Thomas Gaist

The German news magazine Der Spiegel reported over the weekend that documents supplied by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden prove the NSA spied on internal communications at the United Nations headquarters in New York City during the summer of 2012. The NSA has also targeted the European Union and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), according to Der Spiegel.

Documents published by Der Spiegel show that the NSA tapped into the UN’s internal video conferencing system and deployed decryption technology to gain access to the video stream. Within weeks of penetrating the video stream, the NSA ramped up the number of communications being decrypted and monitored from 12 to 458.

“The data traffic gives us internal video teleconferences of the United Nations (yay!),” read one of the documents quoted in the report.

Der Spiegel further reported on a US intelligence program called the “Special Collection Service,” which operates in diplomatic facilities across the globe. “The surveillance is intensive and well organized and has little or nothing to do with warding off terrorists,” the magazine wrote.

Previous revelations have shown systematic spying by the US on EU governments. American intelligence operatives apparently gained access to the virtual private network (VPN) relied on by EU embassies in the US. Files copied from NSA servers by Snowden include detailed plans of the EU’s information technology infrastructure and other internal EU documents.

The latest revelations of the massive and international scope of the US government’s illegal spying operations come only two weeks after a White House press conference in which President Obama repeated the official lies about the supposedly limited and legally sanctioned character of the secret NSA programs.

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Julian Assange

It has been revealed today, thanks to Edward Snowden, that Google and other US tech companies received millions of dollars from the NSA for their compliance with the PRISM mass surveillance system.

So just how close is Google to the US securitocracy? Back in 2011 I had a meeting with Eric Schmidt, the then Chairman of Google, who came out to see me with three other people while I was under house arrest. You might suppose that coming to see me was gesture that he and the other big boys at Google were secretly on our side: that they support what we at WikiLeaks are struggling for: justice, government transparency, and privacy for individuals. But that would be a false supposition. Their agenda was much more complex, and as we found out, was inextricable from that of the US State Department. The full transcript of our meeting is available online through the WikiLeaks website.

The pretext for their visit was that Schmidt was then researching a new book, a banal tome which has since come out as The New Digital Age. My less than enthusiastic review of this book was published in the New York Times in late May of this year. On the back of that book are a series of pre-publication endorsements: Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Michael Hayden (former head of the CIA and NSA) and Tony Blair. Inside the book Henry Kissinger appears once again, this time given pride of place in the acknowledgements.

Schmidt’s book is not about communicating with the public. He is worth $6.1 billion and does not need to sell books. Rather, this book is a mechanism by which Google seeks to project itself into Washington. It shows Washington that Google can be its partner, its geopolitical visionary, who will help Washington see further about America’s interests. And by tying itself to the US state, Google thereby cements its own security, at the expense of all competitors.

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Stephen Lendman

Democracy exists in name only. Modern day McCarthyism harms everyone. State terror threatens everyone. Humanity's endangered.

In the late 1930s and 1940s, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) targeted alleged communist sympathizers. Uncorroborated hearsay alone mattered.

Prominent Hollywood figures were named. Hundreds of actors, directors, producers, screenwriters, musicians, songwriters, and other artists were accused of communist sympathies. They were blacklisted.

Notable ones were called the Hollywood Ten. They included screenwriter Alvah Bessie, screenwriter/director Herbert Biberman, screenwriter Lester Cole, director Edward Dmytryk, screenwriter Ring Lardner, Jr., screenwriter John Lawson, screenwriter Albert Maltz, screenwriter Samuel Ornitz, producer/screenwriter Adrian Scott, and author/screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.

McCarthyism signifies baseless slander, unscrupulous fearmongering, and political lynchings. Communist hearings got headlines. They were televised. They were witch-hunt prosecutions.

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Stephen Lendman

Whenever America goes to war or plans one, media scoundrels march in lockstep. Truth is the first casualty. Managed news misinformation substitutes. It happens every time. It's standard practice.

It's no different this time. Facts on the ground don't matter. They're systematically ignored. Nations Washington opposes are vilified. Harsh media scoundrel rhetoric targets them. It repeats with disturbing frequency. It's escalating now.

Wednesday's Ghouta incident ignited a firestorm. Emotion and misinformation substitute for responsible reporting. Credible analysis is systematically lacking. Fingers point the wrong way. It's de rigueur. It's shameless. It's reprehensible. It's unconscionable. It doesn't matter.

On August 22, New York Times editors headlined "The Corpses in Syria." Assad's government was called a "cutthroat regime." If he's proved responsible for Wednesday's Ghouta incident, "as many suspect, the United States and other major powers will almost certainly have to respond much more aggressively than they have so far," said Times editors.

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Barry Grey

The mounting provocations and war preparations against the Assad regime threaten to unleash a far wider and more bloody war across the Middle East—one that could bring the US into direct conflict with Russia and China.

