The detention of David Miranda and the “war on terror”

Joseph Kishore

The detention and interrogation by UK authorities of David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, is a chilling act of political intimidation.

Miranda was detained and questioned for nine hours—the maximum allowed by the relevant section of the British Terrorism Act of 2000. He was denied the right to a lawyer and the right to remain silent. His personal effects were seized and not returned, including his computer, cell phone, camera, and memory sticks with documents leaked by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

“They got me to tell them the passwords for my computer and mobile phone,” Miranda told the Guardian. “They said I was obliged to answer all their questions … They were threatening me all the time and saying I would be put in jail if I didn’t cooperate.”

These are the acts of political gangsters operating outside of all legal restraint. Miranda, a private citizen, was detained, questioned, threatened and had his property confiscated solely because of his relationship to Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras, whom Miranda had been visiting in Berlin. Both Greenwald and Poitras have worked with Snowden to expose secret and illegal spying programs by the United States and its international collaborators, including the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).

While Miranda was detained in Britain, the central protagonist was the Obama administration, which has led an international campaign of vilification and persecution against Snowden since he first revealed himself in June. On Monday, a White House spokesman said that the US had been given a “heads up” about the British action before it happened, and that US and British intelligence agencies have had extensive discussions. While the administration claims that it did not ask the British to seize Miranda, a formal request was hardly necessary. The police and spy agencies of the two countries operate on the same wavelength.


Growing Up In America

Paul Craig Roberts

Things Are Bad And Getting Worse

Terrible things are happening faster than we can keep up with them. Monsanto, widely regarded as a criminal enterprise, is expanding its monopoly over seeds and food production into Chile and Latin America. Monsanto has given up for now on monopolizing Europe’s agriculture, but has brought the EU around to allowing it to market GMO food products. Money speaks, which perhaps is the reason that Chile’s former president, Michelle Bachelet, introduced the pro-Monsanto legislation that one of the legislative chambers has passed. There are mass demonstrations in Chile against the legislation that destroys Chile’s sovereignty over its food production, but just as Monsanto can purchase the US government it also can purchase the Chilean government. In our day and time, governments are just another commodity to be bought and sold by powerful corporations.

And then there is Fukushima. Media have led us to think that this nuclear crisis is over, but it appears that it is only beginning. The risk of apocalypse is high. You can read here one assessment of the risks to all of us. Here another. And here another. And another. And here.

As soon as Egypt gets a democracy with an elected president, Washington has the military, which is dependent on Washington for money and equipment, to overthrow the democracy, just as Washington does in Honduras and elsewhere. The Egyptian government that democracy produced was Islamist. The Muslim Brotherhood is moderate, not radical, but the moderate Islamists showed lack of enthusiasm for supporting the Washington-Israeli policy of genocide for Palestine. Washington finds “freedom and democracy” unacceptable when it does not support Washington’s foreign policy.

This fall Congress will again be confronted with the debt ceiling limit. To keep this specter at bay, the US Treasury has been employing questionable means. The crisis that has been kicked down the road is likely to worsen, because the economy is likely to renew its decline in ways that cannot be disguised by manipulated statistics. Sooner or later the world will realize that the US cannot pay its bills and that the world’s reserve currency is being ruthlessly printed in order to prop up busted banks and the US Treasury. The house of cards that US economic policy has constructed in the 21st century can collapse at any time.


Egypt’s Junta Has Nothing to Lose

M. K. Bhadrakumar

The US is immensely pleased with the Egyptian junta.

The appointment of Robert Ford as the new American ambassador to Egypt was indeed an ominous sign that the Obama administration expected civil war conditions to arise in Egypt. Ford’s forte during his hugely successful «diplomatic» assignment in Baghdad in the middle of the last decade was to organize the notorious death squads, which tore Mesopotamia apart and destroyed Iraq almost irreparably.

Equally, Ford played a seminal role in his subsequent ambassadorial assignment in Damascus in 2011 in successfully triggering the Syrian civil war. Ford is the living embodiment of the stunning reality that between the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, there has been no real shift in the United States’ policies in the Middle East aimed at perpetuating its regional hegemony…

Make no mistake about it that the US game plan is to destabilize and destroy Egypt just the same way Iraq and Syria have been destroyed so that Israel’s absolute security is assured in the region for the conceivable future.

This is the conclusion that can be safely drawn as the Egyptian junta launched the mass murder of hundreds of Egyptian protestors on Wednesday. A bloodbath of horrendous proportions has commenced in Egypt.


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