The US government is putting on a full-court press to track down, arrest and prosecute Edward Snowden for blowing the whistle on the National Security Agency’s massive collection of data on phone calls by Americans and Internet use by foreigners.

US Secretary of State John Kerry urged Russia to “do the right thing,” block Snowden from leaving Moscow, and instead turn him over to the United States for prosecution. Talking to reporters in New Delhi, India, Kerry said, “We think it is very important in terms of our relationship. We think it is very important in terms of rule of law. There are important standards.”

But Marjorie Cohn, professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, said there is another rule of law, international law, that may give the 30-year-old systems analyst a path to political asylum. Cohn said Snowden could cite “a well-founded fear of persecution” based on the mistreatment of fellow whistleblower Bradley Manning. 

DB: Why don’t you begin with an overview of the case, and how you see it.

MC: Edward Snowden revealed a secret program of massive spying on Americans and people all around the world and turned them [documents] over to the Guardian and Washington Post. Then he went to Hong Kong, which is where he was until he left [on Sunday]. The US government is going to charge him under the Espionage Act with crimes that could garner him 30 years, or even life in prison if they decide to add extra charges.

The Obama administration has gone after whistleblowers in an unprecedented manner, filing charges against eight people under the Espionage Act, more than twice all prior presidents combined. Most recently, the firestorm around Mr. Snowden is about whether he will be extradited back to the US to stand trial on these charges. He was in Hong Kong, left and stopped in Moscow. There have been reports that he might go to Ecuador where he applied for political asylum and he did confer with officials from the Ecuadoran government when he was in Russia.

He could be extradited, sent back to the US for trial, either by Russia or any country he passes through on the way to Ecuador. Or Ecuador could extradite him back to the US Russia and the US do not have an extradition treaty, but the US has extradited seven Russian prisoners in the last two years. A country can refuse extradition when the offense is political in nature. He would be charged under the Espionage Act and espionage is a classic political act that gives rise to a refusal of extradition, so they could refuse extradition on those grounds.

There’s also a provision in the Convention against Torture called non-refoulement that forbids extradition of a person to a country where there are substantial grounds to believe he would be in danger of being tortured. Since Bradley Manning, another prominent whistleblower, was tortured by being held in solitary confinement for nine months, a country could conclude Edward Snowden might be subjected to the same fate, and deny extradition on that ground.

Also a country has an obligation to refuse extradition when it would violate fundamental rights. The right to be free from torture and cruel treatment is a fundamental right. Under the refugee convention, Ecuador or Iceland, where he’s applied for asylum as well, or any country, could grant Snowden political asylum if he can show he has a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of political opinion in the US He probably could make that showing in one of those countries. At this point it’s very fluid.

The Johannesburg Principles of national security, freedom of expression and access to information, which were issued in 1996 provide, “No person may be punished on national security grounds for disclosure of information if the public interest in knowing the information outweighs the harm from the disclosure.” It’s important to be talking about that. What did Edward Snowden do? Did he harm the national security?

There have been claims that terrorist attacks were thwarted by the massive dragnet surveillance Snowden exposed, but Senators [Mark] Udall and [Ron] Wyden, who have been on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and looking at this classified information for years, say that’s not true. The intelligence that is the most useful for foiling these plots is traditional intelligence and not a dragnet surveillance where they listen in to people’s phone calls and track what kinds of places they visit on the internet.

Even if they are not listening in on the content of the phone calls or reading the content of the messages, the fact that they are profiling, coming up with so-called patterns based upon the websites people visit or the people they call could be a tremendous invasion of privacy and lead to a lot of false intelligence.

DB: The scuttlebutt in the press today talks about how Snowden’s lack of character is reflected by his choice of going to one of the US enemies, Ecuador, Cuba or Russia.

MC: Quite frankly, if the US didn’t have such an antagonistic and ill-advised policy against countries like Venezuela and Cuba, even Ecuador, then these countries would probably be extraditing him back to the United States. But when the United States pursues the kinds of policies it does in Latin America, it alienates progressive governments, like Ecuador, which has a democratic, not tyrannical government.

Let’s keep in mind that In the 70s and 80s, the US was supporting all the tyrannical countries in Latin America that were kidnapping, disappearing, torturing and murdering people. But it’s hard to blame these governments for not being willing to jump to whatever the US says. According to Michael Ratner, a lawyer for Julian Assange, the Obama administration is bullying countries all over the world so they can get Ed Snowden rendered to the US where he can be prosecuted.

Certainly the US government is known for its bullying. It has bullied countries that signed the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court [ICC] — bullied them into not turning Americans over to the court if Americans are found in those countries. The Bush administration certainly bullied countries about the ICC. Even the Obama administration has, if not by bullying, influenced Spain to drop charges under universal jurisdiction against the six Bush torture lawyers. That could be a form of bullying.

The US has been notorious for bullying countries, especially smaller countries, for years — they are blackmailed into believing they will lose foreign assistance from the US if they don’t do what the US wants. When Americans are asked in the polls about what Edward Snowden did, and they think about it personally — do we want the government monitoring our personal communications — they are very much against these massive spying programs and not so critical of Edward Snowden.

It’s important that the independent media bring what is happening to the people so they are not just left with sound bites from the corporate media that will paint Snowden as a traitor because he violated national security that keeps us safe from terrorist attacks. We heard that all through the Bush administration and it certainly didn’t make us any safer than we would have been otherwise. It probably makes us less safe since there’s so much hatred for the US since we invaded and killed so many people in Iraq and Afghanistan. The extensive torture, Guantanamo, the drone strikes, which have been stepped up during the Obama administration, have all created much more hatred against the United States.

DB: Is there any precedent, any case you could make that this man acted for the greater good of society?

MC: A precedent is Dan Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers, which revealed what was going on in the Vietnam War and helped ultimately end that war. You could say that was for the greater good. Also, Bradley Manning leaked evidence of war crimes, the collateral murder video, among other things, which showed commission of war crimes as defined by the Geneva Conventions, by people in the US Army. Yes, there is precedent for this.

DB: Do you think the US is going to figure out a way to get him? Would they be breaking international law if they sent a pick-up team to get him, wherever he was?

MC: Yes, they would. He needs very tight security wherever he is because it’s not beyond belief to think some thugs could kidnap him and render him to the US

DB: Is there any legal justification for the US to do that?

MC: No, but somebody could do it and say they weren’t working for the government. The government could say he’s a traitor and we need to bring him to justice in our country and he is being shielded.

DB: So he can be kidnapped and left somewhere the US could get him? The US could say, “We didn’t get him. We found him here.”

MC: That’s possible.

Dennis J Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom. You can access the audio archives at www.flashpoints.net.

Republished with permission from:: Counterpunch

There are reoccurring themes in Chicana/o history such as the Sleeping Giant that echo the aspirations and frustrations of a community. This expression says that somehow we are going to wake up as a people and become a political force, and consequently get equal opportunities.

The Sleeping Giant is a sort of modern day version of the Rip Van Winkle tale. It was popularized in the 60s because for years Mexican Americans were the nation’s second largest minority group, but they were invisible to policy makers who did not take them into account.

The origin is unknown, but I have heard some say that it once referred to volcanoes that slept until the day they suddenly erupted. I searched the web for an answer; however, the results were far from conclusive.

An interesting version is that it was first spoken by a Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto  during the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. In a 1970 film “Tora! Tora! Tora!” the admiral says “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve,” referring Americans reaction to the attack.

During the 1960s, the expression was popular among Mexican American leaders who took ownership of the narrative. Although I cannot pin down when and where I first heard it, the best explanation is that Chicanas/os first used it in Crystal City, Texas during a 1963 electoral victory celebration.

Hundreds of Mexican Americans gathered near a statue of Popeye the Sailor, and celebrated the takeover of the city council. Although Mexican Americans outnumbered whites by two to one, the gringos had controlled all five seats on the Crystal City Council.

As a consequence of a highly successful voter registration drive Mexican Americans won control of the council. Albert Fuentes, who led the voter registration campaign, reportedly declared, “We have done the impossible. If we can do it in Crystal City, we can do it all over Texas. We can awaken the sleeping giant.”  The victory raised hopes nationally that the system would finally pay attention to Mexicans.

As chignon as the expression sounds, Mexican Americans were probably not the first to use the Sleeping Giant metaphor.  A better explanation is that it is the minority’s version of a political epiphany. It leaves unanswered the question of what we were going to do once we awoke from the nightmare.

Another allegory that is frequently used by Chicanas/os was the crab mentality, which referred to the problems Mexicans had in organizing a movement. Dr. Ernesto Galarza once said, referring to the infighting amongst Chicana/o leaders, “I don’t know why it is so hard to organize Mexicans, there are plenty to go around,” adding “you take 50 and someone else takes on 50 and so on.”

Invariably the crab mentality is used as an explanation for a lack of unity.

This stereotype is not exclusive to Mexicans. It has been popular among most minorities for some time. My cursory research says that the phrase was first popular among Filipinos, who attributed it to writer Ninotchka Rosca who made reference to crabs in a bucket. Rosca describes a way of thinking, which he summarizes as “if I can’t have it, neither can you,” using the metaphor of crabs in a pot.

When I was a kid my father would use the expression envidiosos (envious people)) or celosos (jealous people). In conversations, the elders would say “No tengo enemigos simplemente los envidiosos me odian por como soy” (I do not have enemies only the jealous people hate me for what I am).

The moral of the story is that individually the crabs could easily escape from the pot and escape their collective misery, but instead, they grabbed at each other and prevented anyone from escaping ensuring that they remained in the bucket. Likewise humans “pull down” or minimize the importance of any member who achieves success beyond the others.

It was a theme in Oscar Lewis’ The Children Of Sanchez. When the protagonist Jesús Sánchez, living with his family in a Mexico City ghetto, wins the lottery and prepares to move out of it, his former neighbors and friends shun the family.

The metaphor has been used frequently in novels, describing workers or small towns. It criticizes short-sighted and non-constructive thinking versus unity.  It generalizes that there are individuals or communities attempting to improve themselves, but that neighbors and co-workers work against each other. This behavior also occurs between ethnic and racial groups such as competition between Chicanas/o and African-Americans who sometimes fight each other over crumbs instead of fighting those in power.

Dr. José Angel Gutiérrez used the crab metaphor in his book A Gringo Manual on How to Handle Mexicans Americans (1975) where he took a tongue and cheek swipe at those breeding internal dissention. Columnist Frank Del Olmo in 1989 wrote in the Los Angeles Times “Latino Power and the Last Cliche: Accomplishment Overtakes the Crab-in-a-Bucket Fable.”

Del Olmo rebutted the stereotype and the criticism of Latino efforts at unity because “It presumes that Mexican-Americans can’t work together (or Puerto Ricans and other Latinos),” can’t work together.” He adds that “As far back as the 1920s, Mexicans who sought refuge here during the Mexican Revolution organized themselves into self-help groups centered on their community churches. Some even formed labor unions to organize Mexican workers on the farms and in the mines of the Southwest. If those movements failed to achieve all their potential, it was usually because employers, farmers and other powerful interests did all they could to repress them.” Del Olmo called the story of the Mexican crab simplistic.

During my over 50 plus years of activism I have found both of these expressions a bit irritating not so much because they lack some validity, but because they always seem to be betting on the come. The Sleeping Giant presumes that numbers and unity will solve all of our problems without considering the growing class gap in our community. It also assumes that the right way is to work within the system.

The Sleeping Giant has problems. Recently some of my colleagues on the left have resurrected the National Question assuming that conditions are the same as they were in the 19^th century. I consider this trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. There are so many more variables today such as the differences within the disparate Latino groups, class and race to name a few.

In any event the Sleeping Giant is anesthetizing. My feeling is that the only thing that has anchored us is the Immigrant Question, and even then we are divided on strategy with some of us blindly cheerleading for President Barack Obama. The issue of education seems to have gotten away from us, and we fail to articulate how the state has manipulated us into thinking that we have won when we get a favorable court ruling, forgetting that this can be erased by the Supremes in white robes. In other words, we are grateful for the crumbs.

The crab allegory is probably the one with the longest life. The cellos and the pettiness seem to have increased especially among small inbreeding groups within academe. Within Chicana/o academic circles some people are jealous because someone else publishes a book. It is all too common for those doing nothing to take pot shots at those who are on top thinking that in some way it will make them their equal and give them a slice of fame.

This is not to say that we should not criticize — criticism is the basis for correction. But the criticism should be constructive offering alternatives and a path to a conversation. Too often people sit around in academe labeling themselves progressives and doing nothing about building a foundation so people can escape the bucket.

RODOLFO ACUÑA, a professor emeritus at California State University Northridge, has published 20 books and over 200 public and scholarly articles. He is the founding chair of the first Chicano Studies Dept which today offers 166 sections per semester in Chicano Studies. His history book Occupied America has been banned in Arizona. In solidarity with Mexican Americans in Tucson, he has organized fundraisers and support groups to ground zero and written over two dozen articles exposing efforts there to nullify the U.S. Constitution.

Republished with permission from:: Counterpunch

“I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful manner, by saying no.”

— James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence in an interview with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell

The question: is the Lesser offender  or the Greater offender  the Greater )ffender? It depends on one’s perspective. If the listener relies on spokesmen for the Greater (aka the government) then it is clear that the Lesser is the greater, if not indeed, the only offender. If one considers the Constitution and listens to the non-governmental commentators, the answer is less clear. It becomes even less clear when in its rush to condemn the Lesser, the Greater has been forced to acknowledge that it has lied and misrepresented things to those whom it governs. The Greater uses bluster and strong words to convince the listener that all virtue is found in its corner and none in the corner of the Lesser.

The Greater is not content to rail against its citizens who question its motives. They rail against foreign powers that fail to recognize the evils the Greater sees in the Lesser and threaten to jeopardize relations with those powers if they fail to accept the Greater’s demands with respect to Edward Snowden. Edward Snowden is, of course, the man who has forced the United States government to come clean about its activities that invade the privacy of citizen and non-citizen alike. And Mr. Snowden has not only forced the United States government to admit that it has lied to its people, it has caused the government to make blustery pronouncements to foreign countries. His actions have generated millions of words of commentary about the government’s actions.

In his daily briefing on June 24, White House Press Secretary, Jay Carney, expressed the administration’s outrage that China had not arrested Mr. Snowden after he had been formally charged by the United States with three felonies. Mr. Carney said that letting Mr. Snowden leave China for Moscow would have “a negative impact on the U.S. China relationship.” Mr. Carney failed to comment on the fact that Mr. Snowden’s disclosures have had a negative impact on the relationship many U.S. citizens have with their government. On June 17, 2013, President Obama told Charlie Rose that the cyber-hacking of U.S. companies and government agencies by China that was disclosed in a report early in 2013, could lead to a deterioration of relations between the two powers. He said that the Chinese understand “this can adversely affect the fundamentals of the US-China relationship.” Those comments were made before the South China Morning Post reported that MR. Snowden said the NSA has hacked major telecommunication companies in China, attacked network backbones at Tsinghua University and hacked computers at the Hong Kong headquarters of Pacnet.

Thanks to Mr. Snowden we now know that the National Security Agency has lied to the Congress and to the American people about its surveillance activities. We might have learned about it many years ago but for the law that prohibits those who know the government may be breaking the law from telling the people they represent that their government is breaking the law. As The Guardian reported, for at least two years Senators Mark Udall and Ron Wyden have been publicly stating that the U.S. government is relying on “secret legal interpretations” to claim surveillance powers that are so broad that Americans would be “stunned” were they to learn of them. Since the violations of law were classified the Senators could not let their constituents know what they are. In  a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder 2012 they said: “We believe that most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court] have interpreted section 215 of the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows.”

In a letter to Gen. Keith Alexander, the head of the National Security Agency, Sen. Udall accused the agency of providing false information in a fact sheet it gave members of Congress about its spying programs.  The letter says the fact sheet has “significant inaccuracies.” Mr. Udall could not say what part of the fact sheet is inaccurate since that would “divulge classified information.” However, Mr. Udall says, “In our judgment this inaccuracy is significant, as it portrays protections for American’s privacy as being significantly stronger than they actually are. We urge you to correct this statement as soon as possible. (The Fact sheet was pulled by the agency.)

We now know that the NSA is collecting telephone call metadata on millions of Verizon customers. That contradicts Gen. Alexander who told Fox News in 2012 that the agency “does not ‘hold data’ on U.S. citizens. In a speech at the Reuters Cybersecurity Summit he said: “The great irony is we’re the only ones not spying on the American people.” It was General Alexander who told Congress that over 50 Terrorist Plots were thwarted thanks to the programs that he and his colleagues said didn’t exist. Citizens can decide for themselves whether or not to believe him.

What Senators Udall and Wyden thought citizens should know but could not disclose we now know. Not because of our elected representatives but because of a man now charged as a criminal. Go figure.

Christopher Brauchli is a lawyer living in Boulder, Colorado. He can be emailed at brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu.

Republished with permission from:: Counterpunch

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) attends a meeting in Tel Aviv on June 2, 2013.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_wonderful_american_world_of_informers_and_agents_provocateurs_20130628/

Posted on Jun 28, 2013

Republished with permission from:: TruthDig

I should unsubscribe to Organizing for Action (OFA)–a group supporting the election of Democrats, but I won’t, because I’m mining data from the obscenely insincere. The emails open with a clever ploy, use of the familiar, my given name. It’s almost intimate. Some are signed “Barack”. Here’s one, minus a few sentences:

Missy —

My administration is taking steps to cut carbon pollution, prepare our nation for the unavoidable impact of climate change, and put America’s best and brightest to work to solve this issue on a global scale.

One thing we know is we’ll face a well-organized and well-financed opposition by the special interests that profit from keeping things the way they are – and there are members of Congress who fundamentally deny the science on this issue.

I need to know you’ll fight alongside me. Say you will. [Subliminal, using the title of a love song.]

Over the next few months and years, I’m going to need the millions of OFA supporters who understand that we have a responsibility to future generations to fight climate change to join me, and be a force of change in your communities.

We owe it to our children and grandchildren to take action – and now is the time.

Today, I’m here to tell you I am committed to doing my part.

Say you’ll do yours:

Thanks,

Barack

This deserves only an “oh, please.” But I have to challenge, because many “progressives” are applauding the recent climate speech.

And Barack’s “…we’ll face a well-organized and well-financed opposition by the special interests that profit from keeping things the way they are…” is maddening. As if he ever obstructs these profiteers. And what about those who don’t deny the science, yet fail to change the status quo?

Tossing the “children and grandchildren” card is exasperating when Barack’s consigned to the young a future grimmer than dismal. His climate plan is less ado about something, a gift to the special interests for whom he’s expressed disdain. And any time he says “children” and “future” I immediately think about the consequences of his domestic and foreign policies.

In pledging to do his part, Barack implies he’ll nurture our ecosystem, yet his loyalty is to the fossil fuel industry. His words speak a different language than his actions.

The next message, from the Executive Director of OFA, Jon Garson, is sent on Barack’s behalf. Again, I’ve deleted some sentences, but here’s most of it:

Missy —

I love this:

President Obama is going to meet three supporters backstage at an event next month.

If you’re picked, you’ll get flown out for free to meet him – and you can even bring a guest.

Think of how happy you’ll make the loved one you pick to join you – and the photos you’ll be showing off to your friends and family for years to come of the experiences you’ve had as part of the movement for a progressive agenda for the nation.

Wow, I want to be selected. I have so many peace friends who’d like a face-to-face encounter with President Obama. Maybe, I’d invite A. as my guest. After reading one of my articles, he emailed. During an exchange, he wrote, “Current update on my Home country”–followed by:

In Baluchistan province of Pakistan, today the terrorists have blown up the museum-grade residence of father of the nation Muhammad Ali Jinnah; after few hours a bus full of female students of a women university was blown up in Quetta; and one and a half hour latter a tertiary hospital’s emergency ward was blown up where the injured female students were brought for treatment. Such is the state Pakistan is living after it has allied with the US in War on terror in Afghanistan.

Yes, A. described a single day. One day among many days and nights of terror–carnage countenanced and implemented by Barack Obama in countries across five continents, now.

Oh, my, I see two new messages from Jon Carson, neither of which needs to be opened. One of the subject lines is:
“The Supreme Court’s ruling this morning made history.”

I’m happy for the euphoric whose civil rights are recognized. I hope they’re inspired to end injustice in every area.

But really, this is our government deflecting, declaring DOMA unconstitutional while gutting the Voting Rights Act. As the NSA rapes our privacy. And GET this: A Democrat, one whose wife has received Gen. Wesley Clark’s endorsement for the 2016 presidential run, signed DOMA into law.

Again, I should unsubscribe to these OFA emails. But I can’t. They’re fascinating examples of hypocrisy. Like love notes from a charlatan.

Missy Beattie has written for National Public Radio and Nashville Life Magazine. She was an instructor of memoirs writing at Johns Hopkins’ Osher Lifelong Learning Institute in Baltimore. Email: missybeat@gmail.com.

Republished with permission from:: Counterpunch

A tear should be shed, though keep in the singular. Australia’s first female Prime Minister Julia Gillard and probably last for some time, is no more. Elected by unelected officials, she was knifed by the same individuals who encouraged the knifing of her rival, the now re-elected Kevin Rudd. Promoted by individuals an electorate would scarce recognise over an individual loathed for his personality and his dislike for factions, Australian politics stutters to its farcical climax come September.

The Australian opposition always termed them the factional bosses, the deranged nits of the Australian Labor Party who preferred favours to democracy. But the unstable mind is a terrible punishment, and the Australian public have found that their new Prime Minister is their ex-Prime Minister who was deposed in favour of the ex-Prime Minister. One leader (Rudd) could campaign but not govern; the other (Gillard) govern but not campaign. The bifurcation of the ALP’s leadership has been its source of torment and doom. Tribalism remains it source of misery.

On the basis of this recent conduct, there is much to be said that Australian politics in its current form should be abolished, its politicians either promoted to the Sylvan idyll (the equivalent of a cobwebbed House of Lords) or banished to some imitation of Devil’s Island on terms of hard labour. Better still, given its tardiness in protecting its citizens, the Australian government should petition for Australia to become a U.S. protectorate.

A note on the not so dearly departed. Gillard was always an extension of other people’s programs, their designs laced with factionalism, a person who might have done better had the blade remained in the scabbard. Her skills as a negotiator were never promoted, advertised or encouraged. A minority government is no mean feat, and gathering the views of independents is a rare skill in the Westminster system.

But every triumph of the Gillard government became an bumbling error. The mining tax did not yield the amount it should have. The mining companies always had the better accountants. The issue of refugees arriving by boat never went way — here, the Gillard government decided that it should go one better than the conservative Howard government and excise the entire mainland in abject defiance. Evidently, its lawyers aren’t much better than the accountants.

Gillard’s supporters, who were as reliable as Politburo hacks on the take, are now in retreat. Peter Garrett, not the best musician to gyrate in rock history, was a poor minister and has announced his retirement as Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth. “I believe I have always acted in the best interests of the Party and the Government. I was a front-man who chose to be a team player and make a difference in politics.” A band is a not a party but don’t tell Garrett, one of the least able politicians since governors began being appointed by the imperial authorities.

Similarly, the spineless ex-deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan, a person who always managed to make sound economic management look like an act of massive mismanagement, is handing in his resignation. “Politics is a tough business. The experience either makes you bitter or better. I choose the latter.” Standard rot follows: the ALP knows how to help working people, much is “on the line” and so forth. Rudd’s return will be Labor’s return.

Gillard herself suggested, not very convincingly, that Labor MPs “don’t lack the guts, don’t lack the fortitude, don’t lack the resilience to go out there and argue Labor’s case.” Even, it seems, when it is fictional. Regarding the nature of the opinion polls, Gillard also suggested that her colleagues had shown “spine in the face of that pressure.”