US officials have outlined a series of options that are being considered for a direct assault by American and allied military forces against Syria, using Wednesday’s alleged chemical weapons attack as the pretext. The stepped-up military preparations make clear that the events on Wednesday are part of a provocation to justify yet another neo-colonial war in the Middle East.

The growing threat of direct US intervention in the war for regime-change against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was also underscored Friday by President Obama, who used an interview on CNN to indicate he was seeking to marshal international support and some form of legal cover for a US-led attack.

The New York Times reported in a front-page article Friday that senior officials from the Pentagon, the State Department and the intelligence agencies met with White House officials for three-and-a-half hours Thursday to outline possible military measures. The article cited unnamed officials, who said no decision was reached amid internal differences over whether to launch direct US military action in the coming days.

According to the Times, the military options discussed ranged from cruise missile strikes launched from US ships currently deployed in the Mediterranean Sea to a full-scale air war targeting civilian as well as military sites. The newspaper wrote: “The targets could include missile or artillery batteries that launch chemical munitions or nerve gas, as well as communications and support facilities. Symbols of the Assad government’s power—headquarters and government offices—also could be among the proposed targets, officials said.”

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Anna Filimonova

Recently Greece took the «honor» of first place in Europe for reducing budget expenditures on health services. In particular, expenditures on medications were reduced from 5.6 billion euros (2010) to 3.8 billion euros in 2011 and to 2.88 billion euros in 2012. As a direct result of this, over 50 world pharmaceutical companies have discontinued shipments of medications to Greece. It has become common for relatives of hospital patients to have to run exhausting marathons from pharmacy to pharmacy in search of needed medications. There is an acute shortage of medical equipment. State hospitals are short around 6,500 doctors and 20,000 nurses and orderlies; massive numbers of medical professionals are leaving the country.

Even those who are employed have difficulty paying for medical services, whose prices have abruptly shot up. More and more often people don't have the money to obtain quality medical assistance, especially in rural regions and on the islands. In a UN expert report published in May 2013, it was noted that over 10% of the total population of the country live in conditions of extreme poverty. Greece remains the only country in the Eurozone with no complex social assistance scheme, healthcare services are almost inaccessible to poor and low-income citizens, and almost a third of the population does not have state medical insurance.

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Stephen Lendman

Laws are made to be obeyed. Washington acts like they don't exist. Big Brother is official policy.

It's longstanding. It's no secret. It's well known. Now we know more. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) deserves credit. On August 21, it headlined "Intelligence Agency Attorney on How 'Multi-Communication Transactions' Allowed for Domestic Surveillance." EFF filed a FOIA lawsuit. For over a year, it fought for public disclosure. It demanded release of an 86-page FISA court opinion.

In October 2011, it was gotten. It called NSA's so-called "upstream collection" (UC) system illegal and unconstitutional. It violates the FISA Amendments Act. It breaches constitutional provisions. NSA violates the letter and spirit of federal law. Its UC occurs when it "gets a copy of Internet traffic as it flows through major telecommunications hubs, and searches through for 'selectors,' like an email address or a keyword."

Declassified documents show NSA collected 58,000 or more domestic emails. It obtained other US communications. It's done it annually for at least three years. It's likely done it much longer. It constitutes a gross invasion of privacy. It's unconstitutional. It violates Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment provisions. It's unrelated to terrorism.

In February 2006, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts appointed US District Court for the District of Columbia Judge John D. Bates to serve on the FISA court. From May 2009 - February 2013, he was presiding judge. He said (at least) three times over a three-year period, Washington...

..."disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program. (T)he volume and nature of the information (NSA's) been collecting is fundamentally different than what the court had been led to believe."

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David Walsh

US Army Private Bradley Manning, who helped bring to light innumerable crimes of the American government and armed forces, was sentenced to 35 years in military prison Wednesday, a sentence without precedent for the “crime” of whistle-blowing.

At a press conference the same day, Manning’s attorney, David Coombes, read aloud an open letter from the 25-year-old army private to President Barack Obama. The statement will be included in a request to the Secretary of the Army asking Obama to pardon Manning or commute his sentence to time already served.

The letter is an honest, powerful document, which outlines Manning’s motives for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents. It is unlike the stage-managed “confession” that Manning was obliged to give before his military tribunal in Ft. Meade, Maryland on August 14, during which he apologized for his actions.

In his letter to Obama, Manning first explains that the decision to release the incriminating material was “made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in.” He adds that he agreed at first with the methods adopted by US authorities following 9/11. Not until Manning was deployed to Iraq and began “reading secret military reports on a daily basis” did he start “to question the morality of what we were doing.”

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Gilad Atzmon

The campaign against me and my work fell apart a while ago. I assume that my Jewish detractors came to realise that I enjoy their attention and use it to affirm my criticism of their tribal and exclusivist identity politics.

