule of law, and crimes of war and against humanity over democratic freedoms and equal justice - how all rogue states operate.

Combined, they're "part of a new Israeli strategy to deal with growing international (and internal) criticism - through legislation, belligerence, and repression, including Wall construction, land theft, and isolation.

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Tom Eley

The Iraqi city of Fallujah continues to suffer the ghastly consequences of a US military onslaught in late 2004.

According to the authors of a new study, “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009,” the people of Fallujah are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bomb strikes in 1945.

The epidemiological study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies and Public Health (IJERPH), also finds the prevalence of these conditions in Fallujah to be many times greater than in nearby nations.

The assault on Fallujah, a city located 43 miles west of Baghdad, was one of the most horrific war crimes of our time. After the population resisted the US-led occupation of Iraq—a war of neo-colonial plunder launched on the basis of lies—Washington determined to make an example of the largely Sunni city. This is called “exemplary” or “collective” punishment and is, according to the laws of war, illegal.

The new public health study of the city now all but proves what has long been suspected: that a high proportion of the weaponry used in the assault contained depleted uranium, a radioactive substance used in shells to increase their effectiveness.

In a study of 711 houses and 4,843 individuals carried out in January and February 2010, authors Chris Busby, Malak Hamdan, Entesar Ariabi and a team of researchers found that the cancer rate had increased fourfold since before the US attack five years ago, and that the forms of cancer in Fallujah are similar to those found among the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, who were exposed to intense fallout radiation.

In Fallujah the rate of leukemia is 38 times higher, the childhood cancer rate is 12 times higher, and breast cancer is 10 times more common than in populations in Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait. Heightened levels of adult lymphoma and brain tumors were also reported. At 80 deaths out of every 1,000 births, the infant mortality rate in Fallujah is more than five times higher than in Egypt and Jordan, and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Strikingly, after 2005 the proportion of girls born in Fallujah has increased sharply. In normal populations, 1050 boys are born for every 1000 girls. But among those born in Fallujah in the four years after the US assault, the ratio was reduced to 860 boys for every 1000 female births. This alteration is similar to gender ratios found in Hiroshima after the US atomic attack of 1945.

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Chris Floyd

Henry Miller once said that the purpose of the artist is to "inoculate the world with disillusionment." We are in desperate need of disillusionment today -- disillusionment on a vast scale, disillusionment as a constant discipline. Arthur Silber is one of the greatest such artists now at work, and he has just released a remarkable piece aimed at one the deadliest illusions of our time: the myth of American Exceptionalism. I cannot recommend strongly enough that you read the entire piece, but below are a few excerpts to highlight some of the salient points.

Silber writes of the poisonous effects of the all-pervasive, ever-hardening Exceptionalist myth that has such a death-grip on the American psyche. In some ways, of course, this myth is just a variant of the same kind of self-deluding trumpery that powerful nations and tribes have told themselves down through the centuries -- "We are special, we are superior, whatever we do is good and right, because we are the ones doing it, etc." You could find beliefs like this going back to Rome, to Babylon, to Sumer, probably all the way back to Çatalhöyük or the Blombos Cave.

But the longevity and universality of this pernicious mindset is in no way a mitigation of it. It does not reduce by one iota the responsibility -- the blood-guilt -- of any society that adheres to such a myth, and uses it to "justify" (indeed, celebrate) horrendous crimes. It is American Exceptionalism that we must deal with in our time. And although the belief of this particular bunch of bare, fork'd animals that they are special is nothing new, the gargantuan, ravenous military force that backs up this delusion is unprecedented in world history. It is only in its destructiveness, real and potential, that the American system is indeed exceptional.

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Doug Bandow

In one of the most celebrated debate exchanges of the 2008 presidential campaign, GOP contender Rep. Ron Paul pointed out that Americans were hated because they were "over there" in Islamic lands. In fact, there is virtually no country on earth where American forces are not located.

Luckily, most people in most of those nations are not trying to kill Americans. In fact, many foreigners enjoy being protected at U. S. expense. Alas, Washington's desire to garrison most of the earth's surface helps explain why Uncle Sam is effectively bankrupt.

In fact, it's hard to keep track of America's many overseas military installations. By one Pentagon count there are 865 foreign facilities. But that doesn't count bases in Afghanistan and Iraq, which probably pushes the total past 1000.

There are 268 in Germany, 124 in Japan, and 87 in South Korea. Many of these are small, but the numbers are still incredible. Moreover, writes David Vine of American University:"Others are scattered around the globe in places like Aruba and Australia, Bulgaria and Bahrain, Colombia and Greece, Djibouti, Egypt, Kuwait, Qatar, Romania, Singapore, and, of course, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba -- just to name a few. "

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Stephen Lendman

Rockford resident Jeremy Kunz

That's what Frank Donner called Chicago in his 1990 book, "Protectors of Privilege." As an ACLU attorney, he explained how city police and US intelligence agencies targeted alleged internal subversion, and while it operated "was the outstanding example of it its kind in the United States (in terms of) size, number, and range of targets or operational scope and diversity."