So who do we now have leading the ALP and the Australian nation? Rudd in his second bloom, a person deemed a mood freak, a micromanaging fascist with religious inclinations and a punishing God. He calls staff members late at night wishing them to provide him with material. He sits on decisions. He panics in the headlights, the nerd of nerds who finds paralysis at the end of analysis.

The current shambles of a government, this paraplegic sham, this mangled show, is what the Australian electorate has before it come September. Do you elect the chronically insane, or a fresh set of independent political figures who regard policy above faction, service above patronage? At this point in time, the Opposition leader Tony Abbott has all the cards, though his own credentials on stability are questioned. He is the wolf hiding in not so convincing sheep’s clothing.

There is no better time now than to seek an independent, elected leader of the country, one above the party drones who fear the demise of their feathered posts. An executive separate from Queen and the party machine, an end to the permanent regime of caretaker governments. The Westminster system needs reform. Now wouldn’t that be novel?

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

With 77,000 people, Camden has one public library left, and in a city where Walt Whitman spent 19 years and is buried, there are exactly two bookstores, a Barnes and Noble serving Rutgers Camden students, and, not too far away, La Unique African American Books and Cultural Center, with The Master Game, The New World Order, The Unseen Hand and Say It Like Obama in its window. Camden has no hotel, and only one downtown bar, The Sixth Street Lounge. Hank’s closed in 2010 after half a century in business. Now, if you can barely drink in the heart of any American city, no matter how tiny, you know it’s seriously messed up.

Just off downtown, there’s also Off Broadway, however. The first time I entered, four years ago, I noticed “NO PROFANITIES” on the wall, yet the very stern barkeep had this T-shirt on, “PRACTICE SAFE SEX. GO FUCK YOURSELF.” You’re finally home, I thought. On that occasion, I was able to make the acquaintance of Jamaal, a 65-year-old former math teacher. A jazz lover, he told me his favorite concert ever was Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers at NYC’s Blue Note. We talked about Mickey Roker, who used to be the house drummer at Philly’s Ortlieb’s. I once had a cassette of Roker keeping time behind Dizzy and Ray Brown, but it was erased by an embittered, life-hating middle-aged Korean art student I had lent the tape to. I should be awarded a peace prize, or some chintzy ribbon at least, for not strangling this motherfucker. A bottle of Rolling Rock in Off Broadway was, and still is, only $1.50. Jamaal informed me, “This place is all right. It has an older crowd. You can go home at the end of the night.”

“What’s the alternative?” I asked.

“Someone beats you up or shoots you.”

“I’d rather just go home.”

“Me too.”

In Camden, I had seen Wynton Marsalis at a free concert by the river. Like Baltimore, Camden has a safe tourist section, with a much smaller, grayer fish version of the celebrated aquarium. People who come to this protected enclave don’t need to see the real Camden, not that they want to. They can even arrive and leave via a ferry from Philly.

Lying outside Camden’s tiny bullet-free zone, the Walt Whitman House, on Martin Luther King Blvd, gets almost no visitors, not that Americans are flocking to pay homage to their writers. Even during its days, this “coop” or “shanty,” in Whitman’s own words, was called “the worst house and the worst situated,” and Camden was thriving back then, with its best decades still ahead. By the 1940’s, Camden would become an industrial powerhouse, with many factories employing blacks and whites, and the largest shipyard in the world.

“Yo, Chris Rock, I’m at the Walt Whitman House.”

“Run!”

In 2011, Ken Rose wanted to interview me by phone on July 4th, so I decided to do it in front of the Whitman House. On the day this country was born, I would not be in Philly, its birthplace, but Camden, its prototypical morgue. A habitually lawless government has no business celebrating the Constitution, and with this country being deliberately tortured and drown by its rulers, accompanied by flag-waving acquiescence of deranged voters, each 4th of July has turned into a sick and sad spectacle. Across the street was the Camden County Jail, and on the next block, ABC Bails Bond. Before Ken called, some guy shuffled up and said he was the caretaker of the Whitman home, but as we chattered, I soon realized he didn’t even know who Walt Whitman was. He referred to Whitman in the present tense, as in, “He owns this entire row, including the parking lot right here.” Predictably, he wanted me to give him some change.

Yes, some Camden folks will ask you for cash, but many will also offer you cigarettes, dope or sex. Here, illicit dealing is king. Also in 2011, I met Abdul, who was selling body oils, perfumes, knit hats and boxer’s shorts from a table set up in front of a fried chicken joint. After peddling stuff for 7 years, business was getting worse and worse, so Abdul was planning on moving to Senegal, where he had a wife. Years ago, he had been busted for drugs, a wrong conviction, he claimed, and locked up for 3 1/2 years. In prison, he converted to Islam. Released, he visited Senegal. As he walked into a Western Union, the lady behind the counter exclaimed, “You’re my husband! I saw you in a dream.”

His wife was 40-years old, and “doesn’t have a bad thought,” Abdul said. “She can’t be any better!” Since she didn’t want to come to the States, he would go to her. He was having a house built over there for $20,000. He sent her boxes of old clothes to sell. “American clothes are popular in Senegal,” he explained. “Even used clothes.”

“Where do you get old clothes? Where do you buy them?”

“I don’t buy them. I get them from my relatives!”

In 2012, I met another Black Muslim man, 38-ish, who also sold on the sidewalk, in his case socks from a wheeled cart. Across the street was the ruins of the Carnegie Library, so I said, “That was a beautiful building once!”

“I hear they’re gonna fix it up.”

“Really?! But the city is broke. Camden is broke.”

“Camden is broke?”

“Yeah, man, Camden is broke. Philly is broke. The whole country is broke! Didn’t you hear about all the cops they laid off?”

“They got money.” He then read from the inscription on the building. “Nineteen-O-four. Man, that building is old. How old is that? Thirty, forty years?”

“It was built in nineteen-O-four, so it’s over a hundred-years-old.”

“Really?”

He told me about a cop who had given him a ticket for selling on the street, “The judge will throw it out, though, because I was sitting in a restaurant when he busted me.”

“Yeah, but you’ll still have to waste your time in court. What an asshole! Doesn’t he have better things to do than to bust people trying to make a living? This city is so fucked up and he’s busting you, and you’re not hurting anybody.”

“There is a lot of complaints about this guy.”

“Is he an older guy?”

“No, a young cop, a young, white cop.”

Whoever this cop was, he’s gone, because Camden has laid off its entire police force. That’s right, all 270 cops who survived previous layoffs were let go in April of 2013, though 50 were immediately hired by the County Police that’s now in charge of keeping Camden, um, safe. Announcing this restructuring, the mayor said, “We cannot sit back and allow our children and families to experience another 2012.” Or another 2011, 2010 or 2009, etc., for year in, year out, this post-industrial city ranks as one of the deadliest in America. With its cops trimmed and shuffled, little has changed on Camden’s streets, though there’s a mobile observation tower across from the bus terminal. Inside that box is an anxious man with his head rotating nonstop, or a dozing schmuck, or no one at all, but you wouldn’t know, would you? An instant panopticon, it is sprouting up everywhere, from theme park parking lots to your next mass protest. The Guardian Angels also made a cameo appearance in Camden, but have wisely disappeared. Unarmed, they’d stand an excellent chance of being peeled off the sidewalk, then rolled, posthaste, into Cooper Hospital, Camden’s one world class institution. Come to Camden, where you can be cut up or expire with distinction! World class hands will stitch you up!

“Work here. Play here. Live here,” shout the LIVE CAMDEN billboards, but until recently Baltimore also declared itself, “The Greatest City in America,” and Milpitas, whom most people have never heard of, drapes banners all over its blink-and-miss downtown, trumpeting, “MILPITAS A Great American City.” Whatever. What is Juarez’ slogan, I wonder? Or Kabul’s? Speaking of Cooper, I must tell you about Paul Matthews Young, whom I met in 2012 at the Broadway train stop. On a plate glass window, this 50-ish man had taped his New Jersey ID, social security card and about eight sheets of paper showing his “Moneterial Earning Assessment.” It wasn’t clear what he was trying to convey, to whom, or if it was some kind of protest. When he told me had 18 children, I asked, “With how many women?”

“None.”

“What do you mean none?!”

“I had them by myself.”

He said his 18 kids were born microscopic from the tip of his penis. The doctors at Cooper had something to do with this, but I couldn’t get him to explain fully the procedure beyond the fact that Paul had to pleasure himself quite energetically.

Hearing Paul’s story gave you that old, most generic notion? Now that you’ve got your cheap, discount sox made in China, you want some flesh also? Are you, by chance, versed in gonorrhea? You speak syphilis? Can you spell AIDS? It’s not so much a carnal need, you say, but simply an ethereal desire to assist, or rather, nudge up, the local economy? See her, that’s Angela. She looks about 14, but she might be as old as 17. Walking unsteadily, her eyes are practically closed, but she can see enough to tell that you’re not serious. She’ll keep walking because she has no time to lose. Each day, she can easily go through five or six bags of dope, plus some powder for variety, plus she has to eat, too, and maybe down a few cans of Steel Reserve to flush that lousy Chinese food, bought from Yuk’s, yes, that’s really the name, at 827 S. Broadway. I’m not making anything up. Why would I? No one knows anything about Angela, not even her best friend. Thirty-three-year-old Michelle regularly gives Angela food and dope, but Angela still won’t say nothing about herself, and don’t you give me that shit about her being too drugged to remember, because on one level or another, none of us ever forgets anything.

I won’t forget walking with Michelle when she said, “That’s my baby’s daddy,” and she pointed to some guy across the street. Squinting, the dude was probably thinking, “What’s my side piece doing with that Chink (or fuckhead, or asshole)?” You know, anything but “gentleman” or “Asian American,” per the New York Times stylistic guidelines. To think is already to compose, and thus to dissimulate and cover up, and to write is to further distort, nearly always, what we pretend to think, but writing, paradoxically, can be used to hint at the rawness beneath all this culture, this domestication, this farce, this composition. This half-assed expose almost never happens, however. Maybe it has never happened. Looking hazy, dude kept squinting as if he had a hard time recognizing his lay even.

“It’s Rashid’s birthday!” Michelle shouted.

“Huh? What?”

“Rashid! It’s Rashid’s birthday today!”

Showing no emotion, no smile, no grimace, dude gave Michelle one final squint, then kept walking.

“He doesn’t remember his son’s name?” I chuckled.

“No, he remembers. Lamon’s just a little out of it today.”

“How old is Rashid?”

“Eight! He’s eight-years-old!”

“And he stays with you?”

“No, with my mom.”

“So your mom is not so bad after all.”

“She might as well do something for him, since she didn’t do shit for me!”

Though Michelle is one-quarter Okinawan, it’s hard to see any Asianness on her white face. She was mostly raised by her Japanese grandma, but at 16, she moved to Camden. Already a coke head, she got hooked on heroin at 19, thanks to her junkie uncle. Unable to pay for her daily treat, she started to trick, “I’ve been raped and beaten. Look,” she opened her mouth, “these are dentures. I don’t like to go with young black guys. They’re fucked up! There are, like, nine guys who go around beating up girls.”

“Just for the hell of it?”

“Yeah, just for the hell of it. This is Camden!”

“So what are you going to do? What’s your next move?”

“I’d like to get into rehab, maybe go to Florida.”

“What’s in Florida?”

“I dunno. There’s a good rehab place in Florida. My sister told me about it. I need to get out of Camden, that’s for sure.”

Her pale arms showed purple needle marks, and so did the tops of her hands. Her veins have collapsed. A blue headed pin pierced her upper lip, a large hoop dangled from one ear, and her hair had been dyed a burnt siena or, more likely, was just a red wig. It was a very hot day, yet she was draped in a charcoal colored hoodie, and her faded blue tank top had been rendered lumpy by cheap, ill fitting bra. For someone living rough for so long, Michelle still appeared fresh, so I said, “You know, you don’t even look 33-years-old. You actually look younger!”

“You think so? I used to be beautiful.” She pulled two ID’s from her cloth sack, showed them to me.

Holding one up against her face, I pronounced, “No, I think you actually look better now, but you better get the fuck out of Camden soon.”

She smiled. Her dentures were newish, for they weren’t too yellow. Maybe she had just gotten punched? Michelle then volunteered that Lamon may be pissed because she had been seen with another guy.

“Some guy you like? Some guy you love?”

“It does get lonely out here… Hey, you want to hear something weird? Just last night, this one girl got so fucked up, she took her clothes off and ran down the street.”

The same night, 20-year-old De’quan Rodgers was shot dead, and another young man, 19-years-old, was found with multiple bullet wounds. About three hours before I chatted with Michelle, three more men were perforated. Shootings are nearly daily occurrences here, but a young naked woman running down the street is goofy enough to be remarked upon, if only for the next 24 hours or so.

All over town, there are RIP messages spray-painted onto walls, near where a loved one has died, whether targeted or hit by stray slugs. Sunrise, sunset. Sunrise, sunset. You live and talk much shit until Jesus, Allah, Bruce Lee or Liberace text you, “Kum home, losr.” You strut about and blather beaucoup merde until Glock, SKS or Bersa Thunger tap you on the shoulder and whisper, “Hiya!” Even as you crawl on all fours, sightless and toothless, with your liver, spleen and entrails hanging out, it’s still too early to call it a night. Is it last call already? On a memorial for Izzy and Cunt, someone has scrawled, “Heaven is where we go but hell is where we live.” On shop windows and doors are flyers begging for information on Camden’s disappeared. Some have come to buy drugs, never to be seen again. Some were just strolling to the bodega or the Chinese joint’s bulletproof window. Yuk’s, it’s so yummy!

Sorry, man, all you wanted was a beer and here I am dragging you down with talks of bullets, blood, gurneys, scalpels, needles and more blood, so much blood, blood geysers, showers of blood, so let’s head straight into Off Broadway, without further delay. As if to negate the chaos outside, this dump has so many rules, dude, as in:

NO T-SHIRTS OR VEST

NO HATS TURNED AROUND BACKWARDS

NO SCARVES

NO HOODS OR SKI CAPS

NO BAGGY PANTS

ALL TEE-SHIRTS OF ANY COLOR

MUST HAVE LOGO’S THAT ARE VISIBLE

MUST BE NAVEL HIGH

LOGO MUST BE ON YOUR

CHEST OR BACK

PLEASE DO NOT YELL OR SHOUT

ACROSS THE BAR

THANK YOU

ATTENTION BAR PATRONS

PLEASE DO NOT STAND

ON CHAIR RAIL

PLEASE PLEASE ANYONE CAUGHT TOUCHING

TV WILL BAR YOURSELF PERMANENTLY

ANYONE TOUCHING APPLIANCES BARRED

YOURSELF NO EXCEPTIONS

EMPLOYESS HAVE THE RIGHT TO CHECK

BATHROOMS AT ALL TIME

And, of course:

BE AWARE

THESE PREMISES ARE UNDER 24 HOUR VIDEO

SURVEILLANCE INSIDE & OUT

Well, I’m glad I have a dress shirt on, and no pantaloons, and I’ll do my best not to get touchy feely with that television. Watching a news story of five guys stealing 17 Rolexes after smashing its display case, the barflies whoop with astonishment and delight, but they are blasé about a school shooting simulation. As I eat a sad cheesesteak, with its dispirited meat, cheese and bread, bits of conversation drift to me.

“Yes, there was this girl born without a rectum, and she’s alive still. They haven’t fixed her yet, but they will.”

“You never had possum hash?”

“No, I’m a city boy. I don’t know nothing about that. My cousins in North Carolina might, though.”

“Possum is sweet. It’s an all right meat. And muskrat is OK too. You ought to know what’s edible, and what’s not, because it might come in handy one day.”

“No, ma’am, I’m happy with my chicken and my steak, thank you. I don’t need no squirrel, no rabbit, no raccoon, no possum. Why should I bother about any of that, when I can just go to the store?”

Surrounded by rules, we aren’t any safer, for a dickhead or two can just come in to make everyone lie on the ground, then relieve us of wallets and purses. Most patrons are bunched up at the far end, however, so they’ll have a better chance to see what’s what should shit happens. (Sign on a Camden wall, “If you believe shit happens, park here.”) Several of these lushes are probably packing.

Three Beyonce tunes in a row tell me it’s time to get the fuck home. Soon I’ll stagger into the dusk, into a half feral city of aimless men and women dwelling in rotting row houses, abandoned shells shrouded by vines and shrubs, or tents, like those clustering by the freeway, across from the long-shuttered Sears and beyond a billboard pitching $5,000 Yurman watches to passing motorists. Living apart in a squalid tent down a dirt path blocked by plywood, branches and lumber, ex factory worker Beasto can choose between bacon, hot dog or pork chop, all stored unrefrigerated in a sack of rice, and all reeking, of course. Fifty-seven, he’s been away from Puerto Rico 43 years. Meanwhile, junkie Tina has left her tent, cleaned herself up and reconciled with her mom, so of course, of course, a cheerful respite, or recovery, if you will, is temporarily possible, within the larger framework of tempered hope, outright disappointment and, naturally, unmitigated horror. Staggering on, I will pass by Cooper, where wizardly doctors can give each of us a cleaner, fresher asshole, to pump up our always suspect vanity and confidence, or I might run into lovely Michelle or Angela, for they will still be out there. All night long, she’ll sleepwalk from one john to another, just so she can score and score, until she finally disappears.

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.

Republished with permission from:: Counterpunch

Political Washington is in a fit over the Snowden affair. It is little disturbed by PRISM, Tempera and related abuses against the Republic. Therein lies the unhappy reality of American democracy today. The ferocity of the assault on Snowden and his sympathizers suggests more a collective nervous breakdown among our elites than it does any serious deliberation on what has happened and what we have learned. Indeed, the very purpose of these massive surveillance systems is obscure — other than the repeated reference to ‘securing’ America. From whom — exactly? Defanged terrorist organizations, the Zeta drug cartel (core leaders trained at Fort Bragg), international pedophilia networks of the non-Vatican variety? All we get as answers are fulminations.

With blood in their eyes, Senators Feinstein, Schumer, Graham et al demand a reckoning — by which they mean Snowden’s brutal incarceration a la Manning followed by a speedy conviction for treason. A juridical lynching. The Obama administration joins in the angry tirade and directs its fury abroad, too — at Russia’s Vladimir Putin who is threatened with retaliation so dire as to be left to the imagination, at Hong Kong & the PRC. On the latter, there is necessarily a measure of restraint since the world’s Numero Uno could not survive financially intact for an hour were Beijing to dump just a small fraction of the trillion + dollars it has stashed away. Mutual Assured Destruction.

There is a touch of madness in all this. For the well-being of the United States is in no significant way jeopardized by the substance of Snowden’s revelations — mutterings about “irreversible damage” from General Clapper, General Alexander, Secretary Hagel, and the White House notwithstanding.  Let’s look beyond the storm of rhetoric at the far more temperate reality. First of all, the United States has no enemies out there who are in a position to do us grievous harm — other than by nuclear arsenals which we have lived with for 60 years and which are totally unaffected by NSA spying. That is one. Nobody with a smidgeon of sense conceives of a plot by any major power against the integrity of the country, with or without assistance from residents in the United States who are targeted by these surveillance programs.

As for terrorism, it is a diffuse danger long since degraded to a “disturbance” in the international weather with little potential to strengthen into something menacing. That is two. Besides, what is the logic of upending the Constitution out of the abstract fear of another Boston bomber when we managed to cope with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union without resort to such extreme measures? There was a lot of huffing-and-puffing about “at least 50 plots” foiled thanks to PRISM by Alexander and others. All we got was the referencing of a couple of instances that were of such insignificance as to make the assertion appear ludicrous.*

FBI Director Robert Mueller, testifying before Congress, had the effrontery of presenting as an example of an alleged plot supposedly thwarted the instance of some Somalis in Los Angeles sending $8,500 to a group in Somalia allegedly associated with al-Shabaab — a rag-tag local outfit fighting its own internal civil war and little interested in the United States. This is what we get for $83 billion per annum and an assault on our constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties?

The most “sophisticated” response comes from dutiful backers of the Obama presidency who claim that the White House stands as the last bastion against the legions of Tea Partiers who will sweep away all restraint were there to be another 9/11. Geoffrey Stone, former Dean at the University of Chicago and Obama confidant, has offered this scenario as grounds for keeping the surveillance state intact — with a very few minor modifications. He deserves to be quoted at length:

“what Snowden has revealed is information about ongoing programs, which, we’re told, are extremely important to the national security, and we’re told that the revelation of those programs makes them far less efficient. That’s a very serious–potentially very serious harm to the nation (Bold added)….

 You not only have to protect civil liberties, you also have to protect against terrorism, because what will destroy civil liberties in this country more effectively than anything else is another 9/11 attack. And if the government is not careful about that, and if we have more attacks like that, you can be sure that the kind of things the government is doing now are going to be regarded as small potatoes compared to what would happen in the future. So it’s very complicated, asking what’s the best way to protect civil liberties in the United States.” (Democracy Now June 12, 2013)

Stone makes these assertions as if it were uncontested truth when, in fact, he is parroting White House talking points that have no evidential basis. He is either unaware of these facts or blithely ignores them.

The Stone thesis rests on three highly dubious premises. First, it ascribes to al-Qaidi capabilities that simply do not exist — as all disinterested specialists agree. There simply is no 9/11 or any approximation of it lurking over the horizon. Second, there is no persuasive case to be made that PRISM and related programs are an effective means for identifying and countering a serious conjectured threat. That is not the way good counter-intelligence works. Third, Stone expresses an attitude that plays fast and loose with constitutional guarantees. He, and his fellow self-styled “realists” — like the President himself, ascribe to the right-wing crackpots as embodied by the Tea Party a political clout which they do not possess. (Fact: A majority of Americans actually think that Snowden’s action was worthwhile). Moreover, to the extent that the American public is susceptible to demagogic exploitation of their fears, that condition is due in large measure to the Obama White House’s own campaign of stoking those fears with baseless claims of menacing threats against the United States. The efforts of people like Stone should be directed at persuading the President and his intimate counselors of the imperative need to convey two critical messages: America is not in grave danger; it is the weak and unpatriotic who are willing to sacrifice in a fit of panic the essence of the political compact that makes us who we are. Recommending that we curtail our liberties out of an expedient calculation that there is not the will to defend it is a craven approach that, sadly, bespeaks an attitude that pervades a large part of our political establishment.

Gross failures of probity, will and conviction are drastically weakening Washington’s grip on reality. Its denizens are participants in a theatre of the absurd that is beyond the emotional capacity of our political class to recognize. That is the tragedy. There are strong, legitimate grounds to conclude that these phenomena do not yield their full meaning to conventional political or organizational analysis. The dismaying truth is that we are in the realm of psychopathology.

This warped public discourse is most clearly seen in yet another program, to be executed government-wide, that the Obama White House has been pressing; it has been exposed in secret documents published by the McClatchy newspapers.  This Insider Threat Program calls for a draconian set of measures that foresees fellow employees as well as managers monitoring the behavior of personnel for signs that they might be inclined as some point in the future to leak material — classified or not — to unauthorized persons. The draft proposals go so far as to demand that managers punish those who balk at snitching on their co-workers. “Wreakers” we might call them — in line with the old Stalinist nomenclature for those who showing insufficient revolutionary zeal for “building Communism.”

Even the Social Security Administration and the Peace Corps are slated to be subject to this draconian control regime.  Leaks to the media are equated with espionage; “hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States,” thunders a June 1, 2012 Defense Department strategy memo on the program. That sort of thinking is already manifest in Attorney General Eric Holder’s written statement that FOX reporter could be indicted as a co-conspirator because he wrote a story based on a conversation with a State Department officer that included nothing of a classified nature. By these standards, Edward Snowden indeed is a threat to the nation. If the program is implemented as planned, we will be heralding the arrival of 1984 — albeit a few decades behind schedule.

