Edward Snowden

This short article by Edward Snowden was published yesterday in Der Spiegel.

In a very short time, the world has learned much about unaccountable secret agencies and about sometimes illegal surveillance programs. Sometimes the agencies even deliberately try to hide their surveillance of high officials or the public. While the NSA and GCHQ seem to be the worst offenders – this is what the currently available documents suggest – we must not forget that mass surveillance is a global problem in need of global solutions.

Such programs are not only a threat to privacy, they also threaten freedom of speech and open societies. The existence of spy technology should not determine policy. We have a moral duty to ensure that our laws and values limit monitoring programs and protect human rights.

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Stephen Lendman

Equating journalism with terrorism shows how low Britain has sunk.

Britain's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) operates like NSA. They work cooperatively. They're out-of-control rogue agencies. They spy on their own populations. They do it globally. They conduct espionage. They collect enormous amounts of personal information. They do it illegally.

Obama wages war on freedom. He targets whistleblowers and investigative journalists exposing government wrongdoing. So does Britain. It equates doing so with terrorism.

London's Guardian is threatened. Its offices were raided. Hard drive stored information was destroyed. Its editor, Alan Rusbridger, was warned. Cease and desist or else. He asked if steps would be taken "to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route - by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working." "The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intentions." It was "one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history," he said. It was likely the most chilling.

Two GCHQ security experts oversaw the destruction of Guardian hard drives. They checked to be sure nothing but "mangled bits of metal" remained. Whitehall was satisfied.

Freedom in Britain sustained another body blow. It's fast disappearing like in America. Both nations are more police states than democracies. They mock virtually all democratic principles. They govern lawlessly. They do it ruthlessly. Sweeping surveillance is official policy.

So is suppressing information about government wrongdoing. Journalists involved in exposing it are threatened. Guardian disclosures fall under parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee's remit. It reinforces government claims about compromising national security. When good journalism is equated with doing it, freedom dies. Guardian contributors are targeted for doing their job. Doing so amounts to state censorship. Warnings about prosecutions and imprisonments follow. Free expression is the most important of all rights. Without it, all others at risk. On the bogus pretext of fighting terrorism, America and Britain want none of their lawless activities exposed.

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Jeff Gates

The issue at hand is how best to protect a peace-seeking world from a psychopathic ideology that assumed the appearance of legitimacy so that a Christian Zionist president could be deceived to recognize as a nation a criminal state.

While Zionism is clearly a nationalist ideology, that narrow framing does the term an injustice as it is so much more. Zionism is more accurately described as a strategy for targeting thought and emotion as a means to influence behavior. Naïve Jews were its first victims when induced to identify with an enclave in the Middle East that President Harry Truman, a Christian Zionist, was induced to recognize as a “state.”

Zionism is first and foremost a mental state that manifests as a dispersed form of internalized nationalism—a Diaspora—that binds to an extremist enclave those who may never set foot there. After 1967, this “state” became the “Land of Israel” based on a more expansive area seized by Israel Defense Forces along with other occupied lands that Zionists claim a god gave them.

Zionism recruits by sustaining a shared sense of insecurity within the broader Jewish community. It progresses by marketing its perceived vulnerability and victimhood among those on whom it relies for financial, military and diplomatic support.

When, as now, policies of the Zionist state come under attack, media campaigns herald an outbreak of anti-Semitism and hatred—not for Zionism but for Jews, enhancing recruitment.

By choosing to identify their interests with those of Zionism, Jews choose to make themselves feel insecure. Zionism relies for its success not only on deception but also on self-deceit.

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