Barry Grey

At Friday’s press conference, President Barack Obama resorted to outright lies in his defense of the massive and illegal surveillance programs exposed by former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden.

Obama made it clear that, as far as he was concerned, the problem was not that wholesale violations of the Constitution were being perpetrated by his government, but that these crimes had been made known and had alarmed the public. What was needed was a better job of public relations.

The press conference itself was thrown together to assuage popular anger and concern over the systematic violation of privacy rights. As Obama said, his aim was to “make the American people more comfortable” about government snooping on every aspect of their lives.

“America is not interested in spying on ordinary people,” Obama said, as if documents had never been published exposing the government’s seizure of records of all telephone calls placed in the United States, its dragnet of electronic communications around the world, its recording of license plates, and its photographing of letters.

This statement came one day after the New York Times reported that the NSA is “copying and then sifting through the contents of what is apparently most emails and other text-based communications that cross the border.” It followed last week’s exposure of the NSA’s XKeyscore program, which allows analysts to listen to phone calls and read emails at will without a warrant or authorization from higher-ups.

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Barry Grey

The trial itself was a legal farce. It was a show trial aimed at intimidating popular opposition to the wars and further subordinating an already cowed press.

The guilty verdict handed down Tuesday in the court-martial of whistle-blower Bradley Manning is a travesty of justice. The judge, Col. Denise Lind, found the 25-year-old Army private guilty of 19 of the 21 counts lodged against him, including five counts under the 1917 Espionage Act.

Manning faces a prison term of up to 136 years in the sentencing phase of the trial that begins today at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Manning‘s acquittal on the charge of “aiding the enemy,” which carries a potential death sentence, reflects the awareness of the military and the Obama administration of the broad popular opposition to the proceedings against the young soldier. At the same time, it underscores the fraudulent character of the entire trial.

The prosecution denounced Manning as a “traitor” and charged him with aiding Al Qaeda and carrying out espionage even though there were no allegations that he handed over information to any foreign government or terrorist organization.

Instead, in a sinister and unprecedented attempt to make the revealing of government secrets potentially a capital crime and undermine First Amendment guarantees of speech and press freedom, the government argued that any leaking of classified information constituted espionage because the information could be accessed by those deemed to be enemies. As the government well knows, the “enemy” for whose benefit Manning courageously exposed proof of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, was the American people.

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Thomas Gaist & Barry Grey

Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
is visible through an ambulance window after he was
captured in Watertown, Massachusetts. (New York Post)

The New York Times published a front-page article Thursday (“In 2011 Murder Inquiry, Hints of Missed Chance to Avert Boston Bombing”) that raises new questions about the alleged perpetrators of the April 15 Boston Marathon bombing and adds to the evidence of a government cover-up in the explosions that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.

Citing “senior law enforcement officials,” the article asserts that the elder of the two Tsarnaev brothers alleged to have detonated two bombs near the finish line of the marathon, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was involved in the murder of three men in Waltham, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, on September 11, 2011—the tenth anniversary of the terror attacks on New York and Washington DC.

The ostensible occasion for the article was the arraignment on Wednesday of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Tamerlan’s younger brother, on multiple terrorism charges before a federal judge in Boston. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was captured on April 19 following a shootout in which his older brother was killed. He pled not guilty to 30 counts, most of which potentially carry the death penalty. (See: “Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev arraigned in federal court”).

The Times article published Thursday asserts that Ibragim Todashev, a friend of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and, like Tsarnaev, an ethnic Chechen and martial arts fighter, was also involved in the triple slaying. The authors of the article repeat the official story that Todashev confessed to the involvement of Tamerlan Tsarnaev and himself in the gruesome killings during hours of interrogation at his Florida apartment last May 22. The questioning ended with a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) operative repeatedly shooting and killing Todashev.

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Barry Grey

Obama is the representative of a ruling class that will stop at nothing to defend its wealth and power against the working class — a ruling class, moreover, that presides over a system in mortal crisis.

In his speech in Berlin on Wednesday, President Barack Obama made much of the fact that he was the first American president to speak from the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate, in what was once Stalinist-controlled East Berlin. This was meant to symbolize the triumph of what Obama called “open societies that respect the sanctity of the individual” over oppressive political systems.

He felt obliged, however, to include an explicit defense of the newly exposed surveillance network over which he presides, whose massive and illegal operations dwarf the spying apparatus of the old Stasi secret police.

Obama once again resorted to outright lies, declaring that National Security Agency (NSA) programs that seize the phone records of all Americans and tap into the electronic communications of people all over the world are “bound by the rule of law” and do not target “the communications of ordinary persons.”

This was among the most glaring contradictions in a speech riddled with banalities and lies. Obama invoked the ideals of “peace” and “tolerance,” having just approved the direct arming of Islamist militias that are carrying out sectarian atrocities in Syria. He spoke of “justice” in one breath and his drone assassination program in the next.

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Barry Grey

In a brazen and illegal attack on press freedom, the Obama Justice Department secretly subpoenaed the telephone records of Associated Press editors and journalists and tracked ingoing and outgoing calls on at least 20 telephone lines, including the national headquarters of the press agency and its news bureaus in New York, Hartford and Washington DC. Among the lines tracked was the telephone used by AP reporters working out of the House of Representatives press gallery in the Capitol.