The move toward a establishing a Big Brother state alien to all American tradition and practice is a historic turning-point. Our ostrich-like hiding from this bleak truth is a crucial element in the equation that is making it possible. America’s supposed public servants are transforming themselves into self-proclaimed guardians — with neither cause nor justification. Obviously, there are deep-seated insecurities at play — as well as raw political ambition and careerist aspirations. Secrecy — blanket secrecy, ruthlessly enforced — therefore becomes a compulsion. Snowden is a threat to those elements of our political class obsessed with acquiring the insignia of rank that come with success in lodging oneself in the upper echelons of officialdom. His very courage exposes their self-serving conformity. At the same time, it challenges the control that secrecy endows them with. Control creates feelings of empowerment — the sense of power being more important to fragile personalities than its actual exercise.

What is being concealed is more than the domestic spy apparatus itself. Also concealed are the distortions and untruths about what these systems can and cannot do. As noted above, the value of Mass Data Mining for legitimate purposes of intelligence is greatly exaggerated. There are glaring discrepancies between what theoretically is possible and what we actually accomplish. Don’t we have enough examples of failure re OBL, the Taliban leader cum grocer who fooled Petraeus, Benghazi, etc. to raise doubts about these forecasts of governmental omniscience and latent omnipotence? From a civil liberties perspective, the best thing we have going for us is incompetence — some rooted in human frailties, some rooted in institutions, some rooted in the disconnect between technology and the limited minds that currently direct it.

The Clappers, Alexanders, Holders, etc. are small bore thinkers who possess a small capacity for major political enterprise. In this context, that is reassuring — on balance. By contrast, if there were a Markus Wolf among them, one should be far more worried — Wolf being the East German master spy who for twenty years pitched a perfect game against the West Germans, the U.S., Britain and everyone else in the West. Excited fascination with technology can distort our interpretation of the spying/surveillance question. Think of this: neither the Nazis nor the Bolsheviks needed more than rudimentary technology to put in place and to operate a totalitarian system. It was a fixed dogma, a draconian police apparatus and a remarkably disciplined corps of ruthless leaders that enabled Hitler and Stalin to achieve a level of total suppression.

Today, not only is it obvious that persons with such ambition and traits thankfully do not exist in the United States, but — beyond that obvious fact — grand schemes of any sort are alien to just about anyone among our political elites Those who will be in position to exploit the surveillance state that is taking shape are small minded men of petty ambition. Their gratification comes mainly from the sense of power of having all this capability and information at their disposal — not using it systematically to do something diabolical. Of course, they will continue to persecute and prosecute anyone who either exposes their secret project or who highlights the discomforting truth that it serves no important purpose whatsoever.

My main points are these. One, I see little evidence that MOST of the officials involved have any goal beyond creating and maintaining the system, i.e. no plans for its full exploitation for an enduring political purpose. Abuse, of course, is possible — and likely in individual cases — but nothing systematic. Two, the technical design may be worthy of a Markus Wolf but not the overall political plan — which, to my mind, simply does not now exist. Wolf was a dedicated Communist who used all his talent to advance the cause of the DDR/USSR/ & world Communism. He would have been single-minded and brutal in using PRISM etc toward these ends. What are our current officials aiming at? Supposedly. American security — whatever that means. But they have neither a defined tangible enemy nor an embracing scheme.

Three, one way to understand these people’s psychology is to think of the Masons of yore coming to power and operating such an apparatus. Their goal? Exclusivity, status, secret rituals — all with an overlay of dedication to preserving the sanctity of vague principles. Frankly, at the end of the day I sense that the thinking (such as it is — or, better, sentiment) of Clapper, Alexander. Holder, Obama, et al centers on deriving a deep satisfaction from being something special and doing something noble even as they can’t define with any precision what tangibly that actually is.

Of course, the Masons were much better at safeguarding their secrets of the Inner Sanctum. The NSA Guardians had one Secret so big that it takes one million persons with Top Secret security clearances to keep it oiled and lubed. That is akin to advertising access to the Ark of the Covenant on E-Bay.  So fixated were they on probing everyone else’s secrets that they ended up making exposure of their Holiest of Holies inevitable. That can be called hubris — or, we can use the less flattering ‘s’ word.

The very fact that the systems are being created with no ulterior purpose or even any definable concrete objectives in mind means that success or failure is immaterial. It’s playing the game and fondling the machinery that counts.

The key question is not how best to collect great masses of raw data; it is what you do with information once you have it. I cite in this regard: Operation Barbarossa, Crete, Iran 1979 and the Chinese moves across the Yalu into North Korea. In all those cases, the requisite information was available but ignored. The same holds for 9/11 where the FBI had two field reports of suspicious persons taking fly lessons which were shelved — the reports’ information was obtained the old-fashioned way. The record suggests that most ‘intelligence’ failures are actually failures of intelligence.

Let’s also remind ourselves that the gravest threat to the well-being of the United States over the past decade came from “Wall Street.” Some people at least knew all the shenanigans that were going on and their implications. The Fed was warned of the housing bubble’s potential menace in 2006. The actual tapes of the Open Market Committee meeting at which these concerns were raised are available to the public. Governors, led by Ben Bernanke, can be heard laughing at the ‘ridiculous’ idea of a bubble.

Electronic Data Mining of communications is conceptually an enlarged version of network analysis employed to establish patterns of social interaction — that’s all. Only direct knowledge of the particulars enables purposeful action. We should have learned that lesson from Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen. Otherwise, you get the counter-productive ‘signature strikes,’ mass detentions and a false presumption of actually accomplishing something other than shooting oneself in the foot.

Michael Brenner is a Professor of International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.

Republished with permission from:: Counterpunch

Israeli warplanes and drones have violated Lebanonâ„¢s airspace and flown over several areas of the country.

The Lebanese Army Command Guidance Directorate said two Israeli drones violated the airspace from above the southern village of al-Naqoura, situated about 91 kilometers (57 miles) south of Beirut at 9:35 a.m. local time (0625 GMT) on Thursday.

According to the report, the Israeli drones also executed circular flights over the southern towns of Baalbeck and Hermel. The drones then left the Lebanese skies at around 8:20 p.m. local time (1720 GMT).

The report further indicated that six Israeli warplanes also breached Lebanonâ„¢s airspace at around 11:00 a.m. local time (0800 GMT) and executed circle flights over different parts of the country. They left the airspace at around 7:20 p.m. local time (1420 GMT).

Israel violates Lebanonâ„¢s airspace on an almost daily basis, claiming the flights serve surveillance purposes.

Lebanonâ„¢s government, the Hezbollah resistance movement, and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, have repeatedly condemned the Israeli overflights, saying they are in clear violation of UN Resolution 1701 and the Lebanese sovereignty.

UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which brokered a ceasefire in the war of aggression Israel launched on Lebanon in 2006, calls on Tel Aviv to respect Lebanonâ„¢s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

In 2009, Lebanon filed a complaint with the United Nations, presenting over 7,000 documents pertaining to Israeli violations of the Lebanese territory.

MKA/HSN

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

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Republished with permission from:: AlterNet

June 28, 2013
 |

Chief Justice John Roberts has played the American public like a hand of cards this week. He rolled out of rulings gutting some of the most important civil rights laws of the past 50 years. But he quickly diverted attention to these assaults by holding back two same-sex marriage rulings until the term’s last day.

Everywhere, from ubiquitous Facebook posts, to cheers and hugs on the Court’s marbled steps, to The New York Times columns a day later, euphoria has surged for the ruling written by Justice Anthony Kennedy holding that the definition of marriage in the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional. The other ruling, written by Roberts, allowed the marriages to resume in California.

But Kennedy is no civil rights hero. He wrote the 2010 Citizens United ruling that made federal elections even more of an extreme sport for the rich. His DOMA decision was the right thing to do. It wasn’t courageous. Its scope was limited. And despite predictable homophobic barbs aimed at him from Justice Antonin Scalia, Americans–including many progressives–are missing the big picture.

John Roberts is the most political chief justice in recent decades. His strategic release of this week’s decisions–one setting the stage for overturning affirmative action in higher education, two eviscerating workplace harassment standards, and then gutting the most important voting rights law of the past half-century–were all deliberately buried by the timing of the two marriage decisions. These rulings take months to prepare and their release is not random.

Americans shouldn’t buy into Roberts’ divide and conquer strategy by saying, ‘we won’ on GLBT issues but lost on racial justice. This politicized right-wing majority Court must be seen as the political animal that it is–and could become a target and rallying cry in 2014 elections.

Many political scientists expect the 2014 federal midterm election to be another low-turnout cycle, with 40 million fewer voters than a presidential year. But what would it take to turn 2014 into a wave election that takes back the U.S. House from the GOP? Or expands a Democratic U.S. Senate? Or pressures the Obama administration to do what most people wanted when voting for him for the first time in 2008?

The answer is roughly an 8 percent increase in voter turnout on the Democratic side, according to George Mason University’s Michael McDonald, who studies voter turnout and runs its United States Election Project. He says figuring out what motivates voters is tricky and evasive, just as it is hard to pinpoint what races and voters will tip outcomes.

But the damage that the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority Court has done in recent years, and continued to do this week, evokes deep emotional reactions.

Just look at the euphoria felt and expressed in GLBT circles. It’s real and equality is too long in coming. As The New York Times’ Frank Bruni wrote, the marriage rulings “have another kind of effect, deeply emotional, potentially symbolic, impossible to measure–but arguably much more sweeping.” Bruni is referring to the dignity that’s conferred when powerful institutions affirm one’s identity and self-worth.

But the opposite is also true. When the Court’s radical, rightwing majority hacks away at the legacy of 20th Century’s civil rights movement, most notably gutting the 1965 Voting Rights Act, politics-as-usual no longer suffices. You don’t have to be gay to feel the pride about legitimizing same-sex marriage, just as you don’t have to be African-American to feel the pain caused by Court’s latest race-blind injustice.

Voting rights groups that have worked very hard in communities of color held a press conference a day after the VRA decision. These advocates have slowed or stopped GOP-led voter suppression in Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina that sought to discourage voting by people of color, young people, the poor and the elderly. The Justice Department used the VRA to help them.

Republished with permission from:: AlterNet

Members of a sadistic pedophile ring in Britain are jailed at the Old Bailey.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

It is highly unfortunate that the twenty-fifth anniversary of the submission of the ‘Action Plan for a Nuclear Weapon Free and Non-Violent World Order’[1] by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi before the UN General Assembly (UNGA) on 09 June 1988 during the Third Special Session Devoted to Disarmament has gone unnoticed in India and elsewhere. Rajiv Gandhi’s ‘Action Plan’ had essentially resurrected the long forgotten ‘McCloy-Zorin Accord on General and Complete Disarmament’ [2], which the UNGA had unanimously adopted as resolution No. A/RES/1722(XVI) on 20 December 1961. The ‘Action Plan’ had encapsulated the consistent and persistent positions that India had espoused in the cause of disarmament & world peace before the UN and other international fora ever since 1947. It also represented the views of not only the peace loving people of India and other Third-World nations but also of all people across the world, who were opposed to war and militarism. To understand the significance of the ‘Action Plan’ it is necessary to dwell briefly into the historical circumstances that made it imperative to propose such a plan.

The Hunger for Peace

Rajiv Gandhi’s ‘Action Plan’ marked the zenith of India’s non-aligned foreign policy initiatives. It was not accidental that advancing the cause of peace & disarmament became one of the cornerstones of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which India — along with like-minded nations — had tirelessly strived to build over several decades. It may be recalled that none other than President Dwight Eisenhower has explained concisely as to why the issue of peace & disarmament was critical to social development. Soon after he had first assumed office as the 34^th President of the United States, in a speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors on 16 April 1953, which was titled ‘The Chance for Peace’, President Eisenhower had stated that:

“A nation’s hope of lasting peace cannot be firmly based upon any race in armaments but rather upon just relations and honest understanding with all other nations…. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed…. This Government is ready to ask its people to join with all nations in devoting a substantial percentage of the savings achieved by disarmament to a fund for world aid and reconstruction.”

President Eisenhower then went on to add that:

“These proposals spring, without ulterior purpose or political passion, from our calm conviction that the hunger for peace is in the hearts of all peoples…” [3]

The Soviet Union too had moved a resolution in the UNGA for convening an international convention on the reduction of armaments and the prohibition of weapons of mass destruction — a resolution that the UNGA had adopted on 04 November 1954 as A/RES/808(IX). Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and other leaders of the newly independent nations, who were intent on upholding the interests of the people of the Third World, were also very well aware that “the hunger for peace is in the hearts of all peoples…” Thus, at the Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung in 1955, a prominent part of the Final Communiqué was devoted to ‘Promotion of World Peace and Co-operation’ and it did especially note as follows:

“The conference declared universal disarmament is an absolute necessity for the preservation of peace and requested the United Nations to continue its efforts and appealed to all concerned speedily to bring about the regulation, limitation, control and reduction of all armed forces and armaments, including the prohibition of the production, experimentation and use of all weapons of mass destruction, and to establish effective international control to this end.” [4]

Non-Aligned Movement

Despite President Eisenhower’s laudable pronouncement of 1953, the Soviet Union’s disarmament proposal of 1954, and the Bandung Conference’s appeal to the United Nations in 1955, there was hardly any progress in the direction of disarmament in the next five years and, instead, by the late 1950s, the Cold War between the USSR and the U.S. was actually hotting up. Instead of remaining mute spectators, the non-aligned nations decided to act. At the initiative of leaders such as Joseph Tito (Yugoslavia), Jawaharlal Nehru (India), Achmed Seokarno (Indonesia), Gamal Nasser (Egypt) and Kwame Nkhrumah (Ghana) a conference of non-aligned nations was organized in Belgrade from 01 to 06 September 1961, which was attended by representatives of 25 nations from Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. The Appeal, which the Belgrade Conference had issued on 05 September 1961 signed by each of the Heads of State or Governments of the 25 participating countries [a unique letter of its kind] and addressed to President John Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev, had fervently stated as follows:

“…we take the liberty of urging the Great Powers concerned that negotiations should be resumed and pursued so that the danger of war might be removed from the world and [hu]mankind adopts ways of peace…. We feel convinced that devoted as both of you are to world peace, your efforts through persistent negotiations will lead to a way out of the present impasse and enable the world and humanity to work and live for prosperity and peace.” [5]

The Conference outlined the contours of a desirable agreement on general and complete disarmament, which formed a major component of the Belgrade Declaration that was issued on 06 September 1961. It stated as follows:

“…disarmament is an imperative need and most urgent task of [hu]mankind. A radical solution of this problem, which has become an urgent necessity in the present state of armaments, in the unanimous view of participating countries, can be achieved only by means of a general, complete and strictly internationally controlled disarmament. The Heads of State or Government point out that general and complete disarmament should include the elimination of armed forces, armaments, foreign bases, manufacture of arms as well as elimination of institutions and installations for military training, except for purposes of internal security; and the total prohibition of production, possession and utilization of nuclear, and thermo-nuclear arms, bacteriological and chemical weapons as well as the elimination of equipment and installations for the delivery and placement and operational use of weapons of mass destruction on national territories….

“The participants in the Conference urge the Great Powers to sign without further delay a treaty for general and complete disarmament in order to save [hu]mankind from the scourge of war and to release energy and resources now being spent on armaments to be used for the peaceful economic and social development of all [hu]mankind.” [6]

McCloy-Zorin Accord

The Belgrade Declaration had an immediate and dramatic impact. In response to the Appeal from the non-aligned nations, the U.S and the USSR signed the Joint Agreement on the Principles of General and Complete Disarmament on 20 September 1961, which they had been reportedly negotiating for about five months, and submitted it to the United Nations. Since John McCloy (Chairperson, General Advisory Committee on Arms Control and Disarmament, U.S. Government) and Valerian Zorin (Deputy Foreign Minister, USSR) were the principal negotiators who drafted the agreement before signing it under pressure from the non-aligned nations, the agreement came to be known as the McCloy-Zorin Accord on General and Compete Disarmament. Moreover, the Belgrade Declaration’s forthright position on disarmament was incorporated into the McCloy-Zorin Accord almost in toto. President Kennedy’s address to the UNGA on 25 September 1961 also reflected the sentiments of the non-aligned nations in this regard. He said:

 “Mankind must put an end to war—or war will put an end to mankind.… Let us call a truce to terror. Let us invoke the blessings of peace. And as we build an international capacity to keep peace, let us join in dismantling the national capacity to wage war…. It is in this spirit that the recent Belgrade Conference—recognizing that this is no longer a Soviet problem or an American problem, but a human problem—endorsed a program of “general, complete and strictly an internationally controlled disarmament.” [7]

It was under these circumstances that the UNGA had unanimously adopted the McCloy-Zorin Accord on 20 December 1961. On the next day, the UNGA constituted an Eighteen Nation Committee on Disarmament (ENCD), which included eight representatives of non-aligned nations including India, for framing concrete proposals for realizing the goal of disarmament. The task of concluding a comprehensive test ban treaty was the first item on ENCD’s agenda.

The biggest opposition to disarmament obviously came from the armaments lobby, which was especially powerful in the U.S. According to an article that was published in the ‘Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ (February 1983, p.35): “The anti-disarmament pressures on the President that summer were enormous. They were primarily economic and, derivatively, political.” Quoting from a book by Arthur Dean (a member of John McCloy’s negotiating team) titled “Test Ban and Disarmament: The Path of Negotiation” (1966), the author of the article, Marcus Raskin (who was a member of the U.S. delegation to an 18-nation disarmament conference in Geneva in 1962), further added:

“…protests came from politically powerful representatives of the states with defense industries, especially California and Texas, who feared any disarmament measures might have a deleterious effect on the economies of their states.”

Military-Industrial-Complex

The observations of Marcus Raskin as well as Arthur Dean were ominous considering the tragic fate that soon befell President Kennedy. The warning sounded by President Eisenhower, which no other U.S. president has ever admitted to, also turned out to be prophetic. In his farewell address to the U.S. citizens on 17 January 1961, President Eisenhower had expressed his grave apprehensions about the undue influence that the armament industry was wielding over the U.S. society. He said:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted…” [8]

Just three months after the U.S., USSR and Britain signed the Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) on 05 August 1963 — instead of a comprehensive treaty, Present Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas (Texas) on 22 November 1963. The peace-loving people across the world had hailed the PTBT as a major breakthrough in the path towards disarmament (although in reality it was nothing of that sort and had only served as a cover for fueling a mindless arms race.) The anti-disarmament lobby in the U.S. could not even tolerate a meaningless PTBT and, thus, when it was placed before the U.S. Senate for ratification on 24 September 1963, about 20 per cent of the senators had opposed it.

The Cover-up

The first official enquiry into President Kennedy’s assassination was conducted by the Warren Commission, which was appointed on 29 November 1963. The Commission’s Report, which was submitted on 24 September 1964, concluded that the assassin who killed Kennedy had acted alone and that “The Commission has found no evidence that either Lee Harvey Oswald or Jack Ruby was part of any conspiracy, domestic or foreign, to assassinate President Kennedy.” [9]

However, there was widespread criticism against the conclusions of the Warren Commission Report and suspicions of a cover-up were so strong that a fresh official enquiry had to be instituted 13 years after President Kennedy was killed. The U.S. House of Representatives established the ‘House Select Committee on Assassinations’ in September 1976 and it submitted its report on 29 March 1979. The Committee’s findings, which are highly revealing, were as follows:

* “The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.”

* “The Warren Commission failed to investigate adequately the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President….” [10]

Irrespective of whether or not there was a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy, the fact remains that soon after Kennedy was removed from the scene, the entire disarmament process that had been set in motion in the U.S. at his initiative suffered a serious setback and the McCloy-Zorin Accord was literally thrown into the dustbin.  In the Soviet Union too, with the replacement of Nikita Khrushchev as Premier in 1964, the McCloy-Zorin Accord, which resonated with the various proposals that the USSR had placed before the UN on numerous occasions, was sidelined completely for unknown reasons. The very concept of general and complete disarmament was soon replaced with the introduction in 1968 of the so-called Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which was totally a discriminatory and bogus treaty [11] that was designed solely to serve the interests of the nuclear weapon states. It was supplemented by the so-called Nuclear Weapon Free Zone (NWFZ) treaties, which were again mostly meaningless initiatives that were intended to mislead peace-loving people across the world. [12]

UNSSD

For the next two decades, the world witnessed a feverish nuclear arms race and numerous military interventions including the long-drawn out Vietnam War, which necessitated the convening of the First Special Session of the UN General Assembly devoted to Disarmament in 1978 followed by the Second Special Session in 1982. With the U.S. — USSR rivalry reaching its peak in the 1980s, the series of Six-Nation Peace Initiatives[13] between May 1984 and January 1988 followed by Rajiv Gandhi’s ‘Action Plan’ of 1988 were significant steps that were intended to quell tensions and for guiding the world towards a demilitarized future. However, no progress was ever made in this direction because Rajiv Gandhi was out of office from 1989 and a little later, in 1991, he was brutally assassinated.

What has been most shocking is that, after the gruesome assassination of Rajiv Gandhi on 21 May 1991, instead of the Government of India making every attempt to carry forward his disarmament initiatives, there has been a decisive shift in India’s foreign policy for the worse. Slowly but surely there was a concerted attempt within a section of the Indian establishment to downplay the significance of NAM, to renege from upholding the cause of Third-World nations, and to covertly support the aggressive policies of the United States and of Israel. This dramatic shift in India’s foreign policy was marked by the sudden decision of the Government of India to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel within a few months of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and by allowing Israel to open its embassy in Delhi in January 1992. Since then the so-called “strategic” co-operation with Israel has progressed at a rapid pace.

A study, which was carried out from the perspective of the Israeli establishment, provides deep insight into the extent and ramification of this newfound relationship with India. It has described the relationship as “convergence of strategic interests of the two countries”.[14] The author of that study is Itzhak Gerberg, who was none other than the first Consul and Chargé d’affaires at the Israeli Embassy in India from July 1992 to November 1992.