But yesterday I had a nostalgic moment reading Max Blumenthal dissing me publicly. When Blumenthal was asked about Israeli critics he ended up talking about the vile ‘anti Semites’, ‘neo Fascists’ and the ‘racists’ in the movements.

Interestingly enough, he failed to remember any name but one – Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon is a “pure anti Semite who believes that all of the problems of Israel flow not from colonialism but from Judaism.” said Blumenthal. Apparently, not buying into the clumsy ‘colonial paradigm’ makes me into a ‘neo Fascist’, ‘anti Semite’ and a ‘racist’.

It is obviously clear that Blumenthal didn’t read a single word by me. I naively believe that if someone insists to criticise my work, he or she better spend some time to read me first. It is an established fact that Palestinian activist Ali Abunimah also called for my disavowal while admitting to Prof. Norton Mezvinsky that he has never read a single word by me. Tragically enough, the fear of intellectual exchange and open discourse is endemic within the Jewish progressive ghetto but also within some quarters of the solidarity movement.

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Bill Van Auken

The unsubstantiated charges that the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad carried out a chemical weapons attack outside Damascus killing large numbers of civilians have all the hallmarks of a staged provocation aimed at provoking Western intervention.

Reports of the attack were made by Western-backed opponents of the Assad regime early Wednesday, just as a United Nations chemical weapons inspection team, admitted to Syria by the government just 72 hours earlier, began its work.

Indeed, according to the opposition sources reporting the chemical weapons attacks, they took place in Eastern Ghouta in the eastern suburbs of Damascus, just a few miles from where the UN inspection team is headquartered.

Initial contradictory reports of the alleged attack put the number of victims at as few as 20 and as many as 1,300.

Why the Assad regime should choose such a moment to launch large-scale chemical attacks—under the noses of the UN inspectors—and what motive he would have for doing so, under conditions in which his military has been inflicting a series of defeats on the US-backed “rebels,” has not been explained in any of the extensive media coverage of these unverified allegations.

Nonetheless, the US and its NATO allies, the principal supporters of the bloody war for regime change in Syria, lost no time in issuing condemnations and demanding an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council, which convened behind closed doors in New York Wednesday afternoon.

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Thomas Gaist

Three secret US court opinions declassified Wednesday show that the NSA collected at least 58,000 emails and other US communications per year that were “wholly domestic” and completely unrelated to terrorism. According to a senior US official quoted in USA Today, the court opinions were declassified by Director of National Intelligence James Clapper because Clapper believed they show “effective self-policing” by the NSA.

In one of the documents, a heavily blacked-out 86-page 2011 secret court opinion released Wednesday that declared NSA activities to be unconstitutional, US District Judge John Bates wrote that on three occasions within a three-year period, the state “disclosed a substantial misrepresentation regarding the scope of a major collection program.”

The declassified opinion further stated that “the volume and nature of the information [the government] has been collecting is fundamentally different than what the court had been led to believe.”

The declassified documents were posted at icontherecord.tumblr.com, a web page that was created on Wednesday “at the direction of the President of the United States,” and which claimed to provide “immediate, ongoing and direct access to factual information related to the lawful foreign surveillance activities carried out by the US Intelligence Community.”

While the opinions were released as part of damage control efforts aimed at demonstrating the supposed effectiveness of judicial oversight of surveillance, they show a pattern of regular and massive violations by the government of its own regulations.

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Paul Craig Roberts

David Miranda (2nd L), partner of U.S. journalist Glenn Green-
wald (L), speaks to the media at Rio de Janeiro's International
Airport August 19, 2013. (Credit: Reuters/Ricardo Moraes)

The question is: are there sufficient brainwashed people in both countries to sustain the US/UK myth that “freedom and democracy” are attained via war crimes?

On July 23 I wrote about how the US reversed roles with the USSR and became the tyrant that terrifies the world. We have now had further confirmation of that fact. It comes from two extraordinary actions by Washington’s British puppet state.

David Miranda, the Brazilian partner of Glenn Greenwald, who is reporting on the illegal and unconstitutional spying by the National Stasi Agency, was seized, no doubt on Washington’s orders, by the puppet British government from the international transit zone of a London airport. Miranda had not entered the UK, but he was seized by UK authorities. Washington’s UK puppets simply kidnapped him, threatened him for nine hours, and stole his computer, phones, and all his electronic equipment. As a smug US official told the media, “the purpose was to send a message.”

You might remember that Edward Snowden was stuck for some weeks in the international transit zone of the Moscow airport. The Obama tyrant repeatedly browbeat Russia’s President Putin to violate the law and kidnap Snowden for Obama. Unlike the once proud and law-abiding British, Putin refused to place Washington’s desires above law and human rights.

