FBI Director Robert Mueller acknowledged in Congressional testimony on Wednesday that his agency has used aerial drones for surveillance purposes within the United States. The revelation came in the midst of more efforts to justify the Obama administration’s unconstitutional domestic surveillance programs under the banner of the “war on terror.” Though the government has previously admitted to using drones along the US-Mexico border and in isolated instances, Mueller’s admission was the first time the FBI publicly acknowledged that it uses remotely piloted aircraft. The disclosure may well have been made in order to pre-empt whistleblower Edward Snowden, who has threatened to make public further details about the government’s widespread surveillance programs. [...] Claims that the US government is “fighting terrorism” are all the more absurd considering the Obama administration’s recent decision to arm the Syrian opposition, which is spearheaded by Al-Qaida affiliated groups.

PressTV: FBI uses drones in domestic spying
Russia Today: FBI director admits domestic use of drones for surveillance

Renowned American academic, Noam Chomsky, has said that the administration of U.S. President Barrack Obama is “dedicated to increasing terrorism” all around the world. - “The Obama administration is dedicated to increasing terrorism. In fact, it’s doing it all over the world. Obama, first of all, is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history,” the MIT professor said in an interview with GRITtv host Laura Flanders. Chomsky cited the United States’ drone assassination campaigns as just one example of how Washington is generating terrorism across the globe. “People have a reaction, they don’t say, ‘Fine, I don’t care if my cousin was murdered.’ And they become what we call terrorists. This is completely understood from the highest level, that as you carry out these operations you’re generating terrorism,” he noted. He said it is not surprising that “people hate the country that’s just terrorizing them.”

Footage showing the brutal execution of three people has gone viral on social media. The video, sent to Syria Report, shows a number of men, some of them armed, holding a man down, with his hands bound. Two militants proceed to take turns in beheading the man. One of the men has a handheld transceiver clipped to his waist, while another carries handcuffs. After the man is decapitated, the victim’s head is held up to the apparent cheers to the captors. After the mans headless body is dumped into what looks like a pre-dug pit, two women are seen being marched toward the place where the man was beheaded. After some fumbling with the assault rifle, perhaps arguing over who should carry out the execution, the two women are repeatedly shot. There bodies, like the beheaded man, are dumped into the pit.

AWIP: Syria Sport Zone For Decapitations [ 2 Women were Executed too ] Video

After a week of silence, the Chinese government has begun to use the revelations of former CIA operative Edward Snowden about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) vast electronic spying to hit back at the Obama administration’s allegations of Chinese cyber hacking. Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chungying declared on Monday that the US “should pay attention to the international community’s concerns and demands and give the international community the necessary explanation” over its surveillance programs. She flatly rejected as “nonsense” insinuations by American officials that Snowden was a Chinese agent. In an unprecedented step, China’s state-controlled media highlighted protests in “democratic” Hong Kong last weekend over Snowden’s disclosure that the NSA had hacked hundreds of Hong Kong and mainland Chinese computers. Led by pro-Beijing parties such as the Democratic Alliance for Betterment and Progress, a few hundred protesters marched to the US consulate, holding banners and shouting slogans such as “Defend free speech,” “Protect Snowden” and “No Extradition.”

Michael Hastings, a journalist for BuzzFeed, reportedly died in a fiery car crash early Wednesday morning. The 33-year-old reporter was most famous for his profile of General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone magazine, which led to the general’s ouster. [...]

While it is certainly possible that the car crash was an accident, it must be noted that Hastings no doubt had enemies, including among top military and intelligence officials. As such, the circumstances of his death should be treated as suspicious. Hastings was reportedly deeply troubled by the revelations of government surveillance and spying on journalists. Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s widespread spying came on June 6. Hastings, who was widely known for his use of new media, stopped tweeting on the June 12, and the car crash came one week later on June 19. [Video]

Les Visible: The Ship of Fools on a River of Darkness
Jim Stone: Michael Hastings OBVIOUSLY murdered by bomb on gas tank
WRH: Cars are arguably one of the softest targets when it comes to assassinations and kidnappings

The US government's secret seizure of Associated Press phone records had a "chilling effect" on newsgathering by the agency and other news organizations, AP's top executive said Wednesday. - "Some longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking with us," AP president and chief executive Gary Pruitt said in a speech to the National Press Club. "In some cases, government employees we once checked in with regularly will no longer speak to us by phone. Others are reluctant to meet in person ... This chilling effect on newsgathering is not just limited to AP. "Journalists from other news organizations have personally told me that it has intimidated both official and nonofficial sources from speaking to them as well."

وكالة أنباء العربي الغاضب: Historian comrade Tarif Khalidi sent me this (I cite with his permission): "When googling my name recently, I found that my place of birth is given as :Jerusalem, Israel. After sending five messages to Google to point out that there was no "Israel" when I was born (1938), and receiving no answer, I began to discover other interesting things. You get the same result by googling Edward Said, Khalil Sakakini, and other Palestinian Jerusalemites, all born before Israel was even established; their birthplace is given by Google (in the right-hand corner) as: Jerusalem, Israel. - Even more bizarre, the birthplace of the medieval Islamic geographer, al-Muqaddasi,, born in 940 AD, is given as (you guessed it): Jerusalem, Israel.

Xymphora: The I-Word - Google's position is that it has these wonderful algorithms that kick out search results on a purely objective basis. [...] And yet, we know they are messing with the search results: "Google neuters Google Gaydar". They have apparently been embarrassed into fixing their censorship of the concept of Patrick Buchanan, a man whose isolationism is not 'good for the Jews'. [...] I don't call them 'wars for the Jews' for nothing.

Americans now know that the government is spying. But they still have no idea how many of their communications and activities are being surveilled … or what might be done with that information. Yes, the Government Is Spying On You. You know that the government has been caught spying on the Verizon phone calls of tens of millions of Americans. The spying effort specifically targeted Americans living on U.S. soil. And as NBC News reports:

NBC News has learned that under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the U.S.

This includes metadata...which can tell the government a lot about you. And it also includes content.

At a principals meeting in the White House situation room, Secretary of State John Kerry began arguing, vociferously, for immediate U.S. airstrikes against airfields under the control of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime -- specifically, those fields it has used to launch chemical weapons raids against rebel forces. It was at this point that the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the usually mild-mannered Army General Martin Dempsey, spoke up, loudly. According to several sources, Dempsey threw a series of brushback pitches at Kerry, demanding to know just exactly what the post-strike plan would be and pointing out that the State Department didn’t fully grasp the complexity of such an operation. Dempsey informed Kerry that the Air Force could not simply drop a few bombs, or fire a few missiles, at targets inside Syria: To be safe, the U.S. would have to neutralize Syria’s integrated air-defense system, an operation that would require 700 or more sorties. At a time when the U.S. military is exhausted, and when sequestration is ripping into the Pentagon budget, Dempsey is said to have argued that a demand by the State Department for precipitous military action in a murky civil war wasn’t welcome.

Dana Gabriel: Canada’s prime minister recently addressed the CFR, a globalist think tank who have been a driving force behind the push towards deeper North American integration. The U.S. and Canada are now further advancing this agenda through the Beyond the Border agreement. Both countries are increasing bilateral border transportation and infrastructure coordination. This includes a common approach to border management, security and control. They are also integrating an information sharing system that would be used to track everyone crossing the U.S.-Canada border and entering or leaving the continent. Without much fanfare and seemingly little resistance, Canada is being assimilated into a U.S. dominated North American security perimeter.