Stephen Lendman

On October 1, French newspaper Le Monde headlined "France in the NSA's crosshair: phone networks under surveillance." More on that below.

Previous articles explained. NSA operates lawlessly. It does so by rules it invents. It spies globally. Enormous amounts of data are collected. It's longstanding. It's been ongoing for decades.

Post-9/11, it intensified. It's out-of-control today. It doesn't matter. NSA is a rogue agency. It's a power unto itself. Congressional leaders support it. So does Obama.

Spying domestically isn't for national security. Nor is monitoring allies. It's old-fashioned espionage using state-of-the-art technology. It's about control. It's for economic advantage.

It's to be one up on foreign competitors. It's for information used advantageously in trade, political, and military relations. Foreign embassies, consulates and missions are bugged. NSA calls them "targets."

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John W. Whitehead

“Democracy means that if the doorbell rings in the early hours, it is likely to be the milkman.” ~Winston Churchill

It’s 3 a.m. You’ve been asleep for hours when suddenly you hear a loud “Crash! Bang! Boom!” Based on the yelling, shouting and mayhem, it sounds as if someone—or several someones—are breaking through your front door. With your heart racing and your stomach churning, all you can think about is keeping your family safe from the intruders who have invaded your home. You have mere seconds before the intruders make their way to your bedroom. Desperate to protect your loved ones, you scramble to lay hold of something—anything—that you might use in self-defense. It might be a flashlight, your son’s baseball bat, or that still unloaded gun you thought you’d never need. In a matter of seconds, the intruders are at your bedroom door. You brace for the confrontation, a shaky grip on your weapon. In the moments before you go down for the count, shot multiple times by the strangers who have invaded your home, you get a good look at your accosters. — It’s the police.

Before I go any further, let me start by saying this: the problem is not that all police are bad. The problem, as I point out in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, is that increasing numbers of police officers are badly trained, illiterate when it comes to the Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment, and, in some cases, willfully ignorant about the fact that they are supposed to be peacekeepers working for us, the taxpayer.

Unfortunately, with every passing week, we are hearing more and more horror stories in which homeowners are injured or killed simply because they mistook a SWAT team raid by police for a home invasion by criminals. Never mind that the unsuspecting homeowner, woken from sleep by the sounds of a violent entry, has no way of distinguishing between a home invasion by a criminal as opposed to a government agent. Too often, the destruction of life and property wrought by the police is no less horrifying than that carried out by criminal invaders.

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Solomon Comissiong

A common description for the term addiction is, “the continued repetition of a behavior despite adverse consequences, or a neurological impairment leading to such behaviors…” This definition is most appropriate in regard to the world’s most destructive killing machine – the United States military.

The United States government has long developed an acquired taste for war. And because much of the US population is completely obsequious to whatever their duplicitous government tells them, they, too, have become complacent to a perpetual state of war. Americans punch-drunk on nationalism fail to realize that “their” government is beholden to the interests of imperialism, not their general well being. Like well controlled puppets they chant, “USA number one”, over and over and over again, failing to ever question what “their” country is actually number one in.

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Paul Craig Roberts

The year 2014 could be shaping up as the year that the chickens come home to roost.

Americans, even well-informed ones, don’t know all of the mistakes made by neoconized and corrupted Washington in the past two decades. However, enough is known to see that the US has lost economic and political power, and that the loss is irreversible.

The economic cost of this lost will be born by what remains of the middle class and the increasingly poverty-stricken lower class. The one percent will have offshore gold holdings and large sums of money in foreign currencies and other foreign assets to see them through.

In the political arena, the collapse of the Soviet Union presented Washington with the grand opportunity to reallocate the Pentagon budget to other uses. Part of the reduction could have been returned to taxpayers for their own use. Another part could have been used to improve worn out infrastructure. And another part could have been used to repair and improve the social safety net, thus insuring domestic tranquility. A final, but perhaps most important part, could have been used to begin repaying the Treasury IOUs in the Social Security Trust Fund from which Washington has borrowed and spent $2 trillion, leaving non-marketable IOUs in the place of the Social Security payroll tax revenues that Washington raided in order to fund its wars and current operations.

Instead, influenced by neoconservative warmongers who advocated America using its “sole superpower” status to establish hegemony over the world, Washington let hubris and arrogance run away with it. The consequence was that Washington destroyed its soft power with lies and war crimes, only to find that its military power was insufficient to support its occupation of Iraq, its conquest of Afghanistan, and its financial imperialism.

