Last week, Noble Peace Prize winner President Barrack Obama advised that his administration would be arming the Free Syrian Army with weapons to resist the armies of Syria’s President Bashar Assad. Furthermore, they would look to implement a Libya-style no-fly zone over the country, which like Libya, would likely involve widespread carpet bombing of suspected military strongholds and control centers. With boots on the ground around Syria’s borders, the United States is without a doubt preparing for widespread engagement across the region yet again, with the aim of the new U.S. supplied weapons being more killing and destruction in a civil war that has left tens of thousands dead in the last year.

The Gaza Strip and its population have been subjected to the longest blockade in modern history. This week marks the 6th year of the crippling Israeli blockade. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the blockade is a denial of basic human rights in contravention of international law. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights accuses the international community of turning a blind eye to the suffering of Gazans. Along with Israel’s severe restrictions on Palestinians’ access to agricultural land and fishing waters, it prevents the sustainable growth of the coastal strip. According to OXFAM, the blockade increases the already high levels of food insecurity, unemployment and, aid dependency. Since the beginning of the blockade, Tel-Aviv also waged two wars on the tiny coastal enclave killing and maiming thousands of people. It also keeps the only commercial crossing with Gaza closed for most of the time. Israel withdrew its forces from the Gaza Strip in September 2005 but it continues to maintain a de facto occupation of the territory. As years go by many here blame the perpetual Israeli blockade on what they describe as an international conspiracy of silence.

Afghan security forces have battled militants who launched a gun and bomb attack near the presidential palace, in one of the most secure areas of Kabul. - Officials say all the insurgents were killed after heavy clashes. The Taliban say they carried out the attack. President Hamid Karzai was in the palace, but the target appears to have been the nearby Ariana hotel, believed to house a CIA base. This is the latest in a string of attacks on Kabul in recent months. Most recently a suicide bomber in the capital targeted a prominent Afghan politician on 18 June, just hours before Nato formally handed security responsibility to the Afghan forces. With this attack the Taliban infiltrated one of the most heavily-guarded areas of the capital, with several key buildings such as the defence ministry and Nato headquarters located very close by. The Afghan Taliban have showed no sign of abating their assault on security targets, despite last week's announcement that it had set up an office in the Gulf state of Qatar for US-led peace talks.

We’ve got the United States and its security bureaucrats digging through our e-mail in the European Parliament. Mashable reveals that the United States has demanded information from Google about the communications of two Wikileaks activists. These events catch our interest here in Brussels, here at the Pirate Party office in the European Parliament. We know Smári, and we have contacted him as a consultant to produce a report on Iceland as an “information paradise” and a conceivable centre for cloud computing. A quick check reveals that we have been in touch with Smári (through Erik Josefsson), via his Gmail account, regarding this report during the time period when the United States was wiretapping his mail. Now, this is not about keeping secrets. That’s not the point. (And besides, we would never use Gmail for anything sensitive.) But there’s an important issue of principle here. The United States is breaking into and digging through mail between the European Parliament and people who have been commissioned to produce its political reports. This is completely unacceptable.

Falkvinge.net: How Today’s NSA Is Much, Much Worse Than Stasi Or Orwell’s “1984”

Last week Mike Riley of Bloomberg, citing four people familiar with the process, reported that thousands of companies work closely with U.S. national security agencies by swapping sensitive trade information for benefits including access to classified intelligence. Riley's scoop — along with Michael Hirsch's report in The Atlantic that Silicon Valley and private defense contractors built the government's surveillance system — sheds light on the remarkably close relationship between private technology companies and the government. It turns out there's also some personnel overlap, as reported by James Risen and Nick Wingfield of The New York Times:

"When Max Kelly, the chief security officer for Facebook, left the social media company in 2010, he did not go to Google, Twitter or a similar Silicon Valley concern. Instead the man who was responsible for protecting the personal information of Facebook’s more than one billion users from outside attacks went to work for [the National Security Agency]."

"I Am Sorry That It Has Come to This": A Soldier's Last Words. - Daniel Somers was a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was part of Task Force Lightning, an intelligence unit. In 2004-2005, he was mainly assigned to a Tactical Human-Intelligence Team (THT) in Baghdad, Iraq, where he ran more than 400 combat missions as a machine gunner in the turret of a Humvee, interviewed countless Iraqis ranging from concerned citizens to community leaders and and government officials, and interrogated dozens of insurgents and terrorist suspects. In 2006-2007, Daniel worked with Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) through his former unit in Mosul where he ran the Northern Iraq Intelligence Center. His official role was as a senior analyst for the Levant (Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and part of Turkey). Daniel suffered greatly from PTSD and had been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and several other war-related conditions. On June 10, 2013, Daniel wrote the following letter to his family before taking his life. Daniel was 30 years old. His wife and family have given permission to publish it.