Sideling of NAM

In a subsequent study, Gerberg noted that, “A major change, directly affecting India’s attitude to Israel, occurred in India’s foreign policy in 1991.” He went on to add “…India, driven by necessity, abandoned the philosophical premises that had guided its diplomacy for forty years.”[15] According to Gerberg, the change in India’s foreign policy led to:  “Abandonment of India’s forty-year love affair with the Third World, symbolized by its obsession with Non-Alignment and its leadership in that movement…. The national self-interest became the driving force behind Indian diplomacy.” [16]

Gerberg also propounded the view that various international developments beginning with the collapse of the Soviet Union “eroded the very concept of NAM and made it internationally irrelevant. This exerted a direct influence on the change of the Indian attitude to Israel in 1992.”[17] He also disclosed that, “Since 1947, Washington had been nudging India to modify its foreign policy towards Israel” [18] The fundamental basis of the Israeli-India relationship, in Genberg’s view, was as follows:

“For Israel, arms exports have been an essential and integral part of its security sector since they lower the cost of production, offset the cost of research and development, reduce Israel’s balance deficit, and provide employment. The Israeli defence industries cannot depend on the home market alone and about three-quarters of its production has to be exported. India presents an attractive and challenging opportunity as a market for Israel’s defence industry.” [19]

Gerberg makes no bones of the fact that: “…India has gradually emerged as Israel’s most important arms market.”[20] Therefore, presumably vis-à-vis India, Israel would adopt any and all such strategies to safeguard the best interests of its armaments industry! Gerberg also noted that, “After September 11 there was a growing understanding in India, and also in Israel, that Indo-American-Israeli cooperation was likely to yield considerable benefits for all three parties.… During the tenures of the NDA* governments some forces in India supported the idea of formulating a tripartite axis between the USA, India and Israel as three democracies sharing a common vision; nothing came of this.” [21]

[*National Democratic Alliance led by the rightwing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)]

It is, indeed, a great relief that “nothing came of this” and, hopefully, nothing will come of it in future either! Gerberg’s description of the manner in which NAM’s position has been eroding over the past couple of decades is also very revealing. According to him:

“From the 1990s the NAM’s influence on Indian diplomacy steadily eroded as India sought to reconstruct its foreign policy to meet the requirements of the post-Cold War world…. The BJP did not refer to Non-Alignment as a major principle in India’s foreign policy. In fact, the BJP governments marginalized the concept of Non-Alignment and had fewer illusions about the relevance of past Indian foreign policy and old commitments to the notion of non-alignment as well as to the movement itself.” [22]

Not only the BJP-led governments but also the Indian National Congress-led governments from 1991 onward have done all they could to marginalize the concept of Non-Alignment. The ease with which the U.S. and Israeli Governments have succeeded in influencing the foreign policy of India is truly amazing. The Indian Government seems to have had little difficulty in sideling NAM and jettisoning its leading role in championing the cause of global disarmament and peace. Apart from paying occasional lip-service to Rajiv Gandhi’s ‘Action Plan’, successive governments in India from 1991 onward have done practically nothing to generate global support for executing the ‘Action Plan’. Regrettably, Rajiv Gandhi’s ‘Action Plan’ has met the same fate, which the McCloy-Zorin Accord had met after the assassination of President Kennedy.

Another Conspiracy?

While there is irrefutable evidence that LTTE cadres had carried out the suicide attack to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi, as to who all had possibly aided and abetted the LTTE in plotting the attack has not been unraveled as yet. In short, the question as to whether or not there was a conspiracy behind the killing of Rajiv Gandhi is yet to be answered. This despite the fact that the Justice M.C. Jain Commission of Inquiry, which the Government of India had set up on 23 August 1991, was enjoined to inquire “whether one person or persons or agencies were responsible for conceiving, preparing and planning the assassination and whether there was any conspiracy in this behalf and, if so, all its ramifications.” [23] Nevertheless, the Jain Commission, in the Final Report that it submitted on 07 March 1998 did not rule out the possibility of a larger conspiracy behind Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and had noted as follows:

“…the question requires examination in the background of the likelihood of CIA-MOSSAD links with the LTTE, the track record of CIA, Shri Rajiv Gandhi’s views on re-fuelling and on regional security system, his utterances against the policy and programmes pursued by the U.S., contrary to India’s national interests, and the strong probability of Shri Rajiv Gandhi coming to power and the emergence of India as the Third World leader and leader of NAM movement.” [24]

Because of these remarks of the Jain Commission, the Government of India was forced to set up a Multi-Disciplinary Monitoring Agency (MDMA) in 1998 as a unit of India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) [25] to investigate the conspiracy angle in the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. However, the fact that the MDMA could not submit any report even after 15 years of investigations speaks volumes about the lackadaisical manner in which the MDMA is conducting the probe. Conversely, it could be concluded that the MDMA has been unable so far to refute the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate Rajiv Gandhi. Although those at the helm of affairs in India have remained unconcerned about exposing the conspiracy behind the assassination of India’s former prime minister, every effort should still be made to prevail upon the powers that be to save the fate of the ‘Action Plan’ that Rajiv Gandhi had proposed due to the intrinsic value of that ‘Action Plan’. Hopefully, there are enough concerned people in India and elsewhere, who would come forward to do the needful in this regard!

First Concrete Steps

Among the first concrete steps that require urgent attention for paving the way towards the goal of disarmament and peace are as follows:

* An undertaking by all Nuclear Weapon States never to use nuclear weapons against Non-Nuclear Weapon States (i.e., biding negative security guarantee);

* De-alerting of deployed nuclear weapons by Nuclear Weapon States (to reduce chances of use of nuclear weapons through miscalculation or accident);

* An undertaking by all Nuclear Weapon States not to be the first to use nuclear weapons against each other (No-First-Use Pledge);

* Conclusion of an international convention to outlaw the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons pending their elimination (Nuclear Weapons Convention)

If adequate pressure could be brought to bear on the governments of member-nations of NAM — especially India — and other like-minded nations to initiate action along these lines, the ripple effect those steps would have on subsequent ones would be very significant. Nothing prevents the Government of India from taking the requisite initiative in holding the long-delayed international Nuclear Weapons Convention; if it fails to take necessary initiative in this regard, its commitment to the spirit of Rajiv Gandhi’s ‘Action Plan’ would remain suspect.

N.D. Jayaprakash is Joint Secretary, Delhi Science Forum. He can be reached at: jaypdsf@gmail.com.

REFERENCES.

[1] See: http://www.pugwashindia.org/images/uploads/Report.pdf, pp.186-191

[2] See: http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/key-issues/nuclear-weapons/issues/arms-control-disarmament/mccloy-zorin-accords_1961-09-20.htm

[3] http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/speeches/chance_for_peace.pdf

[4] See: http://www.cvce.eu/obj/final_communique_of_the_asian_african_conference_of_bandung_24_april_1955-en-676237bd-72f7-471f-949a-88b6ae513585.html

[5] See: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-104-004.aspx [Last eight pages]

[6] See: http://cns.miis.edu/nam/documents/Official_Document/1st_Summit_FD_Belgrade_Declaration_1961.pdf

[7] See: http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/DOPIN64xJUGRKgdHJ9NfgQ.aspx. The speech was elaborated by the U.S. Department of State and published under the title “Freedom from War: the United States Program for General and Complete Disarmament in a Peaceful World”, September 1961. See: http://archive.org/details/FreedomFromWar

[8] http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/speeches.html

[9] See: Para 9, Conclusions (of the Warren Commission Report) at: http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/warren-commission-report/chapter-1.html#conclusions

[10] See: Para 3 & para 8b, Findings of the Select Committee on Assassinations, at: http://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/select-committee-report/summary.html#kennedy]

[11]  For more details see article titled “NPT as a Roadblock to Disarmament” at http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/07/05/the-npt-as-a-roadblock-to-disarmament/

[12] The only meaningful NWFZ treaties are the Antarctic Treaty System, which entered into force on 23.06.1961, and the Outer Space Treaty, which entered into force on 10.10.1967.

[13] By Sweden, India, Mexico, Tanzania, Greece and Argentina

[14] Itzhak Gerberg, ‘The Changing Nature of Israeli-Indian Relations: 1948-2005’, March 2008, p.iii,  at

http://uir.unisa.ac.za/bitstream/handle/10500/2936/dissertation_gerberg_%20i.pdf?sequence=1

[15] Itzhak Gerberg, ‘India—Israel Relations: Strategic Interests, Politics and Diplomatic Pragmatism’, Israel National Defense College, IDF, February 2010, p.15, at: http://web.hevra.haifa.ac.il/~ch-strategy/images/publications/India-Israel_relations.pdf

[16] Ibid

[17] Ibid, pp.21-22

[18] Ibid, p.24

[19] Ibid, p.54

[20] Ibid, p.55

[21] Ibid, p.61

[22] Ibid, p.67

[23] See: http://www.frontline.in/navigation/?type=static&page=flonnet&rdurl=fl1418/14180220.htm

[24] Page 169, Vol.III, Justice Jain Commission’s Report. Source: http://parliamentofindia.nic.in/ls/lsdeb/ls12/ses2/0405089810.htm

[25] http://cbi.nic.in/aboutus/manuals/Chapter_3.pdf [2005]

Republished with permission from:: Counterpunch

Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Yukiya Amano says the UN body will continue dialog with Iran over the Islamic Republicâ„¢s nuclear energy program.

Amano made the remarks during a speech at a high-level international IAEA conference in St Petersburg, Russia, on Thursday, ITAR-TASS news agency reported.

Amano pointed to the recent election of Dr. Hassan Rohani as Iran’s new president, saying that the IAEA will not change positions on Iranâ„¢s nuclear issue with the change in presidency.

Å“Weâ„¢ll continue the dialog with the country and it will be aimed at achieving concrete results.”

The IAEA chief, however, said that dialog Å“cannot be held endlessly,” adding that the IAEA aims to make sure that the Iranian nuclear energy program pursues peaceful objectives.

Stressing that the decision on Iranâ„¢s nuclear energy program is Å“in competence of the IAEA Board of Governors,” Amano said his task is to collect information and submit it to the agency.

Iran has also repeatedly announced its willingness to maintain cooperation with the IAEA. Last month, Iran’s Ambassador to the IAEA Ali Asghar Soltanieh stressed the countryâ„¢s Å“political determination to work with the IAEA in order to remove any ambiguities” regarding its nuclear energy program.

On May 15, Iran and the IAEA wrapped up their latest round of talks on Tehranâ„¢s nuclear energy program in Vienna, Austria.

The United States, Israel and some of their allies have repeatedly accused Iran of pursuing non-civilian objectives in its nuclear energy program.

Iran refutes the allegation over its nuclear energy program and argues that as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and a member of the IAEA, it is entitled to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

In addition, the IAEA has conducted numerous inspections of Iran’s nuclear facilities but has never found any evidence showing that Iran’s civilian nuclear program has been diverted to nuclear weapons production purposes.

AR/NN/HMV

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

An Afghan senator has censured the United States for supporting the Taliban militants and its interference in the internal affairs of Afghanistan ahead of the presidential election, Press TV reports.

Senator Belquis Roshan told Press TV on Thursday, Å“In the presence of foreign troops, the people of Afghanistan would never have peace and independence. Now that the US is trying to help the Taliban participate in the coming election, there would be no prosperity for our people too.”

Kabul has announced that the presidential election will be held on April 5, 2014.

On Thursday, Afghan President Hamid Karzai said Kabul had thwarted a foreign plot conspired by the opening of a US-backed Taliban office in Qatar.

The Afghan government, which says wants to lead any talks with the militants, has demanded a full explanation as to how Washington and Doha allowed the Taliban to raise its flag over the office in the Qatari capital.

Å“The truth has finally come to be known when they opened an office for the Taliban in Qatar. With opening this office, they wanted to create ethnic violence here. There in Qatar, they wanted to make the Islamic Emirate for us and here an Islamic presidency. We have foiled their plan. We want a peaceful Afghanistan and a central government,” said Karzai.

Commentators have warned against further insecurity during the electoral process, with the aim of creating ethnic tensions and disintegrating Afghanistan.

Å“We are worried about that. Thatâ„¢s why we share our 7,000 polling center list to the security institution to [ensure safe] and responsible security for these 7,000 polling centers,” said Noor Mohammad Noor, a spokesman for Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

GMA/HSN

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

Russiaâ„¢s parliament has invited former US National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden to assist Moscow in investigating whether US Internet firms gave information about Russian citizens to Washington.

Å“We invite Edward Snowden to work with us and hope that as soon as he settles his legal status, he will collaborate with our working group and provide us with proof of US intelligence agenciesâ„¢ access to the servers of Internet firms,” Russiaâ„¢s Ria Novosti news agency quoted Senator Ruslan Gattarov as saying on Thursday.

Snowden is wanted by the United States on charges that are based on his extraction of classified documents from servers of the NSA – a move that led to revelations about the spy agencyâ„¢s espionage programs, targeting millions of people.

Gattarovâ„¢s remarks come a day after Russiaâ„¢s upper house of parliament decided to establish a special working group to launch a probe into Snowdenâ„¢s claims. Gattarov will lead the group.

He told RIA Novosti that the group will include legislators, diplomats, prosecutors and communications officials. The preliminary results of its investigation are expected to be released in October.

Meanwhile, Kirill Kabanov, who is a member of Russian President Vladimir Putinâ„¢s Human Rights Council, has said that he had asked his colleagues to consider asking the Russian government to give Snowden political asylum.

The councilâ„¢s chairman, Mikhail Fedotov, said the request would be considered and put to a vote.

Snowden, whose passport is revoked by Washington, has asked Ecuador for asylum. On June 24, the Ecuadorian foreign minister said his country is considering his request.

MR/HSN

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

National Union of Journalists chief Dominique Pradalie has criticized the latest decision by European satellite provider, Intelsat, to take Iranian channels off the air, urging vigilance against all types of censorship, Press TV reports.

Referring to Intelsatâ„¢s decision to suspend its services to Iranian media, Pradalie told Press TV, Å“The National Union of Journalists, which I represent, supports freedom of expression and free access to information. Censorship is fine only if someone is trying to violate someone elseâ„¢s human rights, but here thatâ„¢s not the case at all.”

Å“We must be vigilant against all types of censorship. Citizens have a constitutional right to have access to foreign media sources. It cannot be prevented,” she said.

Intelsat is to remove Iranian channels, including Press TV, off the air as of July 1 as part of an unprecedented wave of US-led attacks against Iranian media.

The satellite provider has admitted it is pulling the plug under pressure from the United States and said it sought a waiver from Washington to extend the term of its agreement with Iranian channels, but the US government is determined to prevent Intelsat from doing so.

Press TV has learned that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), an agency of the US Treasury Department headed by an Ashkenazi Jew called Adam Szubin, is behind the pressure on Intelsat.

Intelsat is owned by an American equity firm, and is legally based in Bermuda. The company operates out of Washington D.C. and Luxembourg.

Press TV and other Iranian channels have been targeted by a wave of attacks from European governments and satellite companies since January 2012, with European companies citing the West’s anti-Iran sanctions as a pretext.3

However, Michael Mann, the spokesman for the EU foreign policy chief has told Press TV that the sanctions do not apply to Iranian media.

The French-Israeli CEO of Europe’s satellite giant, Eutelsat, Michel de Rosen, has become one of the point men in the global campaign against Iranian media, repeatedly lobbying the satellite industry to shut down the Iranian press.

Press TV says the campaign against Iranian media violates Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that promotes media freedoms.

Experts say the modern telecommunications industry makes it virtually impossible for Iran to be completely silenced. Iran has been able to find new satellite providers, and use the Internet, to diffuse its unique point of view.

SF/NN/HMV

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

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Republished with permission from:: AlterNet

June 27, 2013
 |

The 2012-2013 school year saw the fight over public education reach a new pitch, ending with mass layoffs in Philadelphia, and other large school districts, and a cadre of parents and workers who began a hunger strike in protest. This final incident marks the end of a 10-month stretch that has seen an increasingly diverse chorus of voices speaking against American education policy’s relentless focus on high-stakes testing, massive expansions of charter schools and mass teacher and staff layoffs. But there have also been some serious advancements in that agenda, especially in large urban districts.

The Philadelphia School District decision to lay off 3,800 teachers and staff (about one-fifth of the workforce), includes 1,202 safety staff among the casualties. Only 12 will remain next school year to watch over the district’s 149,535 students while they are not in class, in the hallways and cafeteria where violence is most likely.

“I just can’t [see] school district of Philadelphia…without student safety staff. It will be a disaster,” says Patricia Norris, a cafeteria worker at Cayuga Elementary in North Philadelphia.

On Monday June 17, Norris, two parents and another school district employee began a hunger strike to protest the layoffs and the general deterioration of public education in Philadelphia. When interviewed that afternoon, she’d been drinking nothing but water all day. She was red-eyed and exhausted, but spoke animatedly from the tent on Broad Street where she was camped outside Corbett’s Philadelphia offices.  “I just want the governor and people in Harrisburg to put their children in our children’s shoes. All I know is I’m fighting. And fasting.” She paused and sunk back in her metal chair. “I just want someone to listen.”

Similar layoffs are being seen in Chicago, where 50 public schools will be shuttered next year, one of the largest number of closures in America history (Philadelphia will be closing 23 public schools next year). These austerity measures put a grim cap on the 2012-2013 school year.

“The mantra of the Republicans was always choice, competition, testing and accountability, says Diane Ravitch, who served as a Assistant Secretary of Education for the first President George Bush. “Now that’s the mantra of the Democratic Party… All over the country, in most states, there is legislation to roll back any kind of rights for teachers, any tenure, any academic freedom, cut their pensions, cut their benefits, make it easier to fire them. Everywhere there is a fight going on for the survival of public education. The country is filled with ground zeroes.”

Below are five of the last school year’s most significant developments in the education wars.

1. Chicago Teachers Strike

The year opened with a bang, as 30,000 teachers and other district staff affiliated with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) took to the streets in protest of Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s education agenda. Beginning on September 10 until September 18, when teachers and students returned to classrooms, the strike highlighted the deep divisions between the Democratic Party’s establishment, including President Barack Obama and the key elements of the party’s base in organized labor and working-class communities in the nation’s large, multi-racial cities.

The strike drew the battle lines for the year, along an ideological, not partisan, basis. On the one side Emanuel’s by-the-book formula for education reform: “High-stakes standardized testing, merit pay for teachers, school closures, privatization and union-busting through charter school expansion, blaming teachers,” as Micah Uetricht wrote in Jacobin.

The CTU not only denounced these austerity measures, but proposed its own solutions in a white paper describing the real reasons for the school district’s plight–systemic underfunding, an unregulated expansion of charter schools at the expense of public schools–and what could be done to raise revenue and create better staffed public schools with stronger curriculum that doesn’t hinge on constantly taking multiple choice tests. (A tactic that would be taken up later in the school year by the Philadelphia Coalition Advocating for Public Schools, a community-labor alliance combating similar forces.)

Republished with permission from:: AlterNet

June 27, 2013
 |

Ever ask the question, “why me?” or perhaps wonder why you attract “bad luck” and cannot have the things you desire? Perhaps you are tired of dating and want to know if your soul mate is out there? Maybe you have been working in the same job for years and secretly fantasize about whether you will ever get a raise? If these thoughts have crossed your mind, you’re not alone.

The desire to know what lies ahead is a fundamental human need as we seek certainty, stability and a harmonious existence in life  — we want to know that for all our efforts, we will someday be rewarded. Particularly, when we suffer hardship or bouts of misfortune for no apparent reason, we consider if it’s something we are personally doing wrong or whether we have taken the wrong path. It is this human desire that leads us to look externally for answers and for some upon the doorstep of a trusty psychic on the quest for spiritual enlightenment.  

So what exactly does it mean when we say a person possesses ‘psychic abilities’? There are a number of abilities we consider “psychic” but the two most commonly encountered in a street reading are psychometry, where a person reads the past history of an object by sensing its vibrational energy and precognition, where a person acquires knowledge of an event in advance by means of extra-sensory perception (ESP), premonition or vision.

While many of us consider fortune telling and such abilities as mere entertainment and a bit of mindless fun, for others there is a genuine risk of getting caught up in a dangerous psychic scam whereby certain frauds claim to possess these psychic abilities with a view to exploiting vulnerable people. Think it couldn’t happen to you? Don’t be so sure…

While I consider myself to be an educated, intelligent woman in control of my own fate for the most part, I have visited psychics on the occasion. Whenever I am faced with periods of stagnation, I attempt to obtain answers from the meta-physical world. However, much to my dismay, I am confronted with the same façade — a phony spiritual medium intent on defrauding me for his/her own pecuniary gain.

Sadly, my story isn’t unique. According to a Gallup Report in 2005, a study found that 73% of Americans believe in at least some form of psychic or paranormal phenomena.  Further, it seems hundreds if not thousands of people across the US have not only experienced the same deceptive psychic con as myself, but have also lost tens of thousands of dollars along the way.

So why would an intelligent person continue to seek out spiritual guidance through psychics after being met with the same hoax time and time again? The secret of the ‘psychic allure’ lies in their intrinsic power to bestow insightful ‘magical’ information upon a vulnerable person in a scenario that typically begins as follows:

First, the hook – you see a sign that reads, “Psychic reading – $10.” You think, “that’s cheap, I’ll go in for a bit of fun”. The psychic glances at your hands and suddenly bedazzles you with extraordinary details about your life, family, profession, and relationships. Alternatively, a “stranger” may approach you on the street claiming to have a ‘spiritual gift’ and begins to freely divulge intimate details about your history.

Now, I’m not talking about those facts that constitute a ‘ cold reading’, whereby a psychic sees an antique ring on your finger and deduces that the ring is very old. No, I’m talking about emotional, heart-wrenching private information that only you could possible know — when she tells you that your ex-boyfriend who you still hold a flame for with the initial K and N wants to reconcile with you OR that while your work in sales is rewarding, your heart truly desires a career in finance.

Republished with permission from:: AlterNet

June 27, 2013
 |

It’s 4:18 a.m. and the strip mall is deserted. But tucked in back, next to a closed-down video store, an employment agency is already filling up. Rosa Ramirez walks in, as she has done nearly every morning for the past six months. She signs in and sits down in one of the 100 or so blue plastic chairs that fill the office. Over the next three hours, dispatchers will bark out the names of who will work today. Rosa waits, wondering if she will make her rent.

In cities all across the country, workers stand on street corners, line up in alleys or wait in a neon-lit beauty salon for rickety vans to whisk them off to warehouses miles away. Some vans are so packed that to get to work, people must squat on milk crates, sit on the laps of passengers they do not know or sometimes lie on the floor, the other workers’ feet on top of them.

This is not Mexico. It is not Guatemala or Honduras. This is Chicago, New Jersey, Boston.

The people here are not day laborers looking for an odd job from a passing contractor. They are regular employees of temp agencies working in the supply chain of many of America’s largest companies — Walmart, Macy’s, Nike, Frito-Lay. They make our frozen pizzas, sort the recycling from our trash, cut our vegetables and clean our imported fish. They unload clothing and toys made overseas and pack them to fill our store shelves. They are as important to the global economy as shipping containers and Asian garment workers.

Many get by on minimum wage, renting rooms in rundown houses, eating dinners of beans and potatoes, and surviving on food banks and taxpayer-funded health care. They almost never get benefits and have little opportunity for advancement.

Across America, temporary work has become a mainstay of the economy, leading to the proliferation of what researchers have begun to call “temp towns.” They are often dense Latino neighborhoods teeming with temp agencies. Or they are cities where it has become nearly impossible even for whites and African-Americans with vocational training to find factory and warehouse work without first being directed to a temp firm.

In June, the Labor Department reported that the nation had more temp workers than ever before: 2.7 million. Overall, almost one-fifth of the total job growth since the recession ended in mid-2009 has been in the temp sector, federal data shows. But according to the American Staffing Association, the temp industry’s trade group, the pool is even larger: Every year, a tenth of all U.S. workers finds a job at a staffing agency.

The proportion of temp workers in the labor force reached its peak in early 2000 before the 2001 slump and then the Great Recession. But as the economy continues its slow, uneven recovery, temp work is roaring back 10 times faster than private-sector employment as a whole — a pace “exceeding even the dramatic run-up of the early 1990s,” according to the staffing association.

The overwhelming majority of that growth has come in blue-collar work in factories and warehouses, as the temp industry sheds the Kelly Girl image of the past. Last year, more than one in every 20 blue-collar workers was a temp.

Several temp agencies, such as Adecco and Manpower, are now among the largest employers in the United States. One list put Kelly Services as second only to Walmart.

“We’re seeing just more and more industries using business models that attempt to change the employment relationship or obscure the employment relationship,” said Mary Beth Maxwell, a top official in the Labor Department’s Wage and Hour Division. “While it’s certainly not a new phenomenon, it’s rapidly escalating. In the last 10 to 15 years, there’s just a big shift to this for a lot more workers — which makes them a lot more vulnerable.”

Republished with permission from:: AlterNet

New York City Council passed two bills designed to guarantee safety and respect for all New Yorkers. The measures were championed by Communities United for Police Reform, a broad coalition of city groups, and will strengthen the existing ban on police profiling and establish independent oversight of the city’s police department.