He referred to "wide-open, no-holds-barred style surveillance" (and vigilantism), unmatched anywhere in the country - (institutionalized) guerrilla warfare against substantial sectors of the city's population," using illegal, criminal methods, including intimidation, physical confrontation, and flagrant abuse, at times involving torture. That was then. What about now?

From 2002 - 2004 alone, over 10,000 complaints were made against police, many involving brutality, including beatings and torture. Yet only 18 resulted in disciplinary action, according to University of Chicago Law Professor Craig Futterman who uncovered the data.

He helped prepare a 2007 University of Chicago report titled, "The Chicago Police Department's Broken System," revealing damning evidence of systemic abuse, including brutality, illegal searches, false arrests, racial targeting, sexual assaults, shoddy investigations, a culture of silence, and apartheid justice mostly affecting the city's Blacks, Latinos, poor and disadvantaged.

The police were called a "regime of not knowing," letting cops get away with torture, even murder - because of "a deep commitment to the machinery of denial... encouraging a culture of silence in the face of abuse perpetrated by officers," Mayor Richard M. Daley and City Council aldermen as culpable as top police officials.

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David Swanson

The most massive and brutal crime committed on this planet during the past decade has been the invasion and occupation of Iraq. And we're seeking to wash the blood off our hands without so much as an "Out, damn spot!" Nowadays "looking forward, not backward" is supposed to take care of everything, even as the crimes continue. What that takes care of is the leading perpetrators who begin to sense that the coast is clear and creep out of their holes to declare, as did Karl Rove this week, that their biggest mistake was not more aggressively attacking those who pointed out their crimes.

If there's anyone who knows where that path leads, it's probably Benjamin Ferencz, who served as Chief Prosecutor for the Einsatzgruppen Trial at Nuremberg in 1947 and who has just published the forward to a new book by Nicolas Davies called "Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq." It's a useful moment in which to be handed this masterful account of what we've done, not just because the liars have been ceded the floor, but also because the crime is ongoing and we will require the proper frame of mind as each deadline for withdrawal from Iraq is violated, and because the Washington Press Corpse has begun to notice the utter irresponsibility of the people we pay to tell us what is happening in the world (not to mention to spy on us, overthrow governments, kidnap, imprison, torture, and assassinate), and because we will not end the endless war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and other places unless there is accountability.

This is also the moment in which the International Criminal Court has done something Ferencz had long worked for, and determined that it will prosecute the crime of aggressive war. Even if ithe ICC cannot go back now and prosecute the most serious such crime of recent years, it can prosecute numerous US war crimes committed during the past decade, and we can address the invasion and occupation of Iraq through courts and legislatures in such a manner as to make its repetition elsewhere more likely to result in criminal charges.

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Lord Monckton

One of the numerous Goebbelian propaganda artifices deployed by the now-retreating climate extremist movement has been the careful avoidance of any debate with anyone on the skeptical side of the case who happens to know anything about climate science or economics.

As the extremists lose the argument and become more desperate, that is changing.

John Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at a Bible college in Minnesota, has recently issued — and widely disseminated — a hilariously mendacious 83-minute attempted rebuttal of a speech I delivered about the climate last October in St. Paul, Minnesota.

So unusual is this attempt actually to meet us in argument, and so venomously ad hominem are Abraham’s artful puerilities, delivered in a nasal and irritatingly matey tone (at least we are spared his face — he looks like an overcooked prawn), that climate-extremist bloggers everywhere have circulated them and praised them to the warming skies.

As usual though, none of these silly bloggers make any attempt actually to verify whether what poor Abraham is saying actually has the slightest contact with reality.

One such is George Monbiot, a scribbler for the the Guardian, the British Marxist daily propaganda sheet. What is Monbiot’s qualification to write about climate science? Well, like Abraham, he’s a “scientist.” Trouble is, he’s a fourteenth-rate zoologist, so his specialty has even less to do with climate science than that of Abraham, who nevertheless presents himself as having scientific knowledge relevant “in the area.”

Here’s the thing. All of the sciences are becoming increasingly specialized. So most scientists — the snake-like Abraham and, a fortiori, the accident-prone Monbiot among them — have no more expertise in predicting or even understanding the strange behavior of the complex, non-linear, chaotic object that is the Earth’s climate than the man on the Clapham omnibus.