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Gilad Atzmon

This must-see short documentary by David Sheen and Max Blumenthal is about the appalling treatment of African migrants in Israel.

The film reveals a most ugly manifestation of Jewish ethnocentrism, exclusivism and bigotry, but you may notice that none of the Israeli racists in the film identifies as a ‘Zionist’ or showed any concern for the Zionist nature of Israel. Instead they, and without exception, express their deep concern with the ‘Jewish State’ its ‘Jewish character’ and matters pertaining to the Jewish religion and Jewish ‘purity’.

We see MK Ben Ari on camera saying “We are not an immigration State,.. our state is different – it is a Jewish State.. for me the Jewish people are precious…this is our only Jewish state”, and PM Benjamin Netanyahu speaks about demographic fears and the ‘Jewish character’ of Israel.

For over a decade now, I have been suggesting that Israeli racism is driven by Jewish supremacism rather than any Zionist ideology. I have argued that Zionism, largely, a foreign notion to most Israelis, is just one symptom of Jewish exclusivism – and for saying it, I have been denounced, harassed and smeared by most Jewish Left organisations and even a few Palestinians. But this documentary actually proves that, all along, I was right. For the Israeli, Jewishness rather than Zionism, is the guiding political signifier. This film is not about Zionist abuse or Israeli ‘new racism’, it is actually about Goy-hatred that is intrinsic to the Jewish political discourse.

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Daniel McAdams

The Times of London yesterday [October 19, 2013] published a sensational Syria story "Assad’s snipers target unborn babies" based on an interview with British doctor David Nott, who had volunteered his medical expertise in Syria over the past several weeks. Dr. Nott said that he had seen several pregnant women come in with abdominal wounds. He speculated that snipers must have been playing some sort of game where they would target the fetuses of pregnant women -- a grisly business to be sure. Said Dr. Nott:

It seemed to me that it was some sort of a game they (the snipers) were having with each other... One day we'd have pregnant women being brought in with gunshot wounds to the uterus. Not just one or two, but seven or eight, which meant to me they (the snipers) must be targeting pregnant women.

Nott "heard local rumors" that these snipers, who seemed were playing a game, were Chinese or Azeri mercenaries fighting with Assad's government forces. None of this was confirmed in any way. Speculation.

But how did Rupert Murdoch's Times of London report this very imprecise bit of speculation on the part of Dr. Nott -- in a huge dramatic spread? How is that for thorough journalism?

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John Pilger

On the set: Cate Blanchett, Woody Allen + unidentified extra

As an inveterate film fan, I turn to the listings every week and try not to lose hope. I search the guff that often passes for previews, and I queue for a ticket with that flicker of excitement reminiscent of matinees in art deco splendour.

Once inside, lights down, beer in hand, hope recedes as the minutes pass. How many times have I done a runner? There is a cinema I go to that refunds your money if you're out the door within 20 minutes of the opening titles. The people there have knowing looks. My personal best is less than five minutes of the awful Moulin Rouge.

The other day, I saw 'Blue Jasmine', written and directed by Woody Allen. The critics' applause was thunderous. "A work of brilliance" ... "Pure movie-going pleasure" ... Smart, sophisticated and hugely enjoyable" ... Brilliantly funny". One journalist called it a "miracle". So I queued for a ticket, even conjuring the wonderful scene from 'Annie Hall' (1975) when Woody Allen, standing in a movie queue, meets his hero, Marshall Mcluhan: he of "the medium is the message".

Today, he might as well call up Hans Christian Andersen's parable about a naked emperor, which applies to his latest "work of brilliance". By any fair and reasonable measure, it is crap.

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Ray McGovern

Consortiumnews Exclusive: President Obama says he welcomes the debate on post-9/11 surveillance of Americans and the world, but that debate was only made meaningful by the disclosures of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who was then indicted and sought asylum in Russia, where he just met with some ex-U.S. intelligence officials, including Ray McGovern.

I’ve had a couple of days to reflect after arriving back from Moscow where my whistleblower colleagues Coleen Rowley, Jesselyn Radack, Tom Drake and I formally presented former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with the annual Sam Adams Associates award for integrity in intelligence.

The thought that companioned me the entire time was the constant admonition of my Irish grandmother: “Show me your company, and I’ll tell you who you are!” I cannot remember ever feeling so honored as I did by the company I kept over the past week.

