Pepe Escobar

The working title of the Edward Snowden movie is still The Spy Who Remains in the Cold. Here's where we stand:

● Snowden could only fly out of Hong Kong because China allowed it.
● Snowden could only arrive in Moscow because Russia knew it - in co-operation with China. This is part of their strategic relationship, which includes the BRICS group (along with Brazil, India and South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. No official source though would ever confirm it.
● With the Latin American offers of asylum (Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua; even Uruguay would consider it), we're approaching the clincher: Moscow is now calculating whether - and how - to help Snowden reach his final destination while extracting maximum political capital out of Washington.

Into this script comes roaring the coup-that-is-not-a-coup sub-plot in Egypt. Cynics' eyebrows will be raised that just as the Barack Obama administration was going mental over the National Security Agency (NSA) spy scandal a revo-coup-o-lution explodes in Egypt. New revelations about the extent of the NSA-centric Orwellian Panopticon keep on coming, but they have been totally downgraded by US corporate media; it's all Egypt all the time. After all, the Pentagon - to which the NSA is attached - owns the Egyptian military, something that even the New York Times had to acknowledge. [1] Yet they don't own Snowden. - [And] this has nothing to do with "terra".

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William Blum

I have written on more than one occasion about the value of preaching and repeating to the choir on a regular basis. One of my readers agreed with this, saying: “How else has Christianity survived 2,000 years except by weekly reinforcement?”

Well, dear choir, beloved parishioners, for this week’s sermon we once again turn to Afghanistan. As US officials often make statements giving the impression that the American military presence in that sad land is definitely winding down – soon to be all gone except for the standard few thousand American servicemen which almost every country in the world needs stationed on their territory – one regularly sees articles in the mainstream media and government releases trying to explain what it was all about. For what good reason did thousands of young Americans breathe their last breath in that backward country and why were tens of thousands of Afghans dispatched by the United States to go meet Allah (amidst widespread American torture and other violations of human rights)?

The Washington Post recently cited a Defense Department report that states: The United States “has wound up with a reasonable ‘Plan B’ for achieving its core objective of preventing Afghanistan from once again becoming a safe haven for al-Qaeda and its affiliates.”

“Preventing a safe haven for terrorists” – that was the original reason given back in 2001 for the invasion of Afghanistan, a consistency in sharp contrast to the ever-changing explanations for Iraq.

However, it appears that the best and the brightest in our government and media do not remember, if they ever knew, that Afghanistan was not really about 9-11 or fighting terrorists (except the many the US has created by its invasion and occupation), but was about pipelines.

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Pepe Escobar

Lenin is watching... (Stasi Museum. Berlin, June 2010)

This Fourth of July has been brought to you by the 'United Stasi of America'. Forget the 4th Amendment. Yes, we are watching you. All of you. All over the world. All the time. But it’s for your own good.

Those were the days when assorted latitudes were glued to the platitudes of an up and coming “Yes We Can” cipher on the virtues of teaching constitutional law. Wake up; in Pentagon speak, the NSA “does not do constitutional freedom.”

The "American-style Stasi methods," as Markus Ferber, a European Parliament member from Merkel's Bavarian sister party, put it, included revoking Edward Snowden’s passport, depriving him of citizenship and rendering him, in theory, stateless. But that does not prevent him from seeking asylum. Any sovereign country may offer him political asylum. It’s a matter of political will – as in calculating the costs of defying the 'United Stasi of America’s' might.

Self-described European champions of freedom of speech such as Austria, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain and Switzerland have tried to buy some wiggle room by saying Snowden would have to make his request on their soil. It’s not true; they could all give him safe passage if they really meant it.

President Obama said US courts will take care of the “29-year-old hacker”. This is pure deception. The Obama administration sees Snowden as the ultimate planetary threat to US security. Worse than bottom-of-the-Arabian-Sea Osama bin Laden. Snowden is worse than “terra”; he’s facilitating “terra”.

And with Glenn Greenwald stressing that Snowden turned over his files to The Guardian, implying that from now on it’s The Guardian leaking (or Der Spiegel this week, and the South China Morning Post two weeks ago), the Obama administration is now severely tempted to criminalize investigative journalism in bulk.

