by Thomas Sowell

Recently
by Thomas Sowell: Random
Thoughts

When teenage
thugs are called “troubled youth” by people on the political left,
that tells us more about the mindset of the left than about these
young hoodlums.

Seldom is there
a speck of evidence that the thugs are troubled, and often there
is ample evidence that they are in fact enjoying themselves, as
they create trouble and dangers for others.

Why then the
built-in excuse, when juvenile hoodlums are called “troubled youth”
and mass murderers are just assumed to be “insane”?

At least as
far back as the 18th century, the left has struggled to avoid facing
the plain fact of evil — that some people simply choose to do things
that they know to be wrong when they do them. Every kind of excuse,
from poverty to an unhappy childhood, is used by the left to explain
and excuse evil.

All the people
who have come out of poverty or unhappy childhoods, or both, and
become decent and productive human beings, are ignored. So are the
evils committed by people raised in wealth and privilege, including
kings, conquerors and slaveowners.

Why has evil
been such a hard concept for many on the left to accept? The basic
agenda of the left is to change external conditions. But what if
the problem is internal? What if the real problem is the cussedness
of human beings?

Rousseau denied
this in the 18th century and the left has been denying it ever since.
Why? Self preservation.

If the things
that the left wants to control — institutions and government policy
— are not the most important factors in the world’s problems, then
what role is there for the left?

What if it
is things like the family, the culture and the traditions that make
a more positive difference than the bright new government “solutions”
that the left is constantly coming up with? What if seeking “the
root causes of crime” is not nearly as effective as locking up criminals?
The hard facts show that the murder rate was going down for decades
under the old traditional practices so disdained by the left intelligentsia,
before the bright new ideas of the left went into effect in the
1960s — after which crime and violence skyrocketed.

What happened
when old-fashioned ideas about sex were replaced in the 1960s by
the bright new ideas of the left that were introduced into the schools
as “sex education” that was supposed to reduce teenage pregnancy
and sexually transmitted diseases?

Both teenage
pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases had been going down
for years. But that trend suddenly reversed in the 1960s and hit
new highs.

One of the
oldest and most dogmatic of the crusades of the left has been disarmament,
both of individuals and of nations. Again, the focus of the left
has been on the externals — the weapons in this case.

If weapons
were the problem, then gun control laws at home and international
disarmament agreements abroad might be the answer. But if evil people
who care no more for laws or treaties than they do for other people’s
lives are the problem, then disarmament means making decent, law-abiding
people more vulnerable to evil people.

Since belief
in disarmament has been a major feature of the left since the 18th
century, in countries around the world, you might think that by
now there would be lots of evidence to substantiate their beliefs.

But evidence
on whether gun control laws actually reduce crime rates in general,
or murder rates in particular, is seldom mentioned by gun control
advocates. It is just assumed in passing that of course tighter
gun control laws will reduce murders.

But the hard
facts do not back up that assumption. That is why it is the critics
of gun control who rely heavily on empirical evidence, as in books
like More
Guns, Less Crime by John Lott and Guns
and Violence by Joyce Lee Malcolm.

National disarmament
has an even worse record. Both Britain and America neglected their
military forces between the two World Wars, while Germany and Japan
armed to the teeth. Many British and American soldiers paid with
their lives for their countries’ initially inadequate military equipment
in World War II.

But what are
mere facts compared to the heady vision of the left?

The political
left has long claimed the role of protector of “the poor.” It is
one of their central moral claims to political power. But how valid
is this claim?

Leaders of
the left in many countries have promoted policies that enable the
poor to be more comfortable in their poverty. But that raises a
fundamental question: Just who are “the poor”?

If you use
a bureaucratic definition of poverty as including all individuals
or families below some arbitrary income level set by the government,
then it is easy to get the kinds of statistics about “the poor”
that are thrown around in the media and in politics. But do those
statistics have much relationship to reality?

“Poverty” once
had some concrete meaning — not enough food to eat or not enough
clothing or shelter to protect you from the elements, for example.
Today it means whatever the government bureaucrats, who set up the
statistical criteria, choose to make it mean. And they have every
incentive to define poverty in a way that includes enough people
to justify welfare state spending.

Most Americans
with incomes below the official poverty level have air-conditioning,
television, own a motor vehicle and, far from being hungry, are
more likely than other Americans to be overweight. But an arbitrary
definition of words and numbers gives them access to the taxpayers’
money.

This kind of
“poverty” can easily become a way of life, not only for today’s
“poor,” but for their children and grandchildren.

Even when they
have the potential to become productive members of society, the
loss of welfare state benefits if they try to do so is an implicit
“tax” on what they would earn that often exceeds the explicit tax
on a millionaire.

If increasing
your income by $10,000 would cause you to lose $15,000 in government
benefits, would you do it?

In short, the
political left’s welfare state makes poverty more comfortable, while
penalizing attempts to rise out of poverty. Unless we believe that
some people are predestined to be poor, the left’s agenda is a disservice
to them, as well as to society. The vast amounts of money wasted
are by no means the worst of it.

If our goal
is for people to get out of poverty, there are plenty of heartening
examples of individuals and groups who have done that, in countries
around the world.

Millions of
“overseas Chinese” emigrated from China destitute and often illiterate
in centuries past. Whether they settled in Southeast Asian countries
or in the United States, they began at the bottom, taking hard,
dirty and sometimes dangerous jobs.

Even though
the overseas Chinese were usually paid little, they saved out of
that little, and many eventually opened tiny businesses. By working
long hours and living frugally, they were able to turn tiny businesses
into larger and more prosperous businesses. Then they saw to it
that their children got the education that they themselves often
lacked.

By 1994, the
57 million overseas Chinese created as much wealth as the one billion
people living in China.

Variations
on this social pattern can be found in the histories of Jewish,
Armenian, Lebanese and other emigrants who settled in many countries
around the world — initially poor, but rising over the generations
to prosperity. Seldom did they rely on government, and they usually
avoided politics on their way up.

Such groups
concentrated on developing what economists call “human capital”
— their skills, talents, knowledge and self discipline. Their success
has usually been based on that one four-letter word that the left
seldom uses in polite society: “work.”

There are individuals
in virtually every group who follow similar patterns to rise from
poverty to prosperity. But how many such individuals there are in
different groups makes a big difference for the prosperity or poverty
of the groups as a whole.

The agenda
of the left — promoting envy and a sense of grievance, while making
loud demands for “rights” to what other people have produced — is
a pattern that has been widespread in countries around the world.

This agenda
has seldom lifted the poor out of poverty. But it has lifted the
left to positions of power and self-aggrandizement, while they promote
policies with socially counterproductive results.

The fundamental
problem of the political left seems to be that the real world does
not fit their preconceptions. Therefore they see the real world
as what is wrong, and what needs to be changed, since apparently
their preconceptions cannot be wrong.

A never-ending
source of grievances for the left is the fact that some groups are
“over-represented” in desirable occupations, institutions and income
brackets, while other groups are “under-represented.”

From all the
indignation and outrage about this expressed on the left, you might
think that it was impossible that different groups are simply better
at different things.

Yet runners
from Kenya continue to win a disproportionate share of marathons
in the United States, and children whose parents or grandparents
came from India have won most of the American spelling bees in the
past 15 years. And has anyone failed to notice that the leading
professional basketball players have for years been black, in a
country where most of the population is white?

Most of the
leading photographic lenses in the world have — for generations
— been designed by people who were either Japanese or German. Most
of the leading diamond-cutters in the world have been either India’s
Jains or Jews from Israel or elsewhere.

Not only people
but things have been grossly unequal. More than two-thirds of all
the tornadoes in the entire world occur in the middle of the United
States. Asia has more than 70 mountain peaks that are higher than
20,000 feet and Africa has none. Is it news that a disproportionate
share of all the oil in the world is in the Middle East?

Whole books
could be filled with the unequal behavior or performances of people,
or the unequal geographic settings in which whole races, nations
and civilizations have developed. Yet the preconceptions of the
political left march on undaunted, loudly proclaiming sinister reasons
why outcomes are not equal within nations or between nations.

All this moral
melodrama has served as a background for the political agenda of
the left, which has claimed to be able to lift the poor out of poverty
and in general make the world a better place. This claim has been
made for centuries, and in countries around the world. And it has
failed for centuries in countries around the world.

Some of the
most sweeping and spectacular rhetoric of the left occurred in 18th
century France, where the very concept of the left originated in
the fact that people with certain views sat on the left side of
the National Assembly.

The French
Revolution was their chance to show what they could do when they
got the power they sought. In contrast to what they promised — “liberty,
equality, fraternity” — what they actually produced were food shortages,
mob violence and dictatorial powers that included arbitrary executions,
extending even to their own leaders, such as Robespierre, who died
under the guillotine.

In the 20th
century, the most sweeping vision of the left — Communism — spread
over vast regions of the world and encompassed well over a billion
human beings. Of these, millions died of starvation in the Soviet
Union under Stalin and tens of millions in China under Mao.

Milder versions
of socialism, with central planning of national economies, took
root in India and in various European democracies.

If the preconceptions
of the left were correct, central planning by educated elites with
vast amounts of statistical data at their fingertips, expertise
readily available, and backed by the power of government, should
have been more successful than market economies where millions of
individuals pursued their own individual interests willy-nilly.

But, by the
end of the 20th century, even socialist and communist governments
began abandoning central planning and allowing more market competition.
Yet this quiet capitulation to inescapable realities did not end
the noisy claims of the left.

In the United
States, those claims and policies reached new heights, epitomized
by government takeovers of whole sectors of the economy and unprecedented
intrusions into the lives of Americans, of which ObamaCare has been
only the most obvious example.

At the heart
of the left’s vision of the world is the implicit assumption that
high-minded third parties like themselves can make better decisions
for other people than those people can make for themselves.

That arbitrary
and unsubstantiated assumption underlies a wide spectrum of laws
and policies over the years, ranging from urban renewal to ObamaCare.

One of the
many international crusades by busybodies on the left is the drive
to limit the hours of work by people in other countries — especially
poorer countries — in businesses operated by multinational corporations.
One international monitoring group has taken on the task of making
sure that people in China do not work more than the legally prescribed
49 hours per week.

Why international
monitoring groups, led by affluent Americans or Europeans, would
imagine that they know what is best for people who are far poorer
than they are, and with far fewer options, is one of the many mysteries
of the busybody elite.

As someone
who left home at the age of 17, with no high school diploma, no
job experience and no skills, I spent several years learning the
hard way what poverty is like. One of the happier times during those
years was a brief period when I worked 60 hours a week — 40 hours
delivering telegrams during the day and 20 hours working part-time
in a machine shop at night.

Why was I happy?
Because, before finding these jobs, I had spent weeks desperately
looking for any job, while my meager savings dwindled down to literally
my last dollar, before finally finding the part-time job at night
in a machine shop.

I had to walk
several miles from the rooming house where I lived in Harlem to
the machine shop located just below the Brooklyn Bridge, in order
to save that last dollar to buy bread until I got a payday.

When I then
found a full-time job delivering telegrams during the day, the money
from the two jobs combined was more than I had ever made before.
I could pay the back rent I owed on my room and both eat and ride
the subways back and forth to work.

I could even
put aside some money for a rainy day. It was the closest thing to
nirvana for me.

Thank heaven
there were no busybodies to prevent me from working more hours than
they thought I should.

There was a
minimum wage law, but this was 1949 and the wages set by the Fair
Labor Standards Act of 1938 had been rendered meaningless by years
of inflation. In the absence of an effective minimum wage law, unemployment
among black teenagers in the recession year of 1949 was a fraction
of what it would be in even the most prosperous years of the 1960s
and beyond.

As the morally
anointed busybodies raised the minimum wage rate, beginning in the
1950s, black teenage unemployment skyrocketed. We have now become
so used to tragically high rates of unemployment among this group
that many people have no idea that things were not always like that,
much less that policies of the busybody left had such catastrophic
consequences.

I
don’t know what I would have done if such busybody policies had
been in effect back in 1949, and prevented me from finding a job
before my last dollar ran out.

My personal
experience is just one small example of what it is like when your
options are very limited. The prosperous busybodies of the left
are constantly promoting policies which reduce the existing options
of poor people even more.

It would never
occur to the busybodies that multinational corporations are expanding
the options of the poor in third world countries, while busybody
policies are contracting their options.

Wages paid
by multinational corporations in poor countries are typically much
higher than wages paid by local employers. Moreover, the experience
that employees get working in modern companies make them more valuable
workers and have led in China, for example, to wages rising by double-digit
percentages annually.

Nothing is
easier for people with degrees to imagine that they know better
than the poor and uneducated. But, as someone once said, “A fool
can put on his coat better than a wise man can put it on for him.”

July
5, 2013

Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators
Syndicate web page.

The
Best of Thomas Sowell

Copyright ©
2013 Creators Syndicate

Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell

by

Doug Hornig
Casey’s
Extraordinary Technology

Recently
by Doug Hornig: Big
Changes Ahead: Gold Just Became Money Again

Happy Independence
Day to our American readers, wherever they might be.

While you’re
enjoying friends, family, and that charbroiled steak, perhaps this
is also a good time to take stock of your own state of independence.
To ponder your privacy, or lack thereof, and what you might do about
it.

For the record,
the word “privacy” doesn’t appear in the Declaration of Independence,
nor anywhere in the Constitution. It’s difficult at this late
date to divine whether the authors of those documents had any real
notion of the term or thought it worth protecting. Nevertheless,
we can draw some inferences from what they did write.

The Fourth
Amendment declares that “the right of the people to be secure in
their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall
issue but on probable cause.” The Fifth Amendment adds that no person
“shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against
himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty or property without due
process of law.”

An overarching
right to be left alone certainly seems implied.

But what about
personal electronic communications – a concept
that could hardly have existed in the 18^th century. Should
they also be secure? That’s the question before us as a society.
It’s been a big one for a long time now, even though it only
makes the front pages when an Edward Snowden type appears.

Snowden might
be the current flavor of the day, but many of his revelations are
little more than yesterday’s news. For example, investigative
reporter Kurt Eichenwald, in his book 500
Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars, revealed how
the NSA’s questionable mass surveillance program – what
he calls “the most dramatic expansion of NSA’s power and authority
in the agency’s 49-year history” – was devised just days
after 9/11, as an end run around the traditional requirements of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Formerly, FISA
demanded that an individual warrant be obtained if the government
wanted to monitor Americans communicating overseas. But the Baby
Bush administration unilaterally swept that aside. The new presidential
directive granted the NSA the power to gather unlimited numbers
of emails and phone calls into a database for analysis, all without
the approval of Congress or any court. (Not to put everything on
Dubya – Obama has essentially doubled down on this encroachment.)

Moving the
surveillance totally onshore was a breeze from there. Connections
between a suspect email address abroad and anyone else – accounts
that either sent or received messages, whether in the United States
or not – would be subject to examination. At that point, a more
detailed list could be constructed, ensnaring any email addresses
contacted by the suspect, and then any addresses contacted by those
addresses, and so on without end.

More specifics
came from whistleblower William Binney, a 30-year veteran of the
NSA. Binney, who resigned from the agency in 2012 because of the
dubious nature of its activities, volunteered the first public description
of NSA’s massive domestic spying program, called Stellar Wind,
which intercepts domestic communications without protections for
US citizens. Binney revealed that NSA has been given access to telecommunications
companies’ domestic and international billing records, and that
since 9/11 the agency has intercepted between 15 and 20 trillion
communications. He further disclosed that Stellar Wind was filed
under the patriotic-sounding “Terrorist Surveillance Program” in
order to give cover to its Constitutionally questionable nature.

We also can’t
pretend to be shocked just because we now know PRISM’s name.
The government has long employed techniques which they hide behind
euphemisms like “full pipe monitoring,” “sentiment analysis,” and
“association mapping.” These involve concurrent surveillance of
both email and social media, in order to build a detailed map of
how evolving movements are organized. Political protests receive
extremely close scrutiny, with information about them shared among
federal, state, and local law enforcement officials. This is what
happened with the “Occupy” demonstrations, where everything participants
did was watched, every communication was recorded, and all of it
was filed away for future reference. Everyone involved is now the
subject of a government dossier.

Even if you’re
not part of a political movement, heaven help you if get caught
up in some vast fishing expedition that hooks everyone who has ever
visited some “suspicious” website, or even merely typed in some
alarm-bell keywords.

Nor has the
value of this kind of information gathering been lost on politicians.
In fact, the presidential race of 2012 will likely go down as the
first one in history – and it won’t be the last – that
was decided by who had the better Internet sniffers. Both the Romney
and Obama campaigns continuously stalked voters across the Web,
by installing cookies on their computers and observing the websites
they visited as a means of nailing down their personal views. CampaignGrid,
a Republican-affiliated firm, and Precision Network, working for
the Democrats, jointly collected data on 150 million American Internet
users. That’s a full 80% of the entire registered voting
population, for those keeping score.

Cellphones
are another rich source of user data, especially when it comes to
apps. If you download one, you grant to the vendor the right to
gather all sorts of personal information. But then, you knew that
when you read the “Permissions” document – you did read it,
right? – so at least you know you can opt out.

Forget about
turning off your phone’s location-tracking feature (which a
mere 19% of us do, Pew says). Regardless of whether it’s on
or off, your wireless carrier knows (and keeps a record of) where
your phone is at all times it’s connected to the cell network.
Carriers can be forced to surrender the information to law enforcement,
not to mention that they’ve been rather less than forthcoming
about what else they may be doing with this data.

Anyone who
thinks the government’s ultimate goal is not to intercept and
archive our every digital message, oral or written – or that
it doesn’t have that capability – needs to be aware of what’s
happening in Bluffdale, Utah, AKA the middle of nowhere. There,
NSA contractors (and only those with top secret clearances) are
putting the finishing touches on a staggeringly huge decryption
and data storage center. James Bamford, the country’s leading
civilian authority on the NSA, wrote in Wired of the facility’s
purpose, which is no less than: “to intercept, decipher, analyze,
and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they
zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea
cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.”

Bluffdale
will cost upwards of $2 billion and occupy a million square feet
of space. Included will be four 25,000-square-foot halls filled
with state-of-the-art supercomputers. The ultimate goal, Bamford
says, is to construct a “worldwide communications network, known
as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes of data.” (A
yottabyte is a septillion, or 10²⁴ bytes – it’s
so gigantic that no one has yet coined a colloquial term for the
next higher order of magnitude.)

To gather
up those yottabytes, the NSA has dotted the country with a network
of buildings set up at key Internet junction points. According to
William Binney, the wiretaps in these secret locations are powered
by highly sophisticated software that conducts “deep packet inspection,”
which is the ability closely to examine traffic even as it streams
through the Internet’s backbone cables at 10 gigbytes per second.

Fortunately,
the situation is impossible but not hopeless – because whenever
technology gets too intrusive, the free market nearly always reacts
with some kind of solution. And that’s the case here. As the
surveillers extended their reach, enterprising liberty lovers immediately
began developing countermeasures.

Keep in mind,
however, that the technologies outlined below can only lessen your
shadow so much, catching a little less attention from the all-seeing
eye of Sauron. No one solution provides perfect privacy, and when
push comes to shove and a government official shows up with a warrant
in hand, he or she will inevitably get access to anything needed.

The first
area to consider addressing is the digital trail you leave when
researching any topic that might be of concern to someone’s
prying eyes (or, for that matter, doing anything at all on the Internet
which you don’t want analyzed, packaged, and sold).

One option
for dealing with this concern is Tor,
which is free and open source. According to its website, the service
was “originally developed … for the primary purpose of protecting
government communications. Today, it is used every day for a wide
variety of purposes by normal people, the military, journalists,
law enforcement officers, activists, and many others.”

Tor tackles
the problem of traffic analysis head on:

“How
does traffic analysis work? Internet data packets have two parts:
a data payload and a header used for routing. The data payload is
whatever is being sent, whether that’s an email message, a web
page, or an audio file. Even if you encrypt the data payload of
your communications, traffic analysis still reveals a great deal
about what you’re doing and, possibly, what you’re saying.
That’s because it focuses on the header, which discloses source,
destination, size, timing, and so on…

“Some
attackers spy on multiple parts of the Internet and use sophisticated
statistical techniques to track the communications patterns of many
different organizations and individuals. Encryption does not help
against these attackers, since it only hides the content of Internet
traffic, not the headers.”

To combat
this, Tor has created a distributed network of users called a VPN
(virtual private network). All data packets on that network “take
a random pathway through several relays that cover your tracks so
no observer at any single point can tell where the data came from
or where it’s going.”

One of the
beauties of Tor is that it’s packaged all up in single download.
Just install the Tor browser – a privacy-tuned clone of the
popular open-source Firefox browser – and it automatically
manages all the networking for you. Surf in relative privacy with
just a few clicks.

For more advanced
users, there are options to route all kinds of activities through
the network other than web browsing, such as Skype calls and file
sharing.

Tor also offers
Orbot, an Android application that allows mobile phone users to
access the Web, instant messaging, and email without being monitored
or blocked by a mobile ISP. It won’t get you around those pesky
data limits, but it will certainly reduce the amount of data your
ISP can provide about you. If you find yourself in a region where
access to certain services is restricted, it will open those options
back up to you.

Cryptohippie
is another site that utilizes the privacy capabilities of a VPN.
According to the company, its subscription-based Road Warrior product
“creates a strongly encrypted connection from your computer to the
Cryptohippie anonymity network. From there, your traffic passes
through at least two national jurisdictions, loses all association
with your identifiers and emerges from our network at a distant
location. But, even with all of this going on, you can surf, check
your email, use Skype, and everything else exactly as you have been.
Unless you reveal it yourself, no one can see who you are or what
your data may be.”

The service
is well aware of the ever-present possibility of government interference
with its operations. Thus Cryptohippie is truly international. Its
only US presence is to authenticate connections to its servers in
other countries. None of its servers are in the States.

(Of course,
if you use Tor or Cryptohippie to log in to secured sites like Amazon
or eBay, your activities at that end will still be logged to a database
and associated with you, so don’t delude yourself that such
tools make you invisible. All they can do is keep your activity
limited to the two parties involved – you and the computer
or person on the other end – and keep outsiders from knowing
that the conversation is taking place.)

These are highly
sophisticated products. Perhaps you don’t think you need that
level of protection, but would just like to keep your browsing habits
private. All of the major browsers, including Internet Explorer,
Firefox, and Google Chrome, have a “clear browsing history” button.
They also have “enable private browsing” functions that you can
activate.

How much value
these options actually have is questionable, but in any event they’re
not going to stop Google from archiving your searches, if that’s
the engine you use. (And who doesn’t?) So if you don’t want
that, you can use a different search service, like DuckDuckGo,
whose strict non-tracking
policy is entertainingly presented in graphic form. Try it out
in comparison to Google, and you’ll find that the results are
reasonably similar (although it seems odd at first not to have that
strip of ads running down the right side of the screen). DuckDuckGo
reports that it has seen a big increase in users since Snowden came
forward.

Another area
to consider addressing is your email. If you’d rather not have
your email subject to daily inspection for “watchwords” our guardians
consider inflammatory, one option is to use a foreign provider that
will be less inclined to comply when Washington comes knocking with
a “request” for user data. There are countless providers to choose
from, including:

• Swissmail.org,
  which is obviously domiciled in Switzerland;
• Neomailbox.com,
  located in the Netherlands;
• CounterMail.com
  in Sweden;
• TrilightZone.org
  in the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, and Malaysia; and
• Anonymousspeech.com,
  which boasts over 600,000 subscribers and is unusual in that it
  has no central location. “Our servers,” the company says, “are
  constantly moving in different countries (Malaysia, Japan, Panama,
  etc.) and are always outside the US and Europe.”

Whichever
provider you choose, just be sure they offer at least an SSL connection
to its services at all times. That will stop someone from downloading
your email right off the wire. Features like encrypted storage and
domicile in a state known for protecting privacy are also nice features.

The latest
entrant in the privacy space is Silent Circle, a company whose story
is worth detailing, because it has placed itself squarely in the
forefront of the clash between alleged governmental need-to-know
and personal privacy rights.

Silent Circle’s
CEO is Mike Janke, a former Navy SEAL commando and international
security contractor who has gathered around him a megastar cast
of techies, including most prominently, the legendary Phil Zimmermann,
godfather of private data encryption and creator of the original
PGP, which remains the world’s most-utilized security system.
Also on board are Jon Callas, the man behind Apple’s whole-disk
encryption, which is used to secure hard drives in Macs across the
world; and Vincent Moscaritolo, a top cryptographic engineer who
previously worked on PGP and for Apple.

The team hit
the ground running last October with the introduction of its first
product, an easy-to-use, surveillance-resistant communications platform
that could be employed on an iPhone or iPad to encrypt mobile communications – text
messages plus voice and video calls.

In order to
avoid potential sanctions from Uncle Sam, Silent Circle was incorporated
offshore, with an initial network build-out in Canada; it has plans
to expand to Switzerland and Hong Kong.

Silent Circle
immediately attracted attention from news organizations, nine of
which signed on to protect their journalists’ and sources’
safety in delicate situations. A major multinational corporation
ordered some 18,000 subscriptions for its staff. Intelligence and
law enforcement agencies in nine countries have expressed interest
in using the company to protect the communications of their own
employees.

As Ryan Gallagher
wrote in Slate:

“The
technology uses a sophisticated peer-to-peer encryption technique
that allows users to send encrypted files of up to 60 megabytes
through a ‘Silent Text’ app. The sender of the file can
set it on a timer so that it will automatically ‘burn’ – deleting
it from both devices after a set period of, say, seven minutes.
Until now, sending encrypted documents has been frustratingly difficult
for anyone who isn’t a sophisticated technology user, requiring
knowledge of how to use and install various kinds of specialist
software. What Silent Circle has done is to remove these hurdles,
essentially democratizing encryption. It’s a game-changer that
will almost certainly make life easier and safer for journalists,
dissidents, diplomats, and companies trying to evade state surveillance
or corporate espionage.”

The burn feature
is extraordinarily valuable. It can mean the difference between
life and death for someone who uses a phone to film an atrocity
in a danger zone and transmits it to a safe remote location. Seven
minutes later, it disappears from the source, even if the phone
is seized and its contents examined.

Additionally,
Silent Circle “doesn’t retain metadata (such as times and dates
calls are made using Silent Circle), and IP server logs showing
who is visiting the Silent Circle website are currently held for
only seven days. The same privacy-by-design approach will be adopted
to protect the security of users’ encrypted files. When a user
sends a picture or document, it will be encrypted, digitally ‘shredded’
into thousands of pieces, and temporarily stored in a ‘Secure
Cloud Broker’ until it is transmitted to the recipient. Silent
Circle … has no way of accessing the encrypted files because the
‘key’ to open them is held on the users’ devices and
then deleted after it has been used to open the files.”

The Silent
Suite, a subscription to which costs US $20/month, covers the communications
spectrum with four features:

Silent Phone
works on iPhone, iPad, Android, Galaxy, and Nexus, and provides
encrypted, P2P, HD mobile voice and video over 3G, 4G, Edge, and
WiFi, “with almost no latency” and no possibility of anyone (including
the company) listening or wiretapping. The cryptographic keys involved
are destroyed at the end of the call.

Silent Text
allows the user to send P2P encrypted material – business documents
(Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Pages, Keynote, PDFs, CAD drawings, etc.),
any file, any movie, any picture, map locations, URLs, calendar
invites – and then delete them with its “Burn Notice” feature.

Silent Eyes
allows for encrypted HD video and voice transmission using a laptop
or desktop device. It’s compatible with all Windows operating
systems.

Silent Mail
encrypts email with PGP Universal. It will run on smartphones, tablets,
and computers using existing mail programs such as Outlook and Mac
Mail. Absolute privacy is ensured with a silentmail.com email address
and 1 Gb of encrypted storage.

This is not
intended as an endorsement of Silent Circle, although we heartily
approve of what the company is trying to do, and the other above
references by no means represent an exhaustive guide to securing
your communications. But they will point you in the right direction
and perhaps spur you to action. A basic search will turn up dozens
more options. Carefully study what each offers, read reviews from
sources you trust, determine the service best suited to your particular
needs, then just sign up.

However, we
all have to accept the cold, hard fact of the matter, which is that
this cat-and-mouse game is likely to be with us for a very long
time. Those who believe they have the right to spy on us will develop
ever more sophisticated ways of doing it. Those who believe we have
a Constitutional right to privacy will fight tooth and nail to protect
it.

It’s possible
that the one side eventually will develop an unstoppable offense
or that the other will come up with a defense that can’t be
breached. But that’s not the way to bet.

In the end,
technology is completely neutral. It will evolve with no regard
to how it is used. Expect those cats and mice to continue chasing
each other, around and around and around. And make do with the best
that is available to you at any given time.

July 5, 2013

Doug Hornig is a writer for Casey
Research.

Copyright
© 2013 Casey
Research

Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell

Diesel-powered
cars could be the ticket — as far as giving us very
high-mileage cars (50-plus MPGs) with excellent power/performance
and without the liabilities of hybrids — including the additional
expense/complexity of having two powerplants (a gas engine
and an electric motor) in the same vehicle — or the compromised
economy/performance of hybrids at highway speeds.

But, as my
week in the just-launched 2014 Chevy Cruze diesel made all-too-plain,
the government is making it very hard to make a case for diesel-powered
cars.

I’ll
explain.

The Cruze I
test drove (read the review here)
comes with two features that many potential buyers may not like.
Unfortunately, they are not optional. If you buy the car,
you’re stuck with them — just like Claymores in the
dashboard (air bags), always-on headlights (Daytime Running Lamps)
and other such things force-fed to the American car buyer.

The first of
these features is a particulate (soot) trap built into the exhaust
system. It must be periodically “regenerated.” Very
high heat (from driving the car) is used to burn off accumulated
soot, thereby preventing it from pouring out of the tailpipe. This
is the chief reason why modern diesel cars don’t smoke —
unlike the diesel-powered infamies of the past. This is wonderful.
Except for one thing. If you don’t drive the car long
enough or fast enough (20-30 minutes continuously at speeds
of 30 MPH or more) the “regeneration” cycle won’t
work as designed. The accumulated soot isn’t burned
off. Instead, it builds up inside the system. Which makes the system
unhappy. And that makes the car’s computer — which controls
everything — unhappy. In turn, you will soon be unhappy.
Because the car’s computer will flash a “trouble code”
(a dashboard warning light will appear) and it will then limit how
fast the car can be driven — until you take it in to Mr. Goodwrench
to get that Great GM Feeling.

If you do a
lot of highway driving, you may never have this problem. But people
who only use the car to commute, who do mostly stop-and-go driving,
may be in for an unwelcome surprise. I wrote a column a few weeks
ago (see here)
about the DC ambulance that went kaput by the side of the
road — with a dying patient inside — as a result of
the vehicle’s computer getting pissy because the “regeneration”
cycle never had a chance to do its thing — the ambulance being
used infrequently and mostly driven for short distances at lower
speeds. That was a Ford. Be advised the “regeneration”
thing is by no means just a GM thing. It is becoming a
universal thing — because it is the only thing that keeps
particulate emissions in line with what the EPA demands. You can
agree or not that curbing soot to nil is a good thing. The question
is whether it’s smart to be so strict if the only way to do
it is to make diesel-powered cars vulnerable to random unplanned
pit stops. Because buyers aren’t going to like that. And once
word gets out, they may not buy diesel-powered cars. Which kind
of makes the whole exercise pointless. Unless the point of the exercise
is to strangle diesel-powered cars in the crib, before they get
a chance to win hearts and minds — and achieve widespread
consumer acceptance.

The next diesel
“feature” is potentially much more of a consumer turn-off:
Urea injection.

You’ve
no doubt heard about catalytic converters. All gas-powered
cars have these devices. They catalytically (chemically) convert
exhaust gasses from obnoxious and harmful to not-obnoxious and harmless
— which is why the better part of any modern car’s exhaust
stream (upwards of 95 percent) is composed of water vapor and carbon
dioxide, both compounds having no ill effect on the quality of the
air we breathe. Well, urea injection in diesel engines works on
a similar principle. By spraying a shot of urea – basically, horse
pee — into the hot exhaust stream, the exhaust gas is chemically
changed to more benign compounds. But unlike the gas-engined car’s
catalytic converter — which requires no periodic maintenance
— a diesel-powered car’s urea injection system requires
regular topping-off of the urea tank. In the Cruze, there’s
a filler neck in the trunk. The tank holds about five gallons of
the stuff — which is typical.

So, what’s
the problem?

Read
the rest of the article

July
5, 2013

Eric Peters
[send him mail] is an
automotive columnist and author of Automotive
Atrocities and Road Hogs (2011). Visit his
website.

Copyright
© 2013 Eric Peters

The
Best of Eric Peters

Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell

by Charles Hugh Smith
OfTwoMinds.com

Previously
by Charles Hugh Smith: Do
Your Hiring Practices Make Sense? Google Thinks Not

We are about
to reap the consequences of tolerating the perfection of the Savior
State / cartel-crony capitalism’s neofeudal debtocracy.

We as a
nation had an unparalleled, historic opportunity to set things right
in the aftermath of the 2008 financial meltdown. Alas, we blew it.
Instead of tearing down what had failed spectacularly, we chose
to do more of what failed spectacularly: cartel-crony capitalism,
centralized wealth and power and an expansion of our financialized
debtocracy.

Gordon Long
and I discussed this epic miss in Window of Opportunity: Blown!

While it’s
certainly easy to blame our corrupt, self-serving leadership, we
have tolerated their “more of the same.” It’s been said that
a people get the government they can tolerate (as well as the one
they deserve), and the American people have tolerated an expansion
of everything that is systemically destructive because we dared
not risk our share of the Savior State swag.

The joke
will be on us, because there won’t be any swag when the rotten edifice
collapses in a heap. The entire Status Quo response can be summarized
thusly: save cartel-crony capitalism and increase central state
power by expanding credit and blowing borrowed trillions, i.e. paper
over structural flaws with tsunamis of free money and credit.

Let’s check
in on the effectiveness of the Keynesian Cargo Cult’s project of
borrowing and blowing trillions: Oops, diminishing returns.

Does this
trajectory of federal borrowing look remotely sustainable to you?

The Federal
Reserve’s number 1 project of bailing out the parasitic financial
cartel with trillions of dollars in free credit has also failed
spectacularly, as the banks can’t find any positive risk/return
in loans except those that are guaranteed by the Federal government
(FHA, Fannie Mae, etc.)

The Federal
Reserve’s number 2 project of “saving” cartel-crony capitalism and
its captured political class of toadies, apparatchiks and factotums
by blowing asset bubbles has succeeded in setting up one violent
crash after another. You don’t need Technical Analysis 101 to
see the megaphone pattern traced out by the three Fed-inflated asset
bubbles.

As you no
doubt recall, nobody in the Fed, Wall Street or the Savior State
saw the inevitable popping of the tech bubble or the housing bubble,
and so it is unsurprising that our “leadership” has once again failed
to anticipate the endgame of financial bubbles is not “to the moon”
but collapse.

“But that
can’t possibly happen.” Yes, we heard that in 1999 and 2006, too.
What must happen will happen, and we as a nation are about to reap
the consequences of tolerating the perfection of the Savior State
/ cartel-crony capitalism’s neofeudal debtocracy.

July
5, 2013

Copyright
© 2013 OfTwoMinds.com

Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell

by
Joseph Mercola

Recently
by Joseph Mercola: Sensible
Sun Exposure Can Help Prevent Melanoma, Breast Cancer, and Hundreds
of Other Health Problems

The frivolous
use of antibiotics, not just in medicine but also in food production,
is the root cause of skyrocketing antibiotic resistance.

Data from
the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control¹
(ECDC) shows a significant rise of resistance to multiple antibiotics
in Klebsiella pneumoniae and E. coli in just
the last four years alone, affecting more than one-third of
the EU, and the primary cause for this man-made epidemic is
the widespread misuse of antibiotics.

Between
the years of 1993 and 2005, the number of Americans hospitalized
due to the antibiotic-resistant “superbug” MRSA
(methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) skyrocketed
from about 2,000 to 370,000.

Currently,
MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant infections kill about 60,000
Americans annually, and account for billions of dollars in health
care costs.²
Antibiotic-resistant disease is not the only danger associated
with the misuse of these drugs. Excessive exposure to antibiotics
also takes a heavy toll on your gastrointestinal health, which
can predispose you to virtually any disease.

Abnormal
gut flora may actually be a major contributing factor to the
rise in a wide variety of childhood diseases and ailments, from
bowel disorders and allergies
to autism.

Agricultural
uses of antibiotics account for about 80 percent of all
antibiotic use in the US,³
so it’s a MAJOR source of human antibiotic consumption. Animals
are often fed antibiotics at low doses for disease prevention and
growth promotion, and those antibiotics are transferred to you via
meat, and even via the manure used as crop fertilizer.

Protecting
your gut health and reducing the spread of antibiotic-resistant
bacteria are significant reasons for making sure you’re only eating
grass-fed, organically-raised meats and animal products.

Gut Viruses
Confer Antibiotic-Resistance to Bacteria, New Research Shows

When used
properly, in the correct contexts and with responsibility, antibiotics
can and do save lives that are threatened by bacterial infections.
But there is one important variable that wasn’t considered when
the widespread use of these “miracle medicines” began, and that
is that bacteria are highly adaptable.

They are
clearly capable of outsmarting antibiotics, and they are doing
so with a vengeance. According to the CDC’s National Antimicrobial
Resistance Monitoring System:⁴

“Antibiotics
kill or inhibit the growth of susceptible bacteria. Sometimes
one of the bacteria survives because it has the ability to neutralize
or evade the effect of the antibiotic; that one bacteria can
then multiply and replace all the bacteria that were killed
off.

Exposure
to antibiotics therefore provides selective pressure, which
makes the surviving bacteria more likely to be resistant. In
addition, bacteria that were at one time susceptible to an antibiotic
can acquire resistance through mutation of their genetic material
or by acquiring pieces of DNA that code for the resistance properties
from other bacteria.

The DNA
that codes for resistance can be grouped in a single easily transferable
package. This means that bacteria can become resistant to many antimicrobial
agents because of the transfer of one piece of DNA.”

Interestingly,
these bacteria have previously unknown allies that supply them with
the antibiotic-resistant genes necessary for their survival. Researchers
at the Wyss Institute have discovered that gut viruses known as
bacteriophages, a.k.a. “phages” are actually instrumental
in conferring antibacterial resistance to bacteria.^5,
6 Most importantly:

“[Phage]
deliver genes that help the bacteria to survive not just the
antibiotic they’ve been exposed to, but other types of antibiotics
as well…

That suggests that phages in the gut may be partly responsible
for the emergence of dangerous superbugs that withstand multiple
antibiotics, and that drug targeting of phages could offer a
potential new path to mitigate development of antibiotic resistance,”
the Institute’s press release⁷
states.

Phages
Are Actually an Important Part of Your Body’s Defense
System

More than
90 percent of the DNA in your body is not yours, but actually belongs
to a wide variety of microbes, and these findings just go to show
how intricately tied your health is to the microorganisms that live
inside you. And, while the word “virus” brings to mind
all things “bad” for you, this is not necessarily true.

