Wayne Madsen

In many ways, National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden is more wanted by the U.S. government than was Osama Bin Laden just six months after the 9/11 attack on the United States. President George W. Bush said during a White House press conference, «Who knows if he’s [Bin Laden] hiding in some cave or not. We haven’t heard from him in a long time. The idea of focusing on one person really indicates to me people don’t understand the scope of the mission. Terror is bigger than one person. He’s just a person who’s been marginalized... I don’t know where he is. I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you».

Compare Bush’s attitude toward Bin Laden to Obama’s obsession with capturing Snowden and the hypocrisy of American foreign policy across the board comes into clear focus.

Barack Obama has made it one of the linchpins of his administration to identify, prosecute, and imprison national security whistleblowers. Obama has charged more government employees under the provisions of the antiquated 1917 Espionage Act than all of his predecessors combined. Edward Snowden was the seventh person charged with violating the Espionage Act after he released to The Guardian and The Washington Post classified documents from the NSA revealing the extent of U.S. communication surveillance of the Internet, phone calls, text messages, and Skype communications within the United States and around the world.

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Mike James

You are the Scum of the Earth. The vilest of the vile...

Have you ever found yourself sitting on a park bench in the middle of a big city, all alone with your thoughts, only to be asked by a concerned stranger as to why you are weeping, though you had no idea that tears were streaming down the cheeks of your face?

Did it come as a shock to you that you were a human being mourning the loss of something precious, yet now beyond your grasp? Was the embarrassment yours or that of the stranger, for, in your own timid way, you felt obliged to apologise for having given outward expression of something that troubled your soul?

“Nothing to see here,” you say. “Alles in Ordnung.” Heuschnupfen, hayfever.

You may find yourself in Berlin, as I do, or in Paris, New York, Sydney, Nairobi, Zurich, Warsaw, Rome, Mombasa, Florence, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, as I have in the past. You may even be sitting on one of those park benches in England dedicated to some local non-entity whose life was dedicated to making of you nothing more than a municipal statistic after the nature of his own imagination.

There appears to be little point in going on. Nothing changes; everything remains the same. Within you there exists a huge chasm of despair, upon the edge of which you are of faint lest the echo of your questions haunt and hound you during both your waking and sleeping hours.

You know that deep down inside, as a free-born child of England, the future that belonged as of right to you and your children was stolen by conceited men in suits and hard-faced culture-change career-women who strutted unashamedly the power halls of neo-liberalism and Fabian socialism, swapping roles as proponents of fast-food “freedom and democracy” with the abandon of whores, their legs wide open to the penetrating thrust of the international Zeitgeist and the nuances of the script handed down to them by Bilderberger grandees.

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Pepe Escobar

Hi, my name is Mostafa and I'll be your moderate insurgent today. I'm addressing you all because we badly need your help. We could have started a Facebook page, like We Need Your Weapons or something, or ask the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights to make a YouTube video, but I prefer to speak straight to your heart.

Our Supreme Commander, the blessed General Salim Idriss, has acknowledged we are now receiving many new weapons from many friendly Arab countries, which helped us "destroy more than 90 armored vehicles" of the Syrian regime. And Amrika helped us to get the guns, of course. But we need more.

Your President Mr Obama told the Blessed King of Saudi Arabia last Friday that he is committed to providing more support for us. Your Secretary of State Mr Kerry said on Saturday there must be more support for us "in order to have an impact on the ground". Your CIA said they will make sure only moderate insurgents get the weapons, and not the bad guys.

But your Congress is blocking our weapons. Oh people from Congress!

Don't be such a spoiler! We have such a brotherhood of nations here. People from 29 different countries! OK, there are a lot of Salafis, a bit hot headed. But for us they are all brothers. In fact most of us are moderate insurgents.

Don't you like moderates? Remember when you wanted to talk to the moderate Taliban? Now you're talking to the moderate Taliban! And the Pakistani Taliban, they are now even sending their people here to help us! The other day they raised a big, white Taliban flag somewhere in the Turkish-Syrian border. That was a blessed moment.

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