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Pepe Escobar

Obama and spy supremo Keith Alexander swear that the Orwellian privatized intelligence-corporate-industrial complex is essential to prevent terrorism. It is not. This is a monumental lie - and Obama is complicit.

HONG KONG - So it's going to be Our Man in Quito. The narrative may not be as elegant as Graham Greene's, but the plot certainly beats the Bourne trilogy - because it's happening live, in real time, right in front of our eyes.

It takes a former CIA asset to beat US "intelligence" - more like intel deprivation. The story of Edward Snowden's escape from Hong Kong is textbook. This correspondent, at dim sum on Sunday, was alerted by a source; "Get ready for something big; he's leaving soon." That was about 12:30 pm Hong Kong time. In fact Snowden had already flown from Chek Lap Kok on SU 213 bound for Moscow at 11:00 am. But nobody knew it yet. Hong Kong was still digesting the front page of the South China Morning Post displaying yet more devastating evidence of US cyber-spying of China.

By 2:00 pm there was a first, one-line alert from the South China Morning Post; he was on a plane to Moscow. I talked to RT in Moscow; they were stunned and sprang into action. Still total silence from Western corporate media. Then the Post confirmed the breaking news with more detail. Yet it took ages for Reuters to release its first short dispatch - as I had commented on my Facebook page. When the "international community" started to learn about it Snowden was already five hours into his flight.

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Pepe Escobar

The film Shanghai starring Gong Li and John Cusack was
a successful collaboration between China and Hollywood.
But now, China wants to do more than just provide the
pretty faces. (Provided to China Daily)

Sun Tzu, the ancient author of The Art of War, must be throwing a rice wine party in his heavenly tomb in the wake of the shirtsleeves California love-in between President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping. "Know your enemy" was, it seems, the theme of the meeting. Beijing was very much aware of - and had furiously protested - Washington's deep plunge into China's computer networks over the past 15 years via a secretive unit of the National Security Agency, the Office of Tailored Access Operations (with the apt acronym TAO). Yet Xi merrily allowed Obama to pontificate on hacking and cyber-theft as if China were alone on such a stage.

Enter - with perfect timing - Edward Snowden, the spy who came in from Hawaii and who has been holed up in Hong Kong since May 20. And cut to the wickedly straight-faced, no-commentary-needed take on Obama's hacker army by Xinhua, the Chinese Communist Party's official press service. With America's dark-side-of-the-moon surveillance programs like Prism suddenly in the global spotlight, the Chinese, long blistered by Washington's charges about hacking American corporate and military websites, were polite enough. They didn't even bother to mention that Prism was just another node in the Pentagon's Joint Vision 2020 dream of "full spectrum dominance".

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Pepe Escobar

They looked like two dejected schoolboys in front of the headmaster by the end of the two-hour Putin-Obama summit at the sidelines of the Group of Eight meeting in Northern Ireland. But as astonishing as the sound of silence was the fact that, on Syria, the former KGB guy was trying to save the "leading from behind" dude from himself.

President Barack Obama coined the monster euphemism that they had "different perspectives" on Syria. He said, deceptively, "We want to try to resolve the issue through political means if possible, so we will instruct our teams to continue to work on the potential of a Geneva follow-up."

If Obama was really trying to solve Syria "through political means" he would not have pre-emptively bombed the Geneva II talks with his "weapons-for-peace" program, as in weaponizing only the "good" Syrian "rebels" and only with a few "non-lethal" toys (that's the bottom line of Washington's spin). "If possible" in this case does translate into "impossible". As for the Geneva II talks, they don't rate anything better than "potential" because Obama knows the myriad, squabbling factions of the Syrian opposition will boycott it.

Sometimes it sounded like Putin wanted to put Obama out of his misery (as in "Assad must go" but I have no clue how to make him obey me). He was visibly trying to impress to Obama that expanding the proxy war in Syria would make the current - horrible - status quo look like a walk in the park.

Obama didn't seem to know what Putin knows. Putin - and Russian intelligence - know very well that the "chemical weapons" fairytale unveiled by White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes is utter nonsense.