Another recent study published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences⁸
found that many of these viruses (phages) actually serve as immune
helpers – not enemies – and form an important part
of your body’s defense system.⁹

Wherever bacteria
reside, you will also find phages, because phages depend on bacteria
for their survival. Phages specialize in breaking open and killing
certain kinds of bacteria, hijacking them in order to replicate.

Most phages have hollow heads, which store their DNA and RNA, and
tunnel tails designed for binding to the surface of their bacterial
targets. According to phages.org, once a phage has attached itself
to a bacterium:

“The
viral DNA is then injected through the tail into the host cell,
where it directs the production of progeny phages, often over
a hundred in half an hour. These ‘young’ phages burst from the
host cell (killing it) and infect more bacteria.”

The researchers
found evidence that these phages partner with animals and humans
to stave off bacterial infections and control the composition
of friendly
microbes in your body. The researchers speculate that some
phages might protect bacteria that benefit their hosts (i.e.
you), while destroying those that cause harm.

Which
brings us back to the featured research, which suggests that
these phages may also play a significant role in the rapid rise
of antibiotic resistance… In essence, it would appear our
zealous overuse of antibiotic drugs is causing these helpful
viruses to boost the survivability of bacteria during the onslaught
of a deadly foe – the antibiotic – only in this case,
the end result is disastrous rather than helpful for the host…
On the upside, these findings may confer new hope for effective
treatments. According to Don Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., Founding Director
of the Wyss Institute:¹⁰

“Antibiotic
resistance is as pressing a global health problem as they come,
and to fight it, it’s critical to understand it. [These] novel findings
offer a previously unknown way to approach this problem – by
targeting the phage that live in our intestine, rather than the
pathogens themselves.”

Colloidal
Silver Dramatically Boosts Effectiveness of Antibiotics

The use
of silver in the battle against pathogenic bacteria goes way
back into antiquity. Hippocrates was one of the first to describe
its antimicrobial properties in 400 B.C. Over the past few years,
several studies
have demonstrated the fact that silver
is indeed one of the most effective agents in the battle against
antibiotic-resistant super pathogens. Yet conventional medicine
has largely dismissed such claims, relegating colloidal silver
to the “woo-woo” section of medical myth.

They may
be inclined to change their tune however, in light of the latest
research^11,
12 which shows
that low doses of silver can make antibiotics up to 1,000 times
more effective, and may even allow an antibiotic to successfully
combat otherwise antibiotic-resistant bacteria. As reported
by Medical News Today:¹³

“…[N]ot
only did silver boost the ability of a broad range of commonly used
antibiotics so as to stop mice dying of otherwise lethal infections,
but it made at least one resistant bacterium succumb to antibiotics
again. The addition of silver also broadened the effect of vancomycin,
an antibiotic that is usually only effective at killing Gram-positive
bacteria like Staph and Strep; aided by silver it killed Gram-negative
bacteria such as those that cause food poisoning and dangerous hospital-acquired
infections.”

For example,
by adding a small amount of silver to the antibiotic, a powerful
synergism occurred, and a urinary tract infection caused by tetracycline-resistant
E. coli was successfully eradicated. Silver also helped save the
lives of 90 percent of mice suffering with a life-threatening abdominal
inflammation by adding it to the antibiotic vanomycin. In the group
receiving vanomycin only, a mere 10 percent survived. The researchers
discovered two mechanisms that help explain how silver can boost
the effectiveness of an antibiotic:

• Silver
  interferes with the bacteria’s metabolism, increasing
  production of reactive oxygen species¹⁴
  (ROS); products of normal oxygen consuming metabolic processes
  in your body that, in excess, can damage cell membranes and
  DNA. Many antibiotics are believed to kill bacteria by producing
  ROS compounds, and here, the researchers found that adding
  a small amount of silver boosted the antibiotic’s ability
  to kill anywhere from 10 and 1,000 times more bacteria
• Silver
  makes the bacteria’s cell membrane more permeable. This
  may explain the beneficial effect of silver on gram-negative
  bacteria, the cells of which are often impenetrable to antibiotics
  due to the molecular size of the drugs

What About
Potential Toxicity of Colloidal Silver?

As for
toxicity, the researchers found that the doses of silver required
were far smaller than the dose needed to harm either mice or
cultured human cells, suggesting that oral and injectable silver
should be quite safe. That said, quality is extremely important,
as misrepresentation of colloidal
silver by less scrupulous manufacturers has in the past
led to some of its more negative connotations. According to
a Commercial Product Report¹⁵
by silver-colloids.com, a site that provides detailed laboratory
analyses of colloidal silver products, there are three distinctly
different types of silver products on the market that are all
labeled and sold as “colloidal” silver:

• True colloidal
  silver
• Ionic silver
  
• Silver protein:
  Due to the high concentration of large silver particles, silver
  protein products are known to cause argyria,
  which turns your skin blue-gray color.

When purchasing
colloidal silver, it’s very important to avoid silver
protein formulas. True colloidal silver seems to be the most
recommended, but ionic silver could probably also be used. In
the featured study, they used ionic silver (Ag) in a silver
nitrate salt (AgNO3), which, again, was found to be quite non-toxic
in animals and human cell cultures. Substantial antimicrobial
activity was found at 30 microns (μM) against E. coli.
If you take ionic silver products according to the manufacturer’s
recommended dosage, ionic silver will not cause argyria. That
said, since there are potential health risks involved if you
select the wrong formula, I recommend you use colloidal
silver only under the guidance and supervision of a qualified
alternative health practitioner who can help you select a high-quality
product.

Statin
Users Beware… Your Cholesterol Medication May Not Mix Well
with Antibiotics!

In related
news, Canadian researchers¹⁶
warn that patients – especially the elderly – taking
cholesterol-lowering drugs
such as Lipitor, should avoid the antibiotics clarithromycin
and erythromycin, as these antibiotics inhibit the metabolism
of statins. Increased
drug concentrations in your body may cause muscle or kidney
damage, and even death. As reported by WebMD:¹⁷

“‘These
drugs do interact and cause difficulties for patients,’ said
lead researcher Dr. Amit Garg, a professor in the department
of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of Western
Ontario in London, Ontario. These adverse reactions
are rare, Garg added. ‘Most people will be fine,’ he said. ‘But
at a population level, hundreds of preventable hospitalizations
are occurring.’ For someone taking a statin, the study suggests
that substituting a different antibiotic – azithromycin
– is safer because it doesn’t interfere with the metabolism
of statins. Another strategy is to stop the statin until the
antibiotic course is finished, Garg said.”

What You Can
Do to Help Stop the Spread of Antibiotic-Resistant Disease

You can
help yourself and your community by using antibiotics only
when absolutely necessary and by purchasing organic, antibiotic-free
meats and other foods. Even though the problem of antibiotic
resistance needs to be stemmed through public policy on a nationwide
level, the more people who get involved on a personal level
to stop unnecessary antibiotic use the better.

Remember,
not every bacterial infection needs to be treated with a drug.
First, as an all-around preventive measure, you’ll want
to make sure your vitamin
D level is optimized year-round, especially during pregnancy,
along with vitamin
K2. But there are also a number of natural compounds that
can help boost your immune system function to help rid you of
an infection, including:

• Oregano
  (oil of oregano)
• Garlic
• Echinacea
• Manuka
  honey (for topical application)

Last but
not least, the use of silver compounds appears to bring new
hope against antibiotic-resistant pathogens. Still, creating
more potent antibiotics, regardless of how that’s achieved,
will not help us in the long run unless we also address the
root causes of antibiotic resistance, which is rampant overuse
– in medicine, but perhaps even more importantly, in agriculture.

If you
live in the United States and want to get involved on a national
level, Food Democracy Now! has created a petition
against the overuse of antibiotics in livestock production.¹⁸
If you care about this issue, I suggest you use this petition
to make your voice heard.

Sources
and References

July
5, 2013

Copyright ©
2013 Dr. Joseph Mercola

The
Best of Joseph Mercola

Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell

by
Elizabeth Renter
Natural Society

There is a
frightening new trend in the medical community: prescribing psychoactive
stimulant medication to children from low-income families to boost
their academic performance. To be more clear, doctors are actually
prescribing ADHD drugs to students who are academically struggling.
Here’s the kicker: the kids don’t have attention deficit
hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Evening
the Scales

One proponent
of the trend, Dr. Michael Anderson, says that ADHD is a “made
up…excuse” for the real illness, which is a social and
educational environment unwilling to spend money on changing the
environment and instead opting to change the child. A self-professed
“social justice thinker,” Anderson knows that many families
cannot afford behavior-based therapy for their children. He sees
the practice of issuing Adderall to children without ADHD as “evening
the scales a little bit.”

Dr. William
Graf, a pediatrician who also sees many children from poor families,
has his concerns with the practice. “These children are still
in the developmental phase, and we still don’t know how these
drugs biologically affect the developing brain.”

When the New
York Times tried to contact educators to speak on the topic
of ADHD, many resisted interviews and some – like a superintendent
of a major school district in California – only spoke anonymously.

“It’s
scary to think…how not funding public education to meet the
needs of all kids has led to this.”

ADHD Drugs
and Dangerous Side Effects

Despite a growing
body of knowledge that the drugs in question – like Adderall
and Risperdal – cause devastating side effects, prescriptions
are on the rise. In 2010 alone, doctors drew up 18 million prescriptions
of Adderall. Companies have even been struggling
to produce enough ADHD drugs due to the massive increase in
prescriptions.

Read
the rest of the article

July
5, 2013

Copyright
© 2013 Natural
Society

Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell

Recently
by Greg Hunter: We’re
Going Into the Greatest Depression — Gerald Celente

Financial analyst
Dr. Jim Willie says there is no way the Fed is going to stop printing
money or even “taper” it. He charges, “Everything is dependent on
Fed support. They know if they take it away, they’re going to create
a black hole. The Treasury bond is the greatest asset bubble in
history. It’s at least twice as large as the housing and mortgage
bubble, maybe three or four times as large.” Dr. Willie goes on
to say, “I think the Fed’s balance sheet is going to expand further,
not contract.” As far as the gold price, Dr. Willie says what you
are seeing now is not real. Dr. Willie says, “In order for the real
gold price to reflect true value, we must shut down the COMEX. Don’t
worry; they’re helping themselves to shut it down by keeping the
price down and causing a fire sale around the world.” Dr. Willie
says a big upward move is coming in gold. What could be the trigger?
Dr. Willie says, “It might be a default for gold delivery . . .
at the same time that a big bank fails. I am hearing every single
night there are three big banks that are running the risk of failure.”
Dr. Willie predicts, “If we have another repeat of Lehman, it’s
going to be 10 times larger. It’s not going to be containable.”
Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with Dr. Jim Willie, Publisher
of the Hat Trick Letter
found on GoldenJackass.com.

July
5, 2013

Copyright
© 2013 USAWatchdog.com

The
Best of Greg Hunter

Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell

Rothbard’s
review of George Orwell’s Nineteen
Eight-Four (Harcourt, 1949) appeared in Analysis,
September 1949, p. 4

In recent
years, many writers have given us their vision of the coming collectivist
future. At the turn of the century, neither Edward Bellamy nor
H. G. Wells suspected that the collectivist societies of their
dreams were so close at hand. As collectivism sprouted following
World War I, many keen observers felt that there was a big difference
between the idyllic Edens pictured by Bellamy and Wells and the
actual conditions of the various “waves of the future.”

Notable among
these revised forecasts of the world of the future were Aldous
Huxley’s Brave
New World and Ayn Rand’s Anthem.
Both of their future worlds, evil as they were, had saving graces.
Huxley’s future was spiritually dead, but at least the masses
were happy; Ayn Rand’s dictators were timid, stupid men who
permitted a renascent individualist to escape from the strangling
collectivist world and begin life anew.

George Orwell’s
collectivist Utopia has plugged all the loopholes. There is no
hope at all for the individual or for humanity, and so the effect
on the reader is devastating. Orwell’s future is run by a
Party whose job is the total exercise of Power, and it goes about
its job with diabolic efficiency and ingenuity. The Party represents
itself as the embodiment of the principles of Ingsoc, or English
Socialism. These principles turn out to be: blind, unquestioning
obedience to the Party, and equally blind hatred of any person
or group the Party proclaims as its enemy. These emotions are
the only ones permitted to anybody; all others, such as personal
and family love, are systematically stamped out.

All ideas
are of course treasonable and subversive – the only persons
permitted to live are those who unthinkingly parrot the Party
Line. Any man with a bent for independent thought is subtly encouraged
in his heresy by the Thought Police. Then, when he has come to
realize the nature of the regime and hates it thoroughly, the
Ministry of Love takes over and, via the most horrible forms of
torture, burns out of him any spark of human dignity. Finally,
the heretic goes to his slaughter convinced of the goodness of
his persecutors. He dies loving the Party and its mythical leader,
Big Brother. Not even martyrdom is permitted in the inferno of
the future.

To accomplish
its purpose of destroying the human mind and heart, the Party
uses: constant propaganda, inducing all to love Big Brother and
hate his enemies; the destruction of truth by continually altering
historical records to conform to the ever-changing Party Line
– thus history is destroyed and all truth flows from the
Party; the destruction of language to make it impossible to think
independent thoughts – by confusing the meaning of words
and by introducing a new gibberish-language; and the destruction
of logic by a process known as doublethink defined as the capacity
to hold in one’s mind two contradictory beliefs at the same
time.

One significant
method that the Party uses to remain in power is to contrive to
keep its country always at war with some other country. The other
countries are also run by similar parties, though each have different
names. By the process of doublethink every loyal Party member
believes that his part will ultimately conquer the world, yet
also recognizes that all the countries tacitly engage in a war
that never becomes too “hot.” Thus, each Party has an
excuse to starve and terrorize its subjects in the name of military
necessity, while its ruler remains secure from any wartime disaster.

“I understand
how,” said Winston Smith, the pathetic heretic of Nineteen
Eight-Four,“but I don’t understand why.” Why
does the Party do all this? One of its leaders explains:

“The
Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested
in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. We are
different from all the oligarchies of the past in that we know
what we are doing. All the others were cowards and hypocrites.
They never had the courage to recognize their motives. We know
that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing
it. Power is not a means; it is an end. The object of persecution
is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of
power is power. How does one man assert his power over another?
By making him suffer. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure
that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting
pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces
and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
In our world, there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph,
and self-abasement – a world of fear and treachery and torment.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on
a human face forever.” Orwell’s collectivist world of
the future is doubtless a nightmare – but is it merely a
dream?

Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell

by Glenn Greenwald
The
Guardian

The NSA
revelations continue to expose far more than just the ongoing operations
of that sprawling and unaccountable spying agency. Let’s examine
what we have learned this week about the US political and media
class and then certain EU leaders.

The first NSA
story to be reported was our
June 6 article which exposed the bulk, indiscriminate collection
by the US Government of the telephone records of tens of millions
of Americans. Ever since then, it has been undeniably clear that
James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, outright
lied to the US Senate – specifically to the Intelligence
Committee, the body charged with oversight over surveillance programs
– when he said “no, sir” in response to this question from
Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden: “Does the NSA collect any type of
data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?”

That Clapper
fundamentally misled Congress is beyond dispute. The DNI himself
has now
been forced by our stories to admit that his statement was,
in his words, “clearly erroneous” and to apologize. But he did this
only once our front-page revelations forced him to do so: in other
words, what he’s sorry about is that he got caught lying to the
Senate. And as Salon’s David Sirota adeptly
documented on Friday, Clapper is still spouting falsehoods as
he apologizes and attempts to explain why he did it.

How is this
not a huge scandal? Intentionally deceiving Congress is a
felony, punishable by up to 5 years in prison for each offense.
Reagan administration officials were convicted of misleading Congress
as
part of the Iran-contra scandal and other
controversies, and sports
stars have been prosecuted by the Obama DOJ based on allegations
they have done so.

Beyond its
criminality, lying to Congress destroys the pretense of oversight.
Obviously, members of Congress cannot exercise any actual oversight
over programs which are being concealed by deceitful national security
officials.

In response
to our first week of NSA stories, Wyden issued a
statement denouncing these misleading statements, explaining
that the Senate’s oversight function “cannot be done responsibly
if senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions”,
and calling for “public hearings” to “address the recent disclosures,”
arguing that “the American people have the right to expect straight
answers from the intelligence leadership to the questions asked
by their representatives.” Those people who have been defending
the NSA programs by claiming there is robust Congressional oversight
should be leading the chorus against Clapper, given that his deceit
prevents the very oversight they invoke to justify these programs.

But Clapper
isn’t the only top national security official who has been proven
by our NSA stories to be fundamentally misleading the public and
the Congress about surveillance programs. As an
outstanding Washington Post article by Greg Miller this week
documented:

“[D]etails
that have emerged from the exposure of hundreds of pages of previously
classified NSA documents indicate that public assertions about
these programs by senior US officials have also often been misleading,
erroneous or simply false.”

Please re-read
that sentence. It’s not just Clapper, but multiple “senior US officials”,
whose statements have been proven false by our reporting and Edward
Snowden’s disclosures. Indeed, the Guardian previously
published top secret documents disproving the claims of NSA
Director Gen. Keith Alexander that the agency is incapable of stating
how many Americans are having their calls and emails invaded without
warrants, as well as the oft-repeated
claim from President Barack Obama that the NSA is not listening
in on Americans’ calls without warrants. Both of those assertions,
as our prior reporting and Miller’s article this week demonstrates,
are indisputably false.

Beyond that,
the NSA got caught spreading falsehoods even in its own public talking
points about its surveillance programs, and were forced by our disclosures
to quietly
delete those inaccuracies. Wyden and another Democratic Senator,
Mark Udall, wrote
a letter to the NSA identifying multiple inaccuracies in their
public claims about their domestic spying activities.

Defending the
Obama administration, Paul Krugman pronounced
that “the NSA stuff is a policy dispute, not the kind of scandal
the right wing wants.” Really? In what conceivable sense is this
not a serious scandal? If you, as an American citizen, let alone
a journalist, don’t find it deeply objectionable when top national
security officials systematically mislead your representatives in
Congress about how the government is spying on you, and repeatedly
lie publicly about resulting political controversies over that spying,
what is objectionable? If having the NSA engage in secret, indiscriminate
domestic spying that warps
if not outright violates legal limits isn’t a “scandal”, then
what is?

For many media
and political elites, the answer to that question seems clear: what’s
truly objectionable to them is when powerless individuals blow the
whistle on deceitful national security state officials. Hence the
endless fixation on Edward Snowden’s tone and choice of asylum providers,
the flamboyant denunciations of this
“29-year-old hacker” for the crime of exposing what our government
leaders are doing in the dark, and all sorts of mockery over the
drama that resulted from the due-process-free revocation of his
passport. This is what our media stars and progressive
columnists, pundits and bloggers are obsessing over in the hope
of distracting attention away from the
surveillance misconduct of top-level Obama officials and their
serial deceit about it.

What kind of
journalist – or citizen – would focus more on Edward Snowden’s
tonal oddities and travel drama than on the fact that top US officials
have been deceitfully concealing a massive, worldwide spying apparatus
being constructed with virtually no accountability or oversight?
Just ponder what it says about someone who cares more about, and
is angrier about, Edward Snowden’s exposure of these facts than
they are about James Clapper’s falsehoods and the NSA’s excesses.

What we see
here, yet again, is this authoritarian strain in US political life
that the most powerful political officials cannot commit crimes
or engage in serious wrongdoing. The only political crimes come
from exposing and aggressively challenging those officials.

How is it anything
other than pure whistleblowing to disclose secret documents proving
that top government officials have been systematically deceiving
the public about vital matters and/or skirting if not violating
legal and Constitutional limits? And what possible justification
is there for supporting the ability of James Clapper to continue
in his job despite what he just got caught doing?

Read
the rest of the article

July
5, 2013

Copyright
© 2013 The
Guardian

Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell

by Brett & Kate McKay
The
Art of Manliness

Across cultures
and time, the archetype of the craftsman has represented man’s
ability to create and has been the mark of mature manhood. He is
homo faber — man the creator. Instead of passively
consuming and letting things happen to him, the craftsman fashions
the world to his liking and proactively shapes and influences it.
Ancient philosophers in both the West and the East have used the
craftsman as a symbol of he who contributes to his community and
as an ensign of humility, self-reliance, and calm industry.

When we think
of the archetypal craftsman, images of a bearded man clad in a leather
apron and rolled-up sleeves, toiling away in his workshop producing
beautiful and useful items comes to mind. What’s interesting
is that the ancient Greeks had a much more inclusive idea of the
craftsman than our modern conception. Besides masons, potters, and
carpenters, the ancient Greeks included jobs now considered “knowledge
professions” like doctors, legislators, and administrators
under the craftsman label. Even the work of a father was considered
a craft of sorts that required the same care and attention to detail
as that of the carpenter. Indeed, the ancient Greeks believed that
the values and ethos of craftsmanship were things all should seek
to live by. In so doing, a man could achieve arete, or excellence,
and thus experience eudaimonia, or a flourishing life.

Over time,
the ideal of craftsmanship was cordoned off to just the technical
arts. Physicians and legislators no longer thought of themselves
as craftsmen, but as philosophers and natural scientists who were
more concerned with the theoretical as opposed to the practical.
Such a shift is a shame, for the principles of craftsmanship truly
do apply to every man, whether he makes furniture or crunches numbers.
Below we take a look at how these overarching principles of the
traditional craftsman can apply to all areas of your life, no matter
your profession.

Many of these
principles are things we’ve covered before on the Art of Manliness.
Make sure to explore the links within this article to more fully
understand the concepts held within.

Do Things
Well for the Sake of Doing Them Well

“Make
every product better than it’s ever been done before. Make
the parts you cannot see as well as the parts you can see. Use
only the best materials, even for the most everyday items. Give
the same attention to the smallest detail as you do to the largest.
Design every item you make to last forever.” — Shaker Philosophy
of Furniture Making

Fundamental
to the code of craftsmanship is the desire to do something well
for its own sake. Sure, the craftsman often gets paid for his work,
but it’s not the paycheck that determines how well he does
the job. A true craftsman will work until the job is done and done
well, even if he’s working for free. Philosopher and motorcycle
repairman Matthew B. Crawford shared a story in his book Shop
Class as Soulcraft that exemplifies the craftsman’s
compulsive fidelity to this ethic.

A guy had brought
an old Magna motorcycle into Crawford’s shop that needed work
on the clutch. Crawford could solve the clutch problem just fine,
but he also noticed that the engine’s oil seal looked “buggered.”
He tried to fix it but didn’t make any headway. Due to the
damage and the nature of the oil seal, replacing it would require
a lot of work and a lot of time. Frustrated, he left his shop for
a smoke. While the smoke filled his lungs, the thought came to him
that:

“The best
business decision would be to forget I’d ever seen the ambiguously
buggered oil seal. With a freshly rebuilt slave cylinder, the
clutch worked fine. Even if my idle speculation about the weeping
oil seal causing the failure of the slave cylinder seal was right,
so what? It would take quite a while for the problem to reappear,
and who knows if this guy would still own the bike by then. If
it is not likely to be his problem, I shouldn’t make it my problem.”

But as he walked
back into the shop, he couldn’t stop thinking about that buggered
oil seal:

“The compulsion
was setting in, and I did little to resist it. I started digging
at the seal, my peripheral vision narrowing. At first I told myself
it was exploratory digging. But the seal was suffering from my
screwdriver, and at some point I had to drop the forensic pretense.
I was going to get that little f***er out.”

Crawford goes
on to explain how he’d often bill his clients fewer hours
than he actually worked on a bike because of his thoroughness or
just his plain curiosity of tinkering with things:

“I feel I
have to meet the standards of efficiency that [an independent
mechanic] set, or at least appear to. So I lie and tell people
a job took ten hours when it might have taken twenty. To compensate,
I also tell them my shop rate is forty dollars per hour, but it
usually works out to more like twenty. I feel like an amateur,
no less now than when I started, but through such devices I hope
to appear like somebody who knows what he is doing, and bills
accordingly.”

Money wasn’t
important to Crawford, just doing the job well for the sake of doing
it well was what mattered.

You can apply
this craftsmanship ethic to more than just tangible objects. Even
if you do more ethereal work, you can do it well for the sake of
doing it well. The reward for doing an exhaustively thorough job
can sometimes be monetary, but it may very well go unnoticed by
one’s customer or boss. The most fulfilling reward of living by
the craftsmanship ethic is the feeling of pride that comes with
knowing you gave a certain job your damndest effort. It’s
the unmatchable satisfaction of seeing one’s inner
integrity displayed in the wholeness and quality of one’s external
labor.

Plan (But
Not Too Much)

With any project,
the craftsman creates twice: first mentally and then physically.
Before he sets chisel to stone or hammer to wood, the craftsman
has already created his work in his mind. In other words, he plans
how to bring out the object from the rough materials and tools before
him.

On the other
hand, while the craftsman understands the importance of planning,
he isn’t over-fastidious about it. Instead of detailed blueprints,
the master craftsman prefers the rough sketch because he knows that
unforeseen problems (or opportunities) can arise once he’s
actually working. The rough sketch, philosopher Richard Sennett
argues in The
Craftsman, provides a “working procedure for preventing
premature closure.” It gives structure, but leaves room for
improvisation and change if needed.

Follow the
example of the craftsman in the way you plan
your life. Envision what your ideal life (and even year, week,
and day) would look like and roughly sketch out how you’re
going to go about making it a reality. Some folks fall into the
trap of trying to plan out every. single. detail. Their over-planning
often leads to frustration when things don’t exactly follow
their ideal blueprint. Even worse, uncompromising attention to a
highly detailed life plan can cause a man to miss out on more rewarding
opportunities that he could not have foreseen ahead of time. When
planning, sketch out a rough plan on the trestle board of your life
and make course adjustments as you actually go about the work of
living.

Measure
Twice, Cut Once

This is one
of the simplest and most memorable maxims of craftsmen, although
it’s not always easy to follow through with in your everyday
life. Suffice it to say that while you should leave room in your
plans for improvisation, when it comes to making decisions that
you can’t take back, make
sure you’ve studied and pondered the choice thoroughly
before you make your “cut.”

Work With
What You Got

The master
craftsman understands that most times he’ll never have the
ideal materials, tools, or environment to work with. Unforeseen
knots are discovered in wood and hidden imperfections in stone are
revealed. Instead of becoming frustrated by such curveballs, the
master craftsman adjusts his plans and works these imperfections
into his creation so that you’d never know they were there.
He can sometimes even work the imperfection into a source of strength
for the piece.

Sometimes a
craftsman doesn’t have the exact tool that he needs, so he
improvises with what he has and learns something new in the process.
As Sennett argues, “Getting better at using tools comes
to us, when the tools challenge us, and this challenge often occurs
just because the tools are not fit-for-purpose. They may not be
good enough or it’s hard to figure out how to use them…However,
we come to use it, the very incompleteness of the tool has taught
us something.”

Just as the
craftsman cannot exactly control what he has to work with, we cannot
control every aspect of our life. We’re all given different
materials and circumstances to work with. Some of us were born with
physical or mental handicaps. Setbacks happen like divorce, accidents,
and job layoffs. Instead of working against this resistance, embrace
it like the craftsman. Instead of seeing these constraints and
contingencies as obstacles, see them as creative opportunities and
incorporate them into your life as unique and interesting pieces
of texture. Remember, some of history’s greatest men turned
what could have been a weakness into a strength.

Cultivate
Patience

A good craftsman
has the patience to stay with frustrating work, even when it takes
longer than he originally thought. He avoids frustration by living
by the following maxim: when something takes longer than you expect,
stop fighting it and embrace it.

Much of our
frustrations in modern life could be avoided if we would just develop
this zen-like patience of the craftsman. Us moderns have a perverse
expectation that things should happen NOW. We want emails answered
immediately and we even expect success to come right away. Mark
Zuckerberg is not your average success story, so stop trying to
be like him. The reality is that things almost always take longer
than expected, especially those things that are good and noble.
So instead of fighting it, embrace it as the calm craftsman does.
Life will become instantly more enjoyable and less stressful once
you cultivate this virtue of patience.

Read
the rest of the article

July
5, 2013

Copyright
© 2013 The Art of Manliness

Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell

Egyptian soldiers stand guard in the area of the Rafah border crossing on May 21, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Bolivian President Evo Morales, whose plane was diverted in Europe this week due to false rumors that US surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden was on board, says the Latin American country does not need the United States Embassy in La Paz.

GJH/MHB

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Republished with permission from: Green Med Info

Bolivian President Evo Morales (C) and his counterparts Nicolas Maduro (C left) of Venezuela and Rafael Correa (C, right) of Ecuador gathered in Cochabamba, on July 4, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]At least one person has been killed and three others injured in an attack on El Arish International Airport in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Germansâ„¢ trust in the United States has plummeted following the disclosure by intelligence contractor Edward Snowden of its spying and surveillance activities, a poll shows.

On Thursday, ARD public television released the results of the phone poll it had conducted with 1,005 random respondents between July 1 and 3.

The results indicated that less than half of respondents regarded the US as a trustworthy partner. The figure was 65 percent before the disclosure of the US spying scandals.

The findings also revealed that 78 percent of the respondents expected German Chancellor Angela Merkel to act resolutely against both the United States and Britain, which is also accused of large-scale data mining.

On Sunday, the British daily The Independent reported that Germanyâ„¢s Office of the Federal Prosecutor is preparing charges following Å“fresh allegations that the [US and UK secret] services spied far more extensively than thought on German phone and internet traffic.”

On Monday, Germany announced that it was summoning the US ambassador over the breach in trust.

If the allegations are true, the massive surveillance program would demonstrate Å“unacceptable Cold War style behavior toward Berlin,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Reports last week revealed that the British spy agencies along with the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) had tapped German phone and internet traffic, sharing its data with the NSA.

The accusations against US and UK intelligence services came after secret US documents were released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

The American whistleblower has assured that the information he obtained about US surveillance programs will continue to be published.

In the beginning of June, Snowden leaked documents that revealed the NSA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been secretly gathering information of American citizens and other people all around the world.

IA/HN

Republished with permission from: Press TV

An Egyptian army armored personnel carrier is positioned outside the Supreme Constitutional Court in Cairo during the swearing-in ceremony of chief justice Adli Mansour as Egypt’s interim president, on July 4, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Every year on July 4th we celebrate our “independence”, but is America really free? How could we possibly be free when “Big Brother” is constantly intruding in our lives in hundreds of different ways? And I am not just talking about NSA snooping. Sadly, the truth is that the United States is beginning to fully embrace a “police state” culture. We have learned that the government monitors and keeps a record of all of our cell phone calls, emails, Internet searches, credit card transactions, and every piece of mail that we send. But most Americans don’t seem to care. We are “encouraged” to report the “suspicious activity” of our neighbors to the authorities, we are told that having security thugs touch the private areas of our women and children at our airports is necessary “for our security”, and 80,000 SWAT team raids are conducted each year in the United States. But the American people don’t seem to care. America was once a great country, but now it is being turned into a giant prison, and only a small minority of the citizens are raising their voices in objection.

When I was a child, I was taught that totalitarian societies such as North Korea, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were the bad guys.

So why in the world would we want to become more like them?

Do we actually believe that these ridiculous security measures are keeping us safer?

At this point, we have already given up so much privacy that we barely have any left.

For example, up until recently I actually believed that our mail was private. But now we have learned that the government is monitoring every piece of mail that the American people send. And according to the New York Times, the government has flagged the mail of thousands of problem citizens for special attention…

Leslie James Pickering noticed something odd in his mail last September: a handwritten card, apparently delivered by mistake, with instructions for postal workers to pay special attention to the letters and packages sent to his home.

“Show all mail to supv” – supervisor – “for copying prior to going out on the street,” read the card. It included Mr. Pickering’s name, address and the type of mail that needed to be monitored. The word “confidential” was highlighted in green.

But even if you are not on the list of those that get special attention, your mail is still photographed. In fact, 160 billion photographs of our mail were sent to the government last year…

Mr. Pickering was targeted by a longtime surveillance system called mail covers, a forerunner of a vastly more expansive effort, the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, in which Postal Service computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States – about 160 billion pieces last year. It is not known how long the government saves the images.

Together, the two programs show that postal mail is subject to the same kind of scrutiny that the National Security Agency has given to telephone calls and e-mail.

The tyrants of the past never dreamed of having some of the technologies that we have today. Virtually everything that we do is watched, monitored, tracked or recorded in some way.

And as technology continues to advance, there will be very little that the authorities will not be capable of.

Some of the technologies that are coming out these days are absolutely frightening. For example, over in Europe one company is now running talking ads that seem like they are coming from inside our own heads…

The proposal involves using bone conduction technology, which is used in hearing aids, headphones and Google’s Glass headset, to pass sound to the inner ear via vibrations through the skull.

A video for the Talking Window campaign released by Sky Deutschland and ad agency BBDO Germany states: “Tired commuters often rest their heads against windows. Suddenly a voice inside their head is talking to them. No one else can hear this message.”

How would you respond if a “voice inside your head” suddenly started talking to you?

In other instances, “Big Brother” can intrude in our lives in more old-fashioned ways.

For example, just check out the rules for July 4th that were posted at the entrance to one park in Lakewood, Ohio. This photo comes from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson…

Why would anyone want to go spend the 4th of July at that park?

But this is what America is turning into. We are turning into a society that is absolutely obsessed with security and control, and this is manifesting in hundreds upon hundreds of different ways. If you doubt this, just check out the following articles…

-“21 Facts About NSA Snooping That Every American Should Know“

-“29 Signs That The Elite Are Transforming Society Into A Total Domination Control Grid“

-“America Is Being Systematically Transformed Into A Totalitarian Society“

-“America Is Embracing The Secret Police Culture Of The Nazis“

-“America’s Roads Have Been Turned Into A Revenue Generating Surveillance Grid“

Fortunately, the recent revelations about the NSA have spurred some Americans into action. For example, a new non-partisan organization known as “Restore The Fourth” is calling on the U.S. government to restore our Fourth Amendment rights. The following is from a press release that the organization recently issued…

*****

Restore the Fourth is a grassroots, non-partisan, non-violent movement that seeks to organize and assemble nationwide protests on July 4th, 2013. Protesters in over 100 cities across America will gather to demand that the government of the United States of America adhere to its constitutionally dictated limits and respect the Fourth Amendment. http://www.RestoretheFourth.net provides a detailed list of protest locations.

Restore the Fourth maintains that justification of the Fourth Amendment beyond the original text need not be given; the legitimacy of which is self-evident. “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” The Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights clearly protects all citizens’ assets, both digital and physical, against searches and seizures without warrant; they aim to assert those rights. They insist that the proper channels of government work to ensure that all policy complies with the supreme laws of the United States of America in their entirety.

Restore the Fourth requests that American citizens’ right to privacy is respected and stands with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and StopWatching.us on their open letter to Congress. As informed members of the American electorate, they endorse and echo the letter’s demands.

1. Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;

2. Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance;

3. Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.

The July 4th demonstrations seek to demand an end to the unconstitutional surveillance methods employed by the U.S. government and to ensure that all future government surveillance is constitutional, limited, and clearly defined.

Restore the Fourth aims to ensure that the will of the people is reflected in the government of the United States of America. This movement intends to bring an end to twelve years of Fourth Amendment abuses, and demonstrate the need for a return to the Constitution. All Americans should stand with them in this cause to protect the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

*****

I would encourage you to speak out about these issues however you can. For some people, that may mean participating in a street protest. For others, it may mean making a great YouTube video. Others spread the word on radio shows or by speaking with their friends. Personally, I have written about these issues extensively on my websites and in my new book. We all have ways that we can object to the fact that America is being systematically transformed into a giant prison.

So what do you think?

Do you believe that America is really free?

Please feel free to share your opinion by posting a comment below…

Republished with permission from: The Economic Collapse

Franceâ„¢s secret services illegally have been spying on the citizens by monitoring their telephone and internet communications as well as internet searches, a report says.

On Thursday, French daily Le Monde reported that the countryâ„¢s security services had stored the data from communications on a supercomputer at the headquarters of the Directorate-General for External Security, known by its French acronym DGSE.

The report said that the DGSE “systematically collects electromagnetic signals emitted by computers in France, as well as the data feed between France and abroad: the entirety of our communications are being spied upon.”

Meanwhile, on the same day, Franceâ„¢s Interior Minister Manuel Valls took a swipe at the US over allegations that its largest intelligence organization, the National Security Agency (NSA), had spied on the European Union offices both in the US and Europe.

Valls said, Å“Such practices, if proven, do not have their place between allies and partners,” and asked Washington to explain the Å“espionage.”

On June 6, The Guardian reported that a top secret US court order allows the US National Security Agency (NSA) to collect data on the millions of US citizens who are customers of the phone company Verizon.

On the same day, the Washington Post reported that the NSA had direct access to internet servers, saying their source, a career intelligence officer, was horrified about the capabilities of the systems used by the US intelligence agency.

On June 9, US surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden admitted his role in the leaks in a 12-minute video posted by The Guardian.

The NSA scandal took even broader dimensions when Snowden revealed information about its espionage activities targeting friendly countries.

IA/MHB

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Bolivian President Evo Morales says an apology from European countries over the diversion of his plane is not enough.

“A simple apology from a country that didn’t let us enter its territory is not enough. A lot will depend on the legal and political debate,” Morales said on Thursday, ahead of a meeting of Latin American leaders in Cochabamba, Bolivia, over the issue, which sparked an international outcry against the European states, which put the Bolivian leaderâ„¢s life in danger on Tuesday.

France, Spain, Portugal and Italy refused to allow Morales’ plane, which was flying from Moscow back to Bolivia, to cross their airspace due to false rumors that US surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden was on board.

Å“The decisions of these countries have violated international law…. We are already making procedures to denounce this to the UN secretary general,” Bolivian Ambassador to the UN Sacha Llorenti told reporters in Geneva on Wednesday.

Llorenti added that the diversion was an Å“act of aggression” against his country, and was equal to Å“kidnapping” the Bolivian president.

He also warned that the move might cause Å“irreparable damage” to diplomatic relations with the European states.

Morales’ plane was forced to land in Austria en route to Bolivia. The aircraft left Vienna after a stopover of more than 12 hours.

Before departing for the summit in Bolivia, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said on Thursday, “Latin America has to react.”

Å“Imagine for one second if this had happened with a European president or the US president — it probably would’ve been grounds for war. And here they think they can infringe and crush international law,” he added.

The Bolivian president was in Moscow to attend a meeting of natural gas-producing nations.

Bolivia is one of the countries to which Snowden has applied for asylum.

Washington has asked Ecuador, Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia not to provide asylum to Snowden.

“While we were flying (home), the US government gave our foreign ministry a scrap of paper asking for the extradition of this young man, Snowden,” said Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who also attending the energy conference in Russia.

“They don’t have the moral standing to demand the extradition of a young man who was alerting to the illegality with which the Pentagon, the CIA and the US act,” Maduro said on Thursday.