They pretend otherwise, of course. Almost four years ago, when I wrote a 2500-word article in the Sunday Telegraph pointing out that the notion of a very large climate warming attributable to future increases in CO2 concentration was scientifically ill-founded, Monbiot wrote a scathing 1800-word response in the Daily Kommissar, in which he made a dozen laughably elementary scientific errors.

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Erich Follath & Dieter Bednarz

Mohamed ElBaradei with his wife Aida and
daughter Laila, at home in Vienna, 2005.

‘This Is an Historical Moment for Egypt’

In a SPIEGEL interview, Egyptian Nobel Peace Prize recipient Mohamed ElBaradei, 68, discusses the urge for change in his home country, possible cooperation with Islamists in the next election and the prospects of driving autocratic Hosni Mubarak out of office.

SPIEGEL: Mr. ElBaradei, some six months ago, you announced in an interview with us that you wanted to retreat from public life. After 12 years as the chief of the United Nations nuclear weapons inspectors in Vienna, you only wanted to give lectures. Now you are challenging President Hosni Mubarak. What happened?

ElBaradei: The decisive moment was my return to Cairo in February. I really only wanted to visit my country again and spend a few weeks at my house here near the pyramids. But then, 1,500 people were standing there at the airport. It was a cross-section of our society: students, business people, workers and surprisingly many women, including Egyptian women with head scarves and veiled faces. Some called out: "This country must be changed, please help us make that happen!" Others held signs reading: "ElBaradei for President!" It electrified me.

SPIEGEL: And that’s why you changed plans? According to the constitution, you can’t even become a candidate for the presidency without your own party.

ElBaradei: I have traveled through the cities and through the villages. I was shaken by the backwardness of my country, deeply moved by the people’s palpable desire for change, overpowered by the sympathy and enthusiasm I was met with. And then it was the regime itself that gave me no other choice than to become politically active. With the help of the state-controlled media, they launched an unprecedented smear campaign against me, denounced me as a foreign agent.

SPIEGEL: You know what happens to challengers of Mubarak. The last man to contest Mubarak for the presidency landed in jail.

ElBaradei: I was in Alexandria a short time ago with Ayman Nour at a protest event dedicated to the victims of the regime’s torture. I’m privileged in that I can rely somewhat on the fact that my international recognition protects me. Of course my wife and my children are afraid of violent attempts against me. But my family know that I have no choice: We live in a special time of awakening. This is an historical moment for Egypt …

SPIEGEL: … in which many see you as a kind of messiah.

ElBaradei: I neither can nor want to be a savior. This mentality of sitting back and waiting for a savior is exactly what I am fighting against. The people have to effectuate change themselves and they have to dedicate themselves to it — that is the only way to achieve decisive progress. And that is exactly what is happening these days, with a breathtaking mobilization in completely new ways.

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Stephen Lendman

The Al-Zaytouna Centre for Studies and Consultations is a Beirut, Lebanon-based organization engaged in "strategic and futuristic studies on the Arab and Muslim worlds, (emphasizing) the Palestinian issue." In July 2010, it published the latest in its "Am I Not a Human?" series titled, "The Suffering of the Palestinian Child under the Israeli Occupation," saying:

Palestinian children grow up "under the Israeli occupation, surrounded by cruelty, oppression, killing, starvation and destruction." Yet, like all children, they dream of playing and living normally and safely. Instead, their father may be dead or in prison, their brother killed, their home destroyed, and their mother forced to give birth at an Israeli checkpoint, risking her and the newborn.

Palestinian children grow up differently from most others, their development "distorted by an occupation," destroying their innocence, dreams and well-being. They live in constant fear, forced to grow up while still a child. "Actually (they are) grown up, for (they challenge) the toughest circumstances," helping their families, replacing a parent when lost, and confronting Israeli incursions. "Amazingly....Palestinian child(ren set) the example to mature people," even when very young.

They live when "we think that the world has become (more) civilized" without cruel colonizations, when global leaders defend human rights, dignity, democratic freedoms, and peace rhetorically, yet are indifferent to oppressed Palestinians, children always the most vulnerable, yet they persist and endure despite enormous hardships and obstacles, what Western children can't imagine.

From September 2000 (the start of the second Intifada) through 2007 alone, 1,400 children were killed, 230 under age 12. What about others under occupation, with no father, injured or handicapped, hungry, impoverished or in prison? Still more who've lost friends and relatives, who live in fear and can't sleep, who feel helpless when Israelis attack, and unprotected under a ruthless occupation, ongoing for over 43 years, affecting them physically, emotionally, and economically, making them feel isolated, helpless, and unaided, world leaders indifferent to their plight and their families.