The Associated Press was given no advance notice of the government dragnet, which reportedly began in April of 2012 and continued through May of that year. Such a massive operation over a two-month period would generate records of many thousands of telephone calls, providing the government with legally privileged information about AP journalists’ sources and methods. More than 100 journalists work in the offices where phone records were seized.

The lines that were tracked included the home and cell phones of at least one editor and an unknown number of reporters. While the Justice Department has not provided any reason for the spying operation, it is widely assumed, and so asserted by AP, that it was carried out in connection with a federal investigation into an alleged leak of “classified” information by the press agency in a May 7, 2012 article concerning a CIA covert operation in Yemen.

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Barry Grey

“We’ve only been showing the feeds that authorities are comfortable with.” ― Chris Cuomo, CNN

With the imposition of a state of siege in Boston, a historical threshold has been crossed. For the first time ever, a major American city has been placed under the equivalent of martial law. The already frayed veneer of a stable democracy based on constitutional principles is in shreds.

On Monday, April 15, two bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon in the city’s center. Three people were killed and over 170 were injured, some seriously. This was a criminal act with tragic consequences. But violence, including acts of mass homicide and disasters resulting in major loss of life, is a regular feature of American society. Even as the events in Boston were unfolding, a factory explosion in Texas, to all appearances linked to safety hazards, took far more lives than the bombs detonated at the end of the marathon.

There is no precedent for the massive mobilization of military, police and intelligence forces carried out April 19 in Boston and its environs, which encompass more than 1 million people. Thousands of heavily armed police and National Guard troops occupied the streets, backed up by machine gun-mounted armored vehicles, Humvees and Black Hawk helicopters. As the WSWS noted, the scene resembled the US occupation of Baghdad.

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Barry Grey

A critical attitude and avoiding falling prey to media manipulation is useful...

The explosion of two bombs Monday afternoon at the Boston Marathon has been accompanied by a rush to judgment by the media, in which claims of a broad new terror attack are being made without any factual substantiation.

The bombs exploded near the finish line of the marathon in the heart of the city's downtown area. According to media reports, at least three people were killed and 144 wounded, including 15 with critical injuries. Witnesses on the scene and at hospitals have reported that the injuries include amputated lower limbs.

The explosions took place within about 20 seconds of one another and 50-100 yards apart, while thousands of marathoners were still running and many thousands of spectators were lined up along the route. The blasts shattered storefront windows, sending shards of glass and other debris into the crowd.

No individual or organization has as yet claimed responsibility for this brutal and criminal act.

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Barry Grey

The political theatrics surrounding the sequester follow a well-established “bad cop, good cop” pattern. The pre-agreed result is always the same.

Over the weekend, President Barack Obama and Democratic and Republican lawmakers signaled that the across-the-board cuts in social programs under the so-called budget “sequestration” order signed Friday by Obama will remain in place indefinitely.

The unprecedented cuts in jobless benefits; education; student loans; nutritional aid to mothers and children; food, drug and water safety; air transport; research and infrastructure and other vital social needs will become the starting point for negotiations over the fiscal year 2014 federal budget. The focus of these talks will be massive cuts in the core social programs dating from the reforms of the 1930s and 1960s—Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Obama and Democratic leaders made it clear that in negotiations with the Republicans to extend funding authorization for the federal government, which expires on March 27, they would not seek to replace the sequester with a deal incorporating token tax increases on the wealthy along with more targeted spending cuts. Instead, they will accept an offer from the Republicans to extend funding at the post-sequester level, i.e., minus $85 billion, until the end of the current fiscal year, September 30.

As the New York Times put it on Saturday, this decision “most likely allows the across-the-board spending reductions to remain in place for months if not years.”

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Barry Grey

What is already occurring is the collapse of any globally integrated and stable monetary system and the outbreak of currency wars.

The Commerce Department on Wednesday reported that the US economy contracted in the fourth quarter of 2012, the first decline in the country’s gross domestic product (GDP) since the second quarter of 2009, the final three months before the official end of the recession.

The report, showing a decline at an annual rate of 0.1 percent between October and December, stunned Wall Street and government economists, who were expecting a growth rate lower than the 3.1 percent recorded in the third quarter of last year, but still well above zero. The consensus projection was for an increase of 1.1 percent.

The dismal report on the US economy follows downwardly revised estimates for world economic growth issued this month by both the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Commerce Department statement reflects the impact on the US of stagnation and decline in major centers of the world economy as well as the lack of any genuine recovery in the real economy of the United States.

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Barry Grey

"[The] direct attack on Constitutionally protected free-speech rights, begun under the Bush administration, has been expanded by the Obama administration, which treats virtually all forms of social and political protest as a potential criminal and terrorist threat."

Internal Federal Bureau of Investigation documents released last Saturday by a civil liberties organization show that FBI anti-terror units across the US targeted and spied on the Occupy Wall Street protests even before they got underway in September 2011.

The secret documents, obtained by the Partnership for Public Justice Fund (PCJF) through Freedom of Information requests and published on the organization’s web site, show that the FBI used police informants and infiltrators to systematically monitor the activities of anti-Wall Street groups and share information about them with other federal, state and local police agencies as well as with private corporations.

The documents are heavily redacted. Nevertheless, they demonstrate that the so-called “war on terror” and the police-state laws and agencies established in its name are being employed to disrupt and suppress political dissent and protect the American corporate-financial elite against the growth of social opposition.

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