The latest documents leaked by the US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed that the UK is running a secret spying center in the Middle East. ● Britain runs the secret snooping station in the Middle East to intercept huge numbers of emails, telephone calls and web traffic for the United States and other Western intelligence agencies, The Independent reported. The newspaper, however, has not disclosed the exact location of the station. ● According to the leaked documents, the information extracted from the underwater fibre-optic cables, is passed to Britain's eavesdropping agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and then shared with the US NSA. ● British government claimed the Middle East installation, is a key element in the West’s so-called “war on terror” and provides a vital “early warning” system when it comes to possible attacks. The UK’s secret surveillance base in the Middle East is part of a larger $1.5 billion clandestine electronic operation, codenamed “Tempora,” which includes recordings of telephone calls, the content of email messages, Facebook entries and the personal internet history of users around the world.

Glenn Greenwald/The Guardian: Snowden: UK government now leaking documents about itself ● The NSA whistleblower says: 'I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent.' ● The Independent this morning published an article - which it repeatedly claims comes from "documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden" - disclosing that "Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies." This is the first time the Independent has published any revelations purportedly from the NSA documents, and it's the type of disclosure which journalists working directly with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden have thus far avoided. That leads to the obvious question: who is the source for this disclosure?

Boing Boing: Snowden denies being source of The Independent's "NSA leak" story exposing UK base

Lawyers for David Miranda, the partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, appeared in the High Court in London on Thursday, seeking an injunction to stop access to the material seized from him by British police. ● After hearing submissions from Miranda’s legal representative and those representing the Metropolitan Police (Met) and the UK’s Home Office, judges Lord Justice Beatson and Justice Kenneth Parker granted a limited injunction supposedly preventing the government and police from “inspecting, copying or sharing” the data seized. This, however, was effectively ruled null and void by their judgement that police could examine the data for “national security purposes.” A full hearing on the issue is to take place on August 30.

Glenn Greenwald: State-loyal journalists seem to believe in a duty to politely submit to bullying tactics from political officials. ● The US and the UK governments go around the world threatening people all the time. It's their modus operandi. They imprison whistleblowers. They try to criminalize journalism. ● They threatened the Guardian with prior restraint and then forced the paper to physically smash their hard drives in a basement. They detained my partner under a terrorism law, repeatedly threatened to arrest him, and forced him to give them his passwords to all sorts of invasive personal information - behavior that even one of the authors of that terrorism law says is illegal, which the Committee for the Protection of Journalists said yesterday is just "the latest example in a disturbing record of official harassment of the Guardian over its coverage of the Snowden leaks", and which Human Rights Watch says was "intended to intimidate Greenwald and other journalists who report on surveillance abuses." And that's just their recent behavior with regard to press freedoms: it's to say nothing of all the invasions, bombings, renderings, torture and secrecy abuses for which that bullying, vengeful duo is responsible over the last decade. ● But the minute anyone refuses to meekly submit to that, or stands up to it, hordes of authoritarians - led by state-loyal journalists - immediately start objecting: how dare you raise your voice to the empire? [...] The US and UK governments are apparently entitled to run around and try to bully and intimidate anyone, including journalists - "to send a message to recipients of Snowden's materials, including the Guardian", as Reuters put it - but nobody is allowed to send a message back to them. That's a double standard that nobody should accept.

TechDirt: Orders To Destroy Guardian Hard Drives Came Directly From PM David Cameron

The Israeli minister for military affairs, “Moshe Yaalon's clumsy attempt to steer the world's reaction to the Syrian chemical weapons massacre suggests that the attack was yet another Israeli false-flag operation,” Kevin Barrett, a Ph.D. Arabist-Islamologist, wrote in an article published on Press TV’s website on Thursday.

Yaalon [...] described the Syria crisis as a bottomless struggle between a ruling Alawite minority and a disparate Sunni opposition including Muslim Brotherhood members and al-Qaeda affiliates, which would result in the "implosion" of Syria into Sunni-, Shia- and Kurdish-dominated parts. Barrett, however, said the remarks did not offer an analysis of the situation in Syria but were...

...“a program of action.” “In fact, they will do whatever it takes to keep the fighting going, including launching false-flag attacks like the recent chemical weapons massacre. Israel's goal, as Yaalon admits, is the destruction of Syria,” the expert stated. “The Israelis and their American proxies have already smashed Iraq, Libya, and Sudan into pieces,” he explained, as part of Tel Aviv’s plan to break up neighboring Middle Eastern countries into "tiny ethnic and sectarian Bantustans." “Now they are targeting Syria and Egypt -- two countries whose land they plan to steal to create a ‘Greater Israel’ stretching from the Nile to the Euphrates.”

