Bill Van Auken

Avraham Shalom, Ami Ayalon, Yaakov Peri, Yuval Diskin,
Avi Dichter and Carmi Gillon (Sony/Allstar Picture Library)

A secret memo provided by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden to the British Guardian newspaper reveals that the US spy agency is funneling raw intelligence data, including information from intercepted communications of US citizens, to Israeli intelligence.

“The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens,” the Guardian article by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill reports.

The undated five-page memo records an agreement reached between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart, the ISNU (Israeli Sigint National Unit), in March 2009, during the first months of the Obama administration.

Entitled “Protection of US Persons,” it purports to lay out a protocol for the Israeli spy agency’s handling of “signals intelligence information that has not been reviewed for foreign intelligence purposes or minimized,” i.e., raw intercepts provided without any filtering by the NSA itself. “Minimization” refers to an ostensible policy of determining whether phone calls, emails and other communications intercepted from American citizens are “essential to assess or understand the significance of the foreign intelligence.”

The memo states that the terms of the agreement are designed to ensure that the handling of such material by Israeli intelligence is “consistent with the requirements upon NSA by US law and Executive Order to establish safeguards protecting the rights of US persons under the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution.”

The Fourth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights, protects against “unreasonable searches and seizures,” barring searches without narrowly defined warrants based on probable cause. It has been ripped to shreds by the NSA’s domestic spying operations, which amount to the wholesale seizure of personal records from virtually every American citizen and millions of people abroad, with no specific warrants whatsoever.

While insisting that the Israelis operate with deference to the US Constitution and law, the memo adds, “This agreement is not intended to create any legally enforceable rights and shall not be construed to be either an international agreement or a legally binding instrument according to international law.” In other words, in practice ISNU and the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad are free to do as they please.

More »

Peter Symonds

Chemical claims should be investigated, not used as pretext
for war. [Recent] reporting has called into question these early,
credulous reports—and highlighted the continuing media failure
to treat WMD claims with the skepticism they deserve. (FAIR)

US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov are due to meet today in Geneva for talks over Moscow’s plan for Syria to give up its chemical weapons. Even before the two sit down, however, the Obama administration has already made clear that the US intends to exploit the negotiations to provide a new pretext for its planned military onslaught on Syria.

In an online chat forum yesterday, Kerry insisted that the US would continue to push for a binding UN resolution that would punish Syria if it delayed or broke off the disarmament process envisaged in the Russian proposal. “We need a full resolution from the Security Council in order to have confidence that this has the force it ought to have,” he said.

The French government has already drawn up a resolution that it plans to table in the UN Security Council that France’s foreign minister Laurent Fabius declared would involve “extremely serious” consequences if Syria failed to adhere to a strict timetable for the destruction of its chemical weapons stocks.

The French resolution also contains a condemnation of the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad for the gassing of civilians. Like the Obama administration, the French government’s “case” for punishing Syria is based on lies. It has provided no evidence that the chemical weapons attack on August 21 was carried out by the Syrian military, nor has it refuted the findings of a Russian investigation which found that anti-Assad Islamist militias were responsible.

More »

Paul Craig Roberts

Putin established as the leader of the free world and the defender of the rule of law - Paul Craig Roberts

Putin’s article in the September 11 New York Times has the stuck pigs squealing. The squealing stuck pigs are just who you thought they would be–all those whose agendas and profits would be furthered by an attack on Syria by the obama Stasi regime.

Included among the squealing stuck pigs are Human Rights Watch bloggers who seem to be financed out of the CIA’s back pocket.

Does any institution remain that has not been corrupted by Washington’s money?

Notice that the reason Putin is being criticized is that he has blocked the obama regime from attacking Syria and slaughtering countless numbers of Syrians in the name of human rights. The stuck pigs are outraged that obama’s war has been blocked. They were so much looking forward to the mass slaughter that they believe would advance their profits and agendas.

Most of Putin’s critics are too intellectually challenged to comprehend that Putin’s brilliant and humane article has left Putin the leader of the free world and defender of the rule of law and exposed obama for what he is–the leader of a rogue, lawless, unaccountable government committed to lies and war crimes.

Putin, being diplomatic, was very careful in his criticism of obama’s September 10 speech in which obama sought to justify Washington’s lawlessness in terms of “American exceptionalism.” Obama, attempting to lift his criminal regime by the bootstraps up into the moral heavens, claimed that United States government policy is “what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.”

What obama told Americans is exactly what Hitler told the Germans. The Russians, having borne more than anyone else the full weight of the German war machine, know how dangerous it is to encourage people to think of themselves as exceptional, unbound by law, the Geneva Conventions, the UN Security Council, and humane concerns for others. Putin reminded obama that “God created us equal.”

More »