The second extraordinary violation occurred almost simultaneously with UK authorities appearing at the Guardian newspaper and illegally destroying the hard drives on the newspaper’s computers with the vain intention of preventing the newspaper from reporting further Snowden revelations of US/UK high criminality.

It is fashionable in the US and UK governments and among their sycophants to speak of “gangster state Russia.” But we all know who the gangsters are. The worst criminals of our time are the US and UK governments. Both are devoid of all integrity, all honor, all mercy, all humanity. Many members of both governments would have made perfect functionaries in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany.

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Stephen Lendman

Arguably America, Israel and Britain are the developed world's most repressive states. Democracy's a convenient illusion. It exists in name only. Police state ruthlessness reflects policy. It's not new. It's worse than ever now. Modern technology makes it easy. It's used oppressively. It targets ordinary people. It's done for any reason or none at all.

On August 18, UK authorities detained Glenn Greenwald's partner, David Miranda. Washington was conspiratorially involved. It didn't surprise. Both countries operate lawlessly. They partner against freedom. They're waging war on fundamental rights. They want them entirely destroyed. They want unchallenged power. They'll stop at nothing to get it.

Miranda was held incommunicado for nine hours. He was denied legal counsel. A counterterrorism law pretext was used to do so. He was in transit from Berlin to Rio de Janeriro. He threatened no one. He violated no laws. His laptop, cell phone, camera, memory sticks, DVDs and game consoles were confiscated. It was done lawlessly. Police states operate this way.

Britain matches some of the worst. It's waging war on social justice. It wants freedom destroyed. It wants opposition to anti-populist repressiveness eliminated. Lawless crackdowns target Muslims. False terrorism charges follow. Neoliberal harshness is official policy. So is sweeping secrecy.

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Thomas Gaist and Joseph Kishore

The UK government is aggressively defending its decision to detain David Miranda, the partner of Glenn Greenwald, for nearly nine hours at Heathrow Airport, seizing his laptop, camera, cell phone and other personal items. Miranda was detained under a UK terrorism law while traveling from Berlin to his home in Rio de Janeiro.

The detention of Miranda was a blatant act of political intimidation directed at all those who seek to reveal crimes and conspiracies against democratic rights carried out by the British and US governments, including former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

Snowden, who has worked closely with Greenwald, is currently exiled in Russia. He has been the subject of an international campaign of vilification, led by the Obama administration.

According to a report by the Reuters news agency, “One US security official told Reuters that one of the main purposes of the British government’s detention and questioning of Miranda was to send a message to recipients of Snowden’s materials, including the Guardian, that the British government was serious about trying to shut down the leaks.”

In other words, the detention had nothing to do with “terrorism” or “national security,” but was, rather, a political decision. This decision clearly involved the highest levels of the US and British governments. On Monday, a White House spokesman acknowledged that the Obama administration had been given a “heads up” about the planned detention. British Prime Minister David Cameron also had advance notice of the plans to detain Miranda, Downing Street confirmed yesterday. The Guardian quoted a source within the government as saying, “We were kept abreast in the usual way. We do not direct police investigations.”

The suggestion from the UK government that somehow the final decision was made by local police agencies is a fraud. The approval of Miranda’s dentition clearly came from No 10 and the White House.

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John W. Whitehead

“The National Security Agency’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.” — Senator Frank Church (1975)

We now find ourselves operating in a strange paradigm where the government not only views the citizenry as suspects but treats them as suspects, as well. Thus, the news that the National Security Agency (NSA) is routinely operating outside of the law and overstepping its legal authority by carrying out surveillance on American citizens is not really much of a surprise. This is what happens when you give the government broad powers and allow government agencies to routinely sidestep the Constitution.

Indeed, as I document in my book, A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, these newly revealed privacy violations by the NSA are just the tip of the iceberg. Consider that the government’s Utah Data Center (UDC), the central hub of the NSA’s vast spying infrastructure, will be a clearinghouse and a depository for every imaginable kind of information—whether innocent or not, private or public—including communications, transactions and the like. In fact, anything and everything you’ve ever said or done, from the trivial to the damning—phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, commuter toll records, etc.—will be tracked, collected, catalogued and analyzed by the UDC’s supercomputers and teams of government agents.

By sifting through the detritus of your once-private life, the government will come to its own conclusions about who you are, where you fit in, and how best to deal with you should the need arise. Indeed, we are all becoming data collected in government files. Whether or not the surveillance is undertaken for “innocent” reasons, surveillance of all citizens, even the innocent sort, gradually poisons the soul of a nation. Surveillance limits personal options—denies freedom of choice—and increases the powers of those who are in a position to enjoy the fruits of this activity. If this is the new “normal” in the United States, it is not friendly to freedom.

Frankly, we are long past the point where we should be merely alarmed. These are no longer experiments on our freedoms. These are acts of aggression.

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