GJH/HN

Republished with permission from: Press TV

The European Parliament says it will scrap agreements with the United States granting it access to European travel and financial data unless Washington reveals the extent of its electronic spying operations in Europe.

On Thursday, the European Parliament approved a non-binding resolution, condemning Washingtonâ„¢s spying on EU officials.

Members of the parliament called on the European Commission, the Council of Ministers and EU member states to take into account Å“all levers at their disposal” in talks with the US.

The European Parliament warned that it would put an end to its data-sharing deals with the US — the Terrorist Finance Tracking Programme (TFTP) and Passenger Name Records (PNR) — if Washington fails to meet the European demand. The deals were created in the wake of the September 11 attacks.

The resolution, however, stopped short of suspending trade talks between the EU and the US which are set to begin in Washington on July 8.

On Wednesday, French government spokeswoman Najat Vallaud-Belkacem said the US-EU negotiations should be delayed until Washington provides the European governments with answers over the spying allegations.

On June 6, The Guardian reported that a top secret US court order allows the US National Security Agency (NSA) to collect data on the millions of US citizens who are customers of the phone company Verizon.

On the same day, the Washington Post reported that the NSA had direct access to internet servers, saying their source, a career intelligence officer, was horrified about the capabilities of the systems used by the US intelligence agency.

On June 9, US surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden admitted his role in the leaks in a 12-minute video posted by The Guardian.

The NSA scandal took even broader dimensions when Snowden revealed information about its espionage activities targeting friendly countries.

IA/MHB

Republished with permission from: Press TV

As the Obama administration maneouvres to get traction for more overt and deadly military intervention in Syria, it may be time to reflect on other times at which a US administration has tried to legitimise a military response. There were Colin Powell’s 2003 lies about WMD. In 1990 there were lies about babies being thrown out of incubators.

Susan Rice lied by telling the world that Libyan loyalist troops were being issued Viagra and instructed to commit mass rapes. When the US wants to start a war, it lies, and these are very big lies. What is more, even once the lies are discovered and broadcast our historical narrative is somehow contrived to seem as if there were no such lies. With a rigidity that rivals any “totalitarian” regime you could name it becomes impossible to deviate. Just because the US put huge amounts of time and effort into deceiving everyone in order to go to war, it doesn’t mean they wanted war. On the contrary, they were victims of their own lies. In Stalin’s or Hitler’s regimes it was unthinkable to accuse the authorities of any mistakes, in our totalitarianism it is impossible to accuse the US regime of doing anything on purpose.

The greatest and most successful of US lies is that of the first Tonkin Gulf incident. Contrary to widespread belief, a US Naval vessel opened fire on Vietnamese vessels first on the occasion of that first incident. The US was guilty of an act of aggression. This was confirmed and aggravated by its lies about the incident, its subsequent lies about a second incident, and above all by the criminal bombing campaign it immediately launched. The truth of this has been public since 2005, but is hardly widespread knowledge. Worse still, the knowledge wasn’t even really hidden before that. Anyone with basic mathematical knowledge could work out from the official Naval history that the US initiated the exchange, and there is no evidence that the Vietnamese even tried to fire torpedoes in return. More to the point (in comparison with current accusations against Syria), no one stopped to question the underlying contention that a weak and poor state would gratuitously go out of its way to provide the US (then and now the world’s most terrifyingly armed state) with exactly the pretext it desired to wage the war it desired at the time it desired.

Moreover, it seems that Western pedagogical discourse (as embodied in textbooks) is not even capable of conveying the known information due to ideological constraints. Our level of indoctrination is such that there is no foreseeable time when a student might read a balanced account such as: “Having determined to unleash its massive military might against the Democratic People’s Republic of Vietnam, the Johnson administration sought to create a pretext. On August the 2^nd a US Navy vessel attacked Vietnamese craft that were within their own territorial waters. The US claimed, rather unbelievably, that it was they who had been attacked. Following this a second ‘incident’ took place which seems to have resulted from interference with sonar and radar aboard two US vessels. Though there were no enemy vessels involved at all, this was accompanied by deliberately fabricated signals intelligence designed to convince elements within the US military and civilian command that the Vietnamese had attacked a second time, when they had never attacked at all. The Tonkin Gulf incidents were a highly successful staged pretext for open warfare that rightly should be placed alongside the Marco Polo bridge incident or the Gleiwitz incident.”

What became the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was drafted by Johnson administration and US military officials in Honolulu two months before any incidents took place.⁽¹⁾This means that the Johnson administration was already intending to widen the war and, given the domestic political circumstances, must have been very desirous of a pretext. The US was conducting a series of provocations, amphibious military raids, known as “OPLAN 34a”, conducted by Republic of Vietnam (RVN) commandos under US command. These were considered militarily useless and “essentially worthless” by US officials and tended to result in great numbers of commandos killed or captured.⁽²⁾

At the same time the US Navy was conducting “DESOTO” intelligence gathering missions by using destroyers to “stimulate and record” Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) defences in order to locate radar installations.⁽³⁾ For obvious reasons this meant that they had to manoeuvre in such a way as to cause the Vietnamese to believe that there was a potential attack, violating waters that the DRV claimed as territorial. Though officially separate, there were linkages between these US Navy operations and the commando raids sufficient to lead Spencer Tucker to conclude that “[i]t was thus not unreasonable for the DRV to assume that the two programmes were one and the same.”⁽⁴⁾ In mid-July 1964 a DESOTO mission was authorised for the USS Maddox. It was to approach up to 4 miles from islands which were the subject of simultaneous OPLAN raids.⁽⁵⁾

On July 30-31 an OPLAN raid was carried out on Hon Me island. On August the 2^nd the USS Maddox, which was in the vicinity of Hon Me, fired on Vietnamese torpedo boats before any fire from the Vietnamese. This is not usually the accepted version of events, so it is worth replicating John Prados’ description, which is based on the US Navy’s own records:

“Now the records show that the Maddox commenced fire at 9,000 yards at precisely 4:08 p.m. local time, three minutes after firing initial warning shots.

…the navy’s official history shows that the Maddox made a positive identification of the PT boats at 9800 yards, but that the lead Vietnamese warship launched its first torpedo-“unobserved by the Maddox”-somewherebetween9,000and5,000yardsfromthespeedingU.S.destroyer.

… Captain Herrick’s messages to higher command make clears more-over, that he considered the Maddox threatened and expected to defend her. Mission commander and commander of Destroyer Division 192, Herrick had been warned by his NSA detachment of a probable attack, estimated the risk as unacceptable, and asked higher authority to cancel the patrol.

… All evidence indicates the Maddox opened fire based on the approach of the North Vietnamese vessels; initiation of engagement was thus on the basis of perceived intent, without reference to an actual attack.”⁽⁶⁾

The point is that anyone who has even a vague grasp of mathematics can discern from the US Navy’s official history that the US fired first in the first Tonkin Gulf incident. This was confirmed in a 1998 article for the National Security Agency (NSA) journal Cryptological Quarterly (declassified in 2005).⁽⁷⁾ The same article points out that “Hanoi’s tactical specifications for its P-4s called for torpedo launches at ranges under 1,000 yards. At over 6,000 yards, it was unlikely a torpedo launched at a moving target could hit anything.”⁽⁸⁾

After this attack by the US it was announced that the DRV had attacked US vessels in international waters, but since the only damage sustained by the Maddox was a single bullet hole, Johnson decided on the minimal reaction of a diplomatic protest. Two days later the Maddox was joined by another destroyer, the USS C. Turner Joy which opened fire on non-existent torpedo boats on the basis of false radar and sonar signals.⁽⁹⁾ An engagement was briefly reported before being thrown into severe doubt within hours. Within an hour of the second “incident” the DRV had denied any activity.⁽¹⁰⁾ Herrick sent the following about 4 hours after reporting the incident:

“Review of action makes many reported contacts and torpedoes fired appear doubtful. … No actual visual sighting by Maddox. Suggest complete evaluation before any further action taken.”

Nonetheless an allegedly “furious” Lyndon Johnson ordered air strikes.⁽¹¹⁾ Even more brazenly McNamara lied to congress, telling them that both destroyers had been attacked. This helped secure the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which had very broad provisions including the right to instantly respond with force in the case of attack on US forces and, on request by any Southeast Asian government, to use “all measures including the use of armed force to assist that nation in the defense of its political independence and territorial integrity against aggression or subversion.”⁽¹²⁾ That was what facilitated the full-scale invasion of Vietnam; when the illegitimate government that the US had installed over the fictional sovereign state that the US created dutifully invited the “assistance” of the US.

The events are, admittedly, complicated. For example, I have not even mentioned yet that the DRV boats on August 2^nd were apparently intending to attack the Maddox. I am not sure how much credence one should put into these claims, but it seems that Prime Minister Le Duan had gone behind the backs of President Ho Chi Minh and armed forces commander Vo Nyuyen Giap to order attacks and that those orders had been countermanded but that this was not received by the DRV torpedo boats.⁽¹³⁾ Nor does it alter the fact that the US was engaged in offensive operations against the DRV, and in fact had been attacking with US personnel since no later than 1961.⁽¹⁴⁾ The question is whether to examine the events by emphasizing US mistakes and confusion, or whether base an analysis or narrative on the deliberate and calculated acts of the US. It is, of course, the former which dominates the scholarly discourse.

By concentrating on known deliberate provocations and deceptions we can construct a narrative which completely obviates any need to refer to US mistakes and misunderstandings. That the US wanted to start bombing the DRV and make a major ground force commitment should not be in doubt. As mentioned, the resolution which would make use of the Tonkin Gulf incidents to achieve those ends was already drafted, and US officials where convinced (rightly) that without a major escalation of US involvement they would “fail”.⁽¹⁵⁾ “Failure” for the US meant a negotiated solution between the leaders in Saigon and other parties, primarily the National Liberation Front (NLF). “Failure” meant the advent of peace.⁽¹⁶⁾

The various commando raids committed under US command, usually by RVN personnel who were very callously expended, were clearly deliberate provocations. As mentioned, they were not considered militarily useful. The explanation given by scholars to explain why the US would thus choose to sacrifice lives and resources thus is that they sought to reassure the Saigon regime. As Hanyok puts it, “if America’s determination to succeed could be communicated to Khanh, then the South Vietnamese might be reassured of the prospects for victory.”⁽¹⁷⁾ This begs the question of what exactly is supposed to be reassuring in the US demonstrating that they are willing to sacrifice the lives of the most highly trained and dedicated RVN personnel in militarily useless endeavours? Either scholars have a rather racially informed view of RVN leader General Nguyen Khanh’s intellect and military acumen, or the actual reassurance could only be derived from the knowledge that these were provocations undertaken in order to lay the groundwork for a massive expansion of the war. As it happens Khanh demonstrably was not reassured, not that any scholars seem to think that this fact might be relevant. He sought to neutralise South Vietnam after the passage of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, but when the US found out that he sought negotiations with the NLF to end the war they overthrew him.⁽¹⁸⁾

Having provoked a minor response, the only damage to the Maddox being a single bullet hole, clearly the Johnson administration felt that the incident was not sufficient to persuade Congress to authorize full-scale war. They warned Hanoi that “any further unprovoked offensive military action against United States forces” would “inevitably” result in “grave consequences.”⁽¹⁹⁾ Those scholars who note Johnson’s limited reaction suggest that it indicates his reluctance to take that step, but this is to ignore the wealth of evidence that he actively sought this massive expansion of the war. Among other things Johnson lied about the nature of the first incident, making it seem like a completely unprovoked attack by the DRV in international waters. Had he wished to avoid war in any way he might still have lied, but using a very different cover story emphasizing the potential for mistakes in areas of tension and calling for calm, not accusing the DRV of an act of aggression. Had the US wished in any way to avoid war, they would not have scheduled and conducted another OPLAN raid on the night of 4-5 August. But they did exactly that.⁽²⁰⁾ At the same time, immediately after the first incident, the Maddox and C. Turner Joy were authorized to approach to 11 miles of the DRV coastline (well within range of the destroyers’ 5 inch guns)⁽²¹⁾, deliberately breaking the territorial limit claimed by the DRV.⁽²²⁾

The second Tonkin Gulf incident and Johnson’s reaction to it reinforce the following position: the US persistently and consistently pursued actions designed to prevent a negotiated settlement of the insurgency in the South and simultaneously to facilitate the expansion of the war with major US troop commitments and massive bombing campaigns which would come to engulf most of Indochina. Further, Johnson’s appearance of having been deceived is belied by his acts and words at the time and later. As such, the fact that Johnson created deniability over his decision to bomb the DRV is actually suggestive of premeditation.

On August 4 a series of cables arrived at the Pentagon detailing extraordinary events. Daniel Ellsberg gives the following account:

“The messages were vivid. Herrick must have been dictating them from the bridge in between giving orders, as his two ships swerved to avoid torpedoes picked up on the sonar of the Maddox and fired in the darkness at targets shown on the radar of the Turner Joy: “Torpedoes missed. Another fired at us. Four torpedoes in water. And five torpedoes in water. . . . Have … successfully avoided at least six torpedoes.”

Nine torpedoes had been fired at his ships, fourteen, twenty-six. More attacking boats had been hit; at least one sunk. This action wasn’t ending after forty minutes or an hour. It was going on, ships dodging and firing in choppy seas, planes overhead firing rockets at locations given them by the Turner Joy’s radar, for an incredible two hours before the stream of continuous combat updates finally ended. Then, suddenly, an hour later, full stop. A message arrived that took back not quite all of it, but enough to put everything earlier in question.”⁽²³⁾

In fact, there were no attacks at all, nor enemy vessels. It was also clear even during the “engagement” that both radar and sonar aboard both destroyers were giving unreliable readings. With reports from the field immediately thrown into doubt, it was signals intelligence which was used as the final justification, the only problem being that someone somewhere fabricated the most crucial message. Before this, however, a misinterpretation of a partial intercept warned of a possible attack. Next, a report based on a complete intercept contradicting that was issued at about the exact time that the destroyers opened fire:

“For NSA and the rest of the SIGINT participants, the second Phu Bai report should have acted as a brake to any further reporting about an attack. It directly contradicted the interpretation — remember, it was an interpretation only — contained in the initial Critic which claimed an attack was being prepared. At this point, all the SIGINT community could accurately state was that there was no signals intelligence reflecting a planned or ongoing attack against the Desoto mission.”⁽²⁴⁾

With the PT boats being ruled out as attackers the NSA decided that it must be SWATOW boats which were attacking. The problem with this being that these boats were not equipped with torpedoes and were not close enough to have reached the destroyers after the alleged attack order had been issued.⁽²⁵⁾ Thus signals intelligence fairly well ruled out an attack at an early stage. A complete lack of intercepts, such as DRV radar activity, that would confirm an attack made this a certainty, as Hanyok points out it was the dog that didn’t bark in the night.⁽²⁶⁾

The intercept which was used, by Robert McNamara, to “prove” that an attack took place was an after-action report. The original decryption, in Vietnamese, is lost and the translation seems somewhat incoherent, however it is known that the translation altered some of the original message. Additionally, the first version of this “after-action” report was issued at or before the time at which the destroyers opened fire, but somehow the translation failed to highlight the original transmission time. Worse still, the translation was actually made up from two different intercepts and, as Hanyok points out, it is clear that the original reports were being discussed among intelligence and defense officials.(27)

Johnson and McNamara both deliberately deceived by covering up the doubts to which both were privy. Even if Johnson was himself misled, as Gareth Porter contends,(28) he was still aware that matters left room for doubt, but chose to present the attack as a complete certainty and launched airstrikes with incredible haste. There was no posturing brinksmanship, no ultimatum, no summits, not even bullying, just destruction and death dropped abruptly from above.

The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, passed on August the 7th, was nearly as hasty as the air strikes. It is not merely hard but impossible to seriously conceive that the rapidity of these actions was prompted by anything so much as by a knowledge that the casus belli would soon disintegrate. Johnson was on record as expressing doubt before the resolution was passed.(29) McNamara was definitely apprised of ample evidence to conclude that there had been no attacks, but used the fabricated intercept as his “smoking gun” proof in addressing Congress.(30) Congress believed McNamara’s story, as did the media. I. F. Stone was a lone voice when he pointed out that reprisal strikes were illegal in peacetime(31), so from this point on the precedent for bombing the DRV had been created and the President had been granted virtually unlimited powers with which to prosecute a full-scale war.

The purpose of spending so much space on the Tonkin Gulf incidents is primarily historiographical. With regard to the first incident, most works touching on the subject will implicitly or explicitly characterize the incident as an unprovoked Vietnamese attack. Until 2005, no one at all acknowledged that the US had attacked first despite the fact that the evidence (namely those numbers that appear in the official US Navy history) had been widely available for decades. Now you would still find it very hard to find any historical account which did not falsify the events. Morevover, the second incident is very odd in its historiography.

Often the second incident is mentioned as if it were roughly equivalent the Gleiwitz incident, staged by the Germans as a pretext for invading Poland. Yet when discussed in more detail, the narrative of the second incident tends to be overtaken with supposed misapprehensions, technical failures, psychological failings. By directing critics of US actions, including scholarly critics, into the contemplation of the strange non-events of the second incident, the US has managed to perpetrate a Gleiwitz-like incident but to maintain the central deception for half a century. Most disturbing of all, not only did the academic world ignore clear evidence of US aggression, but now, years after the declassification of an intelligence study that implicitly documented a US act of aggression, there is no sign that the broader historical discourse will change to reflect this.

Kieran Kelly is the author of Beyond Stalemate: The Second Indochina War as a Genocidal War System. He blogs at On Genocide and his articles have been published at Sabbah Report; GlobalResearch; Op-Ed News; and the BRussels Tribunal.

 Notes

1 Robert Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States And Vietnam, 1941-1975, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p 151; Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, London: Longman, 1980, p 476.

2 Eric Alterman, When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and its Consequences, New York: Viking, 2004, p 160.

3 Robert J. Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds, and the Flying Fish: The Gulf of Tonkin Mystery, 2-4August 1964”, Cryptological Quarterly, Winter 1998, FOIA case # 43933, p 6.

4 Spencer C. Tucker, Vietnam, Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 1999, p 107.

5 Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies…”, p 6.

6 John Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War, Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995, pp 50-1.

7 Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies…”, p 6.

8 Ibid, p 22.

9 Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War, p 53.

10 Tucker, Vietnam, p 108.

11 Langguth, Our Vietnam, pp 301-2.

12 Schulzinger, A Time for War, pp 151-2.

13 Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1945-65. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp 310-1.

14 Prados, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War, p 37.

15 Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, London: Penguin, 2003, pp 1-2.

16 Kieran Kelly, Beyond Stalemate: The Second Indochina War as a Genocidal War System, Saarbrücken, LAP, 2013, pp 75-6.

17 Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds….’, p 9.

18 Ironically Khanh had gained US support for his overthrow of his predecessor, General Minh, by citing the threat of neutralism. Obviously, once he gained power he also gained some perspective on the likely outcome of a wider war.

19 Hanyok, “Skunks, Bogies, Silent Hounds….’, p 18.

20 Ibid, p 30.

21 Langguth, Our Vietnam, p 300.

22 Schulzinger,ATimeforWar,p151.

23 Ellsberg,Secrets,p6.

24 Hanyok, “Skunks,Bogies,SilentHounds….’,p28.

25 Ibid,p29.

26 Ibid,p31.

27 Ibid, pp 34-7.

28 Gareth Porter, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2006, pp 193-200.

29 Ibid, p 200.

30 Schulzinger, A Time for War, pp 151-2.

31 Langguth, Our Vietnam, p 305.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy has resigned from the countryâ„¢s Constitutional Council following a ruling that said he breached spending limits during his 2012 presidential campaign.

On Thursday, Sarkozy quit his post and was required to return 150,000 euros he had spent on his campaign.

The ruling also deprives Sarkozy of the reimbursement of 47.5 percent of total campaign spending he was due under election financing laws.

“After the decision of the Constitutional Council, and facing the seriousness of the situation and the consequences it bears for the opposition and democracy, Nicolas Sarkozy resigns immediately from the Constitutional Council to get his freedom of speech back,” Sarkozy said in a statement.

The former French president has also been under fire over allegations of receiving illegal campaign funding from former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi and Lâ„¢Oreal cosmetics heiress Liliane Bettencourt.

A recent survey conducted by French research firm BVA has also indicated that 70 percent of the French perceive their countryâ„¢s politicians as corrupt.

The rise in political corruption cases comes as France is also dealing with a struggling economy.

The country has not only been struggling with a worsened economy but it has been also hit by a record high number of 3.26 million jobseekers in April, despite campaign promises by President Francois Hollande to curb the rise in unemployment by the end of 2013.

IA/MHB

Republished with permission from: Press TV

A supporter of ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi is seen at the Rabaa al-Adawyah district of Cairo on July 4, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Are the central banks of the world starting to lose control of the financial markets? Could we be facing a situation where the bond bubble is going to inevitably implode no matter what the central bankers do? For the past several years, the central bankers of the planet have been able to get markets to do exactly what they want them to do. Stock markets have soared to record highs, bond yields have plunged to record lows and investors have literally hung on every word uttered by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and other prominent central bankers. In the United States, it has been remarkable what Bernanke has been able to accomplish. The U.S. government has been indulging in an unprecedented debt binge, the Fed has been wildly printing money, and the real rate of inflation has been hovering around 8 to 10 percent, and yet Bernanke has somehow convinced investors to lend gigantic piles of money to the U.S. government for next to nothing. But this irrational state of affairs is not going to last indefinitely. At some point, investors are going to wake up and start demanding higher returns. And we are already starting to see this happen in Japan. Wild money printing has actually caused bond yields to go up. What a concept! And that is what should happen – when central banks recklessly print money it should cause investors to demand a higher return. But if bond investors all over the globe start acting rationally, that is going to cause the largest bond bubble in the history of the planet to burst, and that will create utter devastation in the financial markets.

Central banks can manipulate the financial system in the short-term, but there is usually a tremendous price to pay for the distortions that are caused in the long-term.

In Bernanke’s case, all of this quantitative easing seemed to work well for a while. The first round gave the financial system a nice boost, and so the Fed decided to do another. The second round had less effect, but it still boosted stocks and caused bond yields to go down. The third round was supposed to be the biggest of all, but it had even less of an effect than the second round. If you doubt this, just check out the charts in this article.

Our financial system has become addicted to this financial “smack”. But like any addict, the amount needed to get the same “buzz” just keeps increasing. Unfortunately, the more money that the Fed prints, the more distorted our financial system becomes.

The only way that this is going to end is with a tremendous amount of pain. There is no free lunch, and there are already signs that investors are starting to wake up to this fact.

As investors wake up, they are going to realize that this bond bubble is irrational and entirely unsustainable. Once the race to the exits begins, it is not going to be pretty. In fact, the are indications that the race to the exits has already begun…

During the month of June, fixed income allocations fell to a four-year low, according to the American Association of Individual Investors, as major bond fund managers like Pimco experienced record withdrawals for the second quarter. That pullback sent places like emerging markets and high-yield bonds reeling–just as the Federal Reserve signaled plans to taper its easy-money policies within the coming years. Benchmark bond yields ticked up on that news, and in an unexpected twist, the stock market nosedived as well.

A lot of people out there have been floating the theory that the Fed will decide not to taper at all and that quantitative easing will continue at the same pace and therefore the markets will settle back down.

But what if they don’t settle back down?

Could the bond bubble implode even if there is no tapering?

That is what some are now suggesting. For example, Detlev Schlichter is pointing to what has been happening in Japan as an indication that the paradigm has changed…

My conclusion is this: if market weakness is the result of concerns over an end to policy accommodation, then I don’t think markets have that much to fear. However, the largest sell-offs occurred in Japan, and in Japan there is not only no risk of policy tightening, there policy-makers are just at the beginning of the largest, most loudly advertised money-printing operation in history. Japanese government bonds and Japanese stocks are hardly nose-diving because they fear an end to QE. Have those who deal in these assets finally realized that they are sitting on gigantic bubbles and are they trying to exit before everybody else does? Have central bankers there lost control over markets?

After all, money printing must lead to higher inflation at some point. The combination in Japan of a gigantic pile of accumulated debt, high running budget deficits, an old and aging population, near-zero interest rates and the prospect of rising inflation (indeed, that is the official goal of Abenomics!) are a toxic mix for the bond market. It is absurd to assume that you can destroy your currency and dispossess your bond investors and at the same time expect them to reward you with low market yields. Rising yields, however, will derail Abenomics and the whole economy, for that matter.

The financial situation in Japan is actually very similar to the financial situation in the United States. We both have “a gigantic pile of accumulated debt, high running budget deficits, an old and aging population, near-zero interest rates and the prospect of rising inflation”. In both cases, rational investors should demand higher returns when the central bank fires up the printing presses.

And if interest rates on U.S. Treasury bonds start to rise to rational levels, the U.S. government is going to have to pay more to borrow money, state and local governments are going to have to pay more to borrow money, junk bonds will crash, the market for home mortgages will shrivel up and economic activity in this country will slow down substantially.

Plus, as I am fond of reminding everyone, there is a 441 trillion dollar interest rate derivatives time bomb sitting out there that rapidly rising interest rates could set off.

So needless to say, the Federal Reserve is scared to death of what higher interest rates would mean.

But at this point, they may have lost control of the situation.

Republished with permission from: The Economic Collapse

Quake survivors are pictured outside a hospital in Lampahan village in Aceh province, Indonesia, on June 2, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

The protest movement is directed against the US and its proxy Muslim Brotherhood regime. “Demonstrators carried hand-made posters denouncing Obama and his pro-Muslim Brotherhood Cairo Ambassador, Anne Patterson.” (See F. William Engdahl, Global Research, July 4, 2013)

The Muslim Brotherhood had been spearheaded into the government with the support of Washington as a “replacement” rather than an “alternative” to Hosni Mubarak, who had faithfully obeyed the orders of the Washington Consensus from the outset of his presidency.

While the Armed Forces have cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Coup d’Etat is ultimately intended to manipulate the protest movement and prevent the accession of a “real people’s government”.

The overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi by the Egyptian Armed forces, however, was to ensure political continuity of behalf of Washington.

Western intelligence agencies have a longstanding history of collaboration with the Brotherhood. Britain’s support of the Brotherhood instrumented through the British Secret Service dates back to the 1940s. Starting in the 1950s, according to former intelligence official William Baer, “The CIA [funneled] support to the Muslim Brotherhood because of “the Brotherhood’s commendable capability to overthrow Nasser.”1954-1970: CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood Ally to Oppose Egyptian President Nasser,

These covert links to the CIA were maintained throughout the government of Hosni Mubarak.

From the outset of the “Arab Spring”, the Obama administration’s objective was to undermine secular governments in the Middle East and North Africa and install a model “Islamic State”, which would serve US geopolitical and corporate interests.

“Strong Economic Medicine”

The protest movement against Mubarak in early 2011 was in response to the devastating impacts of IMF reforms. Initiated at the height of the Gulf War in early 1991, these reforms —which span over a period of more than 20 years— have served to impoverish the Egyptian people, while also “opening up” the Egyptian economy to the influx of “foreign investors”.

The Nile Valley which was Egypt’s breadbasket for more than 3000 years was destroyed in favor of food imports from the US and the European Union.

The resulting deregulation of food prices, sweeping privatization, austerity measures had led to poverty and mass unemployment. In turn, social programs collapsed, Egypt’s economy and financial system were destabilized.

Continuity pertaining to neoliberal economic reform is central to US sponsored regime change. Morsi’s accession to the presidency was conditional upon his acceptance of IMF “economic medicine”.

In August 2012, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde stated candidly that “The IMF will accompany Egypt as it undertakes this challenging journey… It’s an Egyptian journey and the IMF is a partner in that journey.”

“We are impressed by the strategy that President Morsi and Prime Minister Kandil have proposed during our meetings today,” Lagarde said at a press conference attended jointly by Kandil. (IMF , August 22, 2012)

A new IMF package of (deadly) macro-economic reforms was launched with a view to “managing Egypt’s political and economic transition” (Ibid). The resulting IMF sponsored “transition” imposed by Egypt’s external creditors has served to exacerbate rather than alleviate the economic and social crisis.

Social conditions have deteriorated dramatically since the demise of Hosni Mubarak. The mass protest movement against President Morsi was in large part motivated by the fact that the Mubarak era macro-economic reforms imposed by Washington and Wall Street continued to prevail, leading to a further process of impoverishment.

The Role of the Armed Forces: “Green Light” from the Pentagon?

The media has portrayed the Egyptian armed forces as broadly “supportive” of the protest movement, without addressing the close relationship between the leaders behind the military coup and their US counterparts.

The fact that segments of the mass movement called for the armed forces to play a “supportive role”, is an obvious ploy:

This is the message that the armed forces received from all over urban Egypt, its cities, and its villages; it (the military) recognized the invitation, understood its intentions, appreciated its necessity and got closer to the national scene hoping, willing and abiding by all limits of duty, responsibility and honesty.

Known and documented, the mass movement has been infiltrated. Sectors of the opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood government are supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and Freedom House. The Kifaya civil society movement, is supported by the US based International Center for Non-Violent Conflict.

The role of the armed forces is not to protect a grassroots movement. Quite the opposite: the objective is to manipulate the uprising and quell dissent on behalf of Washington.

The objective of the military takeover is to ensure that the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood government does not result in a political transition which undermines US control over the Egyptian State and military.

Let us be under no illusions. While there are important divisions within the military, Egypt’s top brass ultimately take their orders from the Pentagon.

Defense Minister General Abdul Fatah Al-Sisi (left), who instigated the Coup d’Etat directed against President Morsi is a graduate of the US War College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania .

General Al Sisi was in permanent liaison by telephone with US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel (right together with Al Sisi) from the very outset of the protest movement. Press reports confirm that he consulted him several times in the days leading up to the Coup d’Etat. It is highly unlikely that General Al Sisi would have acted without a ‘green light” from the Pentagon.

Hagel phoned al-Sisi last Thursday [June 30th] as the huge demonstrations calling for Morsi’s ouster took on an increasingly anti-U.S. tone, and spoke with him again on Tuesday [July 2] after al-Sisi delivered an ultimatum warning that the military would act if Morsi failed to make concessions. Military.com,

In turn General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in permanent contact with his counterpart General Sedki Sobhi, chief of staff of Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF):

Pentagon officials declined to give specifics on the conversations between Hagel and al-Sisi, but chief Pentagon spokesman George Little said that “US officials at all levels [of the military] have made it clear that we support the democratic process in Egypt and that we hope that this period of tension can be resolved in a peaceful manner and that violence can be avoided. … (Military.com, op cit, emphasis added)

According to Military.com, Hagel and Dempsey “were walking a fine line” … “expressing concern while attempting to avoid the impression that the U.S. was manipulating events behind the scenes.”

Egypt is the largest recipient of US military aid after Israel.

The Egyptian military is controlled by the Pentagon.

In the words of General Anthony Zinni, former Commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM):

“Egypt is the most important country in my area of responsibility because of the access it gives me to the region.”(emphasis added)

Republished with permission from: Global Research

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch

Broke nations are bailing out other broke nations with borrowed money. Round and round we go – where we stop nobody knows. As of April, 41 different countries had active financial “arrangements” with the IMF. Sometimes they are called “bailouts” and sometimes they are called other things, but in every single case they involve loans. And most of the time, these loans come with very stringent conditions. It is a form of “global governance” that most people don’t even know about. For decades, the IMF has been able to use money as a way to force developing nations to do what it wants them to do. But up until fairly recently, this had mostly only been done with poor nations. But now an increasing number of wealthy nations are turning to the IMF for help. We have already seen Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Cyprus receive bailouts which were partly funded by the IMF, Spain has received a bailout for its banking sector, and as I noted yesterday, it is being projected that Italy will need a major bailout within six months. How long can this go on before the entire system collapses?

Well, that would depend on how much money the lender has.

And so where does the IMF get their money?

The IMF gets their money from a bunch of nations that are absolutely drowning in debt themselves.

The IMF is funded by “wealthy” nations that dominate the global economy. The following is how Wikipedia describes the IMF’s quota system…

The IMF’s quota system was created to raise funds for loans. Each IMF member country is assigned a quota, or contribution, that reflects the country’s relative size in the global economy. Each member’s quota also determines its relative voting power. Thus, financial contributions from member governments are linked to voting power in the organization.

These are the five largest contributors to IMF funding…

United States – 16.75%

Japan – 6.23%

Germany – 5.81%

France – 4.29%

UK – 4.29%

But those countries are in trouble themselves. The U.S. has a debt to GDP ratio of over 100%. Japan has a debt to GDP ratio of over 200%.

The truth is that these countries are funding the IMF with borrowed money.

So what happens when the contributors run out of money and can’t contribute anymore?

All over the globe, an increasing number of countries are reaching out to the IMF for help. For example, on Thursday we learned that Pakistan is getting a new bailout from the IMF…

Pakistan and the International Monetary Fund have reached an initial agreement on a bailout of at least $5.3 billion.

Pakistani Finance Minister Muhammad Ishaq Dar and IMF mission chief Jeffrey Franks announced the agreement at a press conference Thursday.

And the new government in Egypt is hoping that the revolution that just occurred will not stop the flow of IMF funds…

In recent months, a handful of neighboring countries such as Qatar have been keeping Egypt’s economy afloat by loaning the country’s central bank cash. That has bought Morsi government time to delay implementing the politically-sensitive measures the IMF has sought as a precondition before it gives Cairo a $4.8 billion credit line. In particular, the IMF had said that Egypt must raise taxes and begin phasing out fuel subsidies.

It’s not the only cash at stake. Other international donors have vowed another $9.7 billion for the country once the IMF program is in place. Roughly $1.55 billion in bilateral aid from Washington could also be held up: under U.S. law, the administration can’t loan money to countries where the military is involved in an unconstitutional change in government.

But what often happens with these bailouts is that the “conditions” that are imposed prove extremely difficult to meet. For example, Greece has not implemented all of the “reforms” that they were ordered to implement, and so the flow of future funds may be threatened…

As Greece looks set to miss a key reform deadline set by international lenders, which could jeopardize further financial aid, a Greek government minister said it wasn’t Greece’s fault that it couldn’t live up to the demands of a flawed bailout program.

“There are failures [by Greece],but you assume that the program that has been effectively imposed on us is perfect, which is far from the case,” Nikos Dendias, minister of Public Order and Citizen Protection, told CNBC on Thursday.

His comments come after Greek finance ministry officials said on Wednesday that Greece would not meet targets on reforming its public sector by the deadline set by international lenders, putting further financial aid in jeopardy.

Once a nation gets hooked on bailout money from the IMF or from other international sources, it can be very hard to get off of it. But that is what these globalist organizations like – they want to be able to use money as a form of control.

As we saw with Greece, sometimes a nation will need bailout after bailout. And it appears that is also going to be the case with Portugal. The Portuguese government is on the verge of collapsing and their financial situation is being described as “very fragile”…

Portugal had been held up as an example of a bailout country doing all the right things to get its economy back in shape. That reputation is now harder to sustain and even before this latest crisis, the International Monetary Fund reported last month that Lisbon’s debt position was “very fragile”.

Coming soon after the near-collapse of the Greek government, which has been given until Monday to show it can meet the demands of its own EU-IMF bailout, the euro zone may be on the brink of falling back into full-on crisis.

Right now, Portuguese bond yields are absolutely soaring and the Portuguese economy is rapidly heading into depression.

Portugal is going to desperately need the assistance of the IMF.

But what happens when the nations that primarily fund the IMF start failing themselves?

The U.S. is a complete and total financial disaster and so is Japan. Much of Europe is already experiencing a full-blown economic depression and even China is showing signs of trouble.

So if the “wealthy” nations fail, who is going to be there to help the “poor” nations?

Republished with permission from: The Economic Collapse

Imagine the aircraft of the President of France being forced down in Latin America on “suspicion” that it was carrying a political refugee to safety — and not just any refugee but someone who has provided the people of the world with proof of criminal activity on an epic scale.

Imagine the response from Paris, let alone the “international community”, as the governments of the West call themselves. To a chorus of baying indignation from Whitehall to Washington, Brussels to Madrid, heroic special forces would be dispatched to rescue their leader and, as sport, smash up the source of such flagrant international gangsterism. Editorials would cheer them on, perhaps reminding readers that this kind of piracy was exhibited by the German Reich in the 1930s.

The forcing down of Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane — denied air space by France, Spain and Portugal, followed by his 14-hour confinement while Austrian officials demanded to “inspect” his aircraft for the “fugitive” Edward Snowden — was an act of air piracy and state terrorism. It was a metaphor for the gangsterism that now rules the world and the cowardice and hypocrisy of bystanders who dare not speak its name.

In Moscow for a summit of gas-producing nations, Morales had been asked about Snowden who remains trapped in Moscow airport. “If there were a request [for political asylum],” he said, “of course, we would be willing to debate and consider the idea.” That was clearly enough provocation for the Godfather. “We have been in touch with a range of countries that had a chance of having Snowden land or travel through their country,” said a US state department official.

The French — having squealed about Washington spying on their every move, as revealed by Snowden — were first off the mark, followed by the Portuguese. The Spanish then did their bit by enforcing a flight ban of their airspace , giving the Godfather’s Viennese hirelings enough time to find out if Snowden was indeed invoking article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”

Those paid to keep the record straight have played their part with a cat-and-mouse media game that reinforces the Godfather’s lie that this heroic young man is running from a system of justice, rather than preordained, vindictive incarceration that amounts to torture: ask Bradley Manning and the living ghosts in Guantanamo.

Historians seem to agree that the rise of fascism in Europe might have been averted had the liberal or left political class understood the true nature of its enemy. The parallels today are very different; but the Damocles sword over Snowden, like the casual abduction of the Bolivian president, ought to stir us into recognising the true nature of the enemy.

Snowden’s revelations are not merely about privacy, nor civil liberty, nor even mass spying. They are about the unmentionable: that the democratic facades of the United States now barely conceal a systematic gangsterism historically identified with if not necessarily the same as fascism. On Tuesday, a US drone killed 16 people in North Waziristan, “where many of the world’s most dangerous militants live”, said the few paragraphs I read. That by far the world’s most dangerous militants had hurled the drones was not a consideration. President Obama personally sends them every Tuesday.

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, Harold Pinter referred to “a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed”. He asked why “the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities” of the Soviet Union were well known in the West while America’s crimes were “superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged”. The most enduring silence of the modern era covered the extinction and dispossession of countless human beings by a rampant America and its agents. “But you wouldn’t know it,” said Pinter. “It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”

This hidden history — not really hidden, of course, but excluded from the consciousness of societies drilled in American myths and priorities — has never been more vulnerable to exposure. Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing, like that of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange and WikiLeaks, threatens to break the silence Pinter described. In revealing a vast Orwellian police state apparatus servicing history’s greatest war-making machine, they illuminate the true extremism of the 21st century. Unprecedented, Germany’s Der Spiegel has described the Obama administration as “soft totalitarianism”. If the penny is finally falling, we might all look closer to home.