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Danny Richardson

"In addition to confiscating land claimed to be vacant, and demolishing Palestinian homes built without permits that are almost impossible to secure, Israel has for many years used the excavation and reclamation of Jewish historical sites as a reason for the removal of Arab dwellings within East Jerusalem."

Israel is planning a major land-grab in East Jerusalem worth tens of billions of dollars.

Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein has informed the Supreme Court that the state plans to apply the law on abandoned properties in East Jerusalem. This will mean that Israel can “legally” take over thousands of acres and buildings that are the property of Palestinians, some of whom fled to what the state claims were “enemy states” during the Israeli “War of Independence” and others who have property in East Jerusalem but reside in the Occupied Territories.

The issue was brought before the Supreme Court after four cases were tried in the Jerusalem District Court, which ruled in favour of the owners in two cases and against in two. A special legal panel later ordered the Attorney General to tell the District Court whether it intended to apply a 1950 law to properties in East Jerusalem.

The total worth of the property belonging to the four applicants that was seized in Abu Ghneim mountain is estimated at $10 billion—equivalent to the Israeli defence budget for a year.

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Chris Floyd

In the last decade of the 20th century, a nation often hailed (not least by itself) as the "world's greatest democracy" directed a program of savage economic warfare against a broken, defenseless country. This blockade, carried out with an exacting bureaucratic coldness, killed, by very conservative estimate, at least one million innocent people. More than half of these victims were young children.

Dead children. Thousands of dead children. Tens of thousands of dead children, Hundreds of thousands of dead children. Mountains of dead children. Vast pestiferous slagheaps of dead children. This is what the world's greatest democracy created, deliberately, coldly, as a matter of carefully considered national policy.

The blockade was carried out for one reason only: to force out the broken country's recalcitrant leader, who had once been an ally and client of the world's greatest democracy but was no longer considered acquiescent enough to be allowed to govern his strategically placed land and its vast energy resources. The leadership of both of the dominant power factions in the world's greatest democracy agreed that the deliberate murder of innocent people -- more people than were killed in the coterminous genocide in Rwanda -- was an acceptable price to pay for this geopolitical objective. To them, the game -- that is, the augmentation of their already stupendous, world-shadowing wealth and power -- was worth the candle -- that is, the death spasms of a child in the final agonies of gastroenteritis, or cholera, or some other easily preventable affliction.

It is, by any measure, one of the most remarkable -- and horrific -- stories of the last half of the 20th century, outstripped in that period only by China's 'Great Leap Forward' and by the millions killed in the conflicts in Indochina in which the world's greatest democracy played such an instrumental role. Yet it remains an "invisible war," as Joy Gordon calls it in the title of her new book on the United States and the Iraq sanctions. Not only that, the perpetrators of this Rwanda-surpassing genocide walk among us today, safely, serenely, in honor, comfort and privilege. Some of them still hold powerful positions in government. If their savage war was invisible, then so is the innocent blood that smears them from head to foot.

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Philip Giraldi

The Ministry of Truth was how George Orwell described the mechanism used by government to control information in his seminal novel 1984. A recent trip to Europe has convinced me that the governments of the world have been rocked by the power of the internet and are seeking to gain control of it so that they will have a virtual monopoly on information that the public is able to access. In Italy, Germany, and Britain the anonymous internet that most Americans are still familiar with is slowly being modified. If one goes into an internet café it is now legally required in most countries in the European Union to present a government issued form of identification. When I used an internet connection at a Venice hotel, my passport was demanded as a precondition and the inner page, containing all my personal information, was scanned and a copy made for the Ministry of the Interior -- which controls the police force. The copy is retained and linked to the transaction. For home computers, the IP address of the service used is similarly recorded for identification purposes. All records of each and every internet usage, to include credit information and keystrokes that register everything that is written or sent, is accessible to the government authorities on demand, not through the action of a court or an independent authority. That means that there is de facto no right to privacy and a government bureaucrat decides what can and cannot be "reviewed" by the authorities. Currently, the records are maintained for a period of six months but there is a drive to make the retention period even longer.

The excuses being given for the increasing government intervention into the internet are essentially two:

First, that the anonymity of the internet has permitted criminal behavior, fraud, pornography, and libel.

Second is the security argument, that managing the internet is an integral part of the "global war on terror" in that it is used by terrorists to plan their attacks requiring governments to control those who use it.

The United States government takes the latter argument one step farther, claiming that the internet itself is a vulnerable "natural asset" that could be seized or damaged by terrorists and must be protected, making the case for a massive $100 billion program of cyberwarfare. Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT) argues that "violent Islamist extremists" rely on the internet to communicate and recruit and he has introduced a bill in the Senate that will empower the president to "kill" the internet in case of a national emergency.

But all of the arguments for intervention are essentially themselves fraudulent and are in reality being exploited by those who favor big government and state control.

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