Rixon Stewart

Nearly one hundred years ago Russia underwent a revolution that was to be echoed decades later in China. In historical terms, Russia transformed almost overnight from Imperial Russia to the Soviet Union. From being a largely peasant society ruled by an all powerful Emperor, Russia became a supposedly egalitarian state.

Ostensibly classless, Lenin’s proclamations about the proletariat and the rights of workers were used to dupe the masses. For ultimately Russian communism was based on one thing and one thing only: a belief in the absolute precedence of materialism.

That’s why, according to his grandson John Schiff, to ensure its success, millionaire Jacob Schiff “sank about 20 million dollars for the final triumph of Bolshevism”. For communism was essentially the brainchild of the super rich and served their purposes, rather than those of the ‘workers’.

So despite claims of a more equitable distribution of wealth and although Russia’s leaders may have cloaked their real intentions with political jargon, materialism was still the bedrock on which Russian communism was built. In the eyes of Soviet political commissars any type of spiritual belief was consequently seen as a form of heresy. Resolutely atheistic, they elevated ‘scientific materialism’ over and above any spiritual faith, which they deemed as little more than superstition at best, and a threat to “communism” (i.e. faith in materialism) at worst.

However neither the industrial nor agrarian workers enjoyed much in the way of economic benefit from this new dispensation. They were too busy trying to meet harvest and production targets for that. In other words, their lives were totally beholden to the dictates of materialism.

With hindsight we now know that Russian communism simply didn’t work. Beyond its failure as a political and economic system it also brought unprecedented suffering to millions in the gulags.

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Konstantin Gordeev

Edward Snowden, a young American, grabbed the world attention in the wink of an eye making the revelations on US global surveillance come into the open. The world telecommunications are under constant surveillance carried out by the watchful eye of US special services. The snooping is ubiquitous encompassing US citizens and people in other countries of the world. It’s really complete, there is no exaggeration here, it spreads on bums and presidents, bitterest enemies and bosom friends - all of them watched at any given moment. Phone calls are eavesdropped, fax messages, including the coded ones, are tapped, Internet networks and electronic messages are intercepted, bank transactions are followed, each and every thing is under the eagle eye, there is no escape and no exclusion from the rule.

No surprise, many in America think Snowden is a «traitor» and a «spy». But there is something else that is important: according to polls, over 40% of US citizens say no to the persecution of Snowden, they approve his actions and think he is the one who has revealed the illegal activities of US special services.[1] What has he done to make the US authorities exert pressure on other countries so that they would land foreign presidential planes or make the United States threaten everyone who dares to grant him political asylum at the time tens of thousands Americans come out to show their support for Snowden and his courageous deed? That’s what the Americans say in their in website and blogs posts comparing the US administration actions with fascism, in particular, that’s what an article published by the Truthout says.[2] A petition asking President Barack Obama to pardon admitted state secret leaker Edward Snowden and stop his persecution has passed 100,000 signatures.[3-4]

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RINF Alternative News editorial

When the National Security Agency’s disclosures became known to the public – thanks to Edward Snowden – most people realized that privacy means absolutely nothing.

The governments’ capabilities regarding mass surveillance is jaw dropping and so is their complexity. If you toss in a controlling governance and financial catastrophe, the combined effect is the chilling Orwellian dystopia we see today.

A Look At Greek’s Surveillance and Wiretapping

The figures from the Greek Statistics Agency details – in depth – the scale of the country’s surveillance and wiretapping for the past five years (ever since the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008). Statistics show the country’s wiretaps have increased nearly 1,050 percent during this timeframe.

And, in 2008, the country attained two superbugs that allow Greece’s counter-terrorism and secret police units to listen in on the conversations of its countrymen on a scale that’s unprecedented.

As it stands currently, Internet service providers are not being forced to follow the security standards, meaning browsing histories and emails can be used… all in the name of national security.

One doesn’t have to speculate too hard on who it is the Greek government is they want to “spy” on: governments are ardent to link squatters, anarchists and activists to terrorist groups, property damage and bank robberies. The best way, countries have claimed, is listening in on the private conversations of the whole country.

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Eric London

A report issued by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Wednesday details an immense operation through which nearly 1 billion license plate records of hundreds of millions of drivers are tracked and huge databases are amassed, providing the American government with access to the history and recent whereabouts of the majority of the US population.

For years, a network of federal security agencies, local police departments and private companies have been using automatic license plate readers on police cruisers, in parking lots, at traffic intersections—even through smartphone apps—to photograph cars and their drivers and to record license plate numbers with the matching time, date and location.

“More and more cameras, longer retention periods, and widespread sharing allow law enforcement agents to assemble the individual puzzle pieces of where we have been over time into a single, high-resolution image of our lives,” the report says.