For more information on John Pilger, please visit his website at www.johnpilger.com

Republished with permission from: Global Research

An Iraqi man inspects a burnt-out vehicle at the site of a car bomb explosion in the Hurriyah area of eastern Baghdad on July 3, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Several loud explosions have been heard in the Israeli city of Eilat, near the Egyptian border, an Israeli police spokesman has said.

“Explosions were heard. Search operations have been launched but we have been unable so far to determine the origin of the blasts, be it in Eilat or outside the town,” spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said on Thursday night.

GJH/MHB

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Islam Bibi (R), a senior police officer in the Afghan province of Helmand (file photo)

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Predator drones used by multiple agencies in domestic airspace could be armed.

Kit Daniels
Infowars.com
July 4, 2013

U.S. Customs and Border Protection is now lending Predator drones to a wide range of federal, state, and local agencies for domestic surveillance and possible “non-lethal” strikes, according to federal documents released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Credit: Pat Dennis via Flickr

The FBI, the U.S. Marshals and even the Texas Department of Public Safety have used CBP Predator drones in U.S. airspace. In 2010, CBP reported that future drone payloads could include “non-lethal weapons designed to immobilize targets of interest.”

Last month, FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that the FBI has used drones domestically.

The new documents expose the wide extent of domestic drone use. The EFF released the documents after a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

CBP drone use by other agencies has increased over eight times between 2010 and 2012.

By 2016, CBP wants drones airborne in domestic airspace 24 hours a day, seven days a week to ensure a “layered security strategy.”

Predator drone mission data can be fused into an information sharing center for federal, state, and local agencies across the country.

This drone data center would operate like current Homeland Security fusion centers which have violated Americans’ civil liberties and privacy according to a two-year Senate investigation.

The General Atomics MQ-1 Predator drone, perhaps the most well-known unmanned aerial vehicle, is extensively used overseas by the U.S. Air Force and the CIA for armed drone strikes.

According to Policymic, in a four-year period drone strikes killed at least 800 innocent people in addition to 22 “suspected terrorists”, a civilian kill ratio of 36 to 1. Pakistani sources have claimed an even higher civilian kill ratio of 50 to 1.

In June, Brandon Bryant revealed his former career as an Air Force drone operator.

Bryant saw drone strikes kill people through a computer screen half-way across the world.

This method of killing is no doubt dehumanizing. Men, women, and children are reduced to pixelated targets for drone operators who grew up in arcades.

Near the end of his career, Bryant received a past mission “score card” showing over 1,600 deaths.

Bryant said he can still see the blood and gore when he closes his eyes. Doctors have diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Only time will tell when Predator drones will be used to kill Americans on U.S. soil, unless they have done so already.

Source Documents:

2010 “Concept of Operations” Report to Congress

2012 CPB UAS Mission Prioritization Process Presentation

2010 Daily Flight Logs

2011 Daily Flight Logs — Part 1

2011 Daily Flight Logs — Part 2

2012 Daily Flight Logs — Part 1

2012 Daily Flight Logs — Part 2

2012 Daily Flight Logs — Part 3

Republished with permission from: Infowars

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/independence_from_terror_20130704/

Posted on Jul 4, 2013

Republished with permission from: TruthDig

July 4, 2013
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Summer is a season best celebrated with barbeque, fireworks, and great quantities of beer (although the latter two are usually best when unmixed). This holiday weekend, in particular, allows for an prolonged period of indulgence. But how to choose your beverage? The average American consumer is presented with a bewildering array of beers. Preference depends on a wide variety of factors: Taste, tradition, regional pride, which ads have seeped deepest into our unconscious, and the lateness of the hour. For some, drinking union-made may give their beery binges the righteousness of the just. (A feeling that is often further inflamed after beer number three.)

There are a number of ways of figuring out whether a particular brand is union-made. In the past, cans and bottles would prominently feature the Union Label. Some still do, although today it’s usually hidden away in the small print. The AFL-CIO put up a list of union-made booze on their website for those who care to look. Most of the big names are there. Miller products made by members of the United Auto Workers and The Teamsters: High Life (now decorated with images of a Harley, another union-made product), Miller Genuine Draft, and that elixir of the people, Milwaukee’s Best. The Machinists and Teamsters handle a bunch of Anheuser-Busch’s products: Rolling Rock, Shock Top, the Old Glory-swathed Budweiser, and the sober drinker’s tipple O’Doul’s. A more extensive list on Labor 411 includes Moosehead, Hamms, Lionshead, and, god help us, Olde English 800. 

There are several foreign brands on the list too, chiefly Hoegaarden, Stella Artois, and Canada’s LaBatt’s Blue, whose titular company has recently been in the news because of a boycott against its brewery in St. Johns (the capital city of the Newfoundland and Labrador province). The plant’s 45 workers have been on strike since April 10 because the company asked them to train their own replacements mere days before end of their contract. Although the sides have come to the table multiple times, no agreement has been reached. “This employer has made no indication what so ever that they are willing to negotiate fairly,” says Carol Furlong, president of the Newfoundland and Labrador Association of Public and Private Employees (NAPE), which represents the workers. Meanwhile the plant is being operated by scab labor, so the beer is still flowing.

In response NAPE declared a boycott against “Labatt’s imported products in order to prevent the brewing company’s other unionized employees in Canada from experiencing any loss of work.” Beers on the Canadian boycott list include Stella Artois, Becks, Hoegaarden, and Boddingtons. (In Newfoundland and Labrador the boycott covers all Labatt/AB Inbev made in the province.) What does that mean, if anything, for Americans trying to kick back and enjoy a beer or six this holiday weekend?

There is no AFL-CIO boycott against LaBatt. And Stella Artois, Becks, Hoegaarden are still on the federation’s union made page. (NAPE insists Canada’s imports of Stella Artois and Hoegaarden do not come from the United States anyway.) So the short answer is that you can probably still drink, say, Becks, to your heart’s content. But the more complicated answer, which will have little implications for the next three days beery revelries, lies in the massive consolidation of the companies that supply the nation, and much of the world, with ice cold ones.

The bewildering array of beers mentioned earlier are actually something of a mirage. As Tim Heffernan expertly lays out in the November/December 2012 Washington Monthly, over the course of the aughts the world’s “seven giant brewing conglomerates”–four domestic, three foreign–consolidated into two mega-corporations, Anheuser-Busch InBev and MillerCoors (only Miller products are produced in organized breweries, Coors busted their unions before the joint venture). Both of these giants own a multitude of brands, including big domestics, craft brews, and international brands like Stella Artois, which was owned by the InBev company that purchased Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion in 2008. Combined these two companies sell between 80-90 percent of U.S. beer. (Sam Adams is one of the few well known companies to exist outside their purview, along with a multitude of craft breweries, most of them non-union.)  

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

Alex Timofeev’s doorbell rang after miidnight one morning in late September. The 35-year-old father of two in Madison, Wisconson left his fiancé in bed and opened the front door. Two officers were outside. They identified themselves as officials with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Timofeev’s first thought was about his petition for permanent residency in the states, which–as he told Madison’s Isthmus news–has been in the works for years.

The officers entered Timofeev’s home and told him they held a warrant for his arrest, but refused  to answer any questions. Timofeev was told he couldn’t text his boss at the Nakoma Country Club where he works, even to tell him he would not be into work that day. He was not allowed to make any calls, brush his teeth, or use the bathroom, his fiance Elizabeth Vale-Schesch told Isthmus. 

In cuffs, he was driven to the Milwaukee ICE office where officials said he had “abandoned” his citizenship petition and was going to be deported because of marijuana possession convictions in Dane County as far back as 1996. He was allowed to make a single phone call. Then, he was taken to the Dodge County Detention Facility.

According to Isthmus, Timofeev was born in the Soviet Union but moved to Wisconsin with his family in 1992 at age 14. He has never returned to Russia, and has no friends or relatives there. By 19 he’d been convicted thrice in Dane County for marijuana possession. Each time he pled no contest.

Davorin Odrcic, Timofeev’s immigration attorney, filed a motion in Dane County Court on Dec. 17, 2012 asking the court to vacate Timofeev’s pleas from the 90’s since at the time Timofeev’s attorneys had not informed him that such pleas might result in his deportation.

Circuit court judge Ellen Berz made the decision in January to side with Timofeev. After 4 months in custody, he was released.

Then, the Dane County District Attorney (DA) Ismael Ozanne nudged the state Department of Justice to appeal the circuit court’s decision. Now Timofeev faces deportation once again.

Friends, family and coworkers have written letters to the DA’s office, reminding Ozanne that Timofeev’s days of using drugs ended long ago, and of the fact that he is a hard working chef, friend, and father to his two daughters Sasha, 16 and Kylie, 7.

For now, Timofeev cannot work, which means he cannot pay the child support he usually pays to the penny. His fiancee, who works part time at a community college, is stuck with all of the household bills, and his legal fees of $60,000 have depleated his elderly parents’ small savings.  He is unable to care for his children or his parents, and his wedding to his fiance is on hold, Isthmus reports.

Immigration reform in Congress could potentially provide a fix for Timofeev’s problems, but  the federal bill approved by the Senate June 27, still awaits congressional approval.

“This would be a big change,” Odrcic told Isthmus.  “And it highlights the fact that Congress is not even contemplating a rollback of the 1996 law that affected Alex’s case. It is going in the other direction.”

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

With the July 4 holiday upon us, you may find yourself gathering with family this long weekend. That might mean a barbecue and fireworks, but it may also mean something else: political conversations with your crazy relatives.

Here, then, is a citizen’s guide to debunking a half-dozen absurdities and myths you may find thrown at you, with an emphasis on the economy (particularly, the inequality debate).

1) CLAIM: “The poor are doing just fine!”

Example: Robert Rector:

In 2005, the typical household defined as poor by the government had a car and air conditioning. For entertainment, the household had two color televisions, cable or satellite TV, a DVD player, and a VCR. If there were children, especially boys, in the home, the family had a game system, such as an Xbox or a PlayStation.

HOW TO RESPOND: The idea here is that a rising tide lifts all boats, but as Warren Buffet has noted, in reality, a rising tide lifts all yachts. Even Adam Smith, the hero of classical economists, knows this is bunk: “A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life … But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty.” The real question is not whether the poor can afford silly amenities, like a DVD player or an XBox, it’s whether they can afford essentials: food, clothing, comfort, shelter, etc. For poor Americans, the prices of these goods have increased dramatically, while the price of consumer goods has decreased dramatically. By singling out only consumer goods that have gotten cheaper, Rector disguises the real costs of inequality: worse health outcomes, worse educational outcomes and decreased social cohesion.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

Israeli regime forces have intensified arrests of and attacks against the Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank, Press TV reports.

In their latest assault on Wednesday, Israeli soldiers killed Moataz Sharawna, a Palestinian youth, in the village of Dura near the West Bank city of al-Khalil (Hebron) after running over him with a military jeep.

Witnesses said the attack was intentional as Sharawna was taking part in an anti-Israel demonstration.

On July 1, Israeli forces also arrested Palestinian journalist and photographer Mohammad Waleed al-Azzeh after raiding his familyâ„¢s house in Aida Refugee Camp, located north of the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

Al-Azzehâ„¢s family told Press TV that more than 30 Israeli soldiers entered the place and took him away after violently beating him.

According to the journalistâ„¢s family, Azzeh was arrested for taking pictures of Israeli forces attacking Palestinian children near the refugee camp. His lawyer also said Azzeh would be transferred to the Ofer military prison.

In this regard, Monjed Jadou with Palestine News Network (PNN) told Press TV, Å“I think the media are playing a great role in showing and telling the world what is happening exactly in Palestine,” adding, Å“What happened to Mohammad shows that the Israelis are targeting journalists.”

The Israeli military regularly raids houses of Palestinians in the West Bank, arresting activists and civilians, mostly without any charges. Many Palestinians remain under detention in Israeli prisons, where they are given minimal access to their basic rights.

According to Israeli human rights group, Bâ„¢Tselem, more than 4,700 Palestinian prisoners, including about 170 administrative detainees, are currently held in Israeli prisons.

MKA/SS/HMV

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Tunisian police guard a checkpoint. (file photo)

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Seyyed Abbas Araqchi has criticized several European countries for closing their airspace to Bolivian President Evo Morales.

In a statement released on Thursday, Araqchi said the move was an insult to the rights of the Bolivian nation and their president as the symbol of the sovereignty of the Latin American country.

He argued that the measure also violated international regulations and accepted responsibilities with regard to observing the contents of international conventions and total immunity of planes carrying presidents of various countries.

Bolivia plans to lodge a formal complaint to the United Nations after several European nations denied airspace to Morales plane.

Å“The decisions of these countries have violated international law…. We are already making procedures to denounce this to the UN Secretary-General [Ban Ki-moon],” Bolivia’s Ambassador to the UN Sacha Llorenti told reporters in Geneva on Wednesday.

Bolivia says France, Spain, Portugal and Italy refused to allow Morales plane, which was flying from Moscow back to Bolivia, to cross their airspace on suspicion of carrying US surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden onboard.

Llorenti added that the diversion was an Å“act of aggression” against his country, and was equal to Å“kidnapping” the Bolivian president.

He also warned that the move might cause Å“irreparable damage” to diplomatic relations with the European states.

Morales’ plane was forced to land in Austria en route to Bolivia. The aircraft left Vienna after a stopover of more than 12 hours.

Boliviaâ„¢s envoy to the UN mocked the countries which blocked Morales plane and described them as Å“tools” of the US, saying, Å“In the 19th century, the colonies were in Latin America, and now we see the colonies are in some countries of Europe.”

Bolivia is one of the countries to which Snowden has reportedly applied for asylum.

MP/SS

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Reuters
July 4, 2013

Amnesty International accused Russia, Ukraine and the five Central Asian states on Wednesday of colluding in abductions and unlawful transfers of asylum-seekers and refugees back to Central Asia where they faced the risk of torture.

In a report, the London-based human rights group enumerated cases of asylum-seekers in Russia and Ukraine being spirited away from their apartments or picked up on the street and being forcibly flown back to the Central Asian state of Uzbekistan.

In a separate statement, Amnesty said that when intervention of the European Court of Human Rights obstructed the handover of individuals, “cynical subversions of international law” were used to secure the transfer.

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Beirut says it will pursue through the United Nations the fate of four Iranian diplomats still missing after being kidnapped over three decades ago in Lebanon.

Å“I will on this very day ask Lebanonâ„¢s permanent representative at the United Nations to inquire about the latest investigations into this case by the UN and its Secretary-General [Ban Ki-moon],” Lebanese Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour said at a meeting with the families of the abducted Iranian diplomats on Thursday.

Mansour said Beirut had sent the United Nations two formal letters in the past two years confirming the abduction of the Iranian nationals on the Lebanese soil and these have been recorded as official documents at the UN Secretariat.

He added that the Lebanese Justice Ministry has been asked to submit a report on the latest investigations conducted into the case, vowing not to spare any effort at both national and international levels to resolve this Å“painful issue.”

During the meeting, Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon Ghazanfar Roknabadi and Maryam Mojtahedzadeh, an advisor to the outgoing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, praised Lebanon’s efforts to shed light on the fate of the four diplomats.

They called for continued pursuit of the case by the Lebanese government and the UN and other concerned international organizations, expressing hope that close cooperation between Tehran and Beirut will help to bring the kidnapped Iranians back home.

Å“We expect the Lebanese government to play a constructive role in determining the fate of our loved ones and … prepare the way through negotiations with the UN and other international bodies to mount pressure on the Zionist regime [of Israel] more than before,” said Mojtahedzadeh, wife to one of the missing diplomats.

On July 4, 1982, Ahmad Motevasseliyan, Seyyed Mohsen Mousavi, Taqi Rastegar Moqaddam and Kazem Akhavan were kidnapped by a group of Israel-backed gunmen at a checkpoint in northern Lebanon.

The Lebanese militia forces headed by Samir Geagea was known for its close ties with Israel at the time and was responsible for handing over many Lebanese and foreigners to Israeli custody at the peak of Israelâ„¢s invasion of Lebanon.

Geagea has made contradictory statements concerning the Iranian diplomats, initially saying that his militia handed them to Israel and later claiming that they witnessed their killing inside Lebanon.

The Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah has said that the fate of the abducted Iranians had been raised in indirect negotiations for a prisoner exchange with the Israeli side after the 2006 war.

However, Israel has refused to release any information about the four missing Iranians.

MRS/SS/HMV

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Irish Times
July 4, 2013

The destruction comes five months after archaeologists found a temple on the archaeological site, known as El Paraiso. Photograph: Peruvian Ministry of Culture

Authorities in Peru say a pyramid on one of the oldest archaeological sites in the Americas, parts of which date from 3,000 BC, has been destroyed by property developers.

Criminal charges are being brought against representatives of two companies over the damage. Those responsible face as many as eight years in prison, authorities have said.

A statement issued by the country’s culture ministry described the attack, which occured on June 29th, as an “attack on the cultural heritage of the nation” and said the damage caused to the structure is “irreparable”.

Authorities in Peru say a pyramid on one of the oldest archaeological sites in the Americas, parts of which date from 3,000 BC, has been destroyed by property developers.

Criminal charges are being brought against representatives of two companies over the damage. Those responsible face as many as eight years in prison, authorities have said.

A statement issued by the country’s culture ministry described the attack, which occured on June 29th, as an “attack on the cultural heritage of the nation” and said the damage caused to the structure is “irreparable”.

The developers were caught by police attempting to tear down some of the 11 other pyramids on the site.

After knocking down the 6m (20-foot) high building, which covered 2,500m (3,000 yards) square, the group scattered refuse over the rubble and set it ablaze.

The destruction comes five months after archaeologists found a temple on the archaeological site, known as El Paraiso, which may be as old as Caral, a 5,000-year-old temple north of Lima discovered in 2001.

At 3,000 BC, the complex would predate the Step Pyramid in Egypt and Stonehenge inEngland.

Marco Guillen, who headed the team of archaeologists that made February’s discovery, said at the time that additional security was needed to prevent theft and illegal urban settlements. Peru, best-known for the Inca Empire that lasted for a century until the Spanish Conquest of 1532, was previously dominated by civilizations such as Chavin, Wari-Tiahuanaco and Mochica. Those civilizations came after the people who built El Paraiso and Caral.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/a_warming_climate_will_alter_the_soil_that_feeds_us_20130704/

Posted on Jul 4, 2013

Republished with permission from: TruthDig

The Economist
July 4, 2013

BEHIND every aerial drone is a human operator. Thousands are civilians, working for contractors such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Civilians may not fire missiles, but they fly spy planes and fix them when they break down.

Andrew Lohmar, for example, piloted ScanEagle surveillance drones for the American navy for over five years. He was stationed in Iraq, on ships and even on an oil platform in the Persian Gulf. When his two-man team provided reconnaissance for the rescue of American hostages from Somali pirates aboard the Maersk Alabama, a container ship, in 2009, they worked around the clock for five days straight. Small wonder that a 2011 study by the Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine found nearly half the operators of spy drones suffering from high levels of stress.

“There were times you saw things that you did not really want to, including people dying,” says Mr Lohmar. “Other times brought home the fact that the people on the other end of the lens were human beings too, such as seeing a ‘bad guy’ playing with his kids.”

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Prison Planet.com
July 4, 2013

A few hours before making this video, Luke Rudkowski of WeAreChange.org received an email from an anonymous sender claiming to be a Bilderberg whistleblower with attached photos from inside the 2013 Bilderberg meeting at the Grove Hotel in Watford, England.

The email was sent to his personal email address that he has had since high school, not one of his work or WeAreChange email addresses. Luke opened the email from another computer and itl stated that he was a whistleblower and wanted Luke to break the story so he was sending him these photos exclusively and specifically stated that Luke needed to download the photos.

Fortunately before downloading, Yahoo gives a preview of the photos and the photos were actually graphic child pornography. Luke has had his computer searched by forensics when going into Canada to cover the G20 when they searched him and interrogated him for hours, something like this could happen again when we come back to the U.S. from travelling Europe.

Had this been the case, even with deleting, they would still find the images. There would be no understanding of the true story and he would be facing a felony charge. Besides that also completely jeopardizing his work, reputation and livelihood.

We wanted to make this public for Luke’s safety and also for people to be aware that this kind of thing happens. We do not know who this was, all we know is that it is so important for anyone in this line of work to remain extremely vigilant.

The email address was s27du23d@tormail.org. If anyone can help find out who this person is, it would be greatly appreciated.

Republished with permission from: Infowars

Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire 

One day before members of the Icelandic Parliament are due to break for summer vacation, leaders of three political parties have submitted a special piece of legislation which would make NSA whistleblower and fugitive, Edward Snowden, a citizen of Iceland.

The issue was raised this morning by MP and former Minister of the Interior Ögmundur Jónasson, which could be decided before the weekend.

Some are worried that this bill could be delayed by a piece of fisheries legislation which is also up for vote this Friday.

Although the bill is being backed by three parties, Brighter Future, Piran (Pirate Party) and the Green Party, there is still a possibility that the Snowden bill could be stopped by the current ruling coalition of the Conservative and Moderate parties.

Many will speculate that if such a veto does occur, whether or not Iceland’s executive would do so under extenuating pressure from Washington DC, who has already been accused my the international community this week of applying political pressure on France and Portugal to deny the Bolivian Presidential Jet access through their airspace over accusations that Ed Snowden was being smuggled on board — a move which forced Evo Morales to ground his flight in Vienna in order to reassess his route back to South America.

Iceland is also the home of the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, who have recently taken control of the public media relations, as well as setting up intermediary legal channels for Ed Snowden.

According to Icelandic rules for prospective citizens, the applicant must be present in the country in order to lodge a successful application.

As yet, Snowden is still believed to be stranded in the transit area of Moscow’s International Airport following the cancellation of his US passport by Washington DC.

See original Icelandic news wire story at RUV

July 3, 2013
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The Egyptian street has erupted once again. Two and a half years after the revolution that overthrew longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak captivated the world and fundamentally changed the Middle East, another massive shock to the Egyptian political system is unfolding.

After a year of rule by President Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood-backed politician who won Egypt’s first-ever free and democratic elections last year, ordinary Egyptians have had enough. Responding to a grassroots campaign called “Tamarod”–which means rebel in Arabic–millions of Egyptians have taken to the streets across the Arab world’s most populous nation. They’ve protested in Cairo, the capital; in towns south of Cairo; in the port city of Alexandria; and elsewhere. They are united by one demand: Morsi should go–and he has now gone.

The Egyptian military, the most powerful institution in the country, has forcefully stepped in. On July 1, the armed forces issued an ultimatum that gave Morsi 48 hours to respond to the protesters’ demands–or else be forced from office. The intervention raised the specter of a military coup and a return to military rule–and the specter turned into reality July 3. The military has deployed on the streets in what can only be descriped a coup, albeit a popular coup. The military intervention has immense popular support among the protesters. The Egyptian armed forces announced July 3 that Morsi has been deposed, and that a new political roadmap would be followed.

“No country advances when the society is divided like this,” Wael Ghonim, a key player in the 2011 Egyptian revolution, said on YouTube, according to TIME. “And the main role of the president of the republic is to unite, but, unfortunately, Dr. Morsi, the president of the republic, has miserably failed to do this.”

Fed up with an ailing economy, authoritarianism and a political process exclusively shaped by the Muslim Brotherhood, the masses in Egypt have forced Morsi out. Protesters’ anger has exploded as Muslim Brotherhood offices have been burned to the ground, and the party’s headquarters looted and ransacked. But the Muslim Brotherhood, which was a player in the 2011 revolution, is not likely to go quietly. Muslim Brotherhood activists have also taken to the streets, defending the party’s headquarters and holding counter-rallies. At least 39 people have been killed in clashes between the opposing sides. An American English teacher caught up in the conflict in Alexandria was also killed June 28. In addition, at least one journalist was killed, one raped and seven injured.

The continued polarization in Egypt and the military’s renewed threats to intervene could spell disaster for a country struggling to get on its feet after 30 years of misrule, corruption and human rights abuses perpetrated by the U.S.-backed Mubarak regime.

What does this renewed revolt all mean, and where is it going? What are the roots of the crisis, and what does it mean for the region?

To help explain it all, here are 5 things you should know to understand the current political convulsions in Egypt.

1. Morsi’s Missteps

There are a number of factors fueling the current unrest in Egypt. But the first and most immediate factor is the Islamist leader’s missteps throughout his one-year rule.

Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood member who was jailed by the Mubarak regime, wasn’t elected by overwhelming consensus. He only garnered about 52 percent of the total presidential vote in a contest that pitted him against a Mubarak regime stalwart, Ahmed Shafiq. So he came into office with a slim majority–but he ended up governing like the whole nation loved him, despite vowing in his inaugural address to act as “a servant to the people.”

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

Georgian Foreign Minister Maia Panjikidze says her country’s unilateral abolishment of the visa-free travel regime with Iran is temporary.

Panjikidze said on Wednesday that the decision to revoke visa-free ties with Iran was taken by Georgiaâ„¢s special commission in charge of immigration issues.

Å“We are facing new challenges and we have to formulate a new policy,” she said.

Å“Visa policies with various countries should be revised and regulated. A part of the policy is unilateral cancellation of visa processes with Iran,” the Georgian foreign minister noted.

Chairman of Iran Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee Alaeddin Boroujerdi on Wednesday downplayed Tbilisiâ„¢s new measure as Å“insignificant,” noting, Å“Since tourism industry is among the worldâ„¢s money-making industries, Georgia put itself under embargo by revoking visa-free entry for Iranians.”

On Tuesday, Georgiaâ„¢s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Irakli Vekua, announced that the country had reinstated visa requirements for the Iranians, saying, “As of July 1, Iranian citizens have to obtain a visa to enter the Georgian territory.”

Vekua declined to provide further information on Tbilisiâ„¢s new decision.

In 2010, Iran and Georgia signed an agreement for visa-free travel between the two countries, in a move to enhance bilateral ties in trade and tourism.

MP/SS /HMV

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Many Americans see no point in celebrating anything

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
July 4, 2013

A picture of a “JULY 4TH PARK RULES” notice, posted to the internet perfectly sums up the sorry state of freedom in the nation as Americans celebrate their Independence today.

While the sign outwardly bans any fireworks, barbecues or alcohol, you would think that it would still leave intact the right to celebrate the freedomy and independencey parts of July 4th. Not so.

The sign notifies anyone entering the park that police overlords will be rummaging around inside their bags and coolers, and that “The entire park is under video surveillance.”

Well, that kind of wraps it up for July 4th then.

The sign appeared in Lakewood Ohio, following a set of rules put into place by the parks division of the municipal government.

The video surveillance isn’t even aimed at crime, primarily because there is none. In 2010, Lakewood was named one of the top suburbs in the country to visit. In the same year, Bloomberg Businessweek also described Lakewood as one of the best places to “raise your kids”. In other words, it is above and beyond a typical American suburb, yet the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights still no longer seem to have any effect there.

The image was uploaded to the Imgur website under the title “No Fun Here, Move Along.” Angry residents and disgruntled Americans in general reacted with fury:

“By everything holy, I’m sorry that this community has taken such drastic measures. I hope most of the folks from lakewood disobeys each and everyone of these “rules”.”

“No joke. Illegal search and seizure and surveillance. What is this, 1984?”

“Sounds like the NSA idea of a good time at the park. ”

“there shall be no freedom on the day celebrating freedom…….that makes sense.”

“Police will be searching bags and coolers? On public property and without probable cause or a warrant? On Independence Day? Good luck with that.”

“Attention Individual(s):
Commencement of patriotic feelings may be had between One hour after sunrise to one hour before sunset. Please limit patriotic feelings to one feeling per person. Excess feelings will be confiscated by dream police.”

As we reported yesterday, similar rules and regulations all over the country are leading Americans to question what “freedoms” are they supposed to be celebrating.

–––––––––––––––––––––-

Steve Watson is the London based writer and editor for Alex Jones’ Infowars.com, and Prisonplanet.com. He has a Masters Degree in International Relations from the School of Politics at The University of Nottingham, and a Bachelor Of Arts Degree in Literature and Creative Writing from Nottingham Trent University.

Republished with permission from: Infowars

Ruth Eglash
Washington Post
July 4, 2013

Israel’s government remained conspicuously quiet Thursday about the Egyptian military’s ouster of Mohamed Morsi from the country’s presidency, as Egyptians continued either celebrating or lamenting the removal of the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood leader.

“Israel is trying to keep its distance from what is going on Egypt and not say too much, because anything it says on this issue will be used as a weapon against one side or the other,” commented Eli Shaked, who served as Israel’s ambassador to Egypt from 2003 to 2005.

“For us it does not matter if it’s the Islamists or liberals in power,” he said. “What is important is that Egypt restores law and order and that stability is returned to all of Egypt, especially in the Sinai.” The retired ambassador added, “Cairo has lost most of its sovereignty over the Sinai, and the peninsula has become a jumping board for terrorists.”

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Reuters
July 4, 2013

Global food prices fell 1% in June due to improving supply prospects, the United Nations’ food agency has said , raising forecasts for wheat and maize output in the new season.

Food prices spiked during the summer of 2012 due to a historic drought in the US but prospects for a rebound in global grain supply and good weather forecasts are now weighing on markets.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) price index that measures price changes for a basket of cereals, oil seeds, dairy, meat and sugar, fell for a second month running to 211.3 points in June — its lowest level since February.

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

The 2nd leaders’ summit of the Gas Exporting Countries Forum (GECF) has taken place in Moscow. Experts say there is a candidate to enter the elite club of 13 members once the rich East Mediterranean deposits start to be developed. The vast sea bottom natural gas fields were discovered a few years ago. Israel is the leader in the development; it starts its activities without waiting for neither ultimate resolution of legal issues, nor settling the emerging disputes with neighbors.

It has been exploring the shelf area for many years. In 2009-2010 US Noble Energy discovered substantial natural gas deposits. According to first estimations, the deposits found were to contain 950 billion cubic metres of natural gas, the potential cost exceeding $260 billion. The Tamar gas field (283 billion cubic meters) is located in Israel’s exclusive economic zone, roughly 80 kilometers (50 mi) west of Haifa in waters 1,700 metres (5,600 ft.) deep. The Leviathan is located roughly 130 kilometers (81 mi) west of Haifa in waters 1,500 metres (4,900 ft.) deep in the Levantine basin, near the Lebanese shore, a rich hydrocarbon area in one of the world’s larger offshore gas finds of the past decade. The Tamar is developed by Noble Energy and Israeli Delek Group, which belongs to Israeli billionaire Yitzhak Tshuva, the controlling shareholder. Australian Woodside Petroleum has won the bidding to become the leading developer of the Leviathan. Many gas industry majors kept away from bidding because of regional instability and co-ownership disputes. To avoid the reaction of Arab states Royal Dutch Shell energy giant sold down its major stake in Woodside Petroleum when it joined the Israeli project. (1)

Natural gas from the offshore Tamar field was pumped to Israeli shores for the first time on March 30, the day of the Passover holiday, in the presence of Energy and Water Minister Silvan Shalom. The ceremony took place against the backdrop of Orthodox rabbis protests; they said it was out of time violating the sanctity of holiday. The fact goes to show how significant the event was for the country and its people. Minister Shalom said, «This is an ‘energy independence day’ for Israel». «This breakthrough is the harbinger of the foray of additional private companies» into the Israeli energy market», he added. Yitzhak Tshuva said that one cannot overestimate the importance of the Tamar gas for Israel’s economy. According to him, almost every superlative is appropriate in this case. Thanks to this and other offshore gas reserves, Israel will achieve energy independence for the first time in its history and will no longer have to go begging from other countries. The country has entered a new phase of its history. According to Tshuva, Tamar is a national pride of Israel. (2)

Indeed, the discovery of Tamar has turned the country into a potential energy exporter. There were hot debates, the developers wanted the maximum 55% export quota, but the Netanyahu government took a more balanced decision by the end of July raising the domestic consumption share from 450 billion cubic meters to 540. Some 260 — 360 billion cubic meters are to be exported. It means only 40% of gas production will go abroad, while the remaining 60% will provide Israel with gas supplies during 25, or even 30 years to follow. «The decision balances between the need to ensure a cheap and available source of energy for Israelis and the need to export. This amount of gas will meet our energy needs for at least the next 25 years, « Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointed out. «We are not interested in becoming one of those nations that procrastinated and ended up without gas. We want to harvest the gas and produce billions of dollars in state revenue in favor of the country’s budgetary needs. We have to drive growth forward and natural gas is a growth engine», he said, adding that Israel stands to receive $60 billion in taxes and royalties from the sale of gas over the next two decades. The production will save around $ 4 billion yearly, the sum spent on imports at present. (3)

Silvan Shalom noted the government planned to extend the period of energy independence from 25 to 30 years. Sarah and Myra gas exploratory licenses have failed to produce gas. It has made Israel increase the share destined for domestic consumption. (4)

At that, the implementation of the plans may become a bumpy road. There is no clear sea economic zone delimitation of borders between the neighboring states.The Eastern Mediterranean «gas pie» is disputed by Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Turkey, as well as Palestine striving for independence… The matter gets even more complicated because the states have disputes between themselves, as well each of them with Israel. Formally Lebanon and Israel are still at war. The Lebanese government has launched a complaint to the United Nations saying Israel is in violation of its continental shelf. Syria says the Leviathan stretches to its economic zone. Egypt insists the gas field is closer to its city of Damietta (190 km) than to Haifa (according to Cairo, the alleged distance is 235 km). It claims that the Tamar and Leviathan gas fields are situated on the southern part of an underwater slope that belongs to Egypt since a long time. Palestine accuses Israel of outright stealing the gas from the Gaza Strip.  (5) Ankara is concerned over the plans to develop the deposits near the Cypriot shore, as well as to liquefy and transport the gas jointly by Israel and Cyprus. Turkey thinks the interests of unrecognized Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) are ignored. There is a slim chance the countries of the region will effectively cooperate to develop the deposits. (6)

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already ordered to create a special military force for gas fields protection. The formation includes missile craft and drones. Israel is in talks with Germany on acquisition of four frigates.Some estimates say the government will have to spend around half a billion dollars annually for gas fields and infrastructure defense. (7)

Minister of National Infrastructure Uzi Landau thinks it will affect negatively the production and cost effectiveness. (8) The existing contradictions with the neighbors will hardly stop Israel from extracting the gas for domestic use. The current instability in the region meets the Israel’s short-term interests. Export sales are an imperative for attracting so much needed investments into deposits development and boosting influential international actors presence in the region. At that, the ambitious world market plans evoke serious doubts.

The ambitions are there. For instance, the Institute for Policy and Strategy has come up with the report called Israel’s New Gas Discovery: A Diplomatic and Geopolitical Nuance or Revolution? devoted to diplomatic and geopolitical implications of the gas deposits discovery.  (9) Israeli experts make assessment based on obviously exaggerated estimates of the reserves; the figure three trillion cubic meters has been adduced by U.S. Geological Survey without conducting more thorough exploration research. They say that if the present market trends continue, the supplies from Russia will make up half of European consumption by 2020. The European Union would like to bring it down to, at least, a quarter. If the deposit reserves estimations prove to be correct, then, according to the Institute for Policy and Strategy assessment, starting from 2016 Israel may become a reliable alternative energy supplier for, at least, 50 years. According to these calculations, Israel has the capaсity to supply Europe with up to 30 cubic meters annually and bring the dependence on Russian gas down to 23%.

This is a rather optimistic forecast. It probably reflects the sentiments among some part of military and political elite, though it lacks solid indicators as convincing evidence that the conclusions are based on sound foundation. First, adding 30 billion cubic meters to the 500 billion European market will not result in abrupt reduction of Russia’s presence. Second, the prospects for 30 billion cubic meters export are murky as yet; it could be around 10 billion cubic meters at best. That’s what the Netanyahu government approved key indicators say. The assertions that the liquid gas supplies could improve ties with India, China, Japan and South Korea, and even make Georgia independent from Russia, sound more as a pure fantasy, as well as the plans to compensate the US supplies to American strategic European allies.  (10)All this is presumed to be achieved thanks to only half a percent of world gas reserves.

Even very limited exports will engender the problems extremely hard to tackle. The disputes with neighbors hinder coming up with strictly defined gas export strategy. Israel had started to build a liquefied gas production facility along with Cyprus, but the plans were abrogated due to high costs and the protests of Turkey. Then Ankara initiated a joint study of deep water route going through the Turkish territory around Lebanon and Syria. The idea was refused: the Israelis did not want to be dependent on Turkey, which along with the European Union, could demand making concessions related to the Palestinian issue. Then an idea to build a liquefied gas facility on Israel’s own soil took shape. At first they even considered the possibility of involving Gasprom, and then the proposal was shelved due to «strategic reasons» in favor of French Technip. Now, according to the latest reports, the Israelis are getting back to the liquefied gas facility construction in Vasilikos, located on the Cyprus southern shore (near Limassol). By the end of June the Cypriot Aphrodite deposit owners (70% Noble Energy and 30% Israeli Delek Group) signed a preliminary agreement to build a $6 billion terminal till 2019. The Israeli Leviathan is close to the Aphrodite, so after taking a final decision of Israeli gas exports, the companies will join in a pipeline construction to link the both deposits.  (11)

There is no doubt Ankara will do its best to frustrate the plans. It can do it taking into consideration the fact of its military presence in the northern part of Cyprus. As a result, the only realistic option at present is starting gas supplies to Jordan according to the preliminary accord, which has already been achieved. The export will not exceed 1,5 — 2,0 billion cubic meters a year on the condition the Arab Spring will not spread to the Hashemite kingdom. That’s how the hopes get dashed when you’re not friendly with neighbors.

Notes

(1) http://www.zman.com/news/2013/04/05/148490.html

(2) http://www.zman.com/news/2013/03/30/148085.html

(3) http://www.herzliyaconference.org/eng/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/GuySeemann.pdf

(4) http://9tv.co.il/news/2013/06/19/152916.html

(5) http://www.palestine-info.ru/ru/

(6) http://cdn.www.inss.org.il.reblazecdn.net/upload/(FILE)1369310976.pdf

(7) http://www.newsru.co.il/finance/24mar2011/dohod305.html

(8) http://www.herzliyaconference.org/eng/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/GuySeemann.pdf

(9) http://www.herzliyaconference.org/eng/_Uploads/dbsAttachedFiles/GuySeemann.pdf

(10) Ibid 

(11) http://9tv.co.il/news/2013/06/30/153502.html

Republished with permission from: Global Research

In over a hundred cities across the U.S. and on major websites this July 4th holiday, a grassroots movement is pushing back against newly revealed dragnet spying by the NSA in what may be a “turning point for opposing mass government surveillance.”

The newly launched movement, Restore the Fourth, explains that it

aims to end all forms of unconstitutional surveillance of digital communications by the United States government. One specific program Restore the Fourth seeks to discontinue is known as PRISM, which is directed by the National Security Agency.

The spying programs are a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the group says, so #Restorethe4th protests have been organized for Thursday.