Today is a new day for New York City. The move reflects a growing alarm over NYPD policies and practices that violate the rights of thousands of New Yorkers and undermine police-community relationships — practices such as the discriminatory use of stop-and-frisk that waste valuable public dollars, while producing no measurable impact on public safety.

Criticism is mounting, not only in the council, but also in federal court, where the legality of these practices is being questioned. Those same questions are echoed in the homes of regular New Yorkers — a majority of whom disapprove of stop-and-frisk and two-thirds of whom support independent oversight of the department. The message is clear: it’s time for New York City to turn away from an approach to policing that results in countless rights violations each year, while  doing little to reduce crime, according to an analysis by the Center for Constitutional Rights.

The bills passed by city council respond to increasing evidence that in too many cases the department has substituted stereotyping for real police work. A study by the New York Civil Liberties Union found that in 2011, for example, 41.6% of all New Yorkers stopped by the NYPD were black and Latino men between the ages of 14 and 24 years old, despite the fact that that these groups make up a mere 4.7% of the city’s population. The department has continued to defend these discriminatory tactics, despite evidence that they do not even succeed on their own terms, failing to take guns off the street or to significantly reduce crime. In more than 99% of all 2011 stops, for example, no gun was retrieved. And in the first three months of 2013, crime dropped, even as stops also tapered, undermining the department’s claim that stop-and-frisk is responsible for the city’s lowered crime rate.

All of this suggests that the department’s continued reliance on discriminatory tactics is not about what it takes to actually keep all New Yorkers (and those visiting the city) safe. Instead, it is about what it takes to convince some in New York City’s whiter, wealthier communities that the administration and the department are serious about public safety.

For too long, too many city leaders have accepted discriminatory policing tactics on the assumption that the costs borne by the New Yorkers who are targeted are outweighed by the benefits enjoyed by communities that are not singled out for unlawful and abusive treatment. But the truth is the NYPD’s discriminatory policies and practices have indirect negative impacts on all who live in the city, including its white residents. They allow the NYPD to substitute crude and ineffective strategies — like stopping New Yorkers on the basis of their race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender expression — for the sophisticated police work one might expect from the nation’s largest local law enforcement agency. In the process, they position NYPD officers as adversaries instead of allies of many of the communities they are charged with protecting, reducing willingness to report crime and making all New Yorkers less safe.

It is becoming increasingly apparent, then, that the costs of massive spending on ineffective policing strategies extend beyond those borne by the individuals who are unlawfully targeted in the streets each day. But the most powerful argument for increased NYPD accountability has nothing to do with financial costs and benefits and everything to do with what we, as New Yorkers, allow to be done in our names. And it is about staying true to the city’s own legacy of innovation and the conviction that here — if nowhere else — we can find a way to keep everyone safe without sacrificing anyone’s rights.

Republished with permission from:: AlterNet

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In an unusual move, the Iowa Supreme Court has withdrawn its unanimous rejection of a sexual discrimination lawsuit filed by a woman whose employer fired her for being an “irresistible attraction” to him. The court will reconsider the lawsuit, but there will be no additional oral arguments or filings.

In December, the court dismissed the lawsuit, filed by Melissa Nelson against dentist James Knight. Knight had fired her in 2010 after she worked for him for ten years, because Knight feared he would enter into an affair with Nelson if she continued to work for him.

USA Today reports:

Related Stories

• New York's Vote to Curb Stop-and-Frisk Is Another Win for Civil Rights
• Outrageous: Ammo Maker Selling Pork-Coated Bullets to Fight Muslims
• New Levels of Absurdity: Alex Jones Says The Government is Turning Us Gay with Chemical Warfare

Republished with permission from:: AlterNet

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Republished with permission from:: AlterNet

Earlier this year, New York looked poised to become the 19th state to legalize medical marijuana. The state Assembly passed a bill by a 99-41 margin June 3. A Quinnipiac poll taken that week indicated that 70 percent of New Yorkers supported the idea. And in the state Senate, the Republicans who had blocked medical-marijuana measures the three times they’d passed the Assembly now retained power only by allying with five renegade Democrats–one of whom, Diane Savino of Staten Island, was the bill’s sponsor. Savino repeatedly said she believed she had enough votes to pass the bill, and would bring it to the floor when the right time came.

That time didn’t come. When the state Senate adjourned early in the morning of June 22, the bill had never reached the floor, despite the renegade Democrat faction’s leader, Jeffrey Klein, cosponsoring a more restrictive revised version. Another measure, to reduce the penalty for marijuana possession “in public view” from a misdemeanor to a $100 fine, also died without a vote in the Senate.

Activists and legislators say they don’t know exactly what happened. “The only thing we can conclude,” says Drug Policy Alliance state director Gabriel Sayegh, is that Klein couldn’t reach an agreement with Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos to allow a vote, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo did nothing to help.

Medical-marijuana legislation hasn’t gotten a vote in the Senate any time since it was first introduced in 1997, says Julie Netherland of New Yorkers for Compassionate Care, and “this year wasn’t any different.” One legislative staffer called it a combination of “Republican recalcitrance” and that “the governor didn’t indicate he was superenthusiastic about it.” Skelos told patients who visited his Long Island district office that Cuomo didn’t want it, says Douglas Greene, legislative director for Empire State NORML.

Neither Skelos nor Savino returned calls from AlterNet, but Savino told a cable news channel June 24 that “there was overwhelming support for medical marijuana and that didn’t move forward, because the governor didn’t want to do it.” Cuomo’s main public statement on the issue has been that he opposes medical marijuana, but had an open mind.

To state Senator Liz Krueger (D-Manhattan), the medical-marijuana measure was just one of an “endless list of progressive bills that never had a chance” in the Senate. The upper house also rejected or ignored a campaign finance reform bill, a ban on hydrofracking for natural gas, prohibiting the use of BPA plastic in baby toys, and a Cuomo-backed measure that would have guaranteed abortion rights if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade.

While the Democrats who split from the party for Klein’s “Independent Democratic Conference” faction claimed that allying with the Republicans would help get progressive measures through the Senate, Krueger says, “that never made sense to me, and it’s not true.”

Impasse in Albany

The impasse resulted from New York’s designed-to-be-divided state government, often called the most dysfunctional in the nation. In the predominantly Democratic state, Democrats dominate the Assembly, but the Senate is gerrymandered for a Republican majority. Every Senate district north of New York City has close to the legal minimum population, while every one in the city has close to the legal maximum. The GOP’s cartographers also crafted a Republican seat in southwest Brooklyn by excising the public housing projects of Bensonhurst and Coney Island. Those were attached to Savino’s Staten Island district, which is made contiguous by only a seagull-pecked sliver of shoreline between a highway and the ocean. The Democrats managed to win a majority in 2008 and 2012, but were thwarted both times by senators bolting the party–most of them recipients of massive moolah from New York’s real estate lobby.

Republished with permission from:: AlterNet

A foreign soldier serving with the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has died in eastern Afghanistan as a result of a non-battle injury.

The ISAF said in a statement that the unidentified soldier died on Friday, with the incident currently under investigation.

According to media estimates, the fatality takes the total number of foreign soldiers killed in Afghanistan so far in 2013 to 95, with the United States topping the list with at least 64 deaths.

Attacks on foreign troops are expected to rise in the next months, as Taliban militants have announced the beginning of their Ëœoffensiveâ„¢ across Afghanistan.

According to the icasualties website, at least 3,330 foreign soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan since the US-led invasion of the country in 2001, which was conducted as part of Washingtonâ„¢s so-called war on terror.

The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but insecurity continues to rise across Afghanistan, despite the presence of foreign troops.

The increasing number of foreign military casualties in Afghanistan has caused widespread anger in the United States and other NATO member states, undermining public support for the Afghan war.

GMA/HSN

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

Republished with permission from:: Stephen Lendman

Republished with permission from:: Stephen Lendman

Protesters supporting Edward Snowden hold a photo of him during a demonstration outside the US Consulate in Hong Kong, June 13, 2013.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

An analyst says the Zionist-run Office of Asset Control (OFAC) – an agency of the US Treasury Department – has been granted Å“carte blanche” to launch a campaign against Iranian media and economy, Press TV reports.

Å“Letâ„¢s face the facts here, the Office of Asset Control (OFAC) of the US Treasury Department was handed over to a bunch of hard-line neoconservative arch Zionist Likudnik radical Israeli partisans and those people have been given carte blanche by the US government for some ungodly reason to go after Iran in an all-out monetary war, and an ideological war,” political commentator Kevin Barrett told Press TV in an exclusive interview on Thursday.

Å“They are … trying to shut down the free flow of ideas back and forth between the West and Iran. If they had nothing to fear from the ideas that are coming across on Press TV, al-Alam and the other Iranian channels, this wouldnâ„¢t be a problem,” he said.

The comments come in that wake of a decision by the European communications satellite service provider Intelsat to remove Iranian channels, including Press TV, as of July 1 as part of an unprecedented wave of US-led attacks against Iranian media.

Press TV has learned that OFAC – headed by an Ashkenazi Jew called Adam Szubin – is behind the pressure on Intelsat.

Press TV and other Iranian satellite channels have come under a wave of attacks by European governments and satellite companies since January 2012. They were taken off air in several Western countries, including Britain, France, Germany and Spain.

European companies claim they are abiding by anti-Iran sanctions. However, Michael Mann, the European Union foreign policy chief’s spokesman, has told Press TV that sanctions do not apply to media.

Meanwhile, the French-Israeli CEO of Europe’s satellite giant, Eutelsat, has written letters to several satellite companies, asking them to stop cooperating with Iranian channels, and the Israeli lobby in the United States has openly supported European attempts to ban those channels.

Media activists term the campaign against Iranian media a violation of free speech launched by the same European governments that preach freedom of expression.

Å“Itâ„¢s a case of egregious hypocrisy these people endlessly blabber on about free speech and democracy,” Barrett said.

The analyst noted that the Iranian channels, Press TV in particular, have been targeted by bans because they keep presenting a broader perspective opinion to the world, which is considered a threat to certain powers and the Zionists.

Å“The real issue is that Iran is using its soft power, like these TV channels, to get the truth out to the people of the West and the Zionists are mortally threatened by the truth and they have to kill the messenger.”

AR/NN/HMV

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

The US Army confirmed on Thursday that access to The Guardian newspaper’s website has been filtered and restricted for its personnel.

Gordon Van Vleet, spokesman for the Army Network Enterprise
Technology Command, or NETCOM, said in an email to the Monterey
Herald that the Army is filtering “some access to press
coverage and online content about the NSA leaks.”

The spokesman said the procedure was routine part of “network
hygiene” measures to prevent unauthorized disclosures of
sensitive information.

“We make every effort to balance the need to preserve
information access with operational security,” he wrote,
“however there are strict policies and directives in place
regarding protecting and handling classified information.”

In a later phone conversation he clarified that the filtering was
“Armywide” rather than restricted to some US Army facilities.

Van Vleet said NETCOM, which is part of the Army Cyber Command,
does not determine what sites its personnel can have access to,
but “relies on automated filters that restrict access based on
content concerns or malware threats.”

The Guardian’s website has posted classified information
regarding the NSA’s surveillance activities, including PRISM, the
massive domestic spying program that has Internet companies
collude with military intelligence to keep tabs on Americans’
online habits.

The Herald inquired about the issue after staff at the Presidio
of Monterey, a military installation in California, told the
newspaper that they were able to access The Guardian’s US site,
www.guardiannews.com,
but were prevented from accessing articles on the NSA that
redirected to the British site.

Republished with permission from:: RT

South Korean President Park Geun-hye (R) is accompanied by Chinaâ„¢s President Xi Jinping upon her arrival in Beijing on June 27, 2013.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]A foreign soldier serving with the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has died in eastern Afghanistan as a result of non-battle related injury.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

Ecuador has unilaterally renounced its US trade benefits, insisting that it refuses to submit to Washington threats over its willingness to offer asylum to leaker of NSA electronic spying bids Edward Snowden.

Å“Ecuador doesnâ„¢t accept pressure or threats from anyone and doesnâ„¢t barter its principles and sovereignty or submit to mercantile interests,” the nationâ„¢s President Rafael Correa said Thursday during a speech in the central province of Los Rios.

What Snowden revealed, President Correa added, Å“is a terrible case of massive espionage, both nationally and internationally that clearly threatens the right to intimacy and the sovereignty of states.”

The move came just a day after Chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Robert Menendez, a staunchly pro-Israeli New Jersey Democrat, pledged to do his utmost to block trade benefits for Ecuador should it grant Snowden political asylum.

Å“Our government will not reward countries for bad behavior,” said Senator Menendez in a statement on Wednesday. Å“Trade preferences are a privilege granted to nations, not a right.”

Such threats by Menendez and other US politicians as well as some major media outlets come amid reports that American lawmakers had already considered cutting trade deals with Ecuador due to its good ties with the Islamic Republic of Iran, according to a Washington Post report on Friday.

In an apparent response to recent Washington bullying, Ecuadorâ„¢s Communications Minister Fernando Alvarado pushed back at growing efforts by US media and political circles to influence a possible decision by Quito on the asylum issue, insisting that his nations refuses to accept threats or Å“trade its principles” for commercial benefits.

Ecuador Å“doesnâ„¢t accept pressure or threats from anybody, and it doesnâ„¢t trade its principles or give them up for commercial interests, no matter how important,” Alvarado reportedly said at a news conference on Thursday.

Further ridiculing recent Washington threats and allegations against Quito, Alvarado described US trade preferences as a Å“new instrument of blackmail” and added that Ecuador is offering the United Stated USD23 million to provide human rights training to combat torture, illegal executions and attacks on peopleâ„¢s privacy.

Meanwhile, President Correa further stated on Thursday that Snowden would have to either land in Ecuador or get inside one of its embassies to have his asylum request processed. Snowden Å“is not in Ecuadorian territory so, technically, we cannot process his request,” the president added.

MFB/MFB

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

File photo shows UN peacekeepers on patrol in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

The four-star general who headed the reported cyber-attack by American and Israeli hackers on an Iranian nuclear site is under a DoJ investigation over leaking the details of the operation to the press, reports NBC News.

Retired Marine Gen. James ‘Hoss’ Cartwright, who was deputy
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff between 2007 and 2011, was
the one responsible for the ‘Olympic Games’, a massive attack on
Iranian uranium enrichment facilities conducted under the Bush
and the Obama administrations, the New York Times reported last
July.

At the time the newspaper broke details of the top secret operation,
including collaboration of Israeli hackers in development of the
Stuxnet computer worm, which was used to infect Iranian computer
networks and damage hundreds of centrifuges at the Natanz
enrichment facility.

The leak caused outrage in the Congress, as some Republican
politicians alleged that it was sanctioned high in the Obama
administration to bolster his national security record ahead of
the 2012 election campaign.

Legal sources told NBC News that the FBI investigating the leak
zeroed on Cartwright, once the second-highest ranking officer in
the Pentagon, as the source that provided the newspaper with the
sensitive information. Agents identified the former general
without resorting to a secret subpoena of the phone records of
New York Times reporters, the report says.

Cartwright, 63, received a target letter informing him that he’s
under the investigation, but so far the DoJ hasn’t made a final
decision on whether to charge him, according to the sources.

Cartwright and his lawyer did not comment to NBC.

If indicted, Cartwright would join Bradley Manning, Edward
Snowden and six others charged under the 1917 Espionage Act by
the Obama administration. The current US government has invoked
the law more than all previous administrations combined.

Republished with permission from:: RT

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Baroness Warsi is accused of gross hypocrisy after she boasted about Britainâ„¢s role in ending torture.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

The former second ranking officer in the US military is reportedly under investigation by the Justice Department for allegedly revealing details of the Stuxnet computer virus, which targetted Iranâ„¢s nuclear energy facilities.

NBC News cited legal sources as saying that retired Marine Gen. James Cartwright, 63, is being probed for allegedly leaking classified information about the covert Stuxnet operation.

Cartwright, a four-star general, was responsible for overseeing and running military cyber operations from 2007 to 2011.

Stuxnet, first indentified by the Iranian officials in June 2010, is a malware designed to infect computers using a control system favored by industries that manage water supplies, oil rigs, and power plants.

In July 2010, media reports claimed that Stuxnet had targeted industrial computers around the globe, with Iran being the main target of the attack. They said the country’s Bushehr nuclear power plant was at the center of the cyber attack.

On June 1, 2012, The New York Times revealed that Stuxnet was part of a wave of sophisticated digital attacks codenamed Å“Olympic Games,” which US President Barack Obama had ordered against the computer systems that run Iranâ„¢s main nuclear enrichment facilities.

The paper also confirmed that the Stuxnet virus was created with the help of a secret Israeli intelligence unit.

Iranian experts, however, detected the worm in time, averting any damage to the country’s industrial sites and resources.

In response to such attacks, Iran launched a cyber defense headquarters tasked with preventing computer worms from breaking into or stealing data from the countryâ„¢s maximum security networks, including nuclear facilities, power plants, data centers, and banks.

SF/NN/HMV

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Pakistan’s former military ruler Pervez Musharraf is to face treason charges over his role in imposing emergency rule and detaining judges in 2007, Press TV reports.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

Egyptians protest outside the Egyptian Embassy in London against Shia Muslims killings in Cairo.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

Infowars.com
June 27, 2013

The Trayvon Martin murder case is not about justice. It’s an excuse for a lot of ignorant people to express their racist attitudes. Due to decades of political correctness promoted by the elite and inculcated through their cultural and educational programming system, emotionally charged racist violence is now acceptable and has been since at least the 1992 L.A. riots that claimed over 50 lives following the beating of Rodney King. If George Zimmerman is acquitted, there is the possibility of mob violence and riots with no shortage of violent thugs willing to participate, as demonstrated below.

Racist polarization, promoted in theatrical fashion by the corporate media, distracts people from the real cause of class and racial division – an economic and social system designed for exploitation and predation by a hereditary elite. If we are feeding on each other, if we perpetually with the passing of each generation fall victim to class and racial warfare, we will never recognize the real criminal class victimizing us all.

(H/T: Weasel Zippers)

<!–

–>

This article was posted: Thursday, June 27, 2013 at 10:55 pm

Tags: domestic news

–>

Republished with permission from:: Infowars

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (L) and Minister for Military Affairs Moshe Yaâ„¢alon watch a maneuver in the occupied Golan Heights on June 26, 2013.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

by Paul Huebl
Crime
File News

Recently
by Paul Huebl: Was
Michael Hastings Running for His Life When He Crashed?

Yes, the George Zimmerman trial here has thousands of African-Americans
getting ready for some serious bloodletting.

I don’t
want to make idle and dire predictions but this nation has never
been so divided and racially sensitive. Or African-American President
took sides on this case at the very beginning. That ratified a George
Zimmerman guilty verdict in the minds of millions.

There’s
just one little problem, and that is the murder case should have
never been filed. It was filed purely for political reasons despite
the fact that it was a simple justifiable homicide.

Zimmerman
was the block watch lookout program and followed a suspicious Trayvon
Martin after he used an improper entrance to a gated community.
Zimmerman was acting at the eyes and ears of the Sanford Police
Department. Martin did not like being followed and knew that he
could easily beat up the out-of-shape Zimmerman and did so.

The force
was unequal and Zimmerman was getting his head pounded on the concrete
sidewalk. Zimmerman was fighting for his life when he removed his
Kel-Tec pistol and put a round into Martin’s chest.

The Sanford
Police Department investigated the shooting and had no probable
cause to arrest Zimmerman who regrettably cooperated with them fully.
They made no arrest.

The Leftist
gun rights hating media and African-American agitators could not
wait to exploit this sad story. They used angelic pictures of Martin
from his childhood and even broadcast doctored 911 tapes to make
Zimmerman appear racist.

The propaganda
fairy tale was so simple. An unarmed youngster was merely skipping
along in an apartment complex carrying tea and candy. The lad was
suddenly murdered by an armed monster stalking him because of his
skin color.

It was the
Seminole County Prosecutor that buckled under the political pressure
and brought forward a wrongful prosecution feeding the propaganda.
The case is now on trial and is set to end at the hottest point
in our summer season.

The family
produced a “star” witness, Rachel Jeantel who was on the
phone with Martin at the time of the attack and subsequent shooting.
Jeantel is a very slow-witted girl that was schooled by the Martin
family and possibly their civil lawyer on what she should tell authorities.

The family
and prosecutors soon claimed that Jeantel “Connected all the
dots to this vicious racially motivated murder.” Unfortunately
for Jeantel the dots all scattered everywhere today in court.

Jeantel tried
her best to pull off the charade but could not keep her lies straight
from one moment to the next. Today she had a very painful afternoon
on the witness stand not only admitting lies, but she got caught
red-handed in a perjury trap. They are far from being through with
her yet!

The media
and prosecutors claimed that Zimmerman was a ruthless vigilante
that was racially profiling and stalking African-Americans to kill.
They redundantly said he violated orders from the Sanford Police
Department employees.

Read
the rest of the article

June
28, 2013

Copyright
© 2013 Crime File News

The
Best of Paul Hueble

Republished with permission from:: Lew Rockwell

by Paul Rosenberg
FreemansPerspective.com

Recently
by Paul Rosenberg: The
Other (Worse) Side of the PRISM Scandal

I know,
I know. It’s a Russian thing. When we’re about to do
something stupid, we like to catalog the full extent of our stupidity
for future reference.
— Susan Ivanova, Babylon
5

Perhaps I have
some Russian blood in me. Even though I’m not particularly
a fan of the US Constitution (I would have come down on the side
of the Anti-Federalists), I still say it’s time to take a
moment and catalog what has happened to America.

I am under
no impression that this is going to wake
people up, by the way. Most Americans just don’t want
to know. In fact, they pay people to tell them that everything
is okay and that the people who complain are crazy, stupid, losers,
or conspiracy
believers.

Still, I want
to catalog the extent of the current stupidity for the next generation
— and to kill
the lie that no one from my generation “saw it coming.”

Whatever our
opinion of the US Constitution, it has clearly been the standard
of reference in America and the trashing of this document matters
for the future of the American people.

So, I will
briefly explain what has happened to each of the ten amendments
which make up the crucial section of the US Constitution: the Bill
of Rights.

1st Amendment

Congress
shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom
of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably
to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This one has
been voided repeatedly and on many fronts. Here are just a few examples:

And there are
many more instances. You have free speech only until you reach the
end of your leash.

2nd Amendment

A well-regulated
Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the
right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

More or less
all levels of the US government (along with their sycophants) are
openly at war
with the right of the people to bear arms. I won’t bother
itemizing anything here.

3rd Amendment

No Soldier
shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the
consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be
prescribed by law.

So far as I
know, this one hasn’t been trashed yet. (There really is no
need these days.)

4th Amendment

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.

And what are
our “papers”? That HAS TO include emails, which took over from “papers”
very directly.

The US government,
on almost every level, has become a full-blown
surveillance state, far beyond the Statsi’s wildest dreams.
The National Security Agency alone spends billions of dollars per
year to directly violate the 4^th amendment. It’s
not even close.

Most people
have seen the stories of whistleblowers,
NSA
rooms at AT&T, and covert
agents admitting it all. Those who want to know, know.

These organizations
hide behind dozens of laws, stacked one upon another, but it’s
all complication and misdirection: The right of people to be
secure in their papers (correspondence) is plain. And this amendment
is purposely trashed on a daily basis.

5th Amendment

No person
shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime,
unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except
in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia,
when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall
any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in
jeopardy of life or limb; nor 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; nor shall private
property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

There are too
many trashings to be mentioned here. But we can start with the President
of the United States killing
US citizens with no trial, and then defending his right to do
so.

We could go
on with the standard police tactic of intimidating
people until they testify against themselves, and much more.