“The systems can also plot all vehicles at a particular location, such as the location where a crime—or a political protest—took place” through a procedure called “geofencing,” whereby “law enforcement or private companies can construct a virtual fence around a designated geographical area, to identify each vehicle entering that space.”

The use of this technology for such authoritarian procedures gives the lie to the claims of the government and security apparatus that the purpose of the license-tracking program is to stop crime.

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Arthur Silber

Chris Floyd: All Systems Go: The Core of the Acquittal - The acquittal of George Zimmerman for his killing of Trayvon Martin has already sparked a torrent of fervid commentary -- millions of words -- and will no doubt produce many millions more in the days and weeks to come. But good sense and insight have been near-impossible to find in the roiling surges of this tsunami. One place where you can find these rare commodities is -- as you might expect -- Arthur Silber's blog. Silber has posted a powerful essay on the case and its implications, extending and deepening a likewise excellent piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic, which Silber builds upon to striking effect. You should read the whole piece -- read the whole of both pieces -- but be prepared for some counter-intuitive conclusions, the chief of which is this: in the Trayvon Martin case, the system did not fail; the system worked, it did what it was supposed to do. The problem is that what it is supposed to do is to maintain and replicate the brutal, violent and, above all, dehumanizing injustice encoded in the core of the national culture. Trayvon Martin's life was broken on the hard, metallic spikes of this core; an unspeakable personal loss. But the travesty was not the case itself -- an inevitably ambiguous affair (an unwitnessed encounter between two men, one of them left dead) hobbled with a daunting burden of legal proof required to produce a guilty verdict. No, the real travesty is the system that produced the volatile circumstances of that fateful night, and all of the seething, hateful, fearful, alienating currents that lay behind the encounter. But read the eloquent insights of Silber and Coates for more.

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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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Tom Carter

On Friday, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) released a memorandum setting forth new “guidelines” concerning government surveillance of members of the press. “These revised guidelines will help ensure the proper balance is struck when pursuing investigations into unauthorized disclosures,” announced Attorney General Eric Holder.

Billed on the front page of the New York Times as a major reform that “would significantly narrow the circumstances under which journalists’ records could be obtained,” the memorandum actually does nothing of the kind.

The memorandum (available here) resembles Holder’s previous work on the subject of military commissions, incommunicado detention, drones, and assassination. Couched behind weasel-words, vague loopholes, and conciliatory language, the Obama administration always goes out of its way not to concede any limits on its asserted powers.

As an initial matter, the idea that an internal Department of Justice memorandum could constitute a “reform” is a sham. If the Obama administration can “self-restrict” its activities, then it can just as easily “self-expand” them.

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John Pilger

When I reported from South Africa in the 1960s, the Nazi admirer Johannes Vorster occupied the prime minister's residence in Cape Town. Thirty years later, as I waited at the gates, it was as if the guards had not changed. White Afrikaners checked my ID with the confidence of men in secure work. One carried a copy of 'Long Walk to Freedom', Nelson Mandela's autobiography. "It's very eenspirational," he said.

Mandela had just had his afternoon nap and looked sleepy; his shoelaces were untied. Wearing a bright gold shirt, he meandered into the room. "Welcome back," said the first president of a democratic South Africa, beaming. "You must understand that to have been banned from my country is a great honour." The sheer grace and charm of the man made you feel good. He chuckled about his elevation to sainthood. "That's not the job I applied for," he said drily.

Still, he was well used to deferential interviews and I was ticked off several times - "you completely forgot what I said" and "I have already explained that matter to you". In brooking no criticism of the African National Congress (ANC), he revealed something of why millions of South Africans will mourn his passing but not his "legacy".

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Paul Craig Roberts

The American people have suffered a coup d’état, but they are hesitant to acknowledge it. The regime ruling in Washington today lacks constitutional and legal legitimacy. Americans are ruled by usurpers who claim that the executive branch is above the law and that the US Constitution is a mere “scrap of paper.”

An unconstitutional government is an illegitimate government. The oath of allegiance requires defense of the Constitution “against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” As the Founding Fathers made clear, the main enemy of the Constitution is the government itself. Power does not like to be bound and tied down and constantly works to free itself from constraints.

The basis of the regime in Washington is nothing but usurped power. The Obama Regime, like the Bush/Cheney Regime, has no legitimacy. Americans are oppressed by an illegitimate government ruling, not by law and the Constitution, but by lies and naked force. Those in government see the US Constitution as a “chain that binds our hands.”

The South African apartheid regime was more legitimate than the regime in Washington. The apartheid Israeli regime in Palestine is more legitimate. The Taliban are more legitimate. Muammar Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein were more legitimate.

The only constitutional protection that the Bush/Obama regime has left standing is the Second Amendment, a meaningless amendment considering the disparity in arms between Washington and what is permitted to the citizenry. No citizen standing with a rifle can protect himself and his family from one of the Department of Homeland Security’s 2,700 tanks, or from a drone, or from a heavily armed SWAT force in body armor.