But Thursday isn’t just about a protest, organizers explained in an “ask me anything” session on Reddit yesterday:

our rallies/protests are to gain support and visibility for our goals. Making the Fourth Amendment a “Hot Button Issue” come election time is well within the realm of possibility. The hope is to make any opposition to the idea of privacy “Political Suicide”

Helping to make those goals visible online are web heavyweights including WordPress, Reddit, and Mozilla, and digital rights groups like EFF which, The Hill reports, “will display anti-NSA spying messages on their home pages. They will also direct people to the site CallForFreedom.org, where supporters can donate money to help fund TV ads against the intelligence programs and press for action from lawmakers.”

“The NSA programs that have been exposed are blatantly unconstitutional, and have a detrimental effect on free speech and freedom of press worldwide,” Tiffiniy Cheng of the Internet Defense League and Fight for the Future said in a statement. “This is going to be our biggest protest since SOPA, and it should be no surprise. You can’t disregard people’s privacy, invade their personal lives on a daily basis, and not expect them to fight back.”

Explaining the importance of protests, Cheng and Evan Greer explain:

Today’s protests are a turning point for opposing mass government surveillance. They are the beginning of a large outcry that will continue until we hear real answers and real accountability. We liken today to the first protests that got us to the SOPA blackout and ultimately, the shelving of SOPA and PIPA; American Censorship Day took place 2 months before the blackout and was responsible for making SOPA a household term. It took a lot to defeat SOPA, but it was just one law. What we’re fighting today is something much bigger and more insidious. We’re fighting a broken government that has systematically violated our rights, and turned the Internet into something it was never intended to be — a surveillance network for the government to observe the private lives of anyone in the world. […]

America’s founders *hated* oppressive British surveillance. Understanding that privacy was necessary to many of the basic rights granted to us in the Constitution, they established the 4th Amendment. But Snowden’s revelations show another America: a spy state that intercepts the emails and phone calls of innocent people. What the NSA is doing is criminal. It’s immoral. And it goes against everything this country is supposed to be about. Scholars of privacy and experts on intelligence and surveillance agree.

That’s why we’re taking over the streets, the internet, and the airwaves today, and that’s evidence that the people’s passion for the 4th Amendment is still alive and well. Those responsible for this illegal and anti-democratic surveillance will have to answer to the public one way or another.

________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Republished with permission from: Common Dreams

The Generals have done it again!

Egypt’s president, Mohamed Morsi, was deposed one year after being democratically elected by the Egyptian people. For those opposed to Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), the move by the military is seen as supporting a popular uprising and a belated effort to revive or restore the Egyptian revolution that ousted Hosni Mubarak more than two years ago. But for Morsi’s supporters or those who simply had any respect for democratic governance and the rule of law, the action by the army is nothing short of a brazen though soft military coup d’état.

Which one is it? Here are the facts.

The military in Egypt has always enjoyed a privileged and autonomous status and is tacitly considered the power behind the throne. For decades, political power was concentrated in the hands of an elite yet mostly corrupt political and business class that monopolized power and looted the country’s resources. But the revolution that toppled Mubarak was in essence a rejection not just against the dictator, but also his entire corrupt regime. One of the major demands of the revolution was to get rid of dictatorship and repression and uphold the principles of democracy and the rule of law.

Over the next two years, the political process that followed Mubarak’s overthrow allowed for the will of the Egyptian people to be expressed numerous times through free and fair elections and referenda. The people in Egypt went to the polls at least six times: to vote for a referendum to chart the political way forward (March 2011), to vote for the lower and upper house of parliament (November 2011-January 2012), to elect a civilian president over two rounds (May-June 2012), and to ratify the new constitution (December 2012). Each time the electorate voted for the choice of the Islamist parties to the frustration of the secular and liberal opposition.

To the discontent of the Islamists, all their gains at the polls were reversed by either the Mubarak-appointed Supreme Constitutional Court (SCC) or the military. The lower house of parliament, of which the Islamists won seventy three percent of the seats, was dissolved by the SCC a year ago, while the military has just suspended the new constitution, while ousting the democratically-elected president.

Undoubtedly, the MB committed colossal mistakes. For example, they reneged on several promises to their secular and liberal coalition partners, including to not contest the majority of parliamentary seats, field a presidential candidate, or be more exclude others in the composition of the Constitution Constituent Assembly. Perhaps, their gravest mistake was to ally themselves closely with the Salafist groups during the process of writing the constitution, thus alienating many of the secularists, liberals, as well as Christians even though the MB did not care much about the constitutional ideological battle. Their motivation was not to be outflanked by the Salafis on the Islamic identity of the state. To accomplish this objective, they lost most of the others.

In addition, Morsi and the MB did not adhere to their promise of full partnership in governance. Many of the youth and opposition groups felt that the president and MB leadership were not genuine in their outreach and only sought their participation for cosmetic reasons. Even their Islamic partners such as the Salafist Al-Noor Party complained that the MB wanted to monopolize the major power centers in the state. It did not matter that the MB did not control the military, the intelligence, the security apparatus, the police, the diplomatic corps, the banking system, or even the bureaucracy.  But because of the MB’s lack of transparency and openness, the perception was that they were trying to control the major centers of powers in the state and exclude other parties based on ideology while the reality was that such control was non-existent or superficial.

But to the average people on the street what mattered was their security and livelihood. During his one year in power, Morsi faced enormous challenges: deterioration in security and basic services, lack of social justice, and economic decline. It appeared to many as deliberate attempts by the deep state (entrenched elements and bureaucrats loyal to the former regime) to ensure the failure of his presidency. His lack of transparency and openness to his people in favor of presenting an optimistic or upbeat outlook added to public cynicism and the perception of incompetence. Another major mistake by the MB was its failure to separate its socio-religious movement from its political manifestation, the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP). While the public in past times respected the MB for its social services and religious outreach, engaging in politics by its nature is a source of division and rancor. For example when the MB fielded its presidential candidate in March 2012, it was MB’s Guidance Bureau that made the declaration instead of the FJP. In the eyes of the public there was little distinction between the MB and the FJP. So the MB was, correctly or not, held responsible for any political missteps by the FJP.

In part because the 2011 revolutionary partners were sharply divided on ideological grounds, former regime loyalists, politicians, and corrupt businessmen were able to regroup and play an increasing role in the political battles that engulfed the country. Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP), which
dominated political life for decades, was the only party in the country capable of organizing nationwide and competing with the MB. But since the public rejected the NDP (and it was banned shortly after Mubarak was deposed), it did not participate in the parliamentary elections in the fall of 2011. However, by June 2012, Ahmad Shafiq, Mubarak’s last Prime Minster, represented the NDP’s interests. As one of the two remaining candidates in the second round of the presidential elections, he ultimately lost by less than two percent.

Morsi took over power by June 30, 2012. When he was not as inclusive as promised in his senior appointments,  the opposition almost immediately turned against him. Two months after he was sworn in, they called for a massive protest on August 24, calling it “The protest to oust the rule of the Brotherhood.” Their hostility and acrimony increased as the writing of the new constitution was finalized. Meanwhile, the new political openness and freedom in the country allowed for the private media, owned and controlled by many of the former regime’s loyalists and supporters, to target Morsi and the MB in an orchestrated campaign to alienate and inflame the public.

By the time the president issued his ill-advised and ill-fated constitutional decree, the opposition was not only united against Morsi and the MB but also determined to dislodge them from power. Morsi argued that his move was necessary to protect the nascent democratic political structures that the courts were dissolving one by one. He eventually reversed course and annulled his decree, even though the opposition rejected all his appeals for political dialogue. However, his objective of having a new constitution, which the opposition vehemently rejected, and replacing the Mubarak-appointed public prosecutor, a demand that the youth and revolutionary groups had called for, were already fulfilled. This single act proved to be a rallying point for all the opposition and the remnants of the former regime (fulool), which united under the National Salvation Front (NSF) in order to confront and defeat Morsi and the MB. They campaigned vigorously to defeat the constitution, which to their dismay, was passed by 64 percent.

Meanwhile, the MB and their Islamist allies aimed at targeting the corrupt elements in the judiciary, which represented not only a major obstacle in delaying or dissolving the new democratic components of the state, but also it reversed the convictions and released all the corrupt elements of the Mubarak regime. Although this was also a revolutionary demand, the opposition, which so far had not fared well at the ballot box, aligned itself with the judiciary and accused the Islamists of attacking an independent branch of government that had reservations, if not outright discontent, about the revolution.

By the spring of 2013, the MB and its supporters were preparing for new parliamentary elections, which they had expected to win. Their strategy was that if they won the parliamentary elections and forced judiciary reform, they would be able to control or influence all branches of government and easily confront the deep state and institute their program. Sensing the danger of this scenario, NSF coordinator Dr. Mohammad ElBaradei met with Shafiq in the United Arab Emirates in March. In an interview last week, Shafiq disclosed that he and ElBaradei had agreed on an elaborate plan to depose Morsi and the MB. He also predicted that Morsi and MB officials would be arrested and tried. Furthermore, Shafiq complained that ElBaradei and the opposition did not fulfill their part of the bargain, which was to promote and support Shafiq and help make him the next president, and that they instead began to distance themselves from him.

Throughout the political power struggle, the youth movements, which spearheaded the 2011 revolution against the Mubarak regime, were marginalized while their grievances were not addressed. Morsi and the MB gave only lip service to their demands and needs. But during his address to the nation last week, Morsi belatedly acknowledged this neglect as he promised to address it. By late April, the youth groups had already come together to form a new movement called Tamarrud or Rebellion. The central theme in their program was to call for early presidential elections by gathering 15 million signatures, a million more than Morsi had received during his presidential run.

During the process, the secular opposition and the fulool embraced Tamarrud’s message, while the latter used the offices of the NSF and held several press conferences at the headquarters of well-known media outlets of Mubarak loyalists. There is also anecdotal evidence that the group received financial support from fulool groups. Meanwhile, the private media started a well-orchestrated campaign and continuous onslaught on the MB in particular and the Islamists in general. The level of hostility and hatred spewed against them was reminiscent of the 1930s Nazi propaganda against the Jews. Dozens of incidents were reported in the past two months, in which supporters of the MB were attacked verbally and physically by strangers because of their purported associations.

Though the campaign against the MB was in full swing, the president and the group did not take it seriously and did not attempt to offer a compromise to the opposition or genuinely address their concerns. They miscalculated badly as they thought that the popular support of Tamarrud’s initiative was thin. In short, the MB was facing a perfect storm. Whether in reality or perception, the MB has alienated its former liberal and secular partners, the youth groups, the judiciary, the media, the general public because of lack of services and rising prices The fulool and their allies within the deep state took advantage of this public discontent.  Many former security officials and wealthy businessmen tied to the former regime were seen organizing and mobilizing for the June 30^th protest, the day Tamarrud designated to force Morsi’s ouster. By July 2, the Appellate Court invalidated the appointment of the General Prosecutor appointed by Morsi and returned the Mubarak-appointed corrupt prosecutor, who was dismissed last November. Furthermore, in order to further muddy the political scene, the courts also ordered that Morsi’s Prime Minister, Dr. Hisham Qandil, be arrested and sentenced to one year in prison for not implementing an earlier court order given to a Mubarak-era prime minister.

However, on June 30 an impressive numbers of Egyptians protested against the MB and the president in Tahrir Square and across Egypt. It was reminiscent of the early days of the 2011 protests against Mubarak. Although the protesters did not include Islamist groups, they were diverse. Many youth groups were represented, voicing their frustration of being marginalized and their demands neglected. Many were ordinary citizens alienated because of economic hardship and the lack of basic services. Many were secularists who hated Islamists and wanted to overthrow them by revolutionary means since they could not defeat them at the ballot box. Many were Christians who feared the Islamists and were tacitly encouraged by the Coptic Church to participate. But it was also clear than many were fulool and Mubarak regime loyalists as the picture of the former dictator was prominently raised and hailed in Tahrir Square amid chants in his support. Many were also former and current security officials who showed up in their uniforms. Even two former Interior Ministers who served during the military transitional rule and former regime were leading the protests as revolutionaries, even though they were charged by the youth groups at the time with murdering their revolutionary friends and comrades. Many protesters were also thugs hired by NDP politicians and corrupt business people. In fact, over the three days protest, these thugs raped over 100 women in Tahrir Square including female journalists, according to public officials. Meanwhile, in an orchestrated manner, dozens of buildings that belonged to the MB and the FJP including their headquarters were burned down, torched, or ransacked. More than a dozen members were killed, while hundreds were wounded. Within hours, five cabinet ministers resigned and dozens of senior officials including presidential spokespersons and dozens of diplomats submitted their resignations in an attempt to collapse the state.

Meanwhile, pro-Morsi supporters were also gathering in a different square in Cairo in large numbers. After the MB and its allies saw the massive demonstrations of their opponents on June 30 they called for massive mobilization the following day, holding more than 20 huge protests across the country that also numbered in the millions. With few exceptions, the secular and liberal media ignored these protests.

On the afternoon of June 30, Defense Minister and military chief Gen. Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, who was appointed by Morsi last August, issued an ultimatum to the president and the opposition to reach a compromise within 48 hours or else the military would intervene. In reality, it was an ultimatum to the president to resign since the opposition had in the past rejected all attempts at dialogue or compromise. On July 1, the frustrated president addressed the nation and adamantly rejected the military’s ultimatum, as he called on his people to support his legitimacy as a democratically-elected president. Immediately after the speech, the president’s supporters, who were holding a huge rally in Giza, were attacked by thugs and snipers. Sixteen people were killed and hundreds wounded.

By July 2, it was evident that the army has decided to overthrow Morsi and side with the opposition. As the military reached out to foreign governments, it was clear that many Western governments, especially the U.S. had difficulty accepting the military overthrow of an elected president. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, called their Egyptian counterparts, advising that they should instead either encourage Morsi to resign or keep him as a figurehead.

However, as they officially announced that Morsi was removed from power, the generals surrounded themselves with several civilian and religious leaders, including the head of Al-Azhar, the Coptic Pope, ElBaradei as NSF spokesman, and representatives of Tamarrud and the Salafist Al-Noor Party. It was a brazen attempt to make it seem as if the overthrow of Morsi had broad consensus by civilian and religious leaders.

In essence, Sisi embraced all the demands of the opposition and the fulool. Not only did he depose Morsi and replace him with the head of the SCC, but he also suspended the constitution and dismissed the government. He unilaterally also gave the powers to issue constitutional decrees and legislative authority to the newly- installed president. Within minutes, huge celebrations with full display of festivities and fireworks were taking place in Tahrir Square and in many cities across Egypt. Meanwhile, Morsi’s supporters across Egypt were stunned and angry at the turn of events. They had mistakenly held hope that the army would force some sort of a compromise that would not circumvent the will of the Egyptian people who elected a president and passed a new constitution with a large margin only few months ago.

Immediately after Sisi’s announcement, the new regime began its crackdown on the media that supported the deposed president. Four TV satellite channels that belonged to the MB or the Islamists, as well as two Al-Jazeera channels were suspended and taken off the air. The pro-Morsi protests across Egypt were also surrounded by the military. TV cameras were removed and the electricity was cut in anticipation of forcefully evacuating the protesters, as food and water were denied.

Meanwhile, MB leaders Mohammad El-Beltagi and Esam El-Erian, who played pivotal roles during the 2011 revolution, called Morsi’s ouster by the military an illegal coup d’état and vowed to oppose it, as they called on their supporters to resist it with all peaceful means even if they lose their lives. Morsi also released an eleven-minute video on the Internet rejecting his overthrow and defying the military’s act, insisting on his constitutional legitimacy as the duly elected president of the country.

Meanwhile, a crackdown against the MB leaders and their supporters was in full force, strongly suggesting premeditation. Within two hours of Sisi’s announcement, Morsi and some of his senior assistants were detained and transferred to the defense ministry. Former speaker and FJP Chairman, Dr. Saad Katatni, , MB leader and General Guide Dr. Muhammad Badie, as well as his deputies Khayrat El-Shater and Rashad Bayyoumi were also arrested. Former presidential candidate and Islamist Hazem Salah Abu Ismail and preacher Safwat Hegazi were arrested and charged with ‘insulting the military.’ Al-Ahram newspaper also reported that over 300 arrest warrants were issued against the MB and their supporters, as dozens were rounded up while all MB and FJP properties, assets, and buildings were being seized and their bank accounts frozen. Moreover, within minutes of the announcement, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Muhammd Bin Zayed of the UAE, the two countries most openly hostile to the MB’s rule, issued statements praising and congratulating the military. Ironically, Bashar Al-Assad of Syria expressed his relief and joy at the ouster of ‘the Islamist regime’ that was threatening his country.

Meanwhile, the Secular and liberal opposition and many youth groups and their supporters argued that their protests followed by the ouster of Morsi by the military was analogous to the overthrow of Mubarak. But this argument conveniently ignores the fact that Mubarak was not a legitimate president or elected by the will of the Egyptian people while Morsi, whether one supports or opposes him, loves or hates him, was duly elected in free, fair, and contested elections that the entire world observed and accepted. Furthermore, Mubarak killed hundreds of youth in order to stay in power, while dozens of youth were killed in the streets defending the legitimacy of Morsi’s presidency. In addition, most of the people and groups who oppose Morsi today after one year in power, never lifted a finger during Mubarak’s 30 year reign. Mubarak’s security apparatus used thugs to terrorize his opponents and oversee fraudulent elections, while the same thugs today attack and terrorize unarmed supporters of Morsi. While official and government media outlets and corrupt businesspeople and judges supported Mubarak for decades, the same government-supported media, businesspeople, and judges attacked Morsi from his first day in office.

Liberals, democrats, and human rights activists have been preaching to Islamists for decades that democracy is the only legitimate system for peaceful political participation and transition of power. In 1992, when the Algerian military intervened and canceled elections after the Islamic Salvation front (FIS) won it, the West, led by the U.S. and France, looked the other way. Meanwhile, Algeria was engulfed in civil strife for over a decade, a conflict that resulted in over two thousand deaths. Two decades later, whether or not one agrees with its political program, favors or despises the MB, there is no doubt that the group played by the rules of democracy and embraced the rule of law. It did not employ or advocate the use of violence. Yet, it is the height of irony that the ones who called for, encouraged, and cheered the military intervention to oust a democratically-elected president are the secular, liberal, and leftist parties and individuals such as ElBaradei, Amr Mousa, Naguib Sawiris, Ayman Noor, and Hamdein Sabbahi, as well as human and civil rights activists who frequently advocate for free media and freedom of political association.

The international community looked the other way when the will of the Algerian and Palestinian people were thwarted when they elected Islamists in 1992 and 2006. This is the third time in two decades Islamists are dislodged from power. It remains to be seen if the West will take a strong stand against the military’s latest attempt to prevent Islamists from holding power. It may indeed define the relationship between Islamist groups and Western governments for the foreseeable future.  The message such stand would send to people around the world will be profound. Either the West stands for democratic principles and the rule of law or it does not. When President Obama called Morsi on June 30, he admonished him that “democracy is about more than elections.” But what is equally essential to recognize is that there is no democracy without respecting and protecting the legitimacy of its results regardless of its outcome.

Esam Al-Amin is the author of The Arab Awakening Unveiled: Understanding Transformations and Revolutions in the Middle East. He can be contacted at alamin1919@gmail.com.

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch

Judge Andrew P. Napolitano
foxnews.com
July 04, 2013

Do you have more personal liberty today than on the Fourth of July 2012?

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, he used language that has become iconic.

He wrote that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Not only did he write those words, but the first Congress adopted them unanimously, and they are still the law of the land today.

By acknowledging that our rights are inalienable, Jefferson’s words and the first federal statute recognize that our rights come from our humanity – from within us – and not from the government.

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 11:43 am

Tags: constitution, domestic news, police state

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

William Grigg
Pro Libertate
July 4, 2013

The sobering truth is that, due to the cultivated docility of the American populace, Jefferson’s document, much like the Constitution created eleven years later, poses no threat to the designs of our rulers.

It has often been said that if voting actually changed things, it would be illegal. In much the same sense it could be said that if the genuine meaning of the event commemorated on the Fourth of July were to become widely known, our rulers would respond by criminalizing the celebration and the document that should be at its center.

This isn’t a hypothetical proposition. Around the turn of the 20th Century it was common for “Wobblies” – radical activists belonging to the Industrial Workers of the World, a schismatic socialist sect – to be arrested for reading the Declaration of Independence in public.

The inflammatory, seditious content of that document was largely unknown to the public even then, and when tranquil middle-class Americans were confronted with unsettling assertions like the claim that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed” and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it,” many of them assumed their ears were being assaulted by the rhetoric of foreign subversives.

A few years later, after the regime of the unutterably evil Woodrow Wilson had maneuvered the United States into a European war on the side of Great Britain – still regarded with understandable suspicion by the Middle Americans expected to provide the coffin-stuffers for the conflict – public recital of the Declaration was ruled a violation of the Espionage Act. At least one man was sent to prison for the supposed crime of reading aloud from Jefferson’s document.

In his war message to Congress on April 2, 1917, the detestable Wilson demanded of Americans nothing less than complete and perfect uniformity of opinion and behavior. He also deputized Americans to assist the state in “rebuking and restraining the few who may be of a different mind and purpose” than that ordained by his government.

“If there should be disloyalty,” Wilson promised, “it will be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression; but, if it lifts its head at all, it will lift it only here and there and without countenance except from a lawless and malignant few.”

Less than a century and a half had elapsed since a “lawless and malignant few” had gathered in Philadelphia to certify their disloyalty to the King of England – or, more properly put, a small group of principled men who understood government’s subordinate role in human affairs assembled to withdraw their consent to be governed by that man and his minions.

The Declaration articulated some indispensable truths. The first is the understanding that individual liberty is a gift of God, and the powers of government are contingent and revocable. A man can live without government, but he cannot live, as a man, without liberty. Second, the single greatest enemy to individual liberty is the government claiming the right to rule that individual.

The third, and most troublesome, of those truths is this: There is an inherent right to rebel against the supposed authority of any government that becomes “destructive” of the rights invested in the individual by God. That right, like all others, inheres in the individual. But it can be exercised collectively in the form of principled, violent insurrection when such action is justified. Most of the rest of the Declaration consists of a legal brief justifying the insurrection already underway in the British Colonies, and the decision to sever the political connection between those polities and the British Empire.

It’s hardly surprising that the Wilson regime effectively criminalized the Declaration: Like collectivists of all ages, Wilson assumed that man, who was created for the state, should be pitifully grateful for whatever transient “liberties” he was given by the state, and should be prepared to sacrifice everything on behalf of the state.

“It is not an army we must shape and train for war, it is a nation,” Wilson declared, as he centralized the economy, orchestrated a frenzy of war hatred against Germany, and moved to impose conscription. His Vice President, Thomas Marshall, urged that citizenship be formally revoked for anyone found to be “not heartily in support of the Government in this crisis.”

Bernard Baruch, chairman of the War Industries Board and de facto commissar of the economy, explained the logic of Wilson’s war regime in admirably frank terms: “Every man’s life is at the call of the nation and so must be every man’s property…. The state is all; the individual is of importance only as he contributes to the welfare of the state. His property is his only as the state does not need it. He must hold his life and possessions at the call of the state.”

Just as every man’s life was considered property of the state, so were every man’s offspring. This was made clear by the demented Theodore Roosevelt: “Any man who says, `I didn’t raise my son to be a soldier’ isn’t fit for citizenship. That statement is on the same moral level with saying, `I didn’t raise my girl to be a mother.’”

Killing and dying on behalf of the state – the congealed essence of lethal violence – was thus defined as a moral exercise as exalted as bringing life into the world. Or, as Bill Kauffman observes in his invaluable new book Ain’t My America, to WWI-era collectivists like Wilson and Roosevelt, “Mothers were brood sows. Sons were herded into the abattoir.”

Vaulting over the blood-stained decades that followed Wilson’s administration, we find that today’s adherents of the cult of the nation-state aren’t content to send just their sons to the slaughterhouse; many of them are dispatching their daughters as well.

This was memorably dramatized during a recent “Military Appreciation Sunday” service at the Bell Shoals Baptist Church in Brandon, Florida (a video of which was very generously provided to me by a friend).

The service featured Lt. Col. Steve Russell, who commanded the troops who extracted quondam subcontractor for Washington Saddam Hussein from his “spider hole.” The proceedings began with brief remarks – laden with pious poses and orotund vowels – by the late Pastor Forrest Pollock, in which he gave a detailed recital of the evils perpetrated by Saddam while he was on Washington’s payroll – a remarkable exercise in mote-obsession and beam-ignoring. He then urged attendees to pay heed to a nauseating video presentation offered by Russell’s GOP-jingo PAC, Veterans for Victory.

The video first depicts a father in his 30s rising early in the morning to kiss his wife and son, then depart, clothed in the habiliments of the Empire’s contract killers, to murder people in a distant land who have done our country no harm. Wretched as that spectacle is – almost unbearably so, given that it is set to the “tune” of a soul-less corporate simulacrum of country pop – it is the second vignette that is genuinely abhorrent.

The scene begins with a middle-aged couple walking out of their home, each of them flanking a daughter dressed in a BDU. Their little girl, obviously, wasn’t raised to be a “brood sow”; she’s a fully realized member of the killer caste.

“Somewhere a man and woman … are waving their girl goodbye; for gone are the days of pigtails and curls and candle-light lullabies,” keens the “singer” in the video’s soundtrack as the couple and daughter hold hands in prayer. “If they had their way, she’d stay young forever and never be far from home. But freedom has drawn her heart to danger’s shore – and for freedom they’ll let her go.”

Ah, yes: “Freedom” – defined here as a gift conferred by the Almighty State on some, through the expropriation and death of others.

The video ends with the wife and son being visited by a Marine chaplain who confers on them a folded piece of cloth in exchange for their living, breathing, irreplaceable husband and father. His life was extinguished carrying out what George W. Bush, in a voice-over, describes as “the highest calling of history” – that is, enforcing the divine will of the State through lethal violence.

Mr. Bush, no stranger to blasphemy, insists that their mission resonates with “the words of the prophet Isaiah,” as recorded in chapter 61:1 (“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me; because the Lord hath anointed me … to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound”).

Christians who genuinely understand that passage recognize that it foretold how Jesus Christ would liberate from the captivity of sin those who accept Him as Savior. As the High Priest of Washington’s murderous Civil Religion, Bush follows in the jackboot-steps of Lincoln, Wilson, and their damnable ilk in depicting the State as savior.

Throughout the United States today, Americans will celebrate the sanguinary majesty of that State and its pitiless apparatus of mass murder and repression. We should instead be celebrating the divine gift of individual liberty that was the focus of the “lawless and malignant” insurrectionists who gathered in Philadelphia – disreputable men like Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and Hancock – to shout their defiance at a previous globe-straddling empire.

How different would our society be today if, instead of the Pledge of Allegiance, schoolchildren (in private or home schools, of course) were required, each day, to read or recite this paragraph from the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

What if, instead of starting every day being marinated in the language of submission (to pledge “allegiance,” after all, is to proclaim one’s status as a vassal bound in service to a feudal lord, or “liege”), youngsters were taught, on a daily basis, the principles of self-responsibility, individual liberty, and principled rebellion? As I stated earlier, if this kind of thing were to become common, our rulers would simply criminalize the Declaration. They’ve done it before, and they would be more than happy to do so permanently.

The sobering truth is that, due to the cultivated docility of the American populace, Jefferson’s document, much like the Constitution created eleven years later, poses no threat to the designs of our rulers.

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 11:33 am

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Antonieta Rico
navytimes.com
Jul. 4, 2013

An agreement between the U.S. Coast Guard and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police will allow mixed American/Canadian crews to pursue suspects across borders in the Pacific Northwest.

The Coast Guard signed the “Shiprider” agreement with RCMP’s British Columbia Division on June 17. It will enable Shiprider patrols, with armed crews made up of both Coast Guardsmen and RCMP, to regularly patrol the Canada-U.S. maritime border. The Shiprider agreement is formally known as the Integrated Cross-border Maritime Law Enforcement program; routine patrols under a similar program began in the Great Lakes region the weekend of June 22.

Pacific Northwest Shiprider patrols will have both Coasties and Mounties aboard. Service members from the nation in which a pursuit ends will take the lead when it comes to law enforcement, said Cmdr. Dale Bateman, chief of the enforcement branch at District 13, which encompasses the Pacific Northwest.

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 11:44 am

Tags: domestic news

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O caso Edward Snowden está na raiz de um grave incidente diplomático entre a Bolívia e vários países europeus. Por ordem de Washington, França, Itália, Espanha e Portugal proibiram o avião presidencial de Evo Morales de sobrevoar seus territórios.

1 — Depois de uma viagem oficial à Rússia para assistir a uma cúpula de países produtores de gás, o presidente Evo Morales pegou seu avião para voltar à Bolívia.

2 — Os Estados Unidos, pensando que Edward Snowden, ex-agente da CIAe da NSA, autor das revelações sobre as operações de espionagem de seu país, estava no avião presidencial, ordenou que quatro países europeus — França, Itália, Espanha e Portugal — proibissem que Evo Morales sobrevoasse seus respectivos espaços aéreos.

3 — Paris cumpriu imediatamente a ordem procedente de Washington e cancelou a autorização de sobrevoo de seu território, que havia outorgado à Bolívia em 27 de julho de 2013, enquanto o avião presidencial estava a apenas alguns quilômetros das fronteiras francesas.

4 — Assim, Paris colocou em perigo a vida do presidente boliviano que, por falta de combustível, precisou fazer uma aterrissagem de emergência na Áustria.

5 — Desde 1945, nenhuma nação do mundo impediu um avião presidencial de sobrevoar seu território.

6 — Paris, além de desatar uma crise de extrema gravidade, violou o direito internacional e a imunidade diplomática absoluta da qual todo chefe de Estado goza.

Agência Efe

O presidente boliviano Evo Morales em entrevista coletiva no aeroporto de Viena, na Áustria

7 — O governo socialista de François Hollande atentou gravemente ao prestígio da nação. A França aparece diante dos olhos do mundo como um país servil e dócil que não vacila um instante sequer para obedecer as ordens de Washington, contra seus próprios interesses.

8 — Ao tomar tal decisão, Hollande desprestigiou a voz da França no cenário internacional.

9 — Paris também se tornou alvo de piada no mundo inteiro. As revelações feitas por Edward Snowden permitiram descobrir que os Estados Unidos espiavam vários países da União Europeia, entre os quais a França. Diante dessas revelações, François Hollande pediu pública e firmemente a Washington que parasse com esses atos hostis. Ainda assim, por debaixo dos panos, o Palácio do Eliseu seguiu fielmente as ordens da Casa Branca.

10 — Depois de descobrir que se tratava de uma informação falsa e que Snowden não estava no avião, Paris decidiu anular a proibição.

11 — Itália, Espanha e Portugal também seguiram as ordens de Washington e proibiram Evo Morales de sobrevoar seu território, antes de mudar de opinião, quando souberam que a informação não era verídica, e permitir que o presidente boliviano seguisse sua rota.

12 — Antes disso, a Espanha até exigiu revistar o avião presidencial, violando todas as normas legais internacionais. “Isto é uma chantagem; não vamos permitir por uma questão de dignidade. Vamos esperar todo o tempo necessário”, respondeu o presidente boliviano. “Não sou um criminoso”, declarou Evo Morales.

13 — A Bolívia denunciou um atentado contra sua soberania e contra a imunidade de seu presidente. “Trata-se de uma instrução do governo dos Estados Unidos”, segundo La Paz.

14 —  América Latina condenou unanimemente a atitude da França, Espanha, Itália e Portugal.

15 — A Unasul (União de Nações Sul-Americanas) convocou em caráter de urgência uma reunião extraordinária após esse escândalo internacional e expressou sua “indignação” por meio de seu Secretário-Geral, Ali Rodríguez.

16 — A Venezuela e o Equador condenaram “a ofensa” e “o atentado” contra o presidente Evo Morales.

17 — O presidente Nicolás Maduro, da Venezuela, condenou “uma agressão grosseira, inadequada e não civilizada”.

18 — O presidente equatoriano, Rafael Correa, expressou sua indignação: “Nossa América não pode tolerar tanto abuso!”.

19 — A Nicarágua denunciou “uma ação criminosa e bárbara”.

20 — Havana fustigou o “ato inadmissível, infundado, arbitrário que ofende toda a América Latina e o Caribe”.

21 — A presidente argentina, Cristina Kirchner, expressou sua consternação: “Definitivamente, estão todos loucos. O chefe de Estado e seu avião têm imunidade total. Não pode haver esse grau de impunidade”.

22 — Por meio de seu Secretário-Geral José Miguel Insulza, a OEA (Organização dos Estados Americanos) condenou a decisão dos países europeus: “Não existe justificativa alguma para cometer tais ações em detrimento do presidente da Bolívia. Os países envolvidos devem dar uma explicação das razões pelas quais tomaram essa decisão, particularmente porque isso colocou em risco a vida do primeiro mandatário de um país-membro da OEA”.

23 — A Alba (Aliança Bolivariana para os Povos da Nossa América) denunciou “uma flagrante discriminação e ameaça à imunidade diplomática de um Chefe de Estado”.

24 — Em vez de outorgar o asilo político à pessoa que lhe permitiu descobrir que era vítima de espionagem hostil, a Europa, particularmente a França, não vacila em criar uma grave crise diplomática com o objetivo de entregar Edward Snowden aos Estados Unidos.

25 — Esse caso ilustra que, se a União Europeia é uma potência econômica, é também um engodo político e diplomático incapaz de adotar uma postura independente em relação aos Estados Unidos.

Salim Lamrani

Doutor en Estudos Ibéricos e Latino-americanos da Universidade Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV, Salim Lamrani é professor-titular da Universidade de la Reunión e jornalista, especialista nas relaciones entre Cuba e Estados Unidos. Seu último livro se chama The Economic War Against Cuba. A Historical and Legal Perspective on the U.S. Blockade, New York, Monthly Review Press, 2013, com prólogo de Wayne S. Smith e prefácio  de Paul Estrade. Contato: lamranisalim@yahoo.fr ; Salim.Lamrani@univ-reunion.fr.  Página no Facebook.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

Egypt‘s new military rulers have arrested the Muslim Brotherhood‘s supreme leader, security sources say, and issued warrants for up to 300 other members hours after ousting the elected president, Mohamed Morsi, and taking him and his aides into military custody.

The day after a momentous night in Cairo has revealed the full extent of the military overthrow, with key support bases of the Muslim Brotherhood, including television stations, closed down or raided.

Security officials told the Associated Press and Reuters that the Brotherhood’s supreme leader, Mohammed Badie, was arrested in a coastal city near the Libyan border on Wednesday and flown to Cairo in a military helicopter.

The Brotherhood spokesman Gehad el-Haddad said he could not confirm the reports because the group had lost their lines of communication to Badie.

Prosecutors said on Thursday morning they were seeking Badie’s arrest and that of his deputy, Khairat el-Shater, for inciting violence against protesters outside the Brotherhood’s headquarters in Cairo on Sunday night, when eight protesters were killed.

The dramatic events of the last day have been welcomed by many in the capital, where most state institutions, including the security establishment, had steadily abandoned Morsi since Sunday.

Adli Mansour, the head of the constitutional court, was sworn in as interim head of state on Thursday. In his first remarks as leader, he praised the protests that preceded Morsi’s removal and said they had “corrected the path of the glorious revolution” that brought down the former dictator Hosni Mubarak in February 2011.

“I look forward to parliamentary and presidential elections held with the genuine and authentic will of the people,” Mansour said in a televised address.

The epicentre of the latest revolt, Tahrir Square, was teeming with up to one million revellers until well past midnight. The crowds were reportedly the largest the square had seen at any point since the first stirrings of revolution in 2011, spilling over two bridges across the Nile and into the west of the city.

Elsewhere in Egypt, where backing for the Brotherhood had remained solid despite Morsi’s political tribulations, the reaction to his ousting has been far from celebratory. Up to 10 people died in clashes, and more than 400 were reported wounded, in the hours following the military chief Abdul Fattah al-Sisi’s announcement that he had ended Morsi’s presidency. Rallies are expected in many parts of the country throughout Thursday and are likely to be met by a prominent military presence.

The international response to the coup has so far been muted. Barack Obama is expected to make a statement at some time on Thursday. The US president had been supportive of the democratic ballot that elected Morsi in June 2012. Arab world leaders are understood to be considering how to deal with yet another seismic shift in the political landscape at a time of profound and ongoing regional instability.

The strongest response was from Turkey’s government, which like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has Islamist roots. The foreign minister, Ahmet DavutoÄŸlu, said the overthrow of Morsi was a military coup and unacceptable. The Tunisian ruling party Ennahda condemned a “coup against legitimacy”.

The coming days are likely to prove crucial across Egypt, as the military strives to assert itself in a transition it will guide, with nominal civilian leadership, towards new parliamentary and presidential elections.

The Muslim Brotherhood will also find itself under pressure to react to the ignominious ousting of its chief patron, and the man who guided it to political legitimacy eight decades after the group’s inception throughout the rule of the former president Hosni Mubarak when it remained outlawed.

Republished with permission from: AlterNet

Danone’s formula milk sales increase in Turkey. (image baby bottle via Shutterstock.com)

The multi-national food giant Danone has been accused of misleading mothers with a controversial marketing campaign that warned they might not be providing enough breast milk. The company suggested mothers use powdered baby milk to make up any shortfall.

An investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Danone has been marketing its formula milk product Aptamil in Turkey by suggesting mothers with six-month-old babies may not be providing enough of their own milk to meet their children’s needs.

The campaign boosted infant formula sales in Turkey by at least 15% and may have led to mothers moving their infants on to formula unnecessarily.

Danone says it based its advice on World Health Organisation (WHO) guidance, and claims that both the WHO and UN agency UNICEF endorsed the campaign.

‘Turkish UNICEF and WHO, together with other partners (Ministry of Health, TV stations, supermarkets, Paediatric Association) supported this campaign, with WHO allowing its logo to be used on printed materials,’ it told the Bureau.

The campaign had increased mothers’ estimation of the amount of breast milk fed to their babies by 63%, it added.

Strongly denied

But the WHO has demanded that Danone stop using its name and logo while UNICEF has categorically denied endorsing the company’s actions.

The episode has echoes of the baby milk controversies of the 1970s, which led to the international boycott of Nestle and illustrates the importance of emerging markets to Western multinationals.

‘Danone’s campaign is misleading,’ said Dr Colin Michie, chair of the British Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health’s nutrition Committee.

‘There is not enough evidence to support its approach.’

Dr Michie added: ‘Mothers who accept and follow Danone’s advice could end up moving their babies on to formula milk unnecessarily.’

The company insists that the campaign was aimed at discouraging ‘inappropriate’ substitutions for milk such as rice flour, rather than ‘competing with breast milk’.

Major potential

With a population of 73m, a relatively high birth rate and salaries on the rise, the company identified the infant nutrition market in Turkey as one with major potential.

But traditionally Turkey had high rates of breast feeding — and no tradition of using formula milk. Turkish mothers also tend to give their babies solid food too early, potentially displacing breast milk.