That includes, of course, Snowden himself, WikiLeaks journalist Sarah Harrison (and “remotely” Julian Assange) who, together with Russian civil rights lawyer Anatoly Kucherena, helped arrange the visit, and – last but not least – the 3,000 Internet transparency/privacy activists at OHM2013 near Amsterdam, whom Tom, Jesselyn, Coleen and I addressed in early August and who decided to crowd-source our travel. (See: “In the Whistleblower Chalet” by Silkie Carlo.)

As representatives of Sam Adams Associates for Integrity in Intelligence, we were in Moscow last Wednesday not only to honor Snowden with the award for integrity, but also to remind him (and ourselves) that we all stand on the shoulders of patriots who have gone before and pointed the way.

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Paul Driessen

Computer models, scare stories and ad hominem rants underscore the alarmists’ desperation.

Al Gore is in full attack mode, employing his ridiculous “Climate Reality Project” to “Draw the Line on Denial,” even as he laid off 90% of the staff at his “Alliance for Climate Protection.” Greenpeace has joined the fray, launching a “Dealing in Doubt” campaign that blames ExxonMobil for funding the “global warming denial machine.”

ClimateProgress.org blogger Joe Romm faithfully echoes “Goreacle” and Greenpeace hysterics and blame-casting. To serve his partisan propaganda, he completely ignores the reality that the climate cataclysm cabal outspends the “deniers” by at least $1,000 to $1; ExxonMobil hasn’t supported skeptic groups for years; and the real Big Oil money has gone to extreme green groups.

Chesapeake Energy alone gave $25 million to the Sierra Club, to advance the radical organization’s anti-coal campaign. That one grant is ten times more money than the Heartland Institute received from all fossil fuel energy companies in its entire 29-year history, notes Heartland president Joseph Bast.

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Julie Hyland

Ultimately, the mass impoverishment determined upon by the ruling elite can be implemented only through dictatorial means.

The campaign of vilification and intimidation against the Guardian newspaper for publishing the disclosures of former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden is without precedent in a supposedly democratic country.

Raids on newspaper offices, the forced destruction of computer drives and threats to arrest journalists are actions more commonly associated with military dictatorships. But this is exactly what has been meted out against the Guardian, with threats of worse to come.

On Tuesday, a parliamentary debate is scheduled, instigated by Conservative backbencher Julian Smith, on whether the newspaper is guilty of treason for reporting the illegal surveillance programmes operated by the NSA and Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Smith has already written to the Metropolitan Police calling for the Guardian to be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act and the Terrorism Act 2000.

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Paola Manduca

Iraq's Ministry of Health and the World Health Organisation have published a summary report of ex-post assessment of the prevalence of birth defects, still-births and miscarriages in the country obtained through a household survey. Before publication of the report, I criticised in the British Medical Journal (Rapid responses, September 10, 2013) the design of the survey as inappropriate. Post-publication, clarification of the points I raised was necessary and action to finish the study acquiring historical residence and exposure of the cases should be accepted by the MoH in Baghdad and the WHO, and is feasible. Completing the study with clarifications and these data will show its relevance and pitfalls more clearly.

The study was designed with an inbuilt prejudice of "not wishing to investigate correlation with exposure to depleted uranium"; not very scientific. The MoH-WHO study didn't request information about all environmental exposures and did not consider any other of the complex post-war detritus and situations that could affect reproductive health.

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Michael Crichton

Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, CA – This was not the first discussion of environmentalism as a religion, but it caught on and was widely quoted. Michael explains why religious approaches to the environment are inappropriate and cause damage to the natural world they intend to protect. This essay was published on September 15, 2003 by Science & Public Policy Institute.

I have been asked to talk about what I consider the most important challenge facing mankind, and I have a fundamental answer. The greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda. Perceiving the truth has always been a challenge to mankind, but in the information age (or as I think of it, the disinformation age) it takes on a special urgency and importance.

We must daily decide whether the threats we face are real, whether the solutions we are offered will do any good, whether the problems we're told exist are in fact real problems, or non-problems. Every one of us has a sense of the world, and we all know that this sense is in part given to us by what other people and society tell us; in part generated by our emotional state, which we project outward; and in part by our genuine perceptions of reality. In short, our struggle to determine what is true is the struggle to decide which of our perceptions are genuine, and which are false because they are handed down, or sold to us, or generated by our own hopes and fears.