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Peter Symonds

Australian company Telstra signed a secret agreement in November 2001 to ensure that US intelligence and police agencies had unrestricted access to all electronic communications carried in its cables from the Asia Pacific into the US.

The existence of the contract was first exposed by the Washington Post on July 6 and subsequently in the Sydney Morning Herald. It is one of 28 national security agreements, involving foreign telecommunications corporations with connections to the US, that have been published in full on the Public Intelligence website. The American signatories vary from contract to contract, but include the US Defence Department, Justice Department, Homeland Security and the FBI.

This latest exposure comes on top of revelations by whistleblower Edward Snowden that the US National Security Agency (NSA) has access, via its PRISM program, to the data of nine major Internet companies, including Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo. This system of police state surveillance has ridden roughshod over the US constitution and international law.

The Telstra agreement has provided an alternative means for US spying on American and foreign citizens, by allowing access to the vast amounts of Internet and phone data passing through the backbone of international telecommunications—undersea fibre optic cables.

The binding contract with the US Justice Department and the FBI involved a joint venture company, Reach, between Telstra and its Hong Kong partner, Pacific Century CyberWorks (PCCW). The joint venture has since become the largest carrier of intercontinental telecommunications in Asia. It operates 82,300 kilometres of undersea cables in the Pacific linking China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Fiji to Hawaii and the continental US. It also has a major cable joining the US east coast to Europe via Cornwall in the US and Brittany in France.

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Thomas Hedges

John Kiriakou, the former CIA officer who blew the whistle on Bush’s torture program and is now in prison, sent an open letter[see below] to Edward Snowden last week warning him not to trust the FBI.

“DO NOT,” Kiriakou wrote, “under any circumstances, cooperate with the FBI. FBI agents will lie, trick, and deceive you. They will twist your words and play on your patriotism to entrap you. They will pretend to be people they are not – supporters, well-wishers, and friends – all the while wearing wires to record your out-of-context statements to use against you. The FBI is the enemy; it’s part of the problem, not the solution.”

These are the words of a registered Republican who voted for Gary Johnson, whom the Rosenberg Fund for Children denied a grant, informing him that he wasn’t “liberal enough,” Kiriakou says, for the award — and who last year received a birthday card from Jerry Falwell Jr.

Kiriakou is the first CIA veteran to be imprisoned. It was after he blew the whistle on Bush’s torture program that the CIA, FBI and Justice Department came down on him, at first charging him with aiding the enemy and later convicting him of disclosing the identities of undercover colleagues at the CIA.

The FBI raided his house in the process. They took his computers. They also took his family photos because, they said, he could have embedded secret messages in them.

“I did not start this thing with the idea that I was going to be a whistle-blower,” Kiriakou told Salon in December, two months before being sent off to a low-security prison in Loretto, Pa., with a 30-month sentence.

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Stephen Lendman

New evidence adds greater credibility to numerous past reports. So-called "rebels" bear responsibility for chemical weapons use. They're aided and abetted by Washington, other Western nations, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other regional rogue states. They're longstanding imperial partners. Human life has no value. Unchallenged dominance counts most. Nothing's too lawless to deter seeking it. Ravaging one country after another proves it. Syria's in the eye of the storm. Conflict persists daily. Mass killing and destruction follow.

Western-recruited death squad invaders bear responsibility. There's nothing civil about what's ongoing. Lawless aggression explains it. No evidence links Syrian forces to chemical weapons use. Claiming otherwise doesn't wash. Accusations exclude proof. Nothing independently verifiable exists. False charges substitute for truth and full disclosure. It's standard rogue state policy. Complicit partners operate this way. Previous articles discussed clear evidence. So-called "rebels" used chemical weapons multiple times.

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Stefan Steinberg

In a long interview with the weekly political magazine Die Zeit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel vehemently defended the work of US and western intelligence agencies and reaffirmed that her government was not prepared to offer whistleblower Edward Snowden asylum in Germany.

Merkel used the interview to whitewash the activities of intelligence agencies, and stressed that any discussions conducted over intelligence matters would be held in a spirit recognising that the US: “was and is our most trusted ally over decades.”

In recent weeks the German and sections of the international media have sought to play up differences between the German government and the US following the revelations of the extent of the NSA spying operation revealed by Snowden. The data released by Snowden made clear that in Europe Germany is the country that is most clearly subject to US surveillance.

Praising Merkel’s “caustic” criticisms of US intelligence practices, Die Tageszeitung welcomed one week ago what it referred to as a “transatlantic wake up call.” In fact, Merkel’s interview in Die Zeit makes clear that she will not lift a finger to challenge the illegal activities of the American or German intelligence agencies.

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