In 2009 Numil, Danone’s baby nutrition arm in Turkey, attempted to ‘check what was happening’. It enlisted 577 paediatricians to measure the breast milk production of breastfeeding mothers of children aged six months.

The doctors used breast pumps — a method the UK’s Royal College of Paediatrics says is unreliable — or weighed the babies before and after feeding to get their results.

They found the mothers were producing an average of 290ml per day — although the findings have not been peer reviewed.

The company then attempted to calculate a figure for the amount of breast milk a mother should be providing their child.

It took a WHO bulletin that referred to an independent research paper on the energy children need to get from complementary food after six months of age.

The paper was not designed to prove how much breast milk a child needs and the resulting figure is not recognised as a recommendation for a breastfeeding child by international authorities.

The WHO and UNICEF recommend mothers breastfeed according to their children’s demands rather than specifying a set amount which would be difficult to measure.

Danone then launched a marketing campaign aimed at parents and healthcare professionals to promote the 500ml figure — which it inaccurately claimed was a WHO recommendation — with the slogan ‘Her Gun Yarim Litre’ (Half a Litre Every Day).

Much of the material features a 500ml jug or bottle of milk inside an orange shield — the same orange shield that appears on Danone’s Aptamil formula containers — and an image of a baby drinking from a bottle.

The message was promoted on TV, on-line, including on Facebook and Twitter, and in supermarkets. International advertising and PR firms were drafted in to help the promotion.

One TV ad stated: ‘Your baby needs at least 500ml milk per day. If your breast milk is not enough, give Aptamil formula to support your baby’s immune system.’

Supplementing with formula can reduce breast milk flow. UNICEF says there are several ways mothers can increase their breast milk supply, such as expressing milk between feeds.

Online test

At the same time, Danone publicised an online test it had developed so that mothers could check if they were providing 500ml. The test’s name, Sutum Yeterli Mi? (Is my breast milk enough?), was later changed to Bebegimi Dogru Besliyor Muyum (Am I Feeding my Child Correctly?)

The test asks mothers questions about the frequency and duration of breastfeeding. Thousands of women have filled it in — and according to Danone, most have so far been given the result that they are not providing 500ml. The advice to those who are deemed to be providing less than 500ml is to use formula.

Advertisements on one of the Facebook pages for Danone’s Milupa brand offered discounted formula or free baby bottles in return for sitting the test.

But experts have questioned both the 500ml figure and its use in a recommendation to parents.

Dr Helen Crawley, director of First Steps Nutrition Trust, an independent charity that provides information and resources on infant nutrition, said estimates of how much milk meets infant requirements are needed in case a child has to be fed with expressed breast milk or formula.

‘This is not the same as making a recommendation to mothers about volumes of breast milk,’ she said.

‘The relatively high exclusive breastfeeding rates in Turkey may be undermined by any campaign which both suggests mothers should know how much breast milk their baby is drinking and suggests a volume that may sound unachievable.’

Condemned campaign

Dr Gonca Yilmaz, director of one of the biggest paediatric units in Turkey and a member of the executive committee of the International Society of Social Paediatrics and Child Health, also condemned the campaign.

‘The company is influencing mothers to doubt whether their breast milk is sufficient,’ she said. ‘The health benefits of breast milk are enormous and mothers must not be pressured into buying formula based on inaccurate advice.’

But Professor Enver Hasanoglu, General Secretary of the Turkish National Paediatric Society and Dr Feyza Darendeliler, President of the Turkish National Paediatric Society said they backed Danone.

‘Over the years, we have observed that Danone (Numil) has the ultimate aim of increasing breast milk usage for babies. Due to Danone (Numil’s) ethical code of conduct, we as the paediatric association have given our endorsement for the 500 ml campaign.’

Both the WHO and UNICEF have denied endorsing the campaign and say that their official policy is breastfeeding on demand after six months while gradually introducing other foods.

No permission granted

The WHO has also said Danone did not have permission to use its logo on campaign materials and wrote to the company this month asking it to remove its name within 14 days.

A WHO spokeswoman said: ‘Neither the WHO regional office for Europe nor WHO Turkey endorsed the Danone campaign, nor their use of our logo.’

Dr Ayman Abulaban, the UNICEF representative for Turkey, has also written to the company. ‘The UNICEF Turkey office, which is invested with the representative function in Turkey, has not endorsed this campaign,’ he wrote. ‘We kindly ask you to remove the UNICEF name from your campaign materials and articles.’

Dr Mitchie added: ‘The advice that babies need a specific volume of breast milk after six months is not based on any well-established evidence of which I am aware.

‘There are internationally agreed “recommended daily allowances” for elements of diets, a system that allows for individual variation.  There is no RDA for breast milk volume.’

He added: ‘Babies are to be weaned onto a mixed diet from six months, so that their needs for fluid volumes and nutrients will vary widely.

‘Mother’s milk will also vary considerably between individuals at this point in lactation; fat and protein content, as well as micronutrients are known to be quite diverse.’

The Turkish Ministry of Health was not available for comment when contacted by the Bureau but in a statement to Danone it said: ‘We are pleased that Numil are supporting the Ministry in the promotion of correct infant feeding patterns, to encourage and increase breastfeeding rates as well as reduce inappropriate feeding.’

This story appeared in the Independent newspaper.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

Infowars.com
July 4, 2013

Winston-Salem, N.C. Assistant Police Chief Barry Rountree claims that Tamara Whitt’s dog was charging at him when he fired at it, but the bullet ricocheted off the pavement and hit Whitt in the leg.

Witt, still on crutches, is not surprised that no criminal charges will be filed against Rountree. But she is surprised he is still on schedule for being sworn in as Winston-Salem’s new police chief.

She is planning a protest rally during his swearing-in ceremony.

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 10:18 am

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Robert Wenzel
economicpolicyjournal.com
July 4, 2013

A true character taught about liberty in the 1990s, Andrew J. Galambos.  Harry Browne wrote about him:

He was a fascinating mixture of contrasts. He combined a brilliant mind with an ungracious personality. He was an astrophysicist who taught social science. He preached the importance of respect for intellectual property, but freely lifted the ideas of others without giving them credit. He was dishonest, but he inspired others to be more honest. He disdained the word “libertarian” while turning thousands of people into libertarians. He was an insensitive teacher, and yet he apparently changed the lives of most of the people he taught.

The entire obituary of Galambos written by Browne is must reading. Browne says a lot of negative things about Galambos, but at the end of reading the obituary, the thought lingers: Who was this guy?  And the next thought is: Boy, I wish I could have sat in on one of his courses. They aren’t any notes of his class. Browne reports, Galambos was very protective of his ideas and never put anything in writing. Indeed, Browne tells us:

He required every student entering one of his courses to sign a contract agreeing not to divulge any of the course ideas without permission from Galambos – and not even to use the ideas, in business or elsewhere, without permission.

Thus, it came as a great surprise to me that one of the Galambos courses was recorded and is now online. The course was delivered in 1966 and titled The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine and Your Freedom.

Among many other points in the fascinating lecture series, Galambos makes clear that he believes that it was Thomas Paine not Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the Declaration of Independence. He has me convinced.

Further, Galambos makes a very strong case for Paine being the intellectual inspiration for the American revolutionists taking such a libertarian path.

The series is 3 sessions long, broken up into 7 tracks. It very much worth the time to listen to the entire series. You can find it here.

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 10:15 am

Tags: constitution, domestic news

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Logan
Planet Infowars
July 4, 2013

Obama destroyed over foreign policy in a video that has gone absolutely viral since being posted two weeks ago.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=CnJCvKA-oEU

Republished with permission from: Infowars

Adam Shell and Kim Hjelmgaard
USA Today
July 4, 2013

The price of crude oil traded above $102 a barrel Wednesday – highest level in over a year – as embattled Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi vowed not to yield to demands of millions of protesters that he resign immediately.

As the stock market closed a shortened July Fourth holiday trading session, the price of crude oil hit was trading at $101.22 barrel, up $1.62, up about 1.6% for the day. The benchmark crude oil contract for August delivery traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange gained $1.61 to close at $99.60 a barrel Tuesday.

The political crisis in Egypt is not only causing heightened uncertainty in markets, but it is also raising fears that oil prices could spike if the crisis leads to a supply disruption if the all-important Suez Canal suffers a blockage or bottleneck, says Don Rissmiller, an economist at Strategas Research Partners.

Read full article

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 11:18 am

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Paul Bedard
Washington Examiner
July 4, 2013

President Obama, already the most traveled chief executive in the modern era after internationalist former President George H.W. Bush, is expected to run up an Air Force One tab of at least $24 million this year alone, according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation.

Already Obama, just back from a trip with his family and a huge entourage of staff to several African nations, has run up a $15.2 million bill just for Air Force One in the first six months of 2013. Security and hotel costs can dwarf the jet’s cost. Some estimates of the president’s Africa trip alone top $100 million.

NTUF’s Douglas Kellogg told Secrets that Obama’s Africa Air Force One bill to taxpayers was $6,654,345.

Read full article

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 11:09 am

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Estelle Shirbon
Reuters
July 4, 2013

Ecuador has found a hidden microphone inside its London embassy, where WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is living, and will disclose on Wednesday who controls the device, its foreign minister said.

Ricardo Patino said the microphone was found inside the office of the Ecuadorean ambassador to the United Kingdom, Ana Alban, at the time of a visit to the embassy by Patino to meet with Assange on June 16. Assange lives and works in a different room within the embassy.

The Foreign Office in London declined to comment immediately on the allegation and Prime Minister David Cameron’s spokesman said he did not comment on security issues.

Read full article

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 10:43 am

Tags: big brother, foreign affairs

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

RT
July 4, 2013

NSA leaker Edward Snowden is the subject of an open letter of support just published from behind bars by John Kiriakou, a former CIA agent currently serving time for sharing state secrets.

In a letter dated June 13 and published Tuesday by Firedoglake, the imprisoned CIA vet salutes Snowden for his recent disclosures of classified documents detailing some of the vast surveillance programs operated by the United States’ National Security Agency.

“Thank you for your revelations of government wrongdoing over the past week,” Kiriakou writes. “You have done the country a great public service.”

Read more

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 10:26 am

Tags: big brother, domestic news, government corruption

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Jerry Seper
Washington Times
July 4, 2013

With Congress vowing to secure the nation’s borders as part of an immigration bill that proposes hiring 20,000 new Border Patrol agents, several former immigration officers say border agents have been inhibited in their efforts to patrol the Southwest border by other agencies.

The National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers, along with more than 50 lawmakers, argues that border security has taken a back seat to the environmental concerns of the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

“Their focus is environmental protection, not national security, and they apply their rules to other government agencies regardless of impact on other missions,” the association said in a statement. “While on paper the Border Patrol has access to the lands managed by these other agencies, in actual practice their rules denied free access on an as-needed basis.”

Read full article

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 11:29 am

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

“I committed at least four felonies this morning and got it on video”

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
July 4, 2013

Former Iraq veteran Adam Kokesh staged an open carry protest in Washington DC today by loading a 12 gauge shotgun near the White House — committing at least four felonies in the process.

“I committed at least four felonies this morning and got it on video,” Kokesh texted.

In June 2008, the Supreme Court affirmed the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Heller v. District of Columbia, ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms and that the Firearms Control Regulations Act of 1975 is unconstitutional. However, authorities in DC have largely ignored the ruling and still impose draconian measures on anyone who wants to own a firearm.

Kokesh’s protest stems out of his call for a “new American revolution” that would have involved a march on all 50 state capitols. The former Iraq vet had previously planned to lead an armed march on Washington DC on Independence Day.

Kokesh later revised the plan after he was arrested in May for little more than exercising his First Amendment. “When it comes to this event being executed properly,” Kokesh told the Alex Jones Show, “when the government has already escalated the violent tactics against me personally as an organizer, I can’t in good conscience go forward with a plan that is so centrally dependent and not open source.”

Kokesh is to be saluted for his courage in taking such a bold stance to defend Second Amendment rights.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 11:31 am

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

That the popular movement calling for Morsi’s removal–which contained a diverse set of consituences opposed to the president–was ultimately backed by the powerful military council has gone a long way to complicate how many, both in Egypt and around the world, are interpreting what is happening there. (Photo: Reuters)Judge Adly Mansour, head of Egypt’s supreme constitutional court, was sworn in as interim president on Thursday following the dramatic ouster–or what some are calling a ‘popular coup’–of the nation’s elected president, Mohammed Morsi, on Wednesday.

In remarks following being sworn in, Mansour–who was appointed to the post by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) who declared the end of Morsi’s rule–said that he would protect the ideals of the revolution, maintain respect for the rule of law, and help forge a government that would include all Egyptians, including members of Morsi’s party, the Muslim Brotherhood.

“The revolutionaries of Egypt are everywhere and we salute them all,” he said, “–those who prove to the world that they are strong enough, the brave youth of Egypt, who were the leaders of this revolution.”

“The ultimate goal must be to subdue the military to civilian will, as per democracy’s basic tenets – but also to oppose a president and a group that has attempted to put itself above constitutional-based accountability.” — Sara Khorshid, Egyptian journalist

“The Muslim Brotherhood group is part of this people and are invited to participate in building the nation as nobody will be excluded,” he continued, “and if they responded to the invitation, they will be welcomed.”

Meanwhile, the ousted Morsi, along with his top aides, is believed to be in the military’s custody at an army barracks in Cairo.

Deeper concern is surfacing, however, following reports that members of the Muslim Brotherhood are now being targeted for arrest. As the Association Press reported, and Reuters confirmed, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Mohammed Badie, has been arrested by security officials and as many as 300 other party members may be targeted.

Such developments were condemned by those worrying that ill-treatment and marginalization of MB members would only further destabilize the political situation and speak ruin for the democratic ideals espoused by those calling for an inclusive and peaceful transition.

The overthrow on Wednesday was greeted with jubilation by the hundreds of thousands who had gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square demanding the elected leader, who they accused of executive overreach and mismanagement, to step down.

That the popular movement calling for Morsi’s removal–which contained a diverse set of consituences opposed to the president–was ultimately backed by the powerful military council has gone a long way to complicate how many, both in Egypt and around the world, are interpreting what is happening there.

Many in the West were quick to call the takeover a coup d’etat, while others stressed it was a clear continuation of the same revolution that first took root in early 2011 and ousted the authoritarian rule of Hosni Mubarak.

What follows is a snapshot of those reactions and some of the necessary context and perspective with which to view the ongoing events in Egypt.

Sharif Abdel Kouddous, Egyptian-American journalist and Democracy Now! correspondent, has been offering on-the-ground reports and commentary on his much-followed Twitter feed:

Khaled Shaalan, a political science doctoral student at the School of African and Oriental Studies, makes the case that the majority of Western media continue to misunderstand what’s taking place in Egypt, writing:

The failure of Western media and pundits to both recognize and project the nuances of the current conflict in Egypt through their negligence of people’s agency in shaping the political outcomes is both pathetic and shameful. It is pathetic because it indicates the degree to which Western intellectual circles–especially those profiteering from Western policymaking bodies–remain willfully entrapped in an outdated and out-of-touch Orientalist worldview of the region.

Serious analysts are not in demand, not only because they have long overcome this Orientalist paradigm in analyzing the politics of change in the Middle East, but also because they don’t have the talent of crafting … superficial, short, studio-made answers to questions of news anchors. […]

The insistence on ignoring the possibility of there being other factors at play, quite frankly, conceals a deeply embedded fear by Western powers, especially the US and Britain, of the emergence of a true grassroots democratic alternative in the Arab world’s largest country. Such an alternative would most certainly challenge the US hegemony in the region, even if only by beginning to address different possibilities regarding the future of Egypt, its people and its regional state of affairs.

Sara Khorshid, an Egyptian journalist and columnist, pushes back against the idea that those who worked hardest to overthrow the rule of Morsi, even if he was fairly elected, have somehow “betrayed democracy.” Acknowledging the delicate situation, she writes:

Military rule runs contrary to democracy and it should be rejected and overturned by civilian, democratic rule. At the same time, the Brotherhood’s attempt to replace state apparatuses and seize the nation state’s role in society is clearly undemocratic and cannot be justified on the grounds of advancing the revolution.

Democracy falls within a framework that is wider than just the ballot boxes, and the rule of a group that has constantly defied democratic principles cannot be accepted under the pretext of honouring the “democratic process” or “electoral legitimacy”.

The ultimate goal must be to subdue the military to civilian will, as per democracy’s basic tenets – but also to oppose a president and a group that has attempted to put itself above constitutional-based accountability.

Juan Cole, Middle East scholar and professor at University of Michigan, wants to call what happened in Egypt on Wednesday a ‘Revocouption’ due to the complexity of the situation.

In the end, the revolution and the coup worked in tandem. They were a “revocouption.” Such a conjunction is not unusual in history. The American Revolution against the British was a war before it issued ultimately in a Federal government, and the first president was the general who led the troops. Likewise, the 1949 Communist Revolution in China was not just a matter of the civilian party taking over; there had been a war of liberation against Japan and a civil war between Mao Ze Dong’s Communist troops and the Guomindang, and Mao’s leadership of the Red Army was central to the revolution.

The Rebellion or Tamarrud Movement began in late April (though it built on longstanding youth movements like Kefaya’s Youth for Change and April 6, which had come to see Morsi’s dictatorial tendencies as a threat to values of the revolution). Its young founders felt that President Muhammad Mursi, elected June 30, 2012, had broken his faith with the people and acted extra-legally so many times and so egregiously that he ought not to be allowed to stay in office. They engaged in two main sorts of collective action to get him out. One was a petition drive, in which they sought to collect 15 million signatures asking him to step down. He had been elected by about 13 million to 12 million against his rival Ahmad Shafiq, so 15 million signatures were enough to show that he had lost his popular mandate, in their view. The other was a call for millions to camp out in the main city squares of the country’s cities beginning on June 30, insisting that they would not leave until Morsi resigned and called new elections. They succeeded wildly with both tactics, and anti-theocratic sentiment was one of the reasons people joined them.

Stephen Zunes, professor of politics and chair of Middle Eastern studies at the University of San Francisco, took to his Facebook page to describe what many others were expressing in terms of having mixed feelings about the unfolding events:

Excited about the popular liberal uprising in Egypt and the downfall of Morsi, but worried about the decidedly illiberal and undemocratic Egyptian military, the dangerous precedent of a coup against an elected president, and a possible violent Islamist reaction. […]

Try as they might, neither Nasser, Sadat, nor Mubarak could completely discredit the Muslim Brotherhood in the eyes of the Egyptian people. The only Egyptian president who could do so was Mohamed Morsi.

Laura Gottesdiener, a freelance journalist writing for Waging Nonviolence from New York, says that despite many “outstanding questions” the hundreds of thousands in Tahrir Square and elsewhere are “celebrating the events as evidence that the Arab Spring succeeded in radicalizing Egyptian society, re-instilling the population with the spirit of protest.” She writes:

The current opposition movement began with a grassroots campaign called Tamarod, which means rebel in Arabic. Founded in late April, the movement’s participants spent months collecting signatures for a petition that denounced the lack of physical and economic security since Morsi assumed office. Using both social media and traffic-blocking sign-ins, the activists said they collected more than 22 million signatures as of this week, a full quarter of Egypt’s population.

The future role of the military – which ruled the nation for the second half of the 20th century – will be a major factor in determining the outcome of this week’s events. Currently, the armed forces and the opposition movements appear to have an alliance, one perhaps prompted by fear of Egypt devolving into a violent situation similar to Syria. On Monday, the spokesperson of the Tamarod movement backed the military’s 48-hour ultimatum, saying, “the army responding to the demands of the people crowns our movement.” Wednesday, the spokesman rejected the idea of a military coup, calling it instead a “popular coup.”

Although the idea of a “popular coup” appears counterintuitive, it is not impossible.

Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, put out this statement:

Egyptians suffered enormously under the generals and then under President Morsy’s government, which shoved human rights to the sidelines. One test of whether Egypt can return to a path of democratic development will rest on whether the Freedom and Justice Party can operate without political reprisals against its members.

The government needs to address Egypt’s new reality, one where millions of people have taken to the streets to demand an end to authoritarianism in whatever guise. Political stability in Egypt depends on protecting and promoting political space for Egyptians to peacefully mobilize for social justice and reform on the basis of a free exchange of information.

However, HRW’s Egyptian director Heba Morayef, took to Twitter to condemn reports about the shuttering of Muslim Brotherhood media outlets and the targeting of its political leaders for arrest:

________________________________________________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Republished with permission from: Common Dreams

Foreign-backed militants in Syria want to attack the UK, the Home Office intelligence chief warns.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

A political analyst says Egypt must rid itself of the domination of the Zionist regime of Israel, which has been plaguing the Middle East, or it will face secession and be lost, Press TV reports.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

A devastating landslide has rocked Chinaâ„¢s southwestern Sichuan Province, crushing homes and people on its path across the affected region.

Local authorities said on Thursday nearly two and a half million people have been affected and nearly 120,000 have also been relocated in the devastated region.

Thousands of homes have been also damaged across Sichuan.

In her scramble for safety, one grandmother died while shielding her 15-month-old granddaughter from being crushed by the landslide that swamped their home.

Chinese state broadcaster CCTV played footage of the moment the child was rescued after seven hours.

Torrential downpours have triggered floods and landslides in Sichuan and other parts of China in recent days.

JR/KA

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Iranian president-elect Hassan Rohani (L) meets with Grand Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi in the holy city of Qom on July 4, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Bolivian President Evo Morales’s plane was forced to land in Austria en route to Bolivia on July 2, 2013..

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Militants attack a paramilitary police checkpoint in the troubled northwestern tribal region of Pakistan, killing at least four security personnel and injuring seven others.

The attack happened in the tribal North Waziristan on Thursday and medical sources said the death toll is expected to rise.

Local security officials said tribal policemen cordoned off the area and launched an investigation into the deadly incident.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack although similar incidents are usually blamed on Taliban militants.

In another incident on Thursday, two key militant commanders of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) were killed in a successful operation by security forces in the northwestern city of Peshawar.

Peshawar and several other northwestern towns have experienced a fresh spate of violence and militancy over the past few months. Militant attacks and bomb explosions have killed hundreds of people in Peshawar so far this year.

Thousands of Pakistanis have lost their lives in bombings and other militant attacks since 2001 when Pakistan entered an alliance with the US on the so-called war against terrorism, according to local media.

Thousands others have been displaced by the wave of violence and militancy sweeping across the country.

Since late 2009, there has been a surge in militant attacks in Pakistan.

JR/KA

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Remploy workers occupied Remploy head office in August 2012.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Following outrage and controversy last year over the Obama administration’s unprecedented decision to invite Russian troops for terror drills on U.S. soil, the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is now under fire for signing more agreements to “cooperate” with Vladimir Putin’s Russian “Emergencies Ministry” (EMERCOM) in a wide array of fields. Among the controversial deals outlined in an official Russian press release: exchanging of “experts” and “experience,” “provision of security at mass events,” and “cooperation in disaster response operations.” Critics of the scheme reacted with a mixture of fury and deep concerns.

After the news was picked up in the alternative media, it quickly went viral, stirring widespread fears that Russian forces could be deployed inside the United States under the bogus guise of “security.” Officials from both governments rushed to deny the speculation, trying to downplay the agreements as merely routine international collaboration. However, it remains unclear why the American people would need or want any sort of “assistance” from the Russian government, which, despite the supposed fall of communist tyranny, is still widely regarded as a lawless gangster regime.   

According to government press releases and statements by officials, the latest agreement between the Department of Homeland Security’s FEMA and the Russian Emergency Situations Ministry provides for “expert cooperation in disaster response operations” and further “study” of latest practices. “In addition, the parties approved of U.S.-Russian cooperation in this field in 2013-2014, which envisages exchange of experience including in monitoring and forecasting emergency situations, training of rescuers, development of mine-rescuing and provision of security at mass events,” continued a statement released by EMERCOM after the summit, adding that the level of cooperation between the two governments would continue to develop.

Apparently, protecting the planet from potential threats from space was on the agenda as well. “We have decided that the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and Russia’s Emergencies Ministry will work together to develop systems to protect people and territory from cosmic impacts,” claimed Russian “Emergencies Minister” Vladimir Puchkov in a statement to journalists. “I believe we can make a technological breakthrough in this area if the Emergencies Ministry and FEMA supervise this project, attracting the finest minds and research groups including in Canada, Europe, China, and Southeast Asia.”

The extra-constitutional “agreements” were inked late last month in Washington, D.C., at the fourth annual meeting of the so-called “U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission Working Group on Emergency Situations.” The shady outfit, formed under the Obama administration, is one of almost two dozen similar “working groups” bringing together top U.S. and Russian officials. The bodies are cooperating on everything from the drug war and agriculture to terror, science, “rule of law,” health, environment, energy, nuclear issues, education, culture, media, business, arms control, and more, according to the U.S. State Department. The Senate has not ratified any of the international deals, as required by the Constitution.

“The [Emergency Situations] Working Group promotes enhanced U.S.-Russia cooperation in the field of emergency management,” the State Department says online about its controversial scheme. “In partnership with a wide range of U.S. and Russian agencies, including the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and EMERCOM, the U.S. Departments of State, Homeland Security, Defense, FEMA, and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) have conducted many joint-exercises, exchanges, and conferences with the goal of sharing best practices and improving emergency response capabilities.”

News about the most recent round of agreements between FEMA and EMERCOM first went viral after being reported by the alternative site Infowars, which has readership numbers that dwarf more than a few establishment media sources. Citing the EMERCOM government press release, reporter Paul Joseph Watson said the agreements suggested that some major public events in the United States could rely in part on authorities from Russia to provide security. As the report pointed out, that would be a violation of federal law – not to mention the Constitution.

Commenting on the FEMA deal with Russian authorities, popular conservative talk-radio host Michael Savage called for the arrest of responsible U.S. officials. “You know who FEMA is – don’t you? – the people with the camps ready for you,” he said on July 1, also suggesting that Russian troops would be providing “security” at events in the United States in violation of Posse Comitatus restrictions. Throughout the segment on the U.S.-Russia agreements, Savage continually referred to the Obama administration as a criminal regime that needed to be stopped.

“Many people fear that this government is getting ready for some major action against the people, they think that this gang that targeted its political enemies through the IRS and the NSA is getting ready to use foreign troops on our soil who will not hesitate to shoot to kill,” he continued. “This is illegal. Whoever signed it for the U.S. government should go to prison… This is what’s emerged under this criminal administration… Obama is a gangster – he’s running the country like he’s a gangster commander.”

The New American reached out to FEMA and other relevant U.S. agencies for comment through multiple channels, but officials did not respond to repeated requests. Instead, a spokesman for FEMA tried to downplay the bilateral “agreements” in a statement offered to Kremlin-funded media outlets, saying there would be “no exchange of security or military personnel” under the latest bilateral arrangement. “The agreement continues information-sharing meetings and observation opportunities with first responders and emergency managers,” the unidentified FEMA spokesman claimed, adding that the dubious “partnership” between U.S. and Russian authorities existed for 17 years.

In the 1950s, congressional investigator Norman Dodd was tasked with investigating the subversive activities of major tax-exempt foundations. As part of the project, Dodd said he spoke with Ford Foundation President Rowan Gaither, who reportedly told him that the immensely powerful institutions were working under White House directives. “The substance of the directives under which we operate is that we shall use our grant-making power to so alter life in the United States that we can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union,” Gaither is widely quoted as having told Dodd.

Indeed, more than a few independent researchers came to similar conclusions. The Infowars report about the FEMA agreements, for example, cites State Department Publication 7277. Entitled Freedom From War: The United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World, this document was presented by the Kennedy administration to the United Nations in 1961. Long quoted by the John Birch Society and other opponents of world government, it outlines the official U.S. government policy to progressively disarm the world while strengthening the United Nations and the capabilities of its armed forces. The eventual goal, in essence, is to create a global government under the UN with a monopoly on force that would merge the “Free World” with the countries already enslaved under communist dictatorships. 

While cooperation between Western governments and U.S. administrations has been steadily increasing since the supposed collapse of the communist Soviet Union, President Obama has increased the depth and scope of that “partnership” to unprecedented levels. Among the most stunning examples of Obama’s cozy relationship with Russian authorities: telling then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that after the 2012 election he would have “more flexibility,” continually praising the Russian government while cutting back America’s nuclear arsenal, defying Congress and federal law to send U.S. taxpayer money to the Russian military, inviting Russian troops to Colorado for terror drills, and more.

Of course, the controversial agreements between FEMA and EMERCOM make up just one small piece of the larger puzzle and the big picture. As The New American has documented extensively, the plan to foist a dictatorial one-world government on humanity has been in the works for many decades – likely more than a century, at least. Cooperation between the U.S. government and Russian authorities would obviously be central to the scheme. In recent years, the troubling trends have been accelerating quickly, and without a major outcry by the American people, there will be little standing in the way of the global establishment’s sinister plot.

^{Photo of Russian Interior Ministry soldiers blocking the road during a protest rally in Moscow: AP Images}

Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, is currently based in Europe. He can be reached at
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
.

Related articles:

Russian Troops Coming to U.S. for Terror Drills, DoD Confirms

Defying Congress, Obama Sends U.S. Taxes to Russian State Arms Firm

Obama to Medvedev: “After the Election, I’ll Have More Flexibility”

Obama Demands Smaller U.S. Nuclear Arsenal, Praises Russia

Bilderberg-picked EU Leader Van Rompuy Calls for Global Governance With Russia

Russian Bombers Perform Simulated “Strikes” on Sweden, U.S.

The United Nations: On the Brink of Becoming a World Government

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Russian Red Jihad

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Former Soviet Boss Gorbachev Says Putin Is More Communist Than He Was

Brzezinski Sketches “Strategic Vision” for Putin’s KGB-Run Media

Republished with permission from: The New American

21st Century Wire says…

The timing of this payment gateway opening certainly could be a boon for Wikileaks, who’s latest star, Ed Snowden, could generate millions of dollars in donations for Icelandic docu-dumpers. But there’s more…

The Guardian Newspaper-linked organisation, Wikileaks, appears to now be managing the public-facing PR and media campaign for NSA whistleblower Snowden, which is interesting, considering what Wikileaks stands to gain financially in terms of  fund raising, by aligning itself with Snowden through a series of  upcoming international media opportunities. It would be naive to think that Wikileaks would not want to raise say 20, or $30 million as a result of their current position.

Enter stage left — Julian Assange, from his bunker in the basement of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, who now says he’s ‘involved in brokering a deal where Wikileaks would be financing Snowden’s asylum effort, and who has already spoken to Snowden’s father, Lonnie Snowden — but through “an intermediary’, whom the elder Snowden is only able speak to his son Ed.

Enter stage right — Bruce Fein, the controversial Neocon and Israeli lobby Washington DC  lawyer has been retained by father Lonnie Snowden, and is said to be engineering the domestic effort to bring Snowden back to the US. Fein has recently hit out in public, where Fein said about Wikileaks in an interview with USA TODAY,“They are using him to raise money”.

If this story plays out in adherence to Shakespearean principles, Wikileaks and Fein will each net huge benefits, with Wikileaks netting millions and championing the latest high-profile operative whistleblower while organising his temporary asylum in a hist country like Iceland or Ecuador, after handing Snowden over to Fein’s camp for a dramatic return to the US for the show trial of the century. If that show trial takes place, it will dwarf Benghazi in terms of the political power-play against the Obama Administration — who is already in hot water over a litany of scandals and autocratic overreaching moves both at home and abroad. In addition, a Snowden trial will attract a much larger global media audience, particularly since foreigners now know they are also targets of the NSA’s digital spy network.

Let’s not forget here that Wikileaks is not the only one who stands to net a killing off of handling Mr. Snowden. Bruce Fein and his law firm, The Lichfield Group, could also rake in millions in fees paid for via a campaign for an ‘Ed Snowden Legal Defense Fund’, or something to that effect. Either way you look at, for certain central players in this staged drama, Snowden is golden.

Aside from the money, more and more this story is taking on a partisan shape, and may be more about a right-wing-Israeli lobby agenda at home and abroad, and may not have anything to do with actually changing the current US Federal policies on spying on its own citizens — and foreigners too.

A drama that will be brought to you exclusively… by The Guardian.

Watch closely at how this drama unfolds…

ASSANGE: Back in the spotlight handling PR for whistleblower and fugitive Ed Snowden.
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WikiLeaks says MasterCard lifts ‘financial blockade’

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RT

MasterCard’s financial blockade against WikiLeaks has been lifted more than two years after the credit card company first took measures to keep their customers from supporting the anti-secrecy website.

WikiLeaks announced in a press release Wednesday that MasterCard International has reversed its decision to not process payments for WikiLeaks and that customers can once again contribute to the site’s operations.

Along with VISA, PayPal, Bank of America and Western Union, MasterCard stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks in December 2010 after the whistleblower website began publishing a trove of classified diplomatic cables pilfered from the computer networks of the US Department of State.

WikiLeaks founder and editor Julian Assange previously called that embargo “an unlawful, US influenced, financial blockade” and “an existential threat” to his organization. With MasterCard once again willing to work with Assange and his website, however, the future of WikiLeaks may be all the less uncertain – and at a time when arguably it’s at its most relevance in a while.

Whereas the publication of State Department cables brought an array of critique directed at WikiLeaks at the time, the website has become of renewed interest as of late following an alliance of sorts established between Assange and Edward Snowden, the 30-year-old former government contractor who has been leaking classified National Security Agency documents to the media. Assange has said he’s involved in brokering a deal that could aid in asylum being granted to Snowden – who is currently wanted by the United States on charges of espionage – while he himself is awaiting safe passage to Ecuador, where’s he’s been offered assistance against his own prosecution.

According to an article published on Tuesday by The Washington Post, Assange has spoken to Snowden’s father this week and said he could coordinate an intermediary to exchange messages between the two.

“We are obviously concerned,” Bruce Fein, an attorney for father Lonnie Snowden told the Post. “If Julian Assange can talk to Edward directly, why can’t his dad?”

On his part, Edward Snowden issued a statement through WikiLeaks on Monday condemning US President Barack Obama for his administration’s hunt for leakers and mirrored remarks Assange made last month to RT about how the White House’s actions against whistleblowers – particularly WikiLeaks source Bradley Manning – have hurt journalism as of late.

“We know from at least three national security reporters that their sources are hesitant to speak to them and explicitly cite the treatment of Bradley Manning as a reason as to why they are hesitant to disclose abuses by the United States government in the national security sector,” Assange said at the time. “So already the Manning prosecution is harming the quality of western Democracy and the quality of reporting in the press.”

“In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers,” Snowden said through WikiLeaks on Monday. “No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised – and it should be.”

Of course, the financial blockade against WikiLeaks has also hindered that organization for performing its journalistic duties, at least from December 2010 through this week. As the website acknowledges in their statement, though, all that could change if other companies decide to follow in the footsteps of MasterCard, who made their reversal this week in the wake of a recent court ruling that decided in favor of Assange and his site.

In the statement, WikiLeaks recalls how they won a lawsuit in April when the Icelandic Supreme Court ordered VALITOR, the Icelandic partner for Visa and MasterCard, to recommence processing donations after the blockade was erected in 2010.

“VALITOR complied and reopened its payment gateway, but gave formal legal notice that it would terminate its contract and reclose the gateway on July 1, 2013, citing a unilateral termination clause in the contract,” WikiLeaks wrote. “VALITOR has now fully reversed its position and announces it will honor the contract.”

WikiLeaks says that in response to that ruling, “MasterCard made clear to VALITOR that it no longer desires to blockade WikiLeaks.”

According to the website, VISA has not yet responded to their competitor’s decision. WikiLeaks intends to sue VALITOR for money lost during the two-and-a-half-year embargo.

The protests in Egypt against president Mohammed Morsi were — according to the BBC — the largest in history.

The Egyptian military threw Morsi out in a coup today [July 3, 2013].

Why?

Irish Times reports:

Army concern about the way President Mohamed Morsi was governing Egypt reached tipping point when the head of state attended a rally packed with hardline fellow Islamists calling for holy war in Syria, military sources have said.

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Mr Morsi himself called for foreign intervention in Syria against Mr Assad,leading to a veiled rebuke from the army, which issued an apparently bland but sharp-edged statement the next day stressing that its only role was guarding Egypt’s borders.

***

“The armed forces were very alarmed by the Syrian conference at a time the state was going through a major political crisis,” said one officer, whose comments reflected remarks made privately by other army staff. He was speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to talk to the media.

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For the army, the Syria rally had crossed “a national security red line” by encouraging Egyptians to fight abroad, risking creating a new generation of jihadists, said Yasser El-Shimy, analyst with the International Crisis Group.

At the heart of the military’s concern is the history of militant Islam in Egypt, homeland of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri. The military source condemned recent remarks made by “retired terrorists” allied to Mr Morsi, who has deepened his ties with the once-armed group al-Gamaa al-Islamiya.

Obama had recently sent American troops to prop up Mursi, and the protesters were furious at the U.S. for backing Islamic radicals.

(The U.S. backed Egypt’s previous dictator, as well).

Support of Western intervention in Syria was also one of the main causes of the recent enormous protests in Turkey … which came close to toppling the Turkish leadership.

Indeed, the American government has been providing arms, money and logistical support to Al Qaeda inSyria, Libya, Mali, Bosnia and other countries — and related Muslim terrorists in Chechnya, Iran, andmany other countries. So moderate Arabs all over the Middle East and North Africa are becoming furious at U.S. interventionist policies.

Note: The coup is a set-back for the U.S. , because Egypt — unlike Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran — isn’t on the 20-year-old list of countries targeted for regime change.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

The main index of Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE), TEPIX, continues its upward rise and has set a new record in terms of trade volume despite fresh US-engineered sanctions against Iran.

According to the latest report on TSE trading on Wednesday, the TSE closed at 52,735 at the end of the transaction day.

The rise in TEPIX has been attributed to such industrial heavy weights as Gol-Gohar Mining and Industrial Company, Esfahan Oil Refining Company, Chadormalu Mining and Industrial Company, Bank Mellat, Telecommunication Company of Iran, Mines and Metals Development Investment Co. and Tabriz Oil Refining Company.

Major Iranian industries are directly involved in the TSE, making it unique in the Middle East.

Founded in 1967, the Tehran Stock Exchange has been one of the world’s best performing stock markets in recent years and has ranked as the best bourse index in Europe, Africa and Middle East in 2010 in terms of performance of the main index.

TSE’s annual growth rate of main indices was also ranked as second best among all members of the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE).

The WFE is the association of 52 regulated exchanges around the world which aims to develop and promote standards in markets.