[VIDEO] For years, Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald has argued that journalists in Washington often seem too cozy with the political figures they’re supposed to hold accountable and too quick to amplify the government’s perspective on national security. "Meet the Press" host David Gregory’s suggestion Sunday that Greenwald “aided and abetted” NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, his source for a series of bombshell stories, only seemed to validate that viewpoint. ■ Gregory could have asked Greenwald to respond to criticism from Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who has said The Guardian columnist should be prosecuted. But Gregory didn't cite critics, thereby seeming to endorse the idea that Greenwald's actions may be criminal. "To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?" Gregory asked. Such phrasing comes amid the Obama administration's unprecedented crackdown on leaks and follows McClatchy's blockbuster Thursday report revealing how government "leaks to the media are equated with espionage." Gregory's use of "aided and abetted" also echoed wording in a Department of Justice warrant for accessing Fox News reporter James Rosen’s email account, a move that was widely condemned by members of the media and seen as criminalizing journalism itself.

AWIP: NBC's Gregory: Why shouldn't Greenwald be charged?

Jason Ditz: Anyone who discovers government abuse now has to recognize that even though there are laws meant to protect whistleblowers, it is government policy to persecute and prosecute them to the full extent of the law, and then some. - This month's reporting on enormous NSA surveillance schemes sparked a lot of major concerns about government overreach, but it also made many people forget the May revelation that the Justice Department had moved against the Associated Press (AP), seizing the media outlet's phone records in an effort to root out whistleblowers. It still isn't clear whatever came of the initial investigation that was used as the pretext for this, but the overall strategy of the Bush and Obama administrations that underlies such moves has had a calamitously real impact.

The US authorities must not prosecute anyone for disclosing information about the government’s human rights violations, Amnesty International said after Edward Snowden was charged under the Espionage Act. The organization also believes that the National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower could be at risk of ill-treatment if extradited to the USA. "No one should be charged under any law for disclosing information of human rights violations by the US government. Such disclosures are protected under the rights to information and freedom of expression," said Widney Brown, Senior Director of International Law and Policy at Amnesty International. "It appears he is being charged by the US government primarily for revealing its and other governments’ unlawful actions that violate human rights.”

The governments of Britain and the U.S. are conspiring for a bogus pretense for intervening militarily in yet another Middle Eastern country. - Like former British prime minister, Tony Blair, and former U.S. president George W. Bush, David Cameron and Barack Obama are making every attempt to sell the allegation that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against its own people. As for Iraq, where claims of existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) emerged to be indefensible, scandalous lies, the British and U.S. authorities are claiming that forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria have used chemical weapons, and thus crossed imaginary “red line”, set out by the global arrogance. The scenarios being considered by both Britain and the U.S. for invading Syria are very much similar to those used against Iraq to justify a war, which killed almost one million people and displaced millions more.

London’s Metropolitan police have been implicated in recent years in various corruption scandals, such as the phone-hacking which saw the end of Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World Newspaper. - Allegations of racism have hounded the force ever since a government inquiry dubbed it ‘institutionally racist’, following the poor handling of the racist murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in 1993. 2 of his killers were jailed in 2012, almost 2 decades after the murder, but the rest of the suspects remain free. But now, explosive new allegations in a British newspaper assert that the Metropolitan police spied on the Lawrence family and their supporters in order to find so called ‘dirt’ against their reputation. Former undercover officer Peter Francis says that he was part of a police operation to smear the reputation of the family because their campaign for justice was seen as too critical of the police.

Philip Marshall was killed in a black operation over confessing to having worked with CIA drug smugglers and the potential exposure of 9/11 secrets. In the background to this, former US National Security Agency Officer Wayne Madsen says the 9/11 investigative author Philip Marshall and his children were killed in a "black ops hit" by the CIA, dismissing the suicide hypothesis. Marshall was afraid of being silenced for his revelations about 9/11, Madsen said, noting that a side door the investigator never used was wide open when his dead body was found. Marshall believed the former US President George Bush had pulled off the 9/11 attack to foment a government coup. In his fourth book, he was supposed to disclose blockbuster information.

Press TV has conducted an interview with Dr. Kevin Barrett, an American author and political expert in Madison, Wisconsin, to further discuss the issue. Barrett is joined by Lee Kaplan, investigative journalist from Berkley.

Government – Or Private Individuals – May Be Watching and Listening - We documented earlier today that - if you are near your smart phone – the NSA or private parties could remotely activate your microphone and camera and spy on you. This post shows that the same is true for our computer. Initially, the NSA built backdoors into the world’s most popular software program – Microsoft Windows – by 1999. And a government expert told the Washington Post that the government “quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type” (confirmed).

Washington's Blog: Is Your Smart Meter Spying On You?