Read
the rest of the article

June
28, 2013

Paul
Rosenberg [send him
mail] is the CEO of Cryptohippie
USA, a leading provider of Internet privacy technologies. He
is the “outside the Matrix” author of FreemansPerspective.com,
a site dedicated to economic freedom, personal independence
and individual privacy. Visit us at www.freemansperspective.com
to read more articles like this one.

Copyright
© FreemansPerspective.com

The
Best of Paul Rosenberg

Republished with permission from:: Lew Rockwell

by Tim Hartnett

Before Edward
Snowden’s name became a household word I had a weird exchange with
a guy claiming to be a Federal agent sitting at an Alexandria, Va.
bar. When asked how, exactly, US interests had been harmed by Bradley
Manning’s revelations the man replied, “If I told you I’d have
to kill you.” He was only half-kidding. The conversation moved
on before any implications could be pinned down from the odd remark.
This would be killer had a sensitive side and was soon busy being
offended by the observation that the ATF, who apparently employed
him, “were always the Rodney Dangerfields among G-Men.”

The government
is reluctant to describe specific damage to the realm resulting
from the kind of material released by Manning, Snowden and others.
But that may have more to do with meal ticket security in the national
insecurity industry than with “national security.” If
the” bad guys” already know something who’s getting hurt
when the public gets informed?

The original
video of a US
helicopter attack on a Baghdad marketplace that preceded Manning’s
full trove of documents couldn’t have damaged any vital security
interest. The victims and first hand witnesses already knew who
was gunning all those people down. The real mischief from that disclosure
was what got revealed about how the war in Iraq was being conducted
to the population stateside. What everyone saw appeared to be a
wanton massacre. The fact that two Reuters employees were killed
in it did nothing to belie that impression.

If the Manning
case is any kind of example it will probably never be clear to American’s
without clearances why they are less safe once the leakers hit send.
The first thing imperiled by these downloads is the credibility
of official PR campaigns. We are supposed to believe that government
and academia are in cahoots manufacturing a spiffy new techno-warrior
caste. Not only do they not come cheap but won’t be able to save
us if we remain overly attached to privacy, dignity or any semblance
of accurate reports describing government in action.

The constantly
expanding variety of information that gets absorbed into the gravitational
pull of a black hole classification system doesn’t give Joe Six-pack
much chance of ever wising up. The media isn’t a lot of help on
those occasions when some of the straight dope oozes onto the street
either. The story is always that something devastating has been
exposed rather than what the something is. One-per-centers in the
security industry have concentrated access to data amongst themselves
more efficiently in a few years than financial elites managed with
national wealth over several decades. These two classes of hoarders
are far from mutually exclusive. The 200 some odd miles between
Washington, D.C. and South Manhattan is the most well-worn travel
and communication path in the country.

Conventional
ranks of the 4th estate aren’t bucking the trend. Some have suggested
that reporters, who run in the circles noted above, be elevated
into a further credentialed class of their own. Senator Lindsey
Graham (R, S.C.) recently ruminated: “Who is a journalist is
a question we need to ask ourselves. Is any blogger out there saying
anything-do they deserve 1st amendment protection? These are the
issues of our times.” Some among the class Graham wants to
entitle have been getting
paid by the government they cover as journalists. Would the
senator grant these professionals still more 1st amendment rights
than people with press cards who only receive one check for their
ink? The relationship between Wall Street, government and the media
is not exactly hostile in “our times.” Most of them appear
to share the kind of contempt for the common man that Montgomery
Burns would approve of.

How is it
possible for an electorate that is kept in the dark and covertly
scrutinized to exert any control over their own future? Some in
the media, like Dana Millbank, think it would be disastrous if they
were ever able to. Things like Prism,
the TSA, the 1033
program, US
missiles in Poland, interfering in foreign political developments
and numerous other projects are never brought into public debate
at election times. There are rafts of government activities that
go on independently of political contests. The tiny minorities that
advocate for such things would gladly make it illegal for the unconnected
to find out about them.

If polls are
to be believed a surprisingly large minority in the country think
loyal citizens should have nothing to hide from their rulers. Sneaking
around, encrypting and minding everyone else’s business is the province
of government. The idea that political processes can be manipulated
with these kinds of powers is paranoid from this point of view.
A Justice Department lawyer called me “admirably naïve”
when I jokingly offered him a Manning/Snowden for President bumper
sticker the other day. A seasoned man of the world, apparently,
knows to trust central authority with carte blanche and provide
daily updates on personal contacts. Don’t get distracted by the
20th century or recent divulgences about the IRS.

During the
Bush years the problem, supposedly, was intelligence “stove-piping.”
“Inventing” would have been the better word. What our
spies called “intelligence” generally served as clay to
mold whatever threat the brass had ordered up. Bureaucracies will
never break themselves of that convenient habit. The glut in material
for this artistic medium provided by the technocratic stimulation
overload is creating a cloak and dagger renaissance Fouche and Metternich
never dreamed of. Life will doubtlessly imitate their art.

It is hard
to imagine a system that amasses as much information as the present
one dealing effectively with it all. The mad scientists in charge
are as overwhelmed and unable to focus as a newly pubescent boy
at the beach. Or as awkward, grasping and bloated as a drunk on
weak beer. The number of employees required pretty much guarantees
that everything “top-secret” can’t be contained indefinitely.
Our only hope is that the next cyber-geek turns on them fast enough
to avert inevitable doom.

June
28, 2013

Tim
Hartnett [send him mail]
was born in Alexandria, Va. He works as a contractor and sometime
bartender in Northern Va. Past columns include “What
is the Conservative Movement” and “The Clothes Make the G-Man.”

Copyright
© 2013 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Republished with permission from:: Lew Rockwell

by
Todd Gitlin and Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch

Recently
by Tom Engelhardt: Nuclear
Terror in the Middle East

Back
in the early 1970s, I worked for Pacific News Service (PNS), a small
antiwar media outfit that operated out of the Bay Area Institute
(BAI), a progressive think tank in San Francisco. The first
story I ever wrote for PNS came about because an upset U.S. Air
Force medic wanted someone to know about the American war wounded
then pouring in from the invasion of Laos. So he snuck me
onto Travis Air Force Base in northern California and into a military
hospital to interview wigged-out guys with stumps for limbs who
thought the war was a disaster. In some cases, they also thought
we should have bombed the Vietnamese “back to the stone age.”

I was a good
boy from the 1950s and sneaking onto that base made me nervous indeed.
It was also the most illegal act I encountered at either PNS or
the institute in those years. We did, of course, regularly
have active duty antiwar soldiers and members of Vietnam Veterans
Against the War pass through our office, and we had an antiwar GI
in Vietnam writing for us under a pseudonym. (At some point,
we found out that the Pentagon had actually tracked down and interviewed
every soldier in Vietnam with that pseudonymous name in its attempt
to uncover our journalist.)

In any case,
we doggedly researched, reported, wrote, and edited our stories
on U.S. war policy, which we syndicated, with modest success, to
mainstream newspapers as well as what, in those days, was romantically
called “the underground press.” The only hints of “violence”
you might have stumbled across in our office would have been discussions
of the violence of U.S. war policy.

So imagine
my surprise – okay, I shouldn’t have been, but I was
anyway – when years later one of my co-workers got his FBI
files thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, and it became
clear, on reading through those heavily redacted, semi-blacked-out
pages, that there had been an informer in our office, spying on
us and feeding information to the Bureau. If that was true
in a modest place like PNS/BAI, where wouldn’t there have
been such spies in the world of the antiwar movement? In fact,
U.S. government informers and sometimes agents provocateurs
were, it seems, a widespread phenomenon of those years. It’s
a story that has never fully been told, in part obviously because
the information to tell it just isn’t fully there. By
far the best account I’ve read on the subject, particularly when
it comes to agents provocateurs – government agents
sent in to provoke violence – was a section of Todd Gitlin’s
1980 book The
Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of
the New Left.

Recently, as
Edward Snowden’s National Security Agency revelations about
the high-tech gathering of global (and domestic) communications
of every imaginable sort began
unspooling, Gitlin’s work came to mind again. I had certainly
been aware of how many post-9/11 “terror” cases against
American Muslims rested on the acts and testimony of government
informers, who sometimes even provided (fake) weaponry to hapless
plotters and the spark to begin plotting in the first place.
I began to wonder, however, what we didn’t know about the
low-tech side of America’s massive intelligence overreach.
So I picked up the phone and called Gitlin. The answer, as
his piece today indicates, is one hell of a horrifying lot.
Among the few outfits to pay significant attention to spies and
informers in the ranks of groups opposed to some aspect of Washington’s
policies, the ACLU stands out. In fact, in a map that organization
created, “Spying
on First Amendment Activity – State by State,” you
can take a Mr. Toad’s wild ride through what’s known
of the universe of the twenty-first century American informer.
TomDispatch is pleased to follow up with a Mr. Todd’s wild
ride through the thickets of American intelligence clearly on the
march domestically. ~ Tom

Close
Encounters of the Lower-Tech Kind

By Todd
Gitlin

Only Martians,
by now, are unaware of the phone and online data scooped
up by the National Security Agency (though if it turns out that
they are aware, the NSA has surely picked up their signals
and crunched their metadata). American high-tech surveillance
is not, however, the only kind around. There’s also
the lower tech, up-close-and-personal kind that involves informers
and sometimes government-instigated violence.

Just how much
of this is going on and in how coordinated a way no one out here
in the spied-upon world knows. The lower-tech stuff gets reported,
if at all, only one singular, isolated event at a time – look
over here, look over there, now you see it, now you don’t.
What is known about such surveillance as well as the suborning of
illegal acts by government agencies, including the FBI, in the name
of counterterrorism has not been put together by major news organizations
in a way that would give us an overview of the phenomenon.
(The ACLU
has done by far the best job of compiling reports on spying on Americans
of this sort.)

Some intriguing
bits about informers and agents provocateurs briefly made
it into the public spotlight when Occupy Wall Street was riding
high.  But as always, dots need connecting.  Here is a
preliminary attempt to sort out some patterns behind what could
be the next big story about government surveillance and provocation
in America.

Two
Stories from Occupy Wall Street

The first is
about surveillance. The second is about provocation.

On September
17, 2011, Plan A for the New York activists who came to be known
as Occupy Wall Street was to march to the territory outside the
bank headquarters of JPMorgan Chase.  Once there, they discovered
that the block was entirely fenced in. Many activists came
to believe that the police had learned their initial destination
from e-mail circulating beforehand. Whereupon they headed
for nearby Zuccotti Park and a movement was born.

The evening
before May Day 2012, a
rump Occupy group marched out of San Francisco’s Dolores
Park and into the Mission District, a neighborhood where not so
many 1-percenters live, work, or shop. There, they proceeded
to trash “mom and pop shops, local boutiques and businesses,
and cars,” according to Scott
Rossi, a medic and eyewitness, who summed his feelings up this
way afterward:  “We were hijacked.” The people
“leading the march tonight,” he added, were

“clean
cut, athletic, commanding, gravitas not borne of charisma but of
testosterone and intimidation. They were decked out in outfits typically
attributed to those in the ‘black bloc’ spectrum of
tactics, yet their clothes were too new, and something was just
off about them. They were very combative and nearly physically violent
with the livestreamers on site, and got ignorant with me, a medic,
when I intervened… I didn’t recognize any of these people.
Their eyes were too angry, their mouths were too severe. They felt
‘military’ if that makes sense. Something just wasn’t
right about them on too many levels.”

He was quick
to add, “I’m not one of those tin foil hat conspiracy
theorists. I don’t subscribe to those theories that
Queen Elizabeth’s Reptilian slave driver masters run the Fed.
I’ve read up on agents provocateurs and plants and that sort
of thing and I have to say that, without a doubt, I believe 100%
that the people that started tonight’s events in the Mission
were exactly that.”

Taken aback,
Occupy
San Francisco condemned the sideshow: “We consider these
acts of vandalism and violence a brutal assault on our community
and the 99%.”

Where does
such vandalism and violence come from? We don’t know.
There are actual activists who believe that they are doing good
this way; and there are government infiltrators; and then there
are double agents who don’t know who they work for,
ultimately, but like smashing things or blowing them up. By
definition, masked trashers of windows in Oakland or elsewhere are
anonymous. In anonymity, they – and the burners of flags
and setters of bombs – magnify their power. They hijack
the media spotlight. In this way, tiny groups –
incendiary, sincere, fraudulent, whoever they are – seize
levers that can move the entire world.

The
Sting of the Clueless Bee

Who casts the
first stone? Who smashes the first window? Who teaches
bombers to build and plant actual or spurious bombs? The history
of the secret police planting agents provocateurs in popular
movements goes back at least to nineteenth century France and twentieth
century Russia. In 1905, for example, the priest who led St.
Petersburg’s revolution was some sort of double
agent, as was the man who organized
the assassination of the Czar’s uncle, the Grand Duke.
As it happens, the United States has its own surprisingly full history
of such planted agents at work turning small groups or
movements in directions that, for better or far more often worse,
they weren’t planning on going. One well-documented
case is that of “Tommy
the Traveler,” a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
organizer who after years of trying to arouse violent action convinced
two 19-year-old students to firebomb an ROTC headquarters at Hobart
College in upstate New York. The writer John Schultz reported
on likely provocateurs in Chicago during the Democratic National
Convention of 1968. How much of this sort of thing went on?
Who knows? Many relevant documents molder in unopened archives,
or have been heavily redacted or destroyed.

As the Boston
marathon bombing illustrates, there are homegrown terrorists capable
of producing the weapons they need and killing Americans without
the slightest help from the U.S. government.  But historically,
it’s surprising how relatively often the gendarme is also
a ringleader. Just how often is hard to know, since information
on the subject is fiendishly hard to pry loose from the secret world.

Through 2011,
508 defendants in the U.S. were prosecuted in what the Department
of Justice calls “terrorism-related cases.” According
to Mother
Jones’s Trevor Aaronson, the FBI ran sting operations
that “resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants”
– about one-third of the total. “Of that total,
49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent provocateur
– an FBI operative instigating terrorist action. With
three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror plots
of the last decade were actually FBI stings.”

In Cleveland,
on May Day of 2012, in the words of a Rolling
Stone exposé, the FBI “turned five stoner
misfits into the world’s most hapless terrorist cell.” To
do this, the FBI put a deeply indebted, convicted bank robber and
bad-check passer on their payroll, and hooked him up with an arms
dealer, also paid by the Bureau. The FBI undercover man then
hustled five wacked-out wannabe anarchists into procuring what they
thought was enough C4 plastic explosive to build bombs they thought
would blow up a bridge. The bombs were, of course, dummies.
The five were arrested and await trial.

What do such
cases mean? What is the FBI up to? Trevor Aaronson offers
this appraisal:

“The
FBI’s goal is to create a hostile environment for terrorist recruiters
and operators – by raising the risk of even the smallest step
toward violent action. It’s a form of deterrence… Advocates
insist it has been effective, noting that there hasn’t been a successful
large-scale attack against the United States since 9/11. But what
can’t be answered – as many former and current FBI agents acknowledge
– is how many of the bureau’s targets would have taken the
step over the line at all, were it not for an informant.”

Perhaps Aaronson
is a bit too generous. The FBI may, at times, be
anything but thoughtful in its provocations. It may, in fact,
be flatly dopey. COINTELPRO records released since the 1960s
under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) show that it took FBI
Director J. Edgar Hoover until 1968 to discover that there was such
a thing as a New Left that might be of interest. Between 1960
and 1968, as the New Left was becoming a formidable force in its
own right, the Bureau’s top officials seem to have thought
that groups like Students for a Democratic Society were simply covers
for the Communist Party, which was like mistaking the fleas for
the dog. We have been assured that the FBI of today has learned
something since the days of J. Edgar Hoover. But of ignorance
and stupidity there is no end.

Trivial
and Nontrivial Pursuits

Entrapment
and instigation to commit crimes are in themselves genuine dangers
to American liberties, even when the liberties are those of the
reckless and wild. But there is another danger to such pursuits:
the attention the authorities pay to nonexistent threats (or the
creation of such threats) is attention not paid to actual threats. 

Anyone concerned
about the security of Americans should cast a suspicious eye on
the allocation or simply squandering of resources on wild goose
chases. Consider some particulars which have recently come to light.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, the Partnership
for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) has unearthed documents showing
that, in 2011 and 2012, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
and other federal agencies were busy surveilling and worrying about
a good number of Occupy groups – during the very time that
they were missing actual warnings about actual terrorist actions.

From its beginnings,
the Occupy movement was of considerable interest to the DHS, the
FBI, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies, while
true terrorists were slipping past the nets they cast in the wrong
places. In the fall of 2011, the DHS specifically asked
its regional affiliates to report on “Peaceful Activist Demonstrations,
in addition to reporting on domestic terrorist acts and ‘significant
criminal activity.’”

Aware that
Occupy was overwhelmingly peaceful, the federally funded Boston
Regional Intelligence Center (BRIC), one of 77 coordination centers
known generically as “fusion centers,” was busy
monitoring Occupy Boston daily.  As the investigative journalist
Michael Isikoff recently
reported, they were not only tracking Occupy-related Facebook
pages and websites but “writing reports on the movement’s
potential impact on ‘commercial and financial sector assets.’”

It was in this
period that the FBI received the second of two Russian police warnings
about the extremist Islamist activities of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the
future Boston Marathon bomber. That city’s police commissioner
later testified that the federal authorities did not pass any information
at all about the Tsarnaev brothers on to him, though there’s
no point in letting the Boston police off the hook either.
The ACLU has uncovered documents showing that, during the same period,
they were paying
close attention to the internal workings of…Code Pink
and Veterans for Peace.

Public
Agencies and the “Private Sector” 

So we know
that Boston’s master coordinators – its Committee on
Public Safety, you might say – were worried about constitutionally
protected activity, including its consequences for “commercial
and financial sector assets.” Unsurprisingly, the feds
worked closely with Wall Street even before the settling of Zuccotti
Park. More surprisingly, in Alaska, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi,
Tennessee, and Wisconsin, intelligence was not only pooled among
public law enforcement agencies, but shared with private corporations
– and vice versa.

Nationally,
in 2011, the FBI and DHS were, in the words of Mara Verheyden-Hilliard,
executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, “treating
protests against the corporate and banking structure of America
as potential criminal and terrorist activity.”  Last
December using FOIA, PCJF
obtained 112 pages of documents (heavily redacted) revealing
a good deal of evidence for what might otherwise seem like an outlandish
charge: that federal authorities were, in Verheyden-Hilliard’s
words, “functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall
Street and Corporate America.” Consider these examples
from PCJF’s summary of federal agencies working directly not
only with local authorities but on behalf of the private sector:

– “As
early as August 19, 2011, the FBI in New York was meeting with the
New York Stock Exchange to discuss the Occupy Wall Street protests
that wouldn’t start for another month. By September, prior
to the start of the OWS, the FBI was notifying businesses that they
might be the focus of an OWS protest.”

– “The
FBI in Albany and the Syracuse Joint Terrorism Task Force disseminated
information to… [22] campus police officials… A representative
of the State University of New York at Oswego contacted the FBI
for information on the OWS protests and reported to the FBI on the
SUNY-Oswego Occupy encampment made up of students and professors.”

– An entity
called the Domestic Security Alliance Council (DSAC), “a strategic
partnership between the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security,
and the private sector,” sent around information regarding
Occupy protests at West Coast ports [on Nov. 2, 2011] to “raise
awareness concerning this type of criminal activity.” The
DSAC report contained “a ‘handling notice’ that
the information is ‘meant for use primarily within the corporate
security community. Such messages shall not be released in either
written or oral form to the media, the general public or other personnel…’
Naval Criminal Investigative Services (NCIS) reported to DSAC on
the relationship between OWS and organized labor.”

– DSAC
gave tips to its corporate clients on “civil unrest,”
which it defined as running the gamut from “small, organized
rallies to large-scale demonstrations and rioting.” It advised
corporate employees to dress conservatively, avoid political discussions
and “avoid all large gatherings related to civil issues. Even
seemingly peaceful rallies can spur violent activity or be met with
resistance by security forces.”

– The
FBI in Anchorage, Jacksonville, Tampa, Richmond, Memphis, Milwaukee,
and Birmingham also gathered information and briefed local officials
on wholly peaceful Occupy activities.

– In Jackson,
Mississippi, FBI agents “attended a meeting with the Bank
Security Group in Biloxi, MS with multiple private banks and the
Biloxi Police Department, in which they discussed an announced protest
for ‘National Bad Bank Sit-In-Day’ on December 7, 2011.”
Also in Jackson, “the Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a
‘Counterterrorism Preparedness’ alert” that, despite
heavy redactions, notes the need to ‘document…the Occupy
Wall Street Movement.’”

Sometimes,
“intelligence” moves in the opposite direction –
from private corporations to public agencies.
 Among the collectors of such “intelligence”
are entities that, like the various intelligence and law enforcement
outfits, do not make distinctions between terrorists and nonviolent
protesters. Consider TransCanada,
the corporation that plans to build the 1,179 mile Keystone-XL
tar sands pipeline across the U. S. and in the process realize
its “vision to become the leading energy infrastructure company
in North America.“ The anti-pipeline group Bold Nebraska filed
a successful Freedom of Information Act request with the Nebraska
State Patrol and so was able to put TransCanada’s
briefing slideshow up online.

So it can be
documented in living color that the company lectured federal agents
and local police to look into the use of “anti-terrorism statutes”
against peaceful anti-Keystone activists. TransCanada showed
slides that cited as sinister the “attendance” of Bold
Nebraska members at public events, noting “Suspicious Vehicles/Photography.”
TransCanada alerted the authorities that Nebraska protesters were
guilty of “aggressive/abusive behavior,” citing a local
anti-pipeline group that, they said, committed a “slap on
the shoulder” at the Merrick County Board Meeting (possessor
of said shoulder unspecified). They fingered nonviolent activists
by name and photo, paying them the tribute of calling them “’Professionals’
& Organized.” Native
News Network pointed out that “although TransCanada’s
presentation to authorities contains information about property
destruction, sabotage, and booby traps, police in Texas and Oklahoma
have never alleged, accused, or charged Tar Sands Blockade activists
of any such behaviors.”

Centers
for Fusion, Diffusion, and Confusion

After September
11, 2001, government agencies at all levels, suddenly eager to break
down information barriers and connect the sort of dots that had
gone massively unconnected before the al-Qaida attacks, used Department
of Homeland Security funds to start “fusion centers.”
These are supposed to coordinate anti-terrorist intelligence gathering
and analysis. They are also supposed to “fuse”
intelligence reports from federal, state, and local authorities,
as well as private companies that conduct intelligence operations.
According
to the ACLU, at least 77 fusion centers currently receive federal
funds.

Much is not
known about these centers, including just who runs them, by what
rules, and which public and private entities are among the fused.
There is nothing public about most of them. However, some
things are known about a few. Several fusion center
reports that have gone public illustrate a remarkably slapdash approach
to what constitutes “terrorist danger” and just what
kinds of data are considered relevant for law enforcement.
In 2010, the
American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee learned, for instance,
that the Tennessee Fusion Center was “highlighting on its
website map of ‘Terrorism Events and Other Suspicious Activity’
a recent ACLU-TN letter to school superintendents. The letter
encourages schools to be supportive of all religious beliefs during
the holiday season.” (The map is no longer online.)

So far, the
prize for pure fused wordiness goes to a 215-page manual issued
in 2009 by the Virginia
Fusion Center (VFC), filled with Keystone Kop-style passages
among pages that in their intrusive sweep are anything but funny.
The VFC warned, for instance, that “the Garbage Liberation
Front (GLF) is an ecological direct action group that demonstrates
the joining of anarchism and environmental movements.”
Among GLF’s dangerous activities well worth the watching,
the VFC included “dumpster diving, squatting, and train hopping.”