MP/SS

Republished with permission from: Press TV

File photo shows four kidnapped Iranian diplomats. From left: Ahmad Motevasseliyan, Kazem Akhavan, Taqi Rastegar Moqaddam and Seyyed Mohsen Mousavi.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Sam
Planet Infowars
July 4, 2013

It’s 1:00 AM and 59 people have RSVP’d for Wichita’s Restore the Fourth including me. It may not be as big as many others, but I’m just glad to see Kansas beginning to support serious issues like this.

https://www.facebook.com/events/168294483349231/

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 9:54 am

Tags: activism, constitution

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Awe130
Planet Infowars
July 4, 2013

To answer this question we need to look at the NASA images of the moon and what we can find. According NASA the flag did not move on the moon. In 2012 we found some 16mm film footage that did show that the film footage was not confirm the Apollo moon landing photos. Clearly the flag has rotated.
http://www.awe130.nl/index.php/the-news-awe130

Hasselblad still image of the Apollo 11 flag on the moon.

16mm film footage Apollo 11 of the flag.

Clearly the flag is rotated, question NASA how did this happen on the moon?

View the Nightly News interview in question below:

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 10:06 am

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Let’s remember Thomas Lewis of Ghana. He was sold as a slave to a Danish trader, and then worked in N.Y., Carolina, Jamaica, and Florida before going to London in 1770. Slave catchers caught him riverside and trepanned him down river to sea but not before Granville Sharp, the Greek scholar, musician, and abolitionist could obtain a writ of habeas corpus.

Thomas Lewis’s allies were the common people of the neighborhood where he was apprehended, they heard his shouts and summoned Granville Sharp who was able to obtain the writ. That was on the Fourth of July 1770. The wind died down and the writ was served upon the ship captain taking Lewis. Lewis was released and then freed. On hearing the jury’s verdict on behalf of Lewis the assembled onlookers triumphantly shouted, “No Property! No Property!”

Let’s remember also the prosperous grain dealer (“corn factor”) named John Rusby who during the terrible famine of 1800 was found guilty on the Fourth of July of regrating the market of oats in Mark Lane, London. Regrating is buying in order to sell in the same market. The high court of Britain denounced his “shameless effrontery.” The Lord Chief Justice believed  sharp market practices were prohibited by common law, a law going back many, many centuries. Leaflets were produced denouncing that concept of property that food could be sold to profit dealers while consumers were left to beg or steal or starve.  The people shouted, “Bread! Bread!”

Adam Smith believed that forestalling, engrossing, and regrating were as imaginary as witchcraft. However, the burning of “witches” and the profiteering upon the starving still existed then, as they do now. Rusby’s house was attacked and he escaped by leaping over a back wall. Street lights were smashed to prevent identification of the rioters. The War Office sent troops, and quiet returned by one o’clock in the morning. It was but one incident in a great transformation of the coming year defeating the ‘moral economy’ and turning England into an armed camp.

In reflecting on these legal cases and the social struggles giving rise to them, what conclusions might be drawn? People are not property is one, and property serves people is another.

The Declaration of Independence surely requires amendment to reflect this. Unamended, it set in motion an expansion of slavery and principles antithetical to the moral economy.

Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University of Toledo. The London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. His essay on the history of May Day is included in Serpents in the Garden. His latest book is the Magna Carta Manifesto. He can be reached at:plineba@yahoo.com

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
July 4, 2013

Now that the Muslim Brotherhood — the CIA’s “color revolution” proxy in Egypt — has been deposed, another CIA asset, al-Qaeda, has vowed to come to the rescue.

Won’t get fooled again? Egyptians cheer military overthrow of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.

According to Arab-language website Veto Gate, “al-Qaeda, under the leadership of Muhammad Zawahiri, is currently planning reprisal operations by which to attack the army and the Morsi-opposition all around the Republic [of Egypt].”

In December, it was said Morsi had summoned “3,000 jihadis from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia and Iran to be an Islamic army to strike the police and army forces” of Egypt, Raymond Ibrahim reported, citing al-Khabar News.

Morsi also released “jihadi convicts from the nation’s two most notorious terrorist organizations, Islamic Jihad and the Islamic Group” soon after assuming the presidency, according to Ibrahim’s sources.

Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad had received money from the CIA in the mid-1980s and he was allowed to fundraise in the United States on a passport provided by CIA asset Ali Mohamed, a major in the Egyptian army who collaborated with the U.S. Army.

The cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman was the leader of the Islamic Group. Rahman had traveled in the United States on a CIA-supported visa and by 1990 controlled the al-Kifah Refugee Center in New York. Also known as Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), the al-Kifah Center is a CIA creation run by Osama bin Laden and used to recruit Mujahideen fighters for the covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. MAK would eventually morph into what is now called al-Qaeda.

“Now that the Islamists have tasted power — Salafis, Muslim Brotherhood, or al-Qaeda — it is unlikely that they will quietly give it up without a fight,” writes Ibrahim. “History has proven that many jihadis never give up — unless they are in prison or dead. And as Egyptian al-Qaeda leader Muhammad Zawahiri pointed out, not only have they long been inured to sufferings and deprivations — they have nothing to lose.”

The globalists are not likely to give up, either. Egypt’s current crisis is another chapter in a protracted effort to balkanize the Middle East and divide and conquer through religious and sectarian violence — what the globalists call order out of chaos.

The people of Egypt may believe they have deposed yet another tyrant — who assumed power following the removal of the last tyrant, a long-term and faithful globalist client, Hosni Mubarak — but in fact they have handed power back to Egypt’s notorious brutal military.

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 9:45 am

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

County Cork, Ireland.

Dissonance defines twenty first century America. Try as it might to uphold its founding visions, societal and political structures quietly erode its most treasured ideal: freedom.

In a remarkable feat of self-destruction, caused mostly by a foreign policy that inspires nothing but contempt, America’s claim as the “free land” cannot anymore be taken seriously. It’s never ending marathon in winning the war against terrorism, coupled with its carefree foreign policies, have failed to serve any great purpose other than maintaining the charade of a ‘hard man’ national masculine identity. But like all “tough” guys, their weaknesses have nothing to do with scars or muscle injuries, but from the brittle, frail identity their relentless acts of bravado desperately try to hide.

The problem with America is that it’s identity, primary based on the idea of “freedom”, is loosely defined. Beginning with the rushed, under read “Patriot” Act, surveillance techniques have been creeping into the cracks and crevices of American everyday life in slow, steady increments, which serve as a perfect method to normalize a police state. And now, with the scandalous revelations that the National Security Agency has been acquiring the phone records of millions of Americans, never mind spying on Europe, the search for freedom it seems, well – still a search.

No laws, values or controversies occur within a vacuum. Every social ill is symptomatic of a wider malaise, and a surveillance society is symptomatic of a either a society constantly under genuine threat, or one that thinks it’s under genuine threat. But which is it? No matter what the reality, if freedom is to be honored, surveillance has got to go, but like make-up masks the blemishes of an allergic reaction, surveillance masks the cause of its own purpose.

Terrorism interrupts the western mission of freedom, but fear, which the American media dishes out like a feeding frenzy, halts it entirely. At the same time, surveillance laws which supposedly keep society safer only reduce the scope of freedom that can be exercised, and what no better way to give credence to the surveillance state than instilling fear upon the masses, to which the remedy is the promise of “protection”.

As an Irishman keeping track of American news, I have been appalled at senseless mass shootings, so much so my hostility towards the 2nd Amendment would incite wishes to have me emigrated. But recent revelations on American surveillance policies has forced me to realize that the purpose of the second amendment — to overcome government tyranny — makes perfect sense.

But pro-gun advocates must be blind, for government tyranny is on America’s doorstep, and I’m not even seeing peaceful mass protests. The lockdown initiated from the Boston bombing should have been enough of a wake up call to call out the citizen army which the 2nd amendment assumes is available for duty. For the president to say “we don’t cower in fear”, he must have been looking at the wrong news channel, because in reality, instead of acting on the “we will never bow down to terrorism” rhetoric that Washington pounds out like hammer and tong, people peeped and peered out their windows very much stiff with anxiety.

There was hysterical reporting, deserted streets, and police entering random homes, trying to convey the message that they knew what they were doing. Commentators refrained from suggesting that the lockdown could be part of yet another step towards closing American society in securing the titanic omnipresence that is a police state. Even the great Noam Chomsky, in an interview for Russia Today didn’t have much to say on the Boston lockdown issue, only that “I’d hate to second guess police tactics.”

Instead of dutiful citizens kicking up a fuss at capitol hill, they are confined to their cosy sofas and cyberspace to vent their anger. The question must be asked therefore — at what point do Americans say “enough”? When, or rather, if Americans have decided that the government have taken it all a step too far, will it be too late to take action? Or could it be that the political elite have successfully masterminded the acceptance of the police so ingeniously, that America is unable to decide on what exactly constitutes government tyranny?

America therefore, needs to decide on its parameters and limits to its sneaking surveillance, with full public consent. If the American surveillance boom keeps going at the rate its going, the psyche of the masses will succumb to desensitization. American’s may internalize the surveillance society, no matter the magnitude of its tyranny and accept it as the norm. At that point, when the American psyche has been manipulated into accepting the police state as an unquestionably necessary reality that cannot be reversed, we can forget muttering “God is Dead” and start lamenting “Freedom is Dead”.

Barack Obama, the leader of the “free” world, is now merely a charismatic pastor, highly skilled at transforming scripted clichéd speeches into compassionate sermon like monologues intended to sound like it comes from the heart, rather than the malicious minds of manipulating political puppeteers. Obama constantly meanders in and out of apologetic, excuse pumped rhetoric, suggesting that debate needs to happen on issues of national security and gun control, while cleverly reminding his flock that America needs to remain defiant in the face of terrorism. This is the cheapest most accessible talk therapy there is, and it’s right in your living room.

But simply calling America defiant does not make it so. Defiance towards terrorism at home, has now become nothing more than buzz words and candy catchphrases, which are all desperate attempts to feed the worrisome psyche with calm.  The American method of “defeating” terrorism is like belting a swing ball expecting someone else to hit it the other way. But with no one but yourself playing, the harder you hit, the more it will hurt when it pelts back into your jaw.

American foreign policy is now the fertilizer for terrorist motivations, with every American intervention being another ingredient in the big pot of terrorist excuses for having the most pernicious contempt for the US. Most damagingly however, is that the American political ego simply cannot comprehended the hatred it arouses. Unfortunately, like all Shakespearean tragedies, the hero pays a price. Unless the American elite overcomes its superiority complex and re-thinks its foreign policy, terrorism is here to stay, and with it, mass surveillance.

And so, America’s founding vision of itself as the “free land”, is incompatible with its current state of tourrettes syndrome in interfering with foreign countries. As society grows more complex, as citizens stress and strain under the capitalistic forces of everyday life, little time is made to worry about the coming age of taser drones hovering about over the neighborhood, or to the legislative acts passed by congress which further impinges on the individual freedom.

If America is to truly remain free, if it truly wishes to be defiant, it must look into its own backyard. Rather than fight terrorism, it must fight the causes of terrorism (Which in case I haven’t been clear, the causes of terrorism lie in American foriegn policy). Time, however, is running out. The president is no longer a leader, but a governor; the constitution, nothing more than a nostalgic dream of what the founders envisioned.

Robert Bolton is a freelance writer in Ireland.

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch

Aaron Mesmer
My Fox Tampa Bay
July 4, 2013

Changes are coming to the Lakeland Police Department, possibly as soon as next week, a city spokesperson said Wednesday in response to repeated calls for action.

This follows a series of recent scandals surrounding the department.

Lakeland communications director Kevin Cook said the internal investigation is ongoing and stressed the need to allow the process to run its course.

Read more

Editor’s Note: This is the very same police department we reported on in the “Lift Your Shirt, Shake Out Your Bra” Police Search.

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 9:39 am

Tags: domestic news, government corruption

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

During WW2 everyone who went to the movies saw newsreels of Il Duce, der Fuhrer, Panzer Divisions, and of course the courageous men (and some women) in our armed forces fighting for freedom and democracy. It was a controlled media production, often put out by the Office of War Information or any studio with correspondents overseas. All had been pro-war efforts and even when things were going badly, the news was sanitized the best it could be.

Vietnam changed things as the embedded journalists started to see real opposition to the war coming from the front itself. People complained in the European and Pacific theaters and showed every emotion one could display in wartime, but overall the tone was one of defiance and patriotism. In Vietnam, opposition was real and reporting on it was acceptable. Didn’t the White House know the war was lost when Walter Cronkite said so?

What was unique in WW2 was the power of the pen. Newsreels were eye candy but it was the pen of the journalists that most remember back then. One person in particular was Ernie Pyle, the real soldiers’ reporter. Unlike today’s embedded ‘reporters’ whose very lives depend on his/her subjects, and whose stories will thus always be flattering to the mission, Pyle was different. He told the stories of war directly from the point of view of the soldier. When things were bad, he let home know about it. He had an affinity towards the infantry and did not write so flatteringly about the US naval forces for whom he felt had an easier ride of it.

As a child of the post-WW2 era I watched many war movies. I knew about the Stars and Stripes (independent military newspaper), war propaganda, and of Ernie Pyle. I knew that people anxiously waited for his next dispatch. Long before 24/7 cable news, Internet, and phone cameras, the eyewitness had to be someone credible to attain such a lofty position in his/her field. (Incidentally, as I drove around Ft. Meade, MD heading towards the Manning trial, I drove along Ernie Pyle Road, as I did more than 45 years ago with my dad who worked there as a civilian photographer.)

That brings us to today and the one journalist for whom the world awaits daily dispatches from the war zone: Glenn Greenwald. The war zone might not be the blood and guts of an Iwo Jima or the outskirts of a Paris, (leave that to the intrepid Jeremy Scahill) but the war of a brutal empire fighting its own citizens to prevent exposure of its crimes against humanity. I await with incredible eagerness anything he has to say about the Snowden affair. His words are the very soul of truth in journalism, the very reason why we have a 4^th Estate. George Orwell said, “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” Greenwald at the ISO convention in Chicago last week called out the ‘caviar correspondents’ for their obeisance to the presidents’ consistent foreign policy and the war machines that pay their salaries.

For now, Greenwald stands nearly alone. But often it is the ‘one’ voice that speaks louder than all the pipsqueaks who blah blah blah on Sunday morning, pontificating about things they know nothing about, pretending that they talk to the gas station attendants who pump their gas about what’s going on in this world, all to get the (real) people’s point of view.

Myles B. Hoenig is a veteran ESOL teacher in Prince George’s County, MD.

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch

On Sept. 17, Grand Theft Auto V, the latest installment in the wildly popular criminal wish-fulfillment franchise, will be released for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, perhaps as one of the final major games of the current console generation. If you’re a leftist, there are a lot of things you could hate about the series. It glorifies an underground capitalism in which the black-market bourgeoisie are the ostensible heroes, among many, many other reactionary things. But frankly if you only allowed yourself to enjoy art that’s politically unobjectionable you would be left with a pretty small selection that’s kind of—what’s the word? Oh right…boring. At least that’s how I feel.

Maybe it’s because I have little to no life—I’ve got an OK Cupid account, for Christ’s sake! But I’m a guy who’s pumped about the release of GTA V. And I thought I’d take the opportunity to briefly look at the way the developer behind the title, Rockstar Games, has dealt with socialist themes in the past. Because, who knows, GTA V might have similar references and video games are an important and growing medium.

Red Dead Redemption, published by Rockstar, is a 2010 action/adventure game inspired by the spaghetti westerns of filmmakers such as Sergio Leone. Now, you should know: despite my enthusiasm for GTA V, I’m not a die-hard gamer. I haven’t played everything out there, or even close. I got bored and gave up during the opening character creation sequence of Skyrim, a game which, as I understand it, hardcore reviewers had a collective nerdgasm over. But I LOVED RDR. And yes, the caps lock is necessary. The story-line, graphics, and voice acting are pretty darn good and overall it’s a joy to play. So if you have any interest in wasting your life in a virtual world, seriously consider giving RDR a shot.

Anyway, part of the game is set in the Mexican Revolution. It’s my understanding that some of the characters are based on real-life figures but I’ll leave discussion of RDR’s historical accuracy to those with more knowledge on the subject. I am, sadly, just another dumb gringo. My main goal here is to draw leftist attention to a popular but critically underappreciated form.

RDR’s central protagonist is a bounty hunter named John Marston. Asked whether he is a socialist, he explains, “I’m many things, most of them bad. But a man of political principals? No.” Marston initially fights on both sides of the conflict before throwing in his lot with the rebels, seemingly more out of personal loyalty than ideological conviction.

Rockstar portrays the Mexican dictatorship as brutally corrupt, though eventually paints the rebel leadership as little better. Similarly, the publisher seems sympathetic to the revolutionary rank-and-file, while also suggesting they are naive. Luisa Fortuna, a selfless peasant fighter, is perhaps the game’s most uniformly likable character. She speaks passionately of the struggle, declaring, “I am living in history. I’m not afraid to die.” At the same time however, she speaks glowingly of the local guerrilla leader who, coming from an upper-class family, is revealed to be using Fortuna sexually and something of a political tyrant-in-waiting.

In the end, Rockstar sides with the rebels, but quite unenthusiastically. Whether this is an appropriate position is a question I’ll leave for those with more knowledge of Mexico’s history. But the publisher seems to go further, cynically suggesting government can never be representative of the people’s interests, no matter the consequences, no matter how much the masses struggle. This, of course, leaves no room for progressive change.

L.A. Noir, also published by Rockstar, is a 2011 pulpy period piece set in the 1940s. While I have admittedly not finished it, so far it’s not fractionally as fun as RDR. There’s very little overarching story or character development to propel you forward, and the cases you work through could probably be played in any sequence, as you might watch the TV show Law & Order, without missing much.

One investigation could be interpreted as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it criticism of Red Scare hysteria The central protagonist, a police officer named Cole Phelps, investigates a series of suspicious fires he believes to be connected. The game leads you to charge a low-level gas company employee found in possession of anarchist pamphlets, specifically Peter Kropotkin’s Law and Authority. And if I’m following the game’s twists and turns correctly, which I very well may not be, he’s actually innocent.

Another investigation, however, introduces us to a communist character who, while also falsely charged, is probably by far the most unflattering representation of a leftist in both L.A. Noir and RDR. The guy’s insufferably snotty and just in case you didn’t pick this up from what he says, he’s wearing an ascot. I mean, an ascot? Isn’t that a little too on the nose? But it doesn’t stop there. He looks down on working class people and beats women. Just in case you didn’t get that he was a monstrous hypocrite too.

Anyway, do you know of different games, by Rockstar or other publishers, that deal with socialism, socialists, or class struggle more generally? Are you similarly psyched for GTA V?

Jon Hochschartner is a freelance writer from upstate New York.

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch

In ousting Egypt’s first freely elected president, Mohammed Morsi, the Egyptian military have certainly not acted to preserve democracy. They’ve never shown much interest in that. They’re determined to put a break on the mounting political and economic chaos that is ripping the country apart.  That turbulence was threatening not just the survival of Egypt, but, more to the point, it was menacing the vast state within a state that Egypt’s military presides over.

Of course, the Egyptian Army is not monolithic. Its lower ranks are very much of the people: filled with hundreds of thousands of conscripts, drawn from the most humble ranks of society–and has a strong identity with the Egyptian people.

It has traditionally been the most important means of socializing and educating the lower classes, in theory, inculcating them with a sense of pride and patriotism.

Indeed the 1971 Constitution says that the Egyptian Army shall “belong to the people”

Thus, as I have previously blogged, in 1977 when the army was called in to quell riots after President Sadat announced cuts in basic food subsidies, the generals refused to intervene unless the subsidies were reestablished. Sadat restored the subsidies.

The top ranks of the army, however, have other concerns–beginning with personal survival. They certainly will never forget the lurid spectacle of Iranian generals being publicly executed in the aftermath of Khomeini’s revolution in Iran. Iran also demonstrated that a radical revolution also means a radically transformed military. (Egypt’s generals have a constant reminder of that lesson nearby:  The Shah is buried in a Cairo mosque.).

But since the fall of Mubarak, the military have feared not just a takeover by radical Muslims. There is also the fact that real civilian rule could spell an end to the system of massive military corruption and patronage that has gone on for decades in Egypt, a system that has given the military unimpeded control over an estimated 40% of the Egyptian economy—”a state within a state” as a well-informed Egyptian friend of mine puts it.

For years, Egypt’s top military ranks have enjoyed a pampered existence in sprawling developments such as Cairo’s Nasr City, where officers are housed in spacious, subsidized condominiums. They enjoy other amenities the average Egyptian can only dream of, such as nurseries, bonuses, new cars, schools and military consumer cooperatives featuring domestic and imported products at discount prices. In other areas, top officers are able to buy luxurious apartments on generous credit for 10 percent of what those apartments are actually worth.

But we’re not just talking about sensational official perks. Many of Egypt’s brass are notoriously corrupt. Vast swathes of military land, for instance, were sold by the generals to finance some major urban developments near Cairo – with little if any accounting.

Other choice military property ran on the Nile Delta and Red Sea coast boasted idyllic beaches, and exquisite coral reefs. In return for turning the land over to private developers, military officers became key shareholders in a slew of gleaming new tourist developments.

The generals also preside over 16 enormous factories that turn out not just weapons, but an array of domestic products from dishwashers to heaters, clothing, doors, stationary pharmaceutical products, and microscopes. Most of these products are sold to military personnel through discount military stores, but large amount are also sold commercially.

The military also builds highways, housing developments, hotels, power lines, sewers, bridges, schools, telephone exchanges, often in murky arrangements with civilian companies.

The military are also Egypt’s largest farmers, running a vast network of dairy farms, milk processing facilities, cattle feed lots, poultry farms, fish farms. They’ve plenty left from their huge output to sell to civilians through a sprawling distribution network.

The justification for all this non-military activity is that the military are just naturally more efficient that civilians. Hard not to be “more efficient” when you are able to employ thousands of poorly paid military recruits for labor.

Many civilian businessmen complain that competing with the military is like trying to compete with the Mafia. And upon retiring, top military officers are often rewarded with plum positions running everything from factories and industries to charities.

Whatever the number, Robert Springborg, who has written extensively on Egypt, says officers in the Egyptian military are making “billions and billions and billions” of dollars.”

But there’s no way to know how efficient or inefficient the military are, nor how much money their vast enterprises make, nor how many millions or billions get skimmed off since the military’s operations are off the nation’s books. No real published accountings.

No oversight.  Even Mohammed Morsi when he became president, was obliged to agree to the military’s demand that there would be no civilian oversight of the military budget.

Of course none of the above is a surprise to U.S. officials who dole out some 1.3 billion dollars a year in military aid to the Egyptian Army, and hope that sum and the neat weapons it provides will keep the army in line. [One of the most detailed studies of the military’s non-military activities was done by a U.S. military researcher at Fort Leavenworth.]

The U.S. also has a 1.3 billion dollar carrot dangling in front of the Egyptian Army. That annual American military aid to Egypt has allowed the Egyptian officers to get their hands on some of the most sophisticated of modern weapons–as we’ve seen over the past couple of years in downtown Cairo.

The generals realize there is no way the U.S. will continue paying for those goodies if a new regime more hostile to Israel takes power in Cairo.

A perceptive look into all this came via a 2008 U.S.diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.The writer in the U.S. Embassy in Cairo ticked off the various businesses the military was involved in, and considered how the military might react if Egypt’s then president, Hosni Mubarak, were to lose power.

The military would almost certainly go along with a successor, the cable’s author wrote, as long as that successor didn’t interfere in the military’s business arrangements.

But, the cable continued, “in a messier succession scenario, it becomes more difficult to predict the military’s actions.”

No scenario could be “messier” than the mounting chaos in Egypt over the past few months.

The military acted.

BARRY LANDO is a former producer for 60 Minutes who now lives in Paris. He can be reached at: barrylando@gmail.com or through his website.

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch

Brokers are bargaining at Portugalâ„¢s stock market. (file photo)

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Military coups are no reason to celebrate. They derail the very idea of democratic institutions and sentiment. And it so happens that democracy gave Egypt the now deposed President Mohamed Morsi, an option that his opponents found contentious. The Egyptian military, in its espoused wisdom, decided that keeping Morsi was too much to bear, a costly experiment that was taking lives and fracturing the state.

Enter then, by default, the position Egypt found itself under General Hosni Mubarak, when the Muslim Brotherhood was regarded with deep suspicion and kept under strong military wrapping.

Now Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected leader, and leading followers have been re-wrapped, and the experiment of the Muslim Brotherhood put on deep ice. The Tamarod campaign has gotten its prized scalp, ostensibly centred on a secular counter to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Tamarod campaign was itself founded in April by members of the Kefaya movement, which reached prominence during the Mubarak-era.

Tamarod prides itself on being a grassroots response, lacking supporters from the big end of town. The claim is not clearly verifiable, and once the campaign gathered steam, other parties latched on its coattails with tactical enthusiasm. Last week, the movement claimed to have obtained the spectacular number of 15 million signatures, 2 million more than those who voted for Morsi. Now, the number stands at over 20 million.

The responses to the ouster have varied, though they follow strict lines of political and religious thinking in the region. The Syrian government have found reason to cheer at the overthrow and detention of Morsi and his supporters. “Syria’s people and leadership and army express their deep appreciation for the national populist movement in Egypt which has yielded a great achievement” (AFP, Jul 4). Hypocrisy is something some regimes do better than others, and Bashar al-Assad’s endorsement of one form of populist uprising over another shows the state of mental confusion that attends some governments.

His is by no means the only one. The Obama administration will not miss the Morsi regime, yet is happy backing an opposition movement in Syria seething with fundamentalist sentiment.

Nor will the United Arab Emirates, whose regime is happily disposed to crushing dissent and any whiff of democratic ferment, feel any remorse to Morsi’s departure. The statement by Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahayan was filled with encouragement, not for the secular movement that had initiated the army’s reaction, but the Egyptian army itself. “Egypt’s great army once more proves that it is Egypt’s protector … that will ensure it remains a country of institutions and law that protects all components of the brotherly Egyptian people.”

This is the rhetoric of despotic vengeance, not reform. Needless to say, any Egyptian Tamarod campaigner is unlikely to be welcomed in the UAE, a political entity that prohibits the membership of political parties altogether.

In contrast Turkey, facing its own populist movement against a long term ruler, has expressed concern over the undemocratic ouster. It all depends on how that fictitious term “a people’s will” is interpreted. For Turkish deputy prime minister Bekir Bozdag claimed in Ankara that, “The power change in Egypt was not a result of the will of the people. The change was not in compliance with democracy and law” (Al-Ahram Online, Jul 4). The sentiments are hardly surprising given the efforts by Turkey’s Islamic Justice and Development Party to establish ties with Morsi’s government.

Where Tamarod goes, or for that matter the Egyptian military, are the open questions for the moment. Coups by definition repudiate democracy, and Morsi was the choice of the democratic movement, however misplaced it might have initially seemed. His opponents thought otherwise. They will cite, with some justification, that democracy at the end of the gun is a sham experiment.

The fear now is whether one of North Africa’s most significant powers becomes the enlarged battleground for the Islamic experiment in what was misguidedly labelled the Arab Spring. In Tunisia, there is a promise that a mirrored movement will take the reins of protest. Their target is the Islamic experiment that came to replace the despotism the “spring” was meant to remove.

Few in the new movement will miss Morsi, but there is little reason to be too joyous. When nature abhors a vacuum, it fills it with the most astonishing assortment of things. A military regime with no timetable for transitional change is hardly a point of encouragement.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch

It’s 4th of July! We Minute Men who stand and fight at Lexington and Concord are the Taliban of our day.  Scum-class terrorists, we are, in the eyes of “mad” King George 3rd and his generals who treat us with contempt as an unwashed mob of amateurs.  Dirty unscrupulous amoral cowardly vicious American backwoodsmen. We New England and South Carolina guerrillas don’t fight by the formal rules of European warfare, spit-and-polish ranks advancing toward each other across open ground in perfect order bayonets gleaming with drums and fifes playing. Blinded by aristocratic stupidity, an inherited genetic disorder, the King and his advisors never come cloaw to understanding our Patriot culture or psychology.

We’re 3000 miles away from London’s bowing and curtseying, and it takes weeks for a letter to cross the Atlantic.  By the time a murderous royal command is given it’s way too late for the Redcoats to act on it.  Oh, blessed distance!  Thank heaven for the storm-tossed sea.

What drives the British invader-occupiers really crazy is that we American militia, mainly small farmers and artisans, won’t stand erect and fight, “like men”, but snipe and ambush from behind stone walls and trees.  Shoot and vanish.  Like ghosts.  The Redcoats and their German mercenaries complain that we “uncouth militia” let the forest do our fighting as practiced by the Green Mountain Boys and Morgan’s Rangers.  George III chooses to believe only what his imperial fantasies tell him and not real reports from the field.

Civil wars, which wars of liberation tend to be, are savage and bloody. (See Syria, see Gettysburg.) Set-piece colonial battles like Bunker Hill and Saratoga give way to barbaric, terrifyingly personal hand to hand combat in murky woods with axes, pikes, bayonet, fists…no mercy given or asked. We slaughter our prisoners and so do the Redcoats.

Ours is a fraternal civil war because Americans loyal to the king fight us Americans inflamed by Tom Paine’s best-selling, anti-monarch “Common Sense”, “the most incendiary and popular pamphlet of the entire revolutionary era”. Neighbor betrays neighbor, Mohawk Indians fight Oneida Indians, and British and American officers (like the brave traitor Benedict Arnold) change sides for the money.  More black slaves fight for the Crown than for slave-holding George Washington because the British promise freedom to bondage men and women who come over to their side.

A secret to our success is that we home-grown American militia don’t go “bowling alone”. We know and trust each other from years of living and working together in small, tight-knit communities. Some of us have fought shoulder to shoulder in the 7 Years (French & Indian) war. Officers are elected by their men, at least at the beginning of our revolution.   Democracy runs amok, which greatly worries Gen. Washington who likes things kept in the hands of the propertied elite. That Tom Paine has a lot to answer for!

Unspoken is an underlying class tension between our Continental army officers and we shoeless, shivering, starving rankers at, for example, Valley Forge. While we suffer in freezing makeshift tents, Gen. Washington and his top officers eat well and sleep comfortably in warm houses.  We resent privilege but fight on because we aim to be free and independent Americans, and anyway we’re paid a bounty to re-enlist.  Fighting as a unit with our own close neighbors makes all the difference.  We hope it never comes to pass that only a tiny fraction of the American citizenry will do all the fighting.
Another civil war, between us American back country poor and eastern seaboard merchant class, the same class that signed our Declaration of Independence, won’t surface until after the British surrender and we get our independence. Look up “Shay’s Rebellion”, the Occupy movement of its time.

Clancy Sigal is a screenwriter and novelist. His latest book is Hemingway Lives.

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch

Egyptians rally in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on June 30, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Senior Egyptian authorities say the Muslim Brotherhood’s supreme leader has been detained less than a day after the military removed President Mohamed Morsi from power.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Around 75 people living in Londonâ„¢s Brixton area are facing eviction.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad pictured in his office in the capital Damascus on June 13, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Disclaimer: This article is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Views expressed here do not necessarily reflect those of GreenMedInfo or its staff.

Republished with permission from: Green Med Info

People celebrate at Tahrir Square after a broadcast by the head of the Egyptian military announcing the ouster of President Mohamed Morsi in Cairo on July 3, 2013.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The ouster of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has drawn mixed reactions from around the world with US and European Union leaders calling for a swift return to democracy in the North African country.

Republished with permission from: Press TV

presstv.ir
July 4, 2013

As part of this training, there is an increased move to use of military uniforms, armored vehicles, heavy weapons, illegal surveillance, lying to the people, press and courts and systematic interference in the electoral system.

They are becoming “Israeli.”

The door to this foreign influence in America was thrown open by the Department of Homeland Security and, in particular, Michael Chertoff, an Israeli citizen who was, in particular, most instrumental as former Director of DHS in implementing policies challenged as unconstitutional, policies the new “Israeli trained” American police are tasked with stopping opposition to.

“Israelization” of American police is a simple process:

– Total militarization of police, military tactics, utter disrespect for civil law, the constitution, civil liberties, freedom of speech and the unbridled growth of centralized power under unlimited corruption; government by money and organized crime.

– Systematic suppression of dissent

– Systematic use of intimidation to control the electoral process at every level of government

– Seamless coordination with military and “internationalist” groups to prepare for mass internment of sectors of the population, numbering in the millions

– Coordinated use of full military power including but not limited to bombing, strafing, heavy artillery and summary executions, the same methods Israel uses on a daily basis

– Even more control of the press, based on the Israeli model, with two “controlled” views, on pro-government and the second, “controlled opposition.”

Infiltration

It is absolutely necessary to differentiate between Israeli companies and those working tied to quasi-governmental organized crime in America. It is also necessary that citizenry, in particular Americans of Jewish background, recognize that a systematic campaign of controlled and revised history and, more seriously, orchestrated “incidents” are coordinated with groups misrepresenting themselves as defending the Jewish people.

These groups, several come to mind, are, in actuality, Israeli “psyops” groups that actually work on an active basis with terrorists. What are we saying?

90% of terrorism, worldwide, including many of the mass killing incidents, all show a pattern of involvement by intelligence organizations. Almost all “terror threats” and “staged announcements” are traced to groups tied directly to the same people who show up at our door with the “cure” to a disease they themselves create.

“While in Abuja, Nigeria, 3 weeks before the attack on the national police station, I met with Chief of Security Gordon Obua, a close friend and told him this:

“We have identified the Headquarters of the National Police as a potential target. It has an unguarded gate and parking facility and is close to the presidential palace. We predict that a car bomb will be exploded there, followed by one other bombing attack.

At these attacks, you will be approached by a security company that will offer you, not only protection by a massive bribe.”

The meeting was in the presidential suite of the Transcon Hilton in Abuja, witnessed by my legal team. The attack as described happened exactly 3 weeks later and the company that came with a suitcase of cash and a promise to turn Abuja, a beautiful city into “Fortress Abuja” is among those now training American police.

The same group is also suspected in the bombing of a Christian Church in Alexandria, Egypt, on January 1, 2011, another car bomb. Similarly, recent bombings in Cameroon, Kenya and Tanzania have the same “fingerprints.”

The same group “ran” the Detroit “Crotch Bomber.”

The Israeli handlers who worked with Abdullah Mohamed in Yemen and walking him onto a plane to the US with a bomb, no ticket, no passport and no visa, as witnessed by two Detroit area lawyers, Kurt and Lori Haskell, also train American police.

We see this over and over, police, government and terrorists, all the same thing.

Of course, few Americans are aware that the “spokesman” for the group called “al Qaeda” is actually an American named Adam Perlman whose grandfather helped found the ADL (Anti-Defamation League)

To some, terrorism is a business, and like a tire store that leaves nails in the road nearby, some “counter-terrorism” companies have more experience in building car bombs than finding them.

Why America?

Israeli security companies, primarily made up of active Mossad and former Israeli military members, began working across Africa. Israeli expertise in wiretapping on behalf of ruling parties was what opened the door. Their expertise, as shown in Britain by the Murdoch/News of the World scandals, is excellent.

They were even able to wiretap the 3 prime ministers, members of the royal family, heads of police and national security agencies, key members of legislative bodies and a hand full of celebrities. The equipment for this costs millions, can only be brought into the country by diplomatic pouch and its use is considered espionage as it foments broad unregulated and unauthorized wiretapping, totally unaccountable.

Hundreds of such units are with America police departments, as advised by the Department of Homeland Security, to keep track of group they feel require observation, despite recent court rulings that have overturned FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) as unconstitutional.

Among the groups watched are veteran’s organizations, the Tea Party, Christian, Muslim and Jewish religious groups, labor unions, professional organizations and members of government, police officers and members of Federal law enforcement and anti-drug organizations.

Former American military, even the crippled and maimed, now head every “terror watch list.”

Corruption

The truth is, America has a long reputation for corrupt police organizations. Every few years there is, in every major city, an investigation with the police commissioner and many senior officers imprisoned.

At one point, Bernie Kerik, nominee for head of the Department of Homeland Security and Police Commissioner of the City of New York had actually served as Minister of the Interior of Iraq under the interim US government that ran that country after the 2003 invasion.

Kerik is in prison, originally charged with 16 felonies, some committed while running Iraq and facing a 142 year sentence and millions in fines. In a plea deal, Kerik is only serving 4 years. Kerik, prior to becoming police commissioner, Minister of the Interior of Iraq and nearly taking over the operation of the largest agency in the United States was New York mayor Rudy Giuliani’s driver.

Every major American city and most smaller departments, and there are thousands, are being “retrained,” not to fight corruption but being armed for civil war, trained to work directly with military personnel to police America in accordance with unpublished policies mistakenly announced by Army head, General Odierno, as published in his article for the Council on Foreign Relations in the May/June edition of Foreign Affairs:

“Where appropriate we will also dedicate active-duty forces, especially those with niche skills and equipment, to provide civilian officials with a robust set of reliable and rapid response options.”

As for the Department of Homeland Security, spearheading the Israeli takeover of America’s police, David Rittgers of the Cato Institute has noted:

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

“A long line of fusion center and DHS reports labeling broad swaths of the public as a threat to national security. The North Texas Fusion System labeled Muslim lobbyists as a potential threat; a DHS analyst in Wisconsin thought both pro- and anti-abortion activists were worrisome; a Pennsylvania homeland security contractor watched environmental activists, Tea Party groups, and a Second Amendment rally; the Maryland State Police put anti-death penalty and anti-war activists in a federal terrorism database; a fusion center in Missouri thought that all third-party voters and Ron Paul supporters were a threat….”

Wikipedia quotes the following on the quality of management and personnel at DHS, a national scandal in itself:

“In July 2006, the Office of Personnel Management conducted a survey of federal employees in all 36 federal agencies on job satisfaction and how they felt their respective agency was headed. DHS was last or near to last in every category including;

– 33rd on the talent management index

– 35th on the leadership and knowledge management index

– 36th on the job satisfaction index

– 36th on the results-oriented performance culture index

The low scores were attributed to major concerns about basic supervision, management and leadership within the agency. Examples from the survey reveal most concerns are about promotion and pay increase based on merit, dealing with poor performance, rewarding creativity and innovation, leadership generating high levels of motivation in the workforce, recognition for doing a good job, lack of satisfaction with various component policies and procedures and lack of information about what is going on with the organization.”

Creating the perfect police state

The visible face of the totalitarian takeover of America is candidate Mitt Romney, sworn to start a world war for Israel, his backers, Sheldon Adelson, gambling boss of Las Vegas and China, the Koch Brothers and the Israel lobby, said to control America’s congress, certainly 100% of the Republican Party.

Gasoline pricing manipulation through terrorism

Gasoline pricing in the world is run by the Koch Brothers who manage the futures market. Fuel prices are unrelated to oil costs but rather manipulated to serve political interests of two Israeli-American billionaires with extremist views.

During the past two weeks, there have been multiple “accidents” in refineries and with pipelines. These have, in fact been terror attacks, cutting refinery output in the US significantly, blocking oil pipelines from the Middle East and inside the US.

None of this, and it is terrorism, has been reported. There is only one cause and that is tied to who benefits from economic problems in an election year, this being Mitt Romney and the Likudist faction in Israel that is advocating war with Iran, not fought by Israel but by the United States, of course.