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Pepe Escobar

From now on, it's just a matter of carefully, gradually guiding US public opinion to fully "normalize" TIA.

Let's talk about PRISM. And let's see some implications of the Edward Snowden-leaked National Security Agency (NSA) Power Point presentation for Total Cyber-Domination.

What's in a name? A prism breaks light into a spectrum of color. PRISM, as expressed in its Dark Side of the Moon-ish logo, is no less than a graphic expression of the ultimate Pentagon/neo-con wet dream; the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine.

The NSA - also known as No Such Agency - is part of the Pentagon.

Full Spectrum Dominance was conceptualized in the Pentagon's 2002 Joint Vision 2020. [1] It's the Pentagon/NSA blueprint for the foreseeable future; in trademark Pentagonese, it identifies "four capabilities - "dominant maneuver, precision engagement, focused logistics and full-dimensional protection".

In sum: Total Information Awareness (TIA).

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Pepe Escobar

The Panopticon was the ultimate surveillance system - a tower surrounded by cells, a pre-Orwellian example of "architecture of oppression". [It] was not originally conceived for the surveillance of a prison, but for a factory crammed with landless peasants on forced labor...

The judgment of Daniel "Pentagon Papers" Ellsberg is definitive; "There has not been in American history a more important leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material". And that includes the release of the Pentagon Papers themselves. Here is the 12-minute video by The Guardian where Snowden details his motives.

By now, everything swirling around the US National Security Agency (NSA) points to a black box in a black hole. The black box is the NSA headquarters itself in Fort Meade, Maryland. The black hole is an area that would include the suburbs of Virginia's Fairfax County near the CIA but mostly the intersection of the Baltimore Parkway and Maryland Route 32.

There one finds a business park a mile away from the NSA which Michael Hayden, a former NSA director (1999-2005) told Salon's Tim Shorrock is "the largest concentration of cyber power on the planet". [1] Hayden coined it "Digital Blackwater".

Here is a decent round up of key questions still not answered about the black hole. But when it comes to how a 29-year old IT wizard with little formal education has been able to access a batch of ultra-sensitive secrets of the US intelligence-national security complex, that's a no-brainer; it's all about the gung-ho privatization of spying - referred to by a mountain of euphemisms of the "contractor reliance" kind. In fact the bulk of the hardware and software used by the dizzying network of 16 US intelligence agencies is privatized.

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Pepe Escobar

Is this the Turkish Spring? No, at least not yet. Is Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan the new Mubarak? No, at least not yet.

History keeps warning us it takes just a spark to light a political bonfire. The recent spark in Istanbul was provided by a small group of very young environmentalists organizing a peaceful sit-in, Occupy-style, in Taksim Square to protest the planned destruction of one of the city center's few remaining public green spaces, Gezi park.

Gezi park's destruction follows a globally tested neoliberalism racket; it will be replaced by a simulacrum - in this case a replica of the Ottoman Artillery Barracks - housing, what else, yet another shopping mall. It's crucial to note that the mayor of Istanbul, also from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), owns a retail chain that will make a killing out of the mall. And the man holding the contract for this "redevelopment" is no less than Erdoğan's son-in-law.

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Pepe Escobar

So Bashar al-Assad has spoken - exclusively, to Argentine daily El Clarín [1,2,3,4](.pdf) (there's a huge Syrian diaspora in Argentina, as well as in neighboring Brazil).

Cutting through the fog of Western hysteria, he made some valuable points. The record shows that, yes, the regime has agreed several times to talk to the opposition; but myriad "rebel" groups with no credible, unified leadership have always refuted.

So there's no way a ceasefire, eventually agreed on a summit - such as the upcoming US/Russia Geneva conference - can be implemented. Assad makes some sense when he says, "We can't discuss a timetable with a party if we don't know who they are."

Well, by now everyone following the Syrian tragedy knows who most of them are. One knows that the Un-Free Syrian Cannibals, sorry, Army (FSA) is a ragged collection of warlords, gangsters and opportunists of every possible brand, intersecting with hardcore jihadis of the Jabhat al-Nusra kind (but also other al-Qaeda-linked or inspired outfits).

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