Liu Chang / Jeff J. Brown / Paul Craig Roberts

Paul Craig Roberts: Xinhua is a news agency of the Chinese government. The Chinese government sees Washington as a largely spent power. Liu Chang puts Washington’s loss of uni-power status very concisely.

After you read the official Liu Chang's commentary (below), read Jeff J. Brown’s commentary on Liu Chang’s report.

Jeff Brown is an American citizen who has worked in Africa, the Middle East, Europe and China, where he has lived for 10 years. He in fluent in English, Portuguese , Arabic, French, and Mandarin. Recently, Jeff Brown published a book, 44 Days Backpacking In China available from Amazon.com.

If you have not recently visited China, this book will give you an idea of the rising superpower, while the bankrupt and de-industrialized US disappears into Third World status. China has the manufacturing and industrial power that America had before Wall Street and the corporations sold out the country. Russia has abundant natural resources. A China/Russian alliance is the consequence of US hegemonic behavior.

Moreover, both Russia and China have recently emerged from their existence under police states comparable to the one that is rising in the US. Countries that have recently lived under police regimes are not interested in returning to them. In the presstitute American media, both China and Russia are portrayed to be the police state that, in reality, now exists in the US.

Americans have been sold out by their “leaders.” America, looted and depleted by Wall Street and the military/security complex, is sucked dry like the victim of a spider’s web. America has become a caricature of itself. America is the source of endless wars on innocent peoples who are demonized as ”terrorists” for no other reasons than profit for the American military/security complex and expanded living space for Israelis.

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Alex Lantier

The US military-intelligence complex has developed through criminal means the surveillance infrastructure of a global police state.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is spying on hundreds of millions of users of Google and Yahoo services, according to a report yesterday in the Washington Post based on internal documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The NSA has broken into the main communication links connecting Yahoo and Google data servers worldwide. In a program codenamed “MUSCULAR,” operated jointly with Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the agencies collect and monitor all communications—involving US and non-US citizens alike—between these servers.

Because the data culling is indiscriminate, the NSA refers to it as “full take,” “bulk access” and “high-volume.” After the communications are collected, they are searched based on undisclosed criteria, with much of it sent on to permanent locations run by the NSA.

The report shatters claims by the Obama administration and American legislators that US agencies respect privacy rights and operate under strict legal oversight. Testimony by spy agency chiefs before the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee on Wednesday, aimed at defusing the diplomatic crisis over the exposure of US spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and hundreds of millions of phone and SMS communications in Europe, consisted of disinformation and lies.

A top secret NSA document shows that in the one-month period ending January 9, 2013 the MUSCULAR program sent back more than 181 million new records for storage at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. These records include both “metadata” information—such as the identity or location of the sender and receiver of messages—and the content of text, audio and video communications.

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John W. Whitehead

“The perception here is of a United States where security has trumped liberty, intelligence agencies run amok (vacuuming up data of friend and foe alike), and the once-admired “checks and balances” built into American governance and studied by European schoolchildren have become, at best, secret reviews of secret activities where opposing arguments get no hearing.” – Roger Cohen

Recent reports indicating that President Obama was aware of and personally approved an NSA program that involved spying on the personal communications of various international leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, have once again highlighted the deception and intransigence of the Obama administration in dealing with the revelations that the National Security Agency has been acting outside the bounds of the law, sucking up electronic communications the world over.

While this may come as a shock to most Americans, I’ve been writing about the NSA’s illegal surveillance tactics since the 1980s, which features prominently in my new book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State. However, this latest development in the spying saga—that the NSA has been aiming its surveillance activities at the citizens of allied countries, including France and Germany—has thrown a kink into the Obama administration’s attempts at maintaining a cozy relationship with its foreign allies.

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