Patterns

As with the mass shootings, be they Columbine years ago, Gabby Giffords at Tucson or so many others, the anthrax attacks now tied to our own government to the DC sniper, police and federal authorities have given out false press notices, sometimes showed up at crime scenes long after normal response times or may well have been complicit.

Nearly every terrorist act that supposedly occurs in the US involves law enforcement recruiting terrorists or carefully removing key suspects who were actually police officers involved.

The Oklahoma City bombing had several suspects disappear. The Detroit airport bombing attempt had witnesses report multiple arrests but no trials.

9/11 had nearly arrested, 2 on the George Washington Bridge who set off a truck bomb but disappeared the next day, people we suspect of being tied to law enforcement or “training groups” that are, in reality terrorists.

Terrorism is law enforcement

What careful analysis indicates is that the groups that are training our police are, if not exactly the same, are closely related to groups suspected of being terrorists themselves, providing support for terrorists in Africa and the Middle East.

Should our new police cars say?

“Protect and Serve
Trained by Terrorists
Big Brother is Watching”

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 8:42 am

Tags: constitution, domestic news, police state

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

Stifling religious expression has sunk to a new low at California’s Sonoma State University. According to the Liberty Institute, a Texas-based legal advocacy group, on two separate occasions a university official told Audrey Jarvis, a 19-year-old student working at the school’s freshman orientation, that she must remove or hide a cross necklace, explaining that the religious symbol might offend another student.

Jarvis, a liberal arts major, was working for the university’s Associated Students Production (ASP) organization, manning a student orientation fair, when the supervisor told her that the university system’s chancellor had a policy against wearing religious items, and said the cross necklace “might offend others, it might make incoming students feel unwelcome, or it might cause incoming students to feel that ASP was not an organization they should join,” recounted Liberty Institute.

But it didn’t just happen once. The supervisor approached Jarvis a second time, asking her to put the cross under her clothing or remove it – a suggestion that so angered the student that she left her job early.

Jarvis told Fox News, “My initial reaction was one of complete shock. I was thrown for a loop.” She added, “I believe as a Christian woman it is my prerogative to display my faith any way I like so long as it is not harming anyone else. I was very hurt and felt as if the university’s mission statement – which includes tolerance and inclusivity to all – was violated.”

Hiram Sasser, a Liberty Institute attorney who is working with Jarvis to resolve the issue, told Fox: “It’s amazing in this day of diversity and tolerance on university campuses that a university official would engage in this type of obvious religious discrimination.”

He added that it’s ironic “there are university officials out there who think that it’s okay to tell Christians to hide their faith, but would cringe if somebody said the same thing about hiding someone’s pride in whatever political or cultural affiliation they may have.”

Sasser said California law clearly indicates that “state employees may wear crosses while they are performing their duties as long as the wearing does not interfere with the employees’ duties or harm the employer’s business interests.”

As for the university, its PR department is doing damage control, with spokeswoman Susan Kashack acknowledging that the supervisor was “completely wrong” to ask Jarvis to remove her cross. “Someone who works here was concerned that the cross might be off-putting to students who are coming to campus for the first time,” she explained to Fox, but “it was absolutely an inappropriate action for him to make that request of her.”

Kashack emphasized that Sonoma State University’s president Ruben Arminana was “was very upset” about the incident, “and asked me to contact Miss Jarvis and give a profuse apology.”

Added the university spokeswoman: “Things like this don’t happen here. It’s very unusual. People here are very aware of discrimination. It’s possible that political correctness got out of hand.”

Republished with permission from: The New American

On July 8, 2013, 17 U.S. military veterans and their allies will stand trial after being arrested as they read the names of the fallen and laid flowers in their memory at New York City’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The NYPD leadership had an opportunity to safeguard the First Amendment protections of those gathered to mark 11 years of war and destruction in Afghanistan. Instead, the police chose to arrest 25 vets and supporters, charging them with violating a rarely enforced 10 pm curfew at the memorial. Their trial will hinge on whether their constitutional and international human rights to speech and assembly may be superceded by municipal park regulations.

On the evening of October 7, 2012, the veterans and their supporters gathered to condemn government lies and betrayals that precipitated wars where so many died. At 9 pm they began to read the names of the fallen. They gathered to respect those who died and the many more who were maimed in body and spirit and still suffer, as some of the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan veterans present that night still do.

The gathering, in keeping with the solemnity of the venue, was orderly and respectful, yet powerful, as Vietnam combat veterans like Bishop George Packard, Mike Hastie, Paul Appell, and others talked of the need to speak truth to power and expose the lies that send young men and women to kill and be killed in wars for profit and empire.

“I chose to travel 2000 miles to stand with my fellow Veterans For Peace in the cold rain on the night of October 7, 2012, because the effectiveness of the First Amendment is being chipped away at an increasing and alarming rate through the imposition of limits on the people’s exercise of their inalienable rights. We see coming to pass precisely the ‘abuse of its powers’ that the states feared would result from a strong federal government unfettered by these necessary restrictions.” –Major Ken Mayers, USMC Ret.

“We are watching our First Amendment rights recede into a deep darkness, to a place where those who speak out could be detained indefinitely without trial and tortured. We see the day when dissent becomes impossible and we know that the only way to keep our rights is to challenge the system while we still can.”–Dr. Margaret Flowers

“I stand in the place of my friends who were killed in Vietnam. I want to disrupt the collective unknowing of war by refusing to remain out of sight, out of mind.” –Vietnam combat veteran Paul Appell

 On that cold, rainy night the veterans and their allies demanded an immediate end to the brutal 11-year war in Afghanistan and an end to all U.S. wars of aggression. They were there to remember and honor the fallen and to stand up for their constitutional rights to assemble peacefully in a public place. If these rights are not upheld by the court, many of them say they will refuse to pay a fine, do community service, or acknowledge any wrongdoing and will do jail time if necessary to stand up for people’s right to assemble.

Veterans For Peace board member Tarak Kauff, also arrested that night, said, “Can you imagine if there were an independent-thinking judge who saw his or her duty to actually protect the Constitution, specifically, the First Amendment?  The prosecution reads the charges, describing the circumstances of our arrest. I can just picture the judge: ‘Wait, are you serious? These veterans were arrested while laying flowers at a veterans memorial? Were they disturbing the peace, desecrating property, using illegal substances?’ ‘No, your honor.’ ‘Then what in God’s name are they doing in this court? Have the police nothing better to do?’”

The trial will begin at 9:30 am in Jury 4, 100 Centre Street, Manhattan, and is expected to last for at least four days. The defendants are represented by National Lawyers Guild-NYC attorneys Diane Brody, Ellery Ireland, Martin Leahy, Vikrant Pawar, Martin Stolar, Jonathan Wallace, and Patricia Wright.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

When we occupied Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC, during the Autumn of 2011, we often marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill to express our many grievances. We were always accompanied by a large contingent of police officers and other members of the national security state, some obvious and others not so much. Along the way, we would pass the Newseum, which has the First Amendment engraved in large letters on the front of the building. We made it a habit to pause at the Newseum and read aloud in unison the words of the First Amendment. The reason for doing so was to let everyone know, including the security state, that we have the right to protest peacefully and that we were exercising that right.

We live in a time when there is much to protest. The government is dysfunctional, ruled by plutocrats who pass laws for their corporate friends that cause real harm and suffering for the people and ecological collapse of the planet. Many activists with whom we work recognize that the traditional tools used to effect change within the system — petitions, lobbying, electing supportive legislators or running for office — largely fail in the current political environment.

Our most effective option is strategic and militant, nonviolent protest in all of its many forms, from boycotts to rallies to hunger strikes. And it is our First Amendment right to use these tools. But rather than respecting and supporting our right to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of our grievances, the national security state and legislators are chipping away at our rights in more extreme ways than ever before.

Even our right to know what is being done in our name is disappearing. The White House and Congress are doing more in secret and are cracking down on those who reveal their actions. Whistleblowers are being charged under the Espionage Act and journalists are being spied upon.

It is up to the people to preserve our rights to dissent and to know the truth. Otherwise, they will continue to slip away. Every day in the US, people are taking action to hold onto these rights and they are inspiring others to do the same.

The Vague Definition of Crime

During the occupation of Freedom Plaza in 2011, we sometimes joked with law enforcement that the Rule of Law only applied to the 99%, not the 1%. The police knew this was more a truth than it was a joke.  Bankers who commit fraud and those who crashed the economy are simply fined and not prosecuted at all. Health insurance and pharmaceutical corporations are regularly fined for fraudulent behavior, more than any other industry. To most large corporations, these fines are simply a cost of doing business and wind up costing much less than what the fraudulent behavior reaps in profits.

Corporate executives are not even held accountable when their business practices result in massive deaths. An example is Warren Anderson, the former chair of Union Carbide during the Bhopal chemical disaster that poisoned over 500,000 people and killed thousands. He skipped bail in India and fled to the US. And he has not been returned despite warrants for his arrest issued by India.

On the flip-side, the Obama administration has been conducting a war on dissent. It appears that the security state can turn almost any behavior into a crime if a person is not a member of the elite. In fact, just a few days ago on June 27, a health care activist was arrested for writing a chalk message on a sidewalk during a protest against the governor for not expanding Medicaid to more Pennsylvanians under the federal health law. The charge was disorderly conduct for writing “a derogatory remark about the governor on the sidewalk.” The remark: “Corbett has health care, we should too.”

Since the Occupy movement rose up in 2011, a number of laws have been passed that are written vaguely and increase the power of the security state. In early 2012, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) passed by Congress contained a provision that loosened the definition of a “terrorist” to include anyone who has contact with Al Qaeda or an “associated organization,” and allowed indefinite detention without trial and extraordinary rendition of US citizens.

Around the same time, Occupy London was placed on the terrorist watch list by the London Police. And it was later learned, after a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request was granted, that the FBI was monitoring the Occupy movement in the US and in some papers referred to Occupy protests as “domestic terrorism.”

In fact, spying and infiltration were widespread in the Occupy movement. We wrote about it in a two-part series. The second article focused on how infiltration has been the norm in US political movements for the last 100 years.  Undercover police were exposed for their infiltration of Occupy in Chicago and Austin, no doubt two instances among many. FOIA requests documented FBI surveillance and infiltration, their entrapment strategy, and how the FBI coordinated the crackdown with local police, including, we discovered,  conference calls with mayors and police chiefs. Sometimes the closing down of encampments involved brutal police action. Often journalists were targeted as were even nurses and health care volunteers.

The involvement of national security agencies was broad. FOIA documents released to the Partnership for Civil Justice Foundation found that in addition to the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Protective Service were involved in nationwide monitoring of Occupy and central to the nationwide crackdown. Other documents show that the National Park Police were doing the same. (The CIA has so far refused to search its files in response to a FOIA request.) A report by law schools documented how the rights of occupiers were routinely violated. And a report covering many of these issues, “Dissent or Terror,” shows how counter-terrorism tools like fusion centers also worked with corporations to attack the Occupy Movement.

Now we’re seeing the same kind of tactics used against climate justice protesters. Ranchers who oppose the KXL pipeline for tar sands are being classified as terrorists, although aggressive targeting of environmentalists is not new.

Chris Hedges and a few colleagues are suing the Obama administration because a section of the 2012 NDAA could be interpreted to incriminate journalists who speak to members of Al Qaeda or other groups determined to be terrorists. In the initial case, Judge Katherine Forrest ruled that this NDAA section was unconstitutional. She placed a permanent injunction on the provision on a Friday afternoon last September, and Hedges’ lawyer was immediately notified that the decision would be appealed by the Obama administration. The emergency appeal occurred first thing on the following Monday morning. The stay was lifted and the Supreme Court refused an interim appeal.

Hedges explains that the administration’s appeal was sought on an emergency basis because it is already secretly using this NDAA provision and didn’t want to be held in contempt of court. The case is ongoing and Hedges expects that it will ultimately be heard before the Supreme Court. He writes that if we lose this struggle, the situation will be much more serious: “Once the state seizes this unchecked power, it will inevitably create a secret, lawless world of indiscriminate violence, terror and gulags. I lived under several military dictatorships during the two decades I was a foreign correspondent. I know the beast.”

Another law passed in 2012, the anti-Occupy Law, made it a more serious charge to protest in an area where a person is under the protection of the Secret Service or in a National Security Special Event. Ray McGovern, former CIA officer who gave the morning intelligence briefings to multiple presidents, says it is no coincidence that these laws were passed after the Occupy movement began. Congress members were concerned that in a mass uprising, the police may not protect them.

There are other signs that the security state is taking more steps to empower itself in the case of a mass uprising. The Pentagon recently gave itself the authority to respond to civil disturbances without even coordinating with local police. The national security state is also making arrangements with other nations in the case that domestic uprisings overwhelm the police and military and outside assistance is necessary.

Kevin Gosztola, who writes the blog “The Dissenter” on FireDogLake.com, has been following the activity of the national security state, including the case of three activists who traveled to Chicago for the NATO protests in May 2012. They were infiltrated by undercover police and arrested pre-emptively the day before the NATO protest. They are the first people to be charged under the state terrorism law passed in Illinois after 9/11.

Gosztola states that the pre-emptive arrests were meant to intimidate activists from expressing their First Amendment rights, and that it is not unusual for police to use statements that are taken out of context and pieced together from multiple conversations in their affidavits. Further, Gosztola writes that the law was written vaguely to give law enforcement “incredible latitude to go after people even if they only have a minor suspicion that those people could engage in terrorism.” He adds, “Coupled with the fact that law enforcement is using infiltrators or informants to push mentally unstable people, impoverished individuals or activists militant in their political beliefs to commit terrorist acts, it is easy for government to concoct terror cases that can be prosecuted.” Terrorism rhetoric was recently used to turn pacifists into terrorists.

Infiltration, spying and pre-emptive arrests are all tools used by the security state to squash dissent. In some cases they work to stifle First Amendment activity, but with unexpected consequences. Since 9/11, Muslims have been targeted by the FBI and other agencies. This has created a culture of fear and the knowledge that their rights don’t exist. Many Muslims are afraid to attend rallies, participate in religious activities or donate to charities.

This injustice to the Muslim community and the increasing reach of the security state affect all of us. They are affronts to our constitutional rights. Whether a person engages in activism or not, the rights to free speech and to dissent are foundations of democracy. The current political system is hurting all of us and disruption of its activities is necessary to force changes that will shift the present environmental and economic course. The real struggle for freedom is occurring right here within the United States.

Crackdown on Whistleblowers and the Media

President Obama’s administration is acting in unprecedented ways to stifle our right to know what our country is doing. Its attacks on whistleblowers and the press are creating a culture of fear to force compliance, facilitated by economic insecurity and high unemployment. At some point, this will backfire.

Throughout history, whistleblowers like Daniel Ellsberg and Karen Silkwood, who died mysteriously, have taken great personal risk to let the public know about lies, corruption and threats to public health and safety by government and corporations. Whistleblowers usually act out of a moral conscience and sense of responsibility to the public. Previously, leaks by whistleblowers led to government investigations such as “Watergate” and the Enron scandal.

However, since President Obama’s first inauguration, whistleblowers who act in the public interest are more likely to be intimidated, retaliated against and charged with crimes. Under Obama, the Espionage Act has been used against seven whistleblowers from Thomas Drake to Bradley Manning, and most recently, Edward Snowden. Prior to Obama, the Espionage Act had only been used three times in total.

Many recent whistleblowers tried to raise their concerns through internal channels before going public with information, e.g., Thomas Drake and his colleagues tried for seven months to work inside the NSA, Congress and courts but got nowhere. But rather than protecting the rights of whistleblowers, it is more likely that this approach will result in retaliation. The Government Accountability Project, which protects the rights of government whistleblowers, states that this is especially true for those in the intelligence community.

The Obama administration has taken the culture of “see something, say something” into government agencies, but not in a way that prevents fraud and corruption. Government employees are now required to report any colleagues who behave as if they may leak information and managers can be held responsible if they do not report “suspicious activity.” This is the “Insider Threat” program that treats leakers as spies who are aiding the enemy and extends all of the way down to those in the Peace Corps. There is even a course on the USDA website called “Treason 101.”

In this new culture of treating whistleblowers as enemies of the state, whistleblowers either need to leave the country entirely or remain anonymous in order to protect themselves. And, much to their own detriment, the mass media is complicit in promoting the idea of whistleblowers as unpatriotic. The Snowden case served as a prime example of indicating who in the media is a mouthpiece for the state and who represents the interests of the public.

Gosztola of the Dissenter criticizes the media who simply parrot official government statements rather than standing up to the government and questioning their behavior. The mass media have become so dominated by corporate power and ambition that they no longer question authority. Gosztola reminds the media that particularly in times of public dissent, their role is to question officials about issues that the public protests.

Glenn Greenwald, reflecting on four weeks in the middle of the NSA surveillance leak storm, notes how people in the corporate mass media express pride that they ask the government for permission before they publish documents; and how they are more than happy to publish leaks the government wants in the public. These acts demonstrate the media working for the government, not for the public interest.

Already, the mass media’s failure to understand the relevance of attacks by the national security state on another media outlet, Wikileaks, is coming back to bite them. The mass media refused to view Wikileaks as a legitimate media outlet and “went so far as to interpret the leaks as revealing desirable traits of US foreign policy making.” When Wikileaks was under attack by the US government, which blocked its bank accounts, destroyed the reputation of Julian Assange and threatened litigation, including a Grand Jury investigation of people associated with Wikileaks, the mass media went along with the attacks.

Now, the mass media in the US is starting to see that the national security state is not their friend. Recently Associated Press had its phone logs seized under the order of the Department of Justice and a top Washington reporter for Fox News, James Rosen, was followed and had personal emails seized by the FBI. Media outlets that are not compliant with the state risk consequences. Just this past week it was reported that the US Army blocked The Guardian on all of its networks.

The Obama administration is going to extremes to suppress information. All of these actions against whistleblowers and the media are attempts to maintain secrecy so the government can hide its crimes. At some level, though, the more the government cracks down, the more there are individuals who have the courage to push back and report the truth or blow the whistle. As Snowden said in responding to questions on The Guardian:

“Binney, Drake, Kiriakou and Manning are all examples of how overly harsh responses to public-interest whistleblowing only escalate the scale, scope and skill involved in future disclosures. Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrongdoing simply because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it. Instead, these draconian responses simply build better whistleblowers. If the Obama administration responds with an even harsher hand against me, they can be assured that they’ll soon find themselves facing an equally harsh public response.”

Assange made a similar point in a recent column on Wikileaks: “This isn’t a phenomenon that is going away. This is inevitable. And by trying to crush these young whistleblowers with espionage charges, the US government is taking on a generation, and that is a battle it is going to lose.”

Flexing Our Rights

Rights are like muscles; they only increase when they are used. To avoid further atrophy, many people are taking steps to preserve the First Amendment.

For example, as more people see the mass media for what it is, a mouthpiece for the plutocrats, independent and citizen media are rising to take its place. Independent media outlets are also working to fund more investigative reporting. And through social media, every person can now easily blog and share photos and videos of events. Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are fighting to preserve internet rights, which are essential to an independent media.

We should also encourage members of the mass media to challenge power and support them when they do. Greenwald said he was deeply inspired by Snowden’s courage and believes it will inspire others. Longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas was a tremendous example of a reporter who asked tough questions. More reporters like her are necessary for a functioning democracy.

There are also efforts to protect whistleblowers. The Government Accountability Project has taken up many prominent cases and was successful in defending Thomas Drake. Bradley Manning, who is on trial at present, is supported by the Bradley Manning Support Network, [Disclaimer: Kevin Zeese serves on the steering committee] which has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for his defense attorneys. Many volunteers attend his hearings wearing T-shirts that have the word “Truth” printed on them so Manning can see he is not alone. And volunteers are present at the trial to transcribe the proceedings, sketch courtroom scenes and hold rallies for Manning at the gates to Fort Meade, where the trial is taking place.

The reaction to the NSA leaks has built opposition to government surveillance. Already over 500,000 people have joined an effort to stop the spying at www.StopWatching.US, and more than 100 organizations have signed onto a letter calling for a Congressional investigation modeled on the Church Committee of the mid-70s.

And resistance is still strong in the United States. We document this everyday on PopularResistance.org. People are rising up to protect their rights to jobs at a living wage, affordable education, health care, housing, a clean environment and more. These are all important because not only do they expose the problems in our country, but they also inspire others to take action.

Some groups are using the courts to protect our rights, as Chris Hedges is doing to stop indefinite detention in the NDAA. Groups like the National Lawyers Guild, EFF, American Civil Liberties Union and Partnership for Civil Justice have filed suits on these issues or on behalf of protesters who have had their rights violated.

Members of Veterans for Peace and others are going on trial for a First Amendment event [Disclaimer: Margaret Flowers is a defendant in the case]. The action last October was designed as a “Paradox Protest,” which places the protesters in a win-win situation and those in power in a lose-lose position. Tarak Kauff of the Veterans for Peace Action Network described the action on our program, “Clearing the FOG Radio.”

The action stemmed from the arrest of Veterans in the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial Plaza in downtown New York City on May Day, 2012. Occupy Wall Street protesters marched to the plaza and planned to hold a general assembly there. Kauff describes the assembly as exactly what one would want to see in a democracy: people engaging in peaceful direct democracy in public. However, the response of the NYPD was to enforce a 10 PM curfew and order the crowd to disperse. The Veterans Peace Team was present and decided to remain in the plaza because the curfew was being enforced selectively, and they were arrested.

The Paradox Action occurred on October 7 on the 11th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan. Veterans and their allies held a ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial to make visible the human and environmental cost of war. There were speakers and musicians followed by a solemn reading of the names of New Yorkers who died in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan as flowers were placed in 11 vases.

At 10 PM, the NYPD showed up en masse to shut down the peaceful protest. Kauff spoke with the officers and explained that the ceremony was peaceful and respectful, that we had the right to honor those who died in war and that for veterans, war memories don’t conveniently shut down at 10 PM. Kauff was told by the police that “We don’t want to set an example for the Occupy movement [by allowing you to stay past the curfew].” Twenty-five veterans and allies were arrested for standing up for the Right to Assemble.

The trial will take place in New York City on July 8 through 10. It is seen as an important precedent to set in defense of the First Amendment because the curfew in the plaza is only enforced when groups assemble there to exercise their rights. Some of the defendants will refuse a guilty plea and if found guilty will not pay a fine or accept community service as a punishment. If the case is lost, it will be appealed.

Kauff, who is on a solidarity hunger strike with the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, states, “If people do not take a stand and resist publicly, the country will continue its slide into totalitarianism. The horror of Guantanamo is an example of what the country is becoming and why we must stand up for our rights. We will not accept punishment. We will not admit wrongdoing.”

Building Democracy at Home

Not everyone has the ability to take the risks involved in resistance actions to protect our rights, but everyone can support those who do. It is important to understand that the political process is dysfunctional and the country is sliding in a direction that hurts all of us. The tools that were traditionally used to effect change from the inside are no longer sufficient. Strategic resistance is a necessary tool to build real democracy within the United States.

As we have seen, the security state will go to great lengths to suppress real dissent. It will use infiltration, intimidation, spying, the courts and even violence to stop those who stand up for our rights and for truth. Through the mass media, the security state will use distraction and personal attacks to keep the focus off of the real issues.

At a time like this, solidarity is important. There is strength in unity. It will take a mass movement in the US to stop policies that harm people and the planet, further entrench corporate power and invade every aspect of our lives. We see this currently in countries like Turkey, Brazil and Egypt. In Brazil, the protests are actually working to force concessions by the government, partly because they have a more functional democracy.

In Brazil, it was an increase in bus fares that ignited a mass movement. In Turkey, it was the development of a public park. We cannot predict what will spark great unrest in the United States or when it will happen, but the conditions are ripe for it. And when it does occur, we are all going to need to exercise our rights, and if they are abused, use that abuse to expand the movement for real democracy.

You can listen to The First Amendment Right to Dissent with Kevin Gosztola and Tarak Kauff on Clearing The FOG.

Republished with permission from: Global Research

Morsi not qualified to lead Egyptians: Iran parl. official

A file photo of a massive protest rally against ousted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in Cairoâ„¢s Liberation Square

Republished with permission from: Press TV

Evo Morales at a press conference at U.N. headquarters in New York. (Photo: Mathieu Vaas/IPS)MONTEVIDEO/WASHINGTON – The suspicion that Bolivian President Evo Morales’ jet was carrying Edward Snowden, the former intelligence contractor who has become Washington´s public enemy number one, triggered an unprecedented international incident.

Four European countries — France, Italy, Spain and Portugal — denied Morales’ presidential jet permission to fly through their airspace on his way back from Moscow to La Paz.

Snowden, the former technical contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA) who released dozens of top secret documents proving that the U.S. government has been tapping global internet and phone systems on a massive scale, is in hiding in the Moscow airport.

“What this ultimately underscores is how seriously the U.S. regards this case.”

Morales’ aircraft was rerouted and forced to land in Austria, where it was stuck on the tarmac for 14 hours. The governments implicated in the incident brandished technical explanations, and after hours of heated negotiations, the presidential jet was allowed to take off again.

While it was grounded, the plane and its passengers were apparently subjected to some kind of inspection, the scope of which is not yet clear. But afterwards, Austria’s foreign minister, Michael Spindelegger, stated that there were only Bolivian citizens in the aircraft.

The incident violates international law, because aircraft carrying national leaders have diplomatic immunity. Bolivian diplomats complained at the United Nations that Morales had been “kidnapped” during the time he was grounded in Austria. And the indignation spread to other South American governments.

An extraordinary meeting of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) has been convened for Thursday in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba to discuss the issue.
Morales, who along with other presidents from the region was in Russia for an oil and gas conference, had expressed sympathy for Snowden’s plight. The whistleblower has been desperately seeking asylum in different countries since his passport was revoked and he was charged with espionage. In the last few days Snowden has applied for asylum in 21 countries. But as of yet he hasn’t received a response from any government.

Washington has not tried to conceal its efforts to block any attempt to offer asylum to the 30-year-old former employee of defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

But U.S. State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki largely evaded questions as to whether communications between the U.S. and the European countries which denied the airspace had led to the rerouting of Morales’ presidential jet. “Ask them,” she said.

She was only willing to acknowledge that U.S. officials had been in touch with “a broad range of countries” in recent days with regard to Snowden.

It is clear that some of those contacts bore fruit. After receiving a phone call from U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said that neither he nor officials in Quito had given authorisation for travel documents that the consul in London issued to Snowden.

The consul in question is in the Ecuadorean embassy in Britain, where Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks whistleblower website, has been living since June 2012. Assange was granted asylum by Ecuador in August 2012.

“While we still do not know what role the U.S. played (in rerouting the plane), it is hard to believe the U.S. did not exert pressure to ensure Snowden was not on the plane, as they apparently suspected,” Coletta Younger, senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), told IPS.

“It was a huge tactical blunder and a breach of diplomatic protocol (by whoever decided to deny the airspace). But it sent a strong message that whoever takes Snowden in will face serious repercussions from the U.S.,” she added.

“I think this could backfire. The Latin Americans are so outraged that it could facilitate the decision to take Snowden in,” Younger said.

Michael Shifter, president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank, said “It seems either the U.S. had something to do (with the decision to deny the airspace) or it was done out of a sense of solidarity with the U.S.

It is possible they made the decision alone based on a recognition of how serious this issue is to the U.S.”

Shifter said that normally such a drastic step would indicate a state of war. He described it as “An extreme overreaction…Whatever one thinks about Snowden or Morales, it seems like this was disrespectful of international law.”

He also said the incident “looks terrible in political terms.“It was out of proportion. It reflects a patronising, paternalistic mindset that stronger countries can bully weaker ones.”

But he disagreed with Younger that it would facilitate a Latin American refuge for Snowden. “What this ultimately underscores is how seriously the U.S. regards this case,” he said.

“It may be tempting to take Snowden in in order to needle the U.S., but the consequences of that will have to be taken into consideration. The U.S., for all its weaknesses, is still the U.S.,” he said.

© 2013 IPS North America

Republished with permission from: Common Dreams

Introduction

Folker Hellmeyer, chief analyst of the Landesbank of Bremen, has some essential questions and suggestions vis-à-vis the current NSA & Co. revelations. He says: “I wish heartily for the United States a return to the values of the U.S. Constitution and respect towards third parties.”

The following article is a compilation of recent Forex Reports, that Folker Hellmeyer writes every weekday on behalf of the Landesbank of Bremen. The translation from German into English for LarsSchall.com was personally authorized by Mr. Hellmeyer.

Folker Hellmeyer, born 1961 in Hamburg, is a banking professional who started his career as foreign exchange trader with Deutsche Bank in Hamburg (1984 — 1987) and London (1988 — 1989). From 1990 to 1995, he worked as an OTC broker in the interbank foreign exchange market at Bierbaum & Co. GmbH & Co. OHG. In 1995, he went to Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen GZ (Helaba) in Frankfurt as a senior analyst. Since April 2002, he has been the chief analyst at Bremer Landesbank, where he is responsible for the Foreign Exchange and Money Market Sales department.

In his book “Endlich Klartext” (“At last, clear text”), published in 2008 by Finanzbuch Verlag in Munich, Hellmeyer takes a look behind the scenes of our financial system. His critical analysis provides the reader with entertaining and informative insight into the U.S. financial system and its political background. The functions of the free market, the policy of the central and commercial banks and the role of rating agencies are critically examined and reviewed.

To what extent can one still believe economic data from the United States? How can one look beyond the veil of political correctness? What is the aim of the Plunge Protection Team? These are some of his questions. Hellmeyer is one of a very few senior bankers in Germany who doesn’t grow tired of reminding the public: “First the free market dies, then democracy dies.”

Lars Schall

The issue of cyber war against the euro zone and Germany, which is a form of “economic and financial war,” remains unchanged and increasingly at the forefront and superimposes rightly all other economic issues. Thus, we can’t get out of doing an evaluation.

We emphasize that the time for naivety and political correctness has expired on these facts.

The fig leaf “defense against terrorism” may apply for telephone, Google, Twitter, or private SMS.

The new situation is that politics was the target of spying.

The factual situation of economic espionage is already known to the cyber-commissioner of the federal government and therefore to the federal government. Cyber war is a facet of economic and financial war. A war is about power, the transaction medium of power is money.

We ask questions:

– Was there access to positioning data (and stops for positions) of European banks (chance of market manipulation with full insurance)?

– What does the information gathering mean for the crisis management in the deficit crisis in the euro zone (aggressive speculation from NY against the euro zone)?

– Was there knowledge of M & A plans and other relevant business goals and equivalent biddings? What does this mean for the competitiveness of U.S. investment banks in relation to non-US, investment banks and potential speculative positioning (insider information gathering) without consequences?

– Were our research results, patents or methods therefore known to the U.S.?

– How likely is the non-disclosure of such information in the context of cooperation / conformity in the “Working Group on Financial Markets,” in which the U.S. banking aristocracy is working closely together with the U.S. Treasury, the central bank and the regulators (USA Corp.)?

A thought experiment is helpful for a sober evaluation:

Imagine if we [in Germany] had spied on the U.S. in the same way the U.S. and UK spy on the euro zone.

Could you imagine that the U.S. would be “happy” about the offer of a quiet diplomatic solution after the attack to gain advantage without further consequences, or would this then have very different consequences?

How significant is the financial and economic damage in the euro zone resulting from [US] political and economic espionage?

Will we give this subject, that is closely related to the requirement for politics to avert damage to the German people, adequate attention?

The necessary measures from this outrageous constellation point in the direction of the recommendations of the Federation of the medium-sized IT Industry (keyword: “Internet Airbus”), since we can no longer rely on the U.S. infrastructure in the internet. That would be by the way a large program of growth for the euro area within the fields of infrastructure, software and hardware.

Because of national interest of the U.S., companies based in the United States may be forced to support intelligence operations of the United States.

What does that really mean for Deutsche Telekom and other on-site German and European companies that deal with sensitive data?

Emancipation from dependence in the IT sector is essential if there is to be a “level playing field” and if we want to live in the euro zone for the coming generations in self-determination and freedom.

We always campaigned time and again for the euro zone against the background of the achieved successes and the anticipated reform.

This attack on our political and economic integrity emphasizes the need for a common continental European commencement, the basic premise of cohesion of the euro zone.

Smallness is fatal in such disputes. The fate of small countries, that were in the crosshairs of U.S. interests or still are, provides sufficient example.

The political response by the federal government to the U.S. spying against people, politics and the economy is very subdued. Unquestionably, a cool head is adequate to avoid unnecessary escalation that could be emotionally satisfying, but would be objectively counterproductive.

One should not sacrifice the economic upturn, that is increasingly measurable in the data, in a cheap way by arrogance and emotion, despite the significant problem with the U.S.

However, this spying is about the elementary basics of the continental European society and its future viability.

This applies both to our political integrity as well to the protection of our capital stock, upon which the prosperity of Germany and the euro zone lasts. Undue interference must be prevented in the future by any means. Trust is basically good. Trust has been broken, however, massively by the U.S. and the UK.

Germany is a “junior partner” which is defined as an attack target of the United States. If Germany as the heavyweight of the euro zone is defined in such a way, then the euro zone is defined that way, too.

This sheds once again a special light on the reactions from the U.S. (banks, rating agencies, media) during the crisis and from the point of view of information gathering. We recall that regularly positive political developments in the euro zone market were counteracted by immediate unexpected downgrades by rating agencies. We don’t want to elaborate today on the role of some professors in this.

This scandal against this background requires not only political action. It requires the establishment of an independent infrastructure, because trust can be restored verbally. The emphasis is on verbally! In the future control is better — i.e. independence from U.S. and UK structures. Who does not walk this path political and structural (infrastructure, software and hardware), is acting at least grossly negligent. This program would be a sustainable growth driver for continental Europe. Yes, the path would be expensive at first. But that was also the case with Airbus, wasn’t it?

The current scandal has enormous importance. Either the world is evolving towards a “level playing field” or subordination is on the agenda, in which the determining power would act on a very one-sided dominance.

Mr. Snowden is becoming lonely. The willingness to help this individual, that supplied valuable and pioneering insights for continental Europe and the world in connection to securing the political and economic integrity and sovereignty, is unincisive.

The political pressure from the U.S. towards the rest of the world in all of this is “respectable”. Sometimes one has the impression that European politics reluctantly shows appropriate responses to the biggest scandal of the last 60 years that was caused by the public knowledge given by Mr. Snowden.

We have previously discussed at this point the issue of “national interest” in the United States (e.g. exemption of banks from financial reporting requirements because of national interest). The topic “Working Group on Financial Markets,” and in this the context the conformity of the financial sector (banking aristocracy), the Treasury, the central bank and the supervisory authorities, is still not in the focus of the media and the markets. We are surprised…

This constellation allows in connection with the possible exemptions from accounting obligations massive intervention in financial markets, which may be quite suitable to force destabilizing effects in third countries (e.g. commodity-producing countries). The topic of economic and financial war comes to mind here. We refer to an article from the reputable internet magazine Politico from 09/04/2009 under the heading “Pentagon prepares for economic warfare” (link: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0409/21053.html).

The actuality is thereby also given. Cyclical commodity markets (in some areas — such as platinum, copper — in production deficits), with the exception of oil (which price is necessary for the production of U.S. shale oil?), are under massive selling pressure, although economic data surprises in a latent positive way…

It is historically unique that precious metals are under dramatic selling pressure in the futures markets, while the physical market is tight and the stock of physical precious metals in the deposits of the exchanges drains massively, while U.S. banks in the current battle festival have for the first time in 12 years established long positions in the gold futures market.

The phrase “because of national interest” is used in the U.S. at least since G.W. Bush inflationary, and U.S. law and the U.S. Constitution are bypassed or even overridden. Thus, the arbitrariness of the rule of law is finally exposed. Constitutionality is the basis of democracy. Does this raise questions about the “democratic constitution” of the United States?

Even China withdraws now from international sea cargo shipping with Iran due to pressure from the U.S. and the national legislation of the United States. One could get the impression that U.S. national jurisprudence dominates globally.

Does this raise questions about sovereignty?

The issue of subordination comes to mind. Subordination to a U.S. regime,

– that withholds itself from any international jurisprudence (The Hague, Hamburg),

– that demonstrable spreads falsehoods in front of the United Nations in order to wage a war of aggression (Iraq),

– that allowed methods of torture under the exclusion of the rule of law,

– that makes the differences in legal status between Americans and foreigners a subject of discussion (discrimination).

We are talking about a government that downplays the political espionage against continental Europe and thereby hides the economic espionage from the discussion.

A regime that does not only let the NSA act as a foreign intelligence service, but a variety of services abroad in various forms, whose tasks and action circles are not even discussed.

We also talk of US-based NGOs, that are looking for freedom and democracy deficits all over the world and are not allowed to get active in the United States despite dramatic inconsistencies (the last U.S. presidential elections) … “Food for thought!”

I emphasize at this point that it’s not about to put the case for anti-Americanism. Companions know that I supported the role and also the policy of the U.S. extensively until the end of the ‘90s. This is about sober criticism.

Since 1997 — 2004, the U.S. was changed from an income-driven economy into an economy, whose economic performance is determined by political control of asset prices.

The purpose of the principle of the free market is in substantial parts connected to this (established under Clinton, Rubin, Summers, Greenspan). This is a core cause of all crises that we currently encounter. Unfortunately, many professors hide this elementary theme since 1997.

It is indispensable for a democrat to address deficits that arise to the liberal order, self-determination and humanism, especially if the activities of the United States are compromising these values at our place.

Even more so a responsible citizen is demanded to protect our constitution and constitutional order. This allows no tolerance concerning the current activities of the U.S.

I wish heartily for the United States a return to the values of the U.S. Constitution and respect towards third parties.

Translated from German by Lars Schall

Republished with permission from: Global Research

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Part-time applications drop amid soaring tuition fees in UK

Republished with permission from: Press TV

dailymail.co.uk
July 4, 2013

A college student is suing the NYPD claiming that police officers unnecessarily stopped on the street and searched her, including looking inside her underwear.

Samantha Rosenbaum, 22, from Essex County, NJ, claims that she was stopped for no apparent reason last year as she stopped to stroke a cat in Williamsburg.

She made the allegations in a Brooklyn federal court lawsuit filed this week concerning the July 17 incident.

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 8:09 am

Tags: constitution, domestic news, police state

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Republished with permission from: Infowars

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/boys_in_custody_and_the_women_who_abuse_them_20130704/

Posted on Jul 4, 2013

Republished with permission from: TruthDig

jpost.com
July 4, 2013

Russia is worried by a lack of progress on organising new talks between Iran and six world powers on Tehran’s nuclear programme, a senior Russian diplomat said on Thursday, despite the victory of a relative moderate in Iran’s presidential election.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov made clear that a diplomatic push to arrange a new round of talks, launched after Hassan Rouhani won the June 14 election, had produced no breakthrough.

“There is no agreement now on when and where the next round will be. That worries us,” Ryabkov told Interfax news agency.

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This article was posted: Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 7:48 am

Tags: foreign affairs, war