The analyst said the recent release of Egypt’s criminal ex-dictator, Hosni Mubarak, from jail was also a calculated Zionist project to outrage the Egyptian masses, and thus accelerate the ongoing massacre of Egyptians by the army.

SANA: Lavrov and Kerry call for objective investigation into possible chemical weapons use in Damascus Countryside ● Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and his U.S. counterpart John Kerry stressed the importance of conducting an objective investigation into reports on possible use of chemical weapons in Damascus Countryside in Syria two days ago. A statement issued by the Russian Foreign Ministry said Lavrov made phone calls with Kerry, highlighting the need that the armed opposition's groups ensure a safe entry for the UN investigators to the region where reports said the possible chemical attack took place. The statement pointed out that Russia has called upon Syria to cooperate with the UN experts. It added that Moscow expects the "Syrian opposition" to make constructive steps towards getting the international conference on Syria held so as to find a solution to the crisis as soon as possible. Earlier, the US announced that it is unable to confirm reports that spoke of an alleged gas attack in Damascus Countryside last Wednesday.

PressTV: British MP: Israel provides terrorists in Syria with chemical weapons
Jason Ditz: Doubts Surround Yesterday’s Allegations of Syria Chemical Weapons Strike
AWIP: Syria: Chemical Attack in Ghouta 'an Accident Caused by Free Syrian Army'

The Cluster Munition Coalition (CMC) has denounced the United States for planning to supply 1,300 cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia. ■ “We are disappointed with the US decision to export cluster bombs to Saudi Arabia as both countries acknowledge the negative humanitarian impact of these weapons on civilians,” CMC Director Sarah Blakemore said on Thursday. “Cluster munitions have been banned by more than half the world’s nations so any transfer goes against the international rejection of these weapons,” she added. The US Defense Department announced on Tuesday that Textron Defense Systems won a contract valued at $641 million to build the bombs for the Persian Gulf state. The contract, expected to be completed by 2015, formalizes the sale of CBU-105 cluster bombers. Congress was first notified about the deal in December 2010.

Israeli warplanes raided Friday at dawn the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine military site in Naameh, south of Beirut, according to the National news Agency. ● For his part, the Front's chief in Lebanon, Ramez Moustafa, confirmed the news and clarified that the Zionist warplanes fired one rocket onto Naameh valley and that no losses or damages were recorded. "We will not respond to this assault in the way that serves the Zionist plan to lure us, yet in the proper place and at the proper time," Moustafa pointed out. The spokesman of the Israeli army asserted that the assault responds to the rockets that were fired Thursday from the Lebanese territories into Nahariya and Akka, north of occupied Palestine.

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has been airlifted by helicopter out of Cairo’s Tora Prison and flown to the army's International Medical Center, where he will remain under guard. The 85-year-old still faces multiple criminal charges. The transfer came after a court ruled that prosecutors can no longer prolong Mubarak’s time in jail with appeals or new charges, a tactic that helped to keep him behind bars for the past 17 months. Prosecutors have decided not to challenge the decision.

Michael Angel Ruiz had a history of drug addiction. On July 28, for reasons unknown, he climbed onto the roof of his apartment. Witnesses called the police to protect his safety. This turned out to have been a fatal decision. First they tased him several times on the roof. He finally complied and hopped down. Cops immediately swarmed him and put him in a choke-hold. Witness Gary Carthen said that Ruiz was "getting choked out and tased at the same time." He remained in a choke-hold for at least three minutes. The most disturbing moments were to come.

Michael Ruiz, now fully restrained, was dragged down the concrete stairs on his face. As deputies held his arms behind his back, they allowed his head to dangle and thump against every stair. At this point Ruiz may have already lost consciousness, and was making no attempt to lift his head. Video shows him lifelessly suffering head trauma on the descent down the stair case. "I just felt sick to my stomach," said Richard Erickson, a retired police detective. "I'd never seen anything like this before, even when I was with the police department."

Radley Balko ■ One of the central themes of my book is that that too many cops today have been conditioned to see the people they serve not as citizens with rights, but as an enemy. My argument is that this battlefield mindset is the product of a generation of politicians telling police that they're at war with things -- drugs, terrorism, crime, etc. -- and have then equipped them with the uniforms, tactics, weapons, and other accoutrements of war. ● Over the last several days, the popular online police magazine PoliceOne site has been rolling out a series of opinion pieces in response to my book. As you might expect, most of them are critical, although a couple have been thoughtful. ● One essay by Sgt. Glenn French was particularly disturbing. French serves as commander of a SWAT team in Sterling Heights, Michigan. French doesn't criticize me for arguing that too many police officers have adopted this battlefield mindset. Rather, he embraces the combat mentality, and encourages other cops to do the same.