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Barry Grey

US newspapers on Sunday led with reports of a tentative settlement between JPMorgan Chase and the Obama Justice Department of numerous investigations into the bank's fraudulent sale of toxic mortgage-backed securities in the lead-up to the 2008 Wall Street crash.

The reports presented the deal, under which the nation’s largest bank will pay $9 billion in fines and provide relief to consumers worth $4 billion, as a victory for the Justice Department and a major step in holding the banks responsible for the economic catastrophe they inflicted on the country and the world.

This is nonsense. JPMorgan and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, have pressed for such a blanket deal to allow the bank to pay a fine and obtain in return the equivalent of a general amnesty for illegal actions that have led to the impoverishment of countless millions of people. The systematic marketing of worthless securities enabled the bank to pocket tens of billions of dollars and further enrich top executives such as Dimon.

When the Ponzi scheme collapsed, the government used trillions of dollars in taxpayer money to bail out the banks and financial firms. Since 2009, it—along with governments all over the world—has been engaged in a savage offensive to recoup the debts taken on by the state by destroying social programs and the living standards of the working class.

The $9 billion fine, the largest penalty ever imposed on a US corporation, is less than half the $21 billion profit JPMorgan recorded in 2012. The bank is pulling in enormous profits despite having set aside $28 billion since 2010 to cover legal costs.

It is necessary to place the size of the fine in the context of the economic damage resulting from the bank's practices. Reportedly, $4 billion will go to settle a suit by the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) charging JPMorgan with knowingly making false statements and omitting material facts in selling $33 billion in worthless mortgage bonds to the government-sponsored mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac at the height of the subprime mortgage bubble (2005-2007). That is about 2 percent of the $188 billion in taxpayer money the government has spent thus far to prop up the firms.

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Paul Craig Roberts

The Man Who Usurped The Constitution

Just as you think the Republicans have destroyed themselves with their government shutdown/default antics, along comes Obama and appoints a fascist murderer head of Homeland Security.

RT reports that Jeh Johnson, a drone proponent and the Pentagon General Counsel who authorized the unconstitutional extrajudicial murder of American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, has been nominated to head Homeland Security. Jeh Johnson is also the Pentagon lawyer who accused WikiLeaks of “illegal and irresponsible actions” and of giving aid to terrorists. Will Congress confirm this tyrant to police state power?

According to an Obama spokesperson, Jeh Johnson was picked to head Homeland Security because “during his tenure at the Department of Defense, he was known for his sound judgment and counsel” and “because he is one of the most highly qualified and respected national security leaders.”

So now we know what it takes to have “sound judgment and counsel” and to be a “highly respected national security leader.”

De-Americanization Of The World

GlobalEurope agrees with my conclusion that the power and prestige of the US government are on the wane. In public announcement GEAB # 78 on October 16 echoing the Chinese government, GlobalEurope reports: “Everyone is trying to free itself from American influence and let go of a United States permanently discredited by recent events over Syria, tapering, shutdown and now the debt ceiling. The legendary US power is now no more than a nuisance and the world has understood that it’s time to de-Americanize.”

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Lee Rogers

Barack Obama has nominated Jeh Johnson to head the Department of Homeland Security. Johnson is actually a perfect choice for the Washington DC war criminals considering his prior track record. Since 2009 he has worked in the Department of Defense as their general counsel. In this role he has provided the legal justification for the Obama regime’s foreign military interventions including drone strikes that have killed numerous civilians. Johnson has also claimed that the Obama regime has the legal authority to kill American citizens if they take up arms with Al-Qaeda. Through these and other ridiculous legal assertions, Johnson has proven that he himself is a terrorist war criminal. Considering that the American economy is edging closer and closer to a total collapse they will need someone in charge of Homeland Security who is not afraid to give orders to kill Americans. Johnson as a terrorist war criminal will fit very nicely into this role.

According to a recent Washington Post article, Johnson was responsible for the prior legal review and approval of all military operations executed by the Obama regime. This makes Johnson an incredibly evil man. The Obama regime has been responsible for a number of war crimes including the authorization of drone strikes that have killed many civilians. Even women and children have been killed by some of these strikes. It is also worth noting that the Obama regime launched an unprovoked attack against the sovereign nation of Libya which by the standards set after World War II is a war crime. Of course they almost did the same thing in Syria until it became clear that such an operation had no real support domestically or amongst the international community. It is hard to believe that anyone could possibly find an appropriate legal justification for such horrible atrocities but apparently if you are a criminal like Johnson this comes easy.

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