In a similarly
jaw-dropping manner, the manual claimed – the italics are mine
– that “Katuah Earth First (KEF), based in Asheville,
North Carolina, sends activists throughout the region to train and
engage in criminal activity. KEF has trained local environmentalists
in non-violent tactics, including blocking roads and leading demonstrations,
at action camps in Virginia. While KEF has been primarily
involved in protests and university outreach, members have also
engaged in vandalism.” Vandalism! Send out an
APB!

The VFC also
warned that, “[a]lthough the anarchist threat to Virginia
is assessed as low, these individuals view the government as unnecessary,
which could lead to threats or attacks against government figures
or establishments.” It singled out the following 2008
incidents as worth notice:

– At the
Martinsville Speedway, “A temporary employee called in a bomb
threat during a Sprint Cup race… because he was tired of picking
up trash and wanted to go home.”

– In Missouri,
“a mobile security team observed an individual photographing
an unspecified oil refinery… The person abruptly left the scene
before he could be questioned.”

– Somewhere
in Virginia, “seven passengers aboard a white pontoon boat
dressed in traditional Middle Eastern garments immediately sped
away after being sighted in the recreational area, which is in close
proximity to” a power plant.

What idiot
or idiots wrote this script?

Given a disturbing
lack of evidence of terrorist actions undertaken or in prospect,
the authors even warned:

“It
is likely that potential incidents of interest are occurring, but
that such incidents are either not recognized by initial responders
or simply not reported. The lack of detailed information for Virginia
instances of monitored trends should not be construed to represent
a lack of occurrence.”

Lest it be
thought that Virginia stands alone and shivering on the summit of
bureaucratic stupidity, consider an “intelligence report”
from the North Central Texas fusion center, which in a 2009 “Prevention
Awareness Bulletin” described, in
the ACLU’s words, “a purported conspiracy between
Muslim civil rights organizations, lobbying groups, the anti-war
movement, a former U.S. Congresswoman, the U.S. Treasury Department,
and hip hop bands to spread tolerance in the United States, which
would ‘provide an environment for terrorist organizations
to flourish.’”

And those Virginia
and Texas fusion centers were hardly alone in expanding the definition
of “terrorist” to fit just about anyone who might oppose
government policies. According to a 2010 report in the Los
Angeles Times, the Justice Department Inspector
General found that “FBI agents improperly opened investigations
into Greenpeace and several other domestic advocacy groups after
the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, and put the names of some
of their members on terrorist watch lists based on evidence that
turned out to be ‘factually weak.’” The
Inspector General called “troubling” what the Los Angeles Times
described as “singling out some of the domestic groups
for investigations that lasted up to five years, and were extended
‘without adequate basis.’”

Subsequently,
the FBI continued to maintain investigative files on groups like
Greenpeace, the Catholic Worker, and the Thomas Merton Center in
Pittsburgh, cases where (in the politely put words of the Inspector
General’s report) “there was little indication of any
possible federal crimes… In some cases, the FBI classified
some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under
its ‘acts of terrorism’ classification.” 

One of these
investigations concerned Greenpeace protests planned for ExxonMobil
shareholder meetings. (Note: I was on Greenpeace’s board
of directors during three of those years.) The inquiry was
kept open “for over three years, long past the shareholder meetings
that the subjects were supposedly planning to disrupt.” The
FBI put the names of Greenpeace members on its federal watch list.
Around the same time, an
ExxonMobil-funded lobby got the IRS to audit Greenpeace.

This counterintelligence
archipelago of malfeasance and stupidity is sometimes fused with
ass-covering fabrication. In
Pittsburgh, on the day after Thanksgiving 2002 (“a slow
work day” in the Justice Department Inspector General’s
estimation), a rookie FBI agent was outfitted with a camera, sent
to an antiwar rally, and told to look for terrorism suspects.
The “possibility that any useful information would result
from this make-work assignment was remote,” the report added
drily.

“The
agent was unable to identify any terrorism subjects at the event,
but he photographed a woman in order to have something to show his
supervisor. He told us he had spoken to a woman leafletter
at the rally who appeared to be of Middle Eastern descent, and that
she was probably the person he photographed.”

The sequel
was not quite so droll. The Inspector General found that FBI
officials, including their chief lawyer in Pittsburgh, manufactured
postdated “routing slips” and the rest of a phony paper
trail to justify this surveillance retroactively.

Moreover, at
least one fusion center has involved military intelligence in civilian
law enforcement. In 2009, a military operative from Fort Lewis,
Washington, worked
undercover collecting information on peace groups in the Northwest.
 In fact, he helped run the Port Militarization Resistance
group’s Listserv. Once uncovered, he told activists
there were others doing similar work in the Army. How much
the military spies on American citizens is unknown and, at the moment
at least, unknowable.

Do we hear
an echo from the abyss of the counterintelligence programs of the
1960s and 1970s, when FBI memos – I have some in my own heavily
redacted files obtained through an FOIA request – were routinely
copied to military intelligence units?  Then, too, military
intelligence operatives spied on activists who violated no laws,
were not suspected of violating laws, and had they violated laws,
would not have been under military jurisdiction in any case.
During those years, more than 1,500 Army intelligence agents in
plain clothes were spying, undercover, on domestic political groups
(according to Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics, 1967-70,
an unpublished dissertation by former Army intelligence captain
Christopher H. Pyle). They posed as students, sometimes growing
long hair and beards for the purpose, or as reporters and camera
crews. They recorded speeches and conversations on concealed
tape recorders. The Army lied about their purposes, claiming they
were interested solely in “civil disturbance planning.”

Years later,
I met one of these agents, now retired, in San Francisco.
He knew more about what I was doing in the late 1960s than my mother
did.

Squaring
Circles

In
2009, President Obama told the graduating class at the Naval
Academy that, “as Americans, we reject the false choice between
our security and our ideals.” Security and ideals: officially
we want both. But how do you square circles, especially in
a world in which “security” has often enough become
a stand-in for whatever intelligence operatives decide to do?

The ACLU’s
Tennessee office sums the situation up nicely: “While
the ostensible purpose of fusion centers, to improve sharing of
anti-terrorism intelligence among different levels and arms of government,
is legitimate and important, using the centers to monitor protected
First Amendment activity clearly crosses the line.”
Nationally, the ACLU rightly worries
about who is in charge of fusion centers and by what rules they
operate, about what becomes of privacy when private corporations
are inserted into the intelligence process, about what the military
is doing meddling in civilian law enforcement, about data-mining
operations that Federal guidelines encourage, and about the secrecy
walls behind which the fusion centers operate.

Even when fusion
centers do their best to square that circle in their own guidelines,
like the ones obtained by the ACLU from Massachusetts’s Commonwealth
Fusion Center (CFC), the knots in which they tie themselves are
all over the page. Imagine, then, what happens when you let
informers or agents provocateurs loose in actual undercover
situations.

“Undercovers,”
writes the Massachusetts CFC, “may not seek to gain access
to private meetings and should not actively participate in meetings…
 At the preliminary inquiry stage, sources and informants should
not be used to cultivate relationships with persons and groups that
are the subject of the preliminary inquiry.” So far
so good. Then, it adds, “Investigators may, however,
interview, obtain, and accept information known to sources and informants.”
By eavesdropping, say? Collecting trash?  Hacking?
All without warrants? Without probable cause?

“Undercovers
and informants,” the guidelines continue, “are strictly
prohibited from engaging in any conduct the sole purpose of which
is to disrupt the lawful exercise of political activity, from disrupting
the lawful operations of an organization, from sowing seeds of distrust
between members of an organization involved in lawful activity,
or from instigating unlawful acts or engaging in unlawful or unauthorized
investigative activities.” Now, go back and note that
little, easy-to-miss word “sole.” Who knows just
what grim circles that tiny word squares?

The
Massachusetts CFC at least addresses the issue of entrapment: “Undercovers
should not become so involved in a group that they are participating
in directing the operations of a group, either by accepting a formal
position in the hierarchy or by informally establishing the group’s
policy and priorities. This does not mean an undercover cannot support
a group’s policies and priorities; rather an undercover should not
become a driving force behind a group’s unlawful activities.”
Did Cleveland’s fusion center have such guidelines?
Did they follow them? Do other state fusion centers?
We don’t know.

Whatever the
fog of surveillance, when it comes to informers, agents provocateurs,
and similar matters, four things are clear enough:

– Terrorist
plots arise, in the United States as elsewhere, with the intent
of committing murder and mayhem. Since 2001, in the U.S., these
have been almost exclusively the work of freelance Islamist ideologues
like the Tsarnaev brothers of Boston.  None have been connected
in any meaningful way with any legitimate organization or movement.

– Government
surveillance may in some cases have been helpful in scotching such
plots, but there is no evidence that it has been essential.  

– Even
based on the limited information available to us, since September
11, 2001, the net of surveillance has been thrown wide indeed.
Tabs have been kept on members of quite a range of suspect populations,
including American Muslims, anarchists, and environmentalists, among
others – in situation after situation where there was no probable
cause to suspect preparations for a crime.

– At least
on occasion – we have no way of knowing how often – agents
provocateurs on government payrolls have spurred violence.

How much official
unintelligence is at work? How many demonstrations are being
poked and prodded by undercover agents? How many acts of violence
are being suborned? It would be foolish to say we know.
At least equally foolish would be to trust the authorities to keep
to honest-to-goodness police work when they are so mightily tempted
to take the low road into straight-out, unwarranted espionage and
instigation.

This article
originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.
To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive
the latest
updates from TomDispatch.com.

June
28, 2013

Tom
Engelhardt [send him mail]
co-founder
of the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of
the American Empire
Project. His book, The
End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly
issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best
of TomDispatch book, The
World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire
(Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. He is also
the author of The
American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s and The
United States of Fear. His latest book is Terminator
Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050 (with
Nick Turse). Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and
sociology at Columbia University, the chair of the PhD program in
communications, and the author of The
Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of
the New Left; The
Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage; and Occupy
Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the Promise of Occupy Wall Street.

Copyright
© 2013 Todd Gitlin

The
Best of Tom Engelhardt

Republished with permission from:: Lew Rockwell

by
Chantal K. Saucier

Recently
by Chantal K. Saucier: What’s
Your ONE Thing?

Human beings
learn constantly and they do so from the time they are born until
the time they die. I have yet to meet anyone who did not believe
this to be true. Yet, the vast majority of people also seem to believe
that human beings between the ages of 5 and 18 will not learn what
they need to know in our society if we don’t “teach” them.
What would children learn if they weren’t required to absorb a pre-determined
curriculum is a question hardly anyone is asking.

People forget,
it seems, that this school business is a very recent invention in
terms of humanity. Truth is, if our ancestors could not have learned
without schools what they needed to know in order to survive and
prosper, none of us would be here. By not trusting children to learn
what they need to know on their own, we are essentially breaking
the shopkeeper’s window on purpose, over and over again, because
we do not trust that he will spend his money wisely if he doesn’t
have to use it to fix the window.

Many of you
are likely familiar with Frederic Bastiat’s broken
window fallacy. A young boy breaks a shopkeeper’s window that
now needs to be repaired. At first, everyone is upset at the broken
window but after a while, some start believing that the misfortune
has its bright side because the broken window will provide work
for the window glazier, who will then have money to spend with other
merchants, and so on.

Bastiat offered
another view. He said that this theory is confined to that which
is seen, without taking into account that which is not seen. Had
the window not been broken, we do not know what the shopkeeper would
have done with the money he gave the glazier. He might have bought
a pair of shoes and he would have then owned a pair of shoes and
a window. Now, he only has a window. Bastiat’s conclusion was that
“society loses the value of things which are uselessly destroyed.”

When we put
children in classrooms and we mandate what they learn, we do not
know what the child might have learned on his own had we not decided
for him. We also do not know what activities the child would have
engaged in, that might have lead to an extraordinary discovery,
if we had not decided for him what he was going to do.

In schools,
we can see that which is learned, but we will never see that which
is not learned or discovered. Therefore, couldn’t we also say that
because of schools, society loses the value of the knowledge that
is uselessly smothered?

The unfair
advantage of human nature

Let’s now look
at another famous narrative by Bastiat. In his “Candle
Makers’ Petition,” which is a satire against protectionism,
Bastiat suggests to the French government that they pass a law mandating
that everyone cover all sources of natural light in their homes
and businesses in order to help the domestic candle making industry.
As a free source of light, Bastiat wrote, the sun has an unfair
competitive advantage over candle makers. By mandating that residents
block all sources of natural light, the government would encourage
industry and thereby increase employment.

If human beings
possess a natural instinct to learn, and children can learn on their
own all they need to know to function in the culture in which they
are born, as Peter Gray defends in Free
to Learn, couldn’t we also argue that human nature has an
unfair competitive advantage over educators?

And if, as
Gray contends, “there is no need for forced lessons, lectures,
assignments, tests, grades, segregation by age into classrooms,
or any of the other trappings of our standard, compulsory system
of schooling,” aren’t schools merely in place to stimulate
an industry and create employment for a slew of educators, administrators
and bureaucrats?

The obvious
difference here is that educators and bureaucrats have won their
petition against human nature decades ago and they have our children.
As a society, we have come to believe that this is the way it has
to be because it’s the way it has been for generations. Our windows
have been closed shut for so long that most, it seems, have forgotten
what the sun looks like or that it’s even there.

All is not
lost, however, and your child need not be lost. As Peter Gray points
out, “The time for revolution is here. It will be a peaceful
one, conducted by people brave enough to walk away from our coercive
schools, smart enough to resist the propaganda saying that such
schooling is essential to success in our culture, and independent
enough to thumb their noses at the education-industrial complex
that pushes coercive schooling and makes it ever more burdensome.”

There is no
need to break the window just so we can fix it; there is nothing
wrong with our children. And we do not need to fight the candle
makers either. All we need to do is open the shutters, uncover our
windows, and simply trust that the sun is still there.

June
28, 2013

Chantal
K. Saucier, Ph.D., [send
her mail] is a founder of Lafayette Sudbury
School scheduled to open this fall in the Lafayette, LA, area. For
more information, visit their page, LafayetteSudbury, on Facebook.
She is also a Realtor with Keller Williams Realty Acadiana. See
her blog @ LafayetteRealEstateNews.com

Copyright
© 2013 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in
part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.

Republished with permission from:: Lew Rockwell

by
Gary North
Tea Party Economist

Recently
by Gary North: Is
Your Retirement Planning as Bad as Most Americans’ Planning? Find
Out Here

These teenagers
violated the law, they are told. Why? For giving the local car rental
firms too much competition.

They decided
last year that they
would go into business rather than go to college. They had a
business plan. They would rent cars owned by Bay Area people. Who
would borrow these cars? People who had flown into San Francisco.

This is part
of a growing national movement: the rental movement. CBS News’
Sunday Morning ran a story on this as
its lead story on Sunday.

Here is a video
on how the new car rental firm works.

It makes sense.

It makes too
much sense.

The rent-a-car
companies see what is coming. These teenagers can provide cheap
slightly used cars, because they spend no money on buying a fleet
of new cars. This is low overhead!

This will be
imitated. Hertz, Avis, and the gang are relying on what looks like
a high-overhead business model.

The city of
San Francisco has decided to nip this in the bud. It has taken these
teenagers to court for unfair business practices.

Crony capitalism?
You’ve got it!

Continue
Reading on libertycrier.com

June
28, 2013

Gary
North [send him mail]
is the author of Mises
on Money. Visit http://www.garynorth.com.
He is also the author of a free 31-volume series, An
Economic Commentary on the Bible.

Copyright ©
2013 Gary North

The
Best of Gary North

Republished with permission from:: Lew Rockwell

by Glenn Greenwald
The
Guardian

When I made
the choice to report aggressively on top-secret NSA programs, I
knew that I would inevitably be the target of all sorts of personal
attacks and smears. You don’t challenge the most powerful state
on earth and expect to do so without being attacked. As a superb
Guardian editorial noted today: “Those who leak official
information will often be denounced, prosecuted or smeared. The
more serious the leak, the fiercer the pursuit and the greater the
punishment.”

One of the
greatest honors I’ve had in my years of writing about politics is
the opportunity to work with and befriend my long-time political
hero, Daniel Ellsberg. I never quite understood why the Nixon administration,
in response to his release of the Pentagon Papers, would want to
break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst and steal his
files. That always seemed like a non sequitur to me: how would disclosing
Ellsberg’s most private thoughts and psychosexual assessments discredit
the revelations of the Pentagon Papers?

When I asked
Ellsberg about that several years ago, he explained that the state
uses those tactics against anyone who dissents from or challenges
it simply to distract from the revelations and personally smear
the person with whatever they can find to make people uncomfortable
with the disclosures.

So I’ve been
fully expecting those kinds of attacks since I began my work on
these NSA leaks. The recent journalist-led “debate” about
whether I should be prosecuted for my reporting on these stories
was precisely the sort of thing I knew was coming.

As a result,
I was not particularly surprised when I received an email last night
from a reporter at the New York Daily News informing me that he
had been “reviewing some old lawsuits” in which I was
involved – “old” as in: more than a decade ago –
and that “the paper wants to do a story on this for tomorrow”.
He asked that I call him right away to discuss this, apologizing
for the very small window he gave me to comment.

Upon calling
him, I learned that he had somehow discovered two events from my
past. The first was my 2002-04 participation in a multi-member LLC
that had an interest in numerous businesses, including the distribution
of adult videos. I was bought out of that company by my partners
roughly nine years ago.

The lawsuit
he referenced was one where the LLC had sued a video producer in
(I believe) 2002 after the producer reneged on a profit-sharing
contract. In response, that producer fabricated abusive and ugly
emails he claimed were from me – they were not – in order
to support his allegation that I had bullied him into entering into
that contract and he should therefore be relieved from adhering
to it. Once our company threatened to retain a forensic expert to
prove that the emails were forgeries, the producer quickly settled
the case by paying some substantial portion of what was owed, and
granting the LLC the rights to use whatever it had obtained when
consulting with him to start its own competing business.

Read
the rest of the article

June
28, 2013

Copyright
© 2013 The
Guardian

Republished with permission from:: Lew Rockwell

I
was able to reconnect with Jim Rogers this morning out of Spain,
legendary co-founder of the Quantum Fund with George Soros, author
of Hot
Commodities, and chairman of the private Beeland Holdings.

It was an especially
powerful interview, as Jim spoke towards the relentless downward
pressure on gold, the upward explosion in interest rates, central
bank money printing, and how to protect yourself ahead of the disastrous
times he sees coming.

When asked
if we’re seeing forced liquidation leading the smash down in
gold this morning, Jim said, “We certainly are. There are a
lot of leveraged players who are now being forced to sell. Usually
when you have this kind of forced liquidation, you’re getting
closer to a bottom, maybe not the final bottom, but certainly close
to a bottom. I even bought a little bit [today].”

With regard
to the intense bearish news stories being published on gold, Jim
suggested investors shouldn’t ”Pay [much] attention to
other people. I pay attention to what’s going on…Obviously
with gold collapsing I know about that – but I don’t listen
to other people.”

Over the last
few years Jim has spoken extensively on shorting government bonds,
and more recently, the 10-year U.S. treasury yield has rocketed
higher (with a corresponding collapse in value). When asked if now
is a good time to be covering those short bond positions, he explained
that, “I’m grappling with that question as we speak…I’m
not short government bonds, [but rather] I’m short junk bonds
on the theory that they will suffer the most when the bond market
finally breaks. The junk bonds will go first, [along with] emerging
market bonds. So I’m trying to figure out what to do, but I
am not covering my shorts [just yet].”

Commenting
on the Fed’s historical ability to control the bond market,
Jim said, “We’re getting to that point where either one
of two things are going to happen; either central banks are going
to stop all this [money printing], or the market is going to force
them to stop it. It looks like we may be having a juncture of both…where
the Fed is getting worried…and at the same time, the market
is jumping in and saying, ‘Yes, it’s insane what you’re
doing, and this has to end.’ So we may have a healthy convergence
of both. And if it’s not ending now, it’s going to end
sometime in the next year, because this cannot go on – it’s
too insane.”

When asked
about the explosive riots occurring in Brazil, Jim warned to prepare
for much more, in that, “This is the first time in history
where you’ve had all the central banks in the world printing
money at the same time. Europe, Japan, America, and the UK, all,
are frantically trying to debase their currencies…I’m
afraid that in the end, we’re all going to suffer perhaps,
worse then we ever have, with inflation, currency turmoil, and higher
interest rates. As I say, this has never happened before, it’s
never been a good policy in the long run, so I’m afraid we’re
all going to suffer for the rest of this decade from this crazy,
crazy money printing.”

As a final
comment to investors looking to protect themselves from these impending
disasters, Jim said, “The way to protect yourself is to own
real assets…because that’s the only thing which will protect
you as currencies debase.”

“If you
have money in the financial system and the financial system collapses,”
he added, “even though you may have done nothing wrong –
you may suffer because somebody else did something wrong. So you
need to be very careful about where your assets are in the financial
system, or have strict control over them yourself, so that you’re
not going to lose them.”

Interview
with Jim Rogers (MP3)

June
28, 2013

Jim
Rogers has taught finance at Columbia University’s business school
and is a media commentator worldwide. He is the author of Adventure
Capitalist, Investment
Biker, Hot
Commodities, A
Gift to My Children, and A
Bull in China. See his
website.

Copyright
© 2013 Bull
Market Thinking

The
Best of Jim Rogers

Republished with permission from:: Lew Rockwell

by Thomas Sowell

Recently
by Thomas Sowell: Abstract
Immigrants

Random thoughts
on the passing scene:

Edmund Burke
said, “There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible
evil of evil men.” Evil men do not always snarl. Some smile charmingly.
Those are the most dangerous. If you don’t think the mainstream
media slants the news, keep track of how often they tell you that
the Arctic ice pack is shrinking and how seldom they tell you that
the Antarctic ice pack is expanding. The latter news would not fit
the “global warming” scenario that so many in the media are promoting.

Someone has
referred to Vice President Biden as President Obama’s “impeachment
insurance.” Even critics who are totally opposed to Barack Obama’s
policies do not want anything to cut short his presidency, with
Joe Biden as his successor.

People who
refuse to accept unpleasant truths have no right to complain about
politicians who lie to them. What other kind of candidates would
such people elect?

Given the shortage
of articulate Republican leaders, it will be a real loss — to the
country, not just to the Republicans — if Senator Marco Rubio discredits
himself, early in his career, by supporting “comprehensive” immigration
reform that amounts to just another amnesty, with false promises
to secure the border.

Ever since
I learned, as a teenager, that the “Saturday Evening Post” magazine
was actually published on Wednesday mornings, I have been very skeptical
about words. “Gun control” laws do not control guns, “rent control”
laws do not control rent and government “stimulus” spending does
not stimulate the economy.

It is hard
to think of two people with more different personalities than New
York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg and President Barack Obama. But they
are soul mates when it comes to thinking that they ought to take
a whole spectrum of decisions out of citizens’ hands, and impose
the government’s decisions on them.

Maybe the reason
for the New York Yankees’ low batting averages has something to
do with the fact that so many of their batters seem to be swinging
for the fences, even when a single would score the winning run.

President Obama’s
denial of knowledge about the various scandals in his administration
that are starting to come to light suggests that his titles should
now include Innocent-Bystander-in-Chief.

It has long
been my belief that the sight of a good-looking woman lowers a man’s
IQ by at least 20 points. A man who doesn’t happen to have 20 points
he can spare can be in big trouble.

When Attorney
General Eric Holder argued that a “path to citizenship” for illegal
immigrants was a “civil right” and a “human right,” that epitomized
the contempt for the public’s intelligence which has characterized
so much of what has been said and done by the Obama administration.

You know you
are old when waitresses call you “dear.”

Although many
people have been surprised and disappointed by Barack Obama, it
is hard to think of a president whose policies were more predictable
from his history, however radically different those policies are
from his rhetoric.

When any two
groups have different behavior or performance, that plain fact can
be turned upside down and twisted to say that whatever criterion
revealed those differences has had a “disparate impact” on one of
the groups. In other words, the criterion is blamed for an injustice
to those who failed to meet the standard.

Have
you heard any gun control advocate even try to produce hard evidence
that tighter gun control laws reduce murder rates? Does anyone seriously
believe that people who are prepared to defy the laws against murder
are going to obey laws against owning guns or large capacity magazines?

I may be among
the few people who want Attorney General Eric Holder to keep his
job — at least until the 2014 elections. Holder epitomizes what
is wrong with the Obama administration. He is essentially Barack
Obama without the charm, so it should be easier for the voters to
see through his lies and corruption.

Despite political
differences, it is hard not to feel sorry for White House press
secretary Jay Carney, for all the absurdities his job requires him
to say with a straight face. What is he going to do when this administration
is over? Wear a disguise, change his name or be put into a witness
protection program?

June
28, 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 James
Delingpole
Daily
Telegraph

Recently
by James Delingpole: Climate
Change: We Really Don’t Need To Waste All This Money

When it comes
to pinpointing the
nadir of the Obama administration, future historians are going
to suffer a serious case of option paralysis. Was it Benghazi?
The NSA? His use of the IRS to harass the Tea party? The various
scandals involving his black ops department, the EPA? Obamacare?

Personally,
though, I think the one they will eventually plump for is Obama’s
Climate Action Plan of June 25 2013. The economy, after all,
is everything. Without an economy you can’t afford a domestic
policy, let alone a foreign policy. So you’d think the very last
thing any president would do as his country began to show the
first vague signs of slow — and quite possibly illusory
— recovery after a long recession would be to jeopardise
it with a whole new raft of utterly pointless regulation and wasteful
government expenditure. Why it would be like seeing a man drowning
and, instead of throwing him a life line tossing him a lead weight.

But that’s
just what President Obama has done with today’s Climate Action Plan whose gory details you can read here.

It promises
another $2.7 billion for “Actionable Climate Science” (whatever
that is) — almost all of which, we know from bitter previous
experience, is going to end up in the sweaty palms of junk-science
troughers in the tradition of Michael Mann and NASA’s James Hansen
rather than seekers-after-truth who genuinely care about the scientific method.

It promises to accelerate Clean Energy permitting: so that’s going to make it harder for people to oppose the ruination of their local landscape, their favourite views, their health and their sleep with all the hideous new wind factories which will now spring up — at massive taxpayer expense — on federal owned land.

Read
the rest of the article

June
28, 2013

Copyright
© 2013 Daily Telegraph

Republished with permission from:: Lew Rockwell

The city of New York has passed two measures meant to rein in NYPD’s stop-and-frisk program by expanding the definition of racial profiling and enacting a seven-year departmental audit program. Mayor Bloomberg has vowed to veto both.

The New York City Council is seeking to create an independent
inspector general with the sole purpose of monitoring the New
York Police Department for seven years going forward. Such an
inspector would also be charged wtih proposing recommendations on
how to improve the department’s operation.

In addition, the council will expand the definition of racial
profiling, thus allowing residents who believe they have been a
target to sue in state court.

According to Reuters, shortly after the vote Bloomberg promised
to veto both measures and force the council to hold another vote
to override his veto. Each of the measures passed through the
51-member council with at least 34 votes, which suggests they
should have the necessary two-thirds majority to override
Bloomberg’s veto.

Both the mayor and New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly have
defended stop-and-frisk, which a federal judge decided was
unconstitutional in January 2013, despite criticism of racial
profiling, arguing that the frequency in stops attributed to
minority neighborhoods are linked to higher crime rates in those
city regions.

An analysis by the New York Public Advocate’s office of data
provided by the NYPD for 2012 has shown that the likelihood that
an African American detained for search would be found in
possession of a weapon was half that of a white person.

Data shows that the NYPD uncovered a weapon in one out of every
49 stops of white New Yorkers, while for latinos a weapon was
found for one out of every 71 stops, and for African Americans,
in one out of 93 stops.

Statistics gathered about the program show that in its history,
more young African-American men have been ‘stopped-and-frisked’
than live in New York City, suggesting that many young black men
have been stopped by police on multiple occasions.

Stop-and-frisk, which proponents claim is aimed at reducing crime
by stopping, questioning and searching individuals suspected of
wrongdoing, has earned the ire of a number of minority advocacy
groups, as well as Democratic mayoral candidates who are vying
for the city’s top job as Bloomberg prepares to end his last
term.

Testimony by several New York police officers in connection to a
lawsuit mounted against the department allege that officers
regularly target young black men and other minorities by an
arbitrary notion of “reasonable suspicion.” Critics of
stop-and-frisk argue that the policy walks hand in hand with
racial profiling.

In March, following evidence provided by a leaked recording,
Officer Pedro Serrano, an 8-year veteran of the New York Police
Department, testified that during a meeting with Deputy Inspector
Christopher McCormick over his job performance he was
specifically told which individuals to concentrate on
investigating.

“I don’t have any trouble
telling you this: male blacks 14 to 20, 21,” said
McCormick.  

Serrano’s testimony was presented as part of Floyd v. City of New
York, in which four plaintiffs claim they were racially profiled
by the NYPD. Four additional police officers presented evidence
for the prosecution in that case.

Mayor Bloomberg, like his predecessor Rudi Giuliani, has made
combating crime a centerpiece of his three terms in office. Since
Bloomberg took office in 2002 city data indicates a steady
decline in major felony offenses overall, which include murder
(including non-negligent manslaughter), rape, robbery, felony
assault and burglary. The number of robberies in 2002, for
example, were reported to be 27,229, and had dropped to 20,144 by
2012.

The particularly low murder rates for a city the size of New York
have been used by mayor Bloomberg and NYPD commissioner Kelly as
indications that controversial and unconstitutional police
tactics are effective. Still, according to 2012 FBI crime
statistics, the city falls somewhere in the middle for all
violent offenses – “violent” crime defined as rape,
robbery and assault in addition to murder.

In June the Obama administration made waves by extending its
support for a monitor to oversee the NYPD’s use of
stop-and-frisk. Bloomberg was quick to slam the administration’s
move.

“We think that a monitor would
be even more disruptive than an IG (inspector general),”
Bloomberg said at the time.

“It just makes no sense
whatsoever, when lives are on the line, to try to change the
rules and hamper the police department from doing their
job,” he added. According to the mayor, similar oversight
efforts in Philadelphia have hampered efforts to combat crime.

Republished with permission from:: RT

Dr. S. Fred Singer interviewed by John F. McManus

Q. Do you have a position regarding global warming?

A. I certainly do. The climate warms and cools naturally all the time. It changes from day to day, month to month, season to season, year to year, and so on. At times, there is global warming; at other times there is global cooling. Some climate changes are predictable and some are not. We can predict that the winters are colder than the summers because we understand the mechanism. We cannot predict the climate from year to year, however, because we do not know why it fluctuates. When the climate warms, there could be a number of reasons for it doing so, including the sun. Another possibility is that human activities are adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and this could produce some warming.

The important question then is: How important is the effect of human activities? And that we cannot tell. We know the theory, which says that human activity could be important, but the theory cannot be trusted until it has been verified. Until now, this theory, which is based largely on a mathematical model, has not been validated against observations. If the theory becomes validated against observations, then we can be more confident about using it to predict the future. But we’re not there yet, and nobody should be basing conclusions and remedies on an unverified theory.

Q. What do the scientific data really show about global warming?

A. Data from earth satellites in use since 1979 do not show any warming. But, eventually, they probably will because carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are increasing in the atmosphere. My personal guess, and I stress that this is only my guess, is that there is a greenhouse effect and that it is very small in comparison to natural fluctuations of the climate. We don’t see this effect yet, but we may notice it in the next century. Even if we do notice it, it will be extremely small and actually inconsequential. It will be an interesting scientific curiosity but it won’t be of any practical importance.

Q. If we experience a couple of warmer years, is it possible that the next year will be cooler?

A. Of course. Climate fluctuates all the time, and we aren’t always able to know why. During the period 1940 until 1975, the climate actually cooled. There was real fear that we were entering another ice age. But the climate suddenly warmed and these fears disappeared.

Q. We repeatedly hear mention of the “greenhouse effect” in which heat is supposedly trapped in the atmosphere because of the presence of carbon dioxide and other gases. Is there such an effect?

A. Yes, there is a greenhouse effect. But the problem here is that high government officials have declared that climate science is “settled” and “compelling.” The clear implication is that enough is known about it to act, and that any further research findings would be “policy-irrelevant” and not important to international deliberations that have led to a climate treaty. My published conclusions state otherwise, that any warming from the growth of greenhouse gases is likely to be minor, difficult to detect above the natural fluctuations of the climate, and therefore inconsequential. In addition, the impacts of warming and the higher carbon dioxide levels are likely to be beneficial for human activities, especially for agriculture that thrives on carbon dioxide.

But, again, the greenhouse effect is real. The emissions of carbon dioxide that we are putting into the atmosphere will make it more pronounced. But that doesn’t mean that the climate is going to warm perceptibly. The atmosphere is very complicated, and there are negative feedbacks that cancel some of the warming. The easiest way to understand what I mean by “negative feedback” is to consider clouds. If you warm the ocean, you get more water vapor, more evaporation, and more clouds that will keep sunlight from entering the earth’s surfaces. This results in a cooling effect – a negative feedback.

Q. Reports about global warming repeatedly cite the 1990 report produced by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Is this a reliable document?

A. The IPCC modified its own report after it had been approved, taking out key phrases to make it appear certain that human activities were affecting the climate. A few key individuals even removed much of the phraseology that discussed the uncertainties of such an opinion. Numerous scientists have pointed out that this document is unreliable.

Q. Were the scientists who produced the initial IPCC report aware that changes had been made after they approved it?

A. No, the changes were done quietly by just a few individuals. Two thousand persons worked on this UN project and more than 1,000 of them were scientists. Approximately 80 saw and approved what they thought was the final report and then just a handful altered it. The newer version (in 1996) included a “Summary for Policymakers” containing a previously unmentioned factor involving human activity’s effect on climate. This led to a conclusion that “the balance of evidence suggests there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” Those who are skeptical about this IPCC conclusion have viewed the statement about “discernible human influence” as trivial and meaningless. But, on the other hand, the media and many policy experts have welcomed its convenient formula as scientific proof of a coming climate catastrophe.

Q. Did any of the scientists involved in this UN study balk at the alterations?

A. Yes, and perhaps the most noteworthy was the highly respected Dr. Frederick Seitz, the former president of the National Academy of Sciences whose objection was published in the Wall Street Journal. He became aware of what had been done and considered it a very grave breach of scientific protocol and ethics. He’s been maligned ever since by individuals from the UN group and by others who decided to throw in their fortune with the UN. These people actually altered a graph and some of the text in the IPCC report.

Q. There have been several articles about an increase in the number and size of icebergs that have broken off from Antarctica. Is the increase in icebergs due to global warming?

A. The climate did warm over the last 100 years and that’s why icebergs are breaking off. There’s no question about that. But the warming took place between 1880 and 1940 so that it is a bit warmer now than it was 100 years ago.

Q. Does it take that long for an iceberg to break off?

A. Yes, it takes a long time for portions of the ice to break off. The melting has been going on for thousands of years and the West Antarctic ice sheet is still melting. The ice sheet may even disappear in 7,000 years. But the real point is that there’s nothing we can do about it. The reason it’s melting is because it’s warmer now than when the ice formed a long time ago.

Q. You mentioned the “climate treaty” and I assume you mean the 1997 Kyoto Protocol that called for industrial nations to cut emissions of “greenhouse gases” in order to deal with global warming. What is your response to this proposal?

A. The Kyoto proposal, even if fully implemented, won’t accomplish anything as far as climate is concerned. It certainly won’t stop the Antarctic ice sheet from melting. The only thing that will stop that is another ice age.

Q. Won’t it accomplish a great deal as far as industry is concerned?

A. Oh, yes. But the announced purpose of the proposal is to prevent global warming and stabilize the climate. It won’t do anything of the sort. If you obey it punctiliously, and all the countries that are supposed to cut back their industrial activity do exactly as called for, even the UN group has calculated that it will reduce the temperature during the next century by 0.05 degrees. No one can even measure that! It is admittedly completely ineffective, so now they’re saying that it’s an important first step.

Q. Do you see this as far more political than scientific?

A. Yes I do. Even a UN report says that we have to reduce emissions by between 60 and 80 percent worldwide. The Kyoto Protocol, if implemented, reduces emissions by a mere five percent among industrialized nations only. But this would have a devastating effect on the economy of our nation. It’s part of the anti-technology, anti-energy, anti-growth philosophy of the extreme “greens.”

Q. Have you seen or heard about the rash of television ads stressing the threat of global warming?

A. These campaigns are being underwritten by a few foundations. The National Environmental Trust has received $11 million to run ads. The government is doing its share by bleeding off money from research and putting it into town meetings and other gatherings to get people upset about this issue. Recently, there was a campaign in Minneapolis called “The Heat is On” to alert people in Minnesota to the danger of slightly warmer winters. That really takes the cake, doesn’t it? I would think the people in Minnesota would be pleased if the climate warmed. The Canadian government has another program entitled “Environment Canada” to get the Canadian people to worry about slightly warmer winters.

Q. Would it be harmful if the climate does become warmer?

A. If it does warm, there will be numerous benefits. Agriculture will be aided because crops will grow faster and sturdier. There will be slightly warmer winters with no effect on summers. Sea level will be hardly affected or perhaps it will rise slightly. This is because of the melting of the ice from the Ice Age and there’s nothing we can do about it. Kyoto’s proposals certainly won’t help.

Q. Do you think a change in our own national leaders will help to calm the fears that have been generated by environmental doomsayers?

A. I’m hoping that the election in 2000 will settle many things. Should George W. Bush be elected president, we have to remember that he subscribed to the science of global warming but he added that he’s opposed to the Kyoto protocol. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know where he stands. But I don’t think the climate issue will surface during the presidential campaign. I don’t think people care that much about it and maybe that’s a good thing. They’re not reacting to the doomsayers as they were expected to do.

Q. Doesn’t Vice President Al Gore contend that the global warming threat is real?

A. He’s not a scientist. He likes to believe the theory because it predicts strong warming and helps to advance his agenda.

Q. Have you read his book, Earth in the Balance, where he actually calls for an end to the internal combustion engine, the guts of our automobiles?

A. No, I haven’t read the book but I’ve read numerous reviews. I understand that he did call for the end of the internal combustion engine. But, by itself, that would not be so serious if there were a substitute that works. I’m ready to substitute something for the internal combustion engine, something like a fuel cell that works, is cost effective, and economical for consumers. There are people working on this, but they haven’t produced one yet.

Q. Other than your own Science and Environmental Policy group, are you part of any scientific groups?

A. Yes, I signed the Oregon petition, which has been signed by 20,000 persons, 18,000 of whom have scientific degrees, many with advanced degrees. This project, begun in response to Kyoto, was launched by Dr. Arthur B. Robinson. He received important help from Dr. Fred Seitz, who sent a letter to scientists across the nation containing eight pages about global warming. In his letter, he stated that the Kyoto agreement was “based on flawed ideas” and that “data on climate change do not show that human use of hydrocarbons is harmful.” And he urged recipients to sign the petition, which stated simply:

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

The Oregon petition was never altered and has 20,000 signatories. The doctored IPCC statement has only 2,000 signatories. But the media seem to focus only on the IPPC statement.

Q. What about the ozone layer and the claims that it is being depleted because of human activity?

A. The ozone layer depletion stopped about 1992. No more depletion has occurred. The total depletion that took place according to a thick United Nations report is about four percent. That’s negligible. Ozone varies from day to day by about 100 percent, and from season to season – if you average it – by about 40-50 percent. The World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program together produced figures stating that there has been no ozone depletion since 1992.

Q. If there are no problems associated with global warming or ozone depletion, is there any environmental problem?

A. The big problem, in my view, is disposing of solid waste, a nice way of referring to garbage. Many areas of the country are finding it difficult to locate suitable places for landfills. Some states are trying to ship their waste to other states. Officials are trying to prohibit the dumping of sludge in the ocean. And if you put waste underground, it may pollute the ground water. This is a real problem. But nobody seems to be getting excited about it. It doesn’t appeal to politicians because politicians seem to love global problems that are more glamorous than garbage.

Q. Do you have an answer to the garbage problem?

A. Incineration is a good answer. But it’s frowned on because it might create a little bit of dioxin. Yet this is the solution that’s being used in Europe. Taking care of the problem this way also generates some energy, so it has some additional advantages.

Q. What is your attitude about nuclear power?

A. Nuclear power is a perfectly reasonable solution to our energy problem. It may or may not be cheaper depending on how the generating stations are built and maintained. The degree of regulation now in place makes it rather expensive, particularly if you force power companies to rebuild their plants while they’re being built in order to satisfy newer regulations. But in many countries, generating electricity with nuclear power is cheaper than any other method. It is tragic that there have been no new nuclear power stations built in this country for many years. In countries such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and now China, they are building these stations rapidly. I hope they are using American technology because it is the safest.

Q. Any final comments?

A. Ten to twenty years from now, younger people will look at their parents and grandparents in disbelief and ask, “Gosh, were you really worried about global warming and ozone depletion?”

Dr. S. Fred Singer is an atmospheric physicist who leads the Washington-based Science and Environmental Policy Project. He is also a distinguished research professor at George Mason University in Virginia and the Institute for Space Science and Technology in Florida. He was the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, now a branch of the Department of Commerce. He is the author of numerous books, the latest of which is Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate.

Republished with permission from:: The New American

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/food_for_thought_on_paula_deen_20130627/

Posted on Jun 27, 2013

Republished with permission from:: TruthDig

A policeman fires tear gas against protesters during a demonstration in Ankara on June 28, 2013.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

Kabul has foiled a foreign plot against Afghans that was hatched by the opening of the Taliban’s political office in Qatar, Afghan President Hamid Karzai says.

Å“Since the opening of the office was against the agreement and promises we had been given, we firmly opposed it and aborted a plot against Afghans,” Karzai said on Thursday in Kabul.

Å“We certainly agree that there is no prospect for improving relations with the Taliban or, any agreement with the Taliban, unless the issue of terrorism is directly addressed,” he added.

On Wednesday, Afghan President blamed the United States for tensions in his country by allowing the opening of the office in the Qatari capital Doha.

The tension between Washington and Kabul broke out on June 18, when the Taliban militant group opened its new political office under the name of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

The Afghan government, which says it wants to lead any talks with militants, has demanded a full explanation as to how the US and Qatar allowed the Taliban to raise its flag over its office in Doha.

Senior Afghan officials in Kabul say the Taliban militants will be able to use the office to raise funds for their campaign in Afghanistan.

The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 as part of Washingtonâ„¢s so-called war on terror. The offensive removed the Taliban from power, but after almost 12 years, insecurity remains across the country.

The increasing number of military casualties in Afghanistan has caused widespread anger in the US and other NATO member states, undermining public support for the Afghan war.

MAM/HN

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister for Arab and African Affairs Hossein Amir-Abdollahian (file photo)

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

Yes, I confess: I’m a veteran anti-fluoridationist, thereby – not for the first time – risking placing myself in the camp of “rightwing kooks and fanatics.” It has always been a bit of a mystery to me why left-environmentalists, who shriek in horror at a bit of Alar on apples, who cry “cancer!” even more absurdly than the boy cried “Wolf! “, who hate every chemical additive known to man, still cast their benign approval upon fluoride, a highly toxic and probably carcinogenic substance. Not only do they let fluoride emissions off the hook, but they endorse uncritically the massive and continuing dumping of fluoride into the nation’s water supply.

The Pros and Cons

First the generalized case for and against fluoridation of water. The case for is almost incredibly thin, boiling down to the alleged fact of substantial reductions in dental cavities in kids aged five to nine. Period. There are no claimed benefits for anyone older than nine! For this the entire adult population of a fluoridated area must be subjected to mass medication!

The case against, even apart from the specific evils of fluoride, is powerful and overwhelming. Compulsory mass medication is medically evil, as well as socialistic. It is starkly clear that one key to any medication is control of the dose: Different people, at different stages of risk, need individual dosages tailored to their needs. And yet with water compulsorily fluoridated, the dose applies to everyone, and is necessarily proportionate to the amount of water one drinks.

What is the medical justification for a guy who drinks ten glasses of water a day receiving ten times the fluoride dose of a guy who drinks only one glass? The whole process is monstrous as well as idiotic.

Adults – in fact children over nine – get no benefits from their compulsory medication, yet they imbibe fluorides proportionately to their water intake.

In addition, studies have shown that while kids aged five to nine may have their cavities reduced by fluoridation, the same kids at ages nine to 12 have more cavities, so that after 12 years of age the cavity benefits disappear. At best, then, the question boils down to: Are we to subject ourselves to the possible dangers of fluoridation solely to save dentists the irritation of dealing with squirming kids aged five to nine?

Any parents who want to give their kids the dubious benefits of fluoridation can do so individually by giving their kids fluoride pills, with doses regulated instead of haphazardly proportionate to the kid’s thirst. Or they can get their kids to brush their teeth with fluoride-added toothpaste. How about freedom of individual choice?

Let us not omit the long-suffering taxpayer who has to pay for the hundreds of thousands of tons of fluorides poured into the nation’s socialized water supply every year. The days of private water companies, once flourishing in the United States, are long gone, although the market in recent years has popped up in the form of increasingly popular private bottled water (even though this option is far more expensive than socialized free water).

There is certainly nothing loony or kooky about any of these arguments, is there? So much for the general case for and against fluoridation. When we get to the specific ills of fluoridation, the case against becomes even more overpowering, as well as grisly.

During the 1940s and ’50s, when the successful push for fluoridation was underway, fluoridation proponents touted the controlled experiment of Newburgh and Kingston, two neighboring small cities in upstate New York, with much the same demographics. Newburgh had been fluoridated and Kingston had not, and the powerful pro-fluoridation establishment trumpeted the fact that ten years later, dental cavities in five- to nine-year-old kids in Newburgh were considerably lower than in Kingston (originally, the rates of every disease had been about the same in the two places).

OK, but fluoride opponents raised the disquieting fact that, after ten years, both the cancer and the heart disease rates were now significantly higher in Newburgh. How did the Establishment treat this criticism? By dismissing it as irrelevant, as kooky scare tactics.

Why were these and later problems and charges ignored and overridden, and why the rush to inflict fluoridation on America? Who was behind this drive, and how did the opponents acquire the “right-wing kook” image?

The Drive for Fluoridation

The official drive began abruptly just before the end of World War II, pushed by the U.S. Public Health Service, then in the Treasury Department. In 1945, the federal government selected two Michigan cities to conduct an official “15-year” study; one city, Grand Rapids, was fluoridated, a control city was left unfluoridated. (I am indebted to a recent revisionist article on fluoridation by medical writer Joel Griffiths, in the left-wing muckraking journal Covert Action Information Bulletin.) Yet, before five years were up, the government killed its own “scientific study” by fluoridating the water in the control city in Michigan. Why? Under the excuse that its action was caused by “popular demand” for fluoridation. As we shall see, the “popular demand’ was generated by the government and the Establishment itself. Indeed, as early as 1946, under the federal campaign, six American cities fluoridated their water, and 87 more joined the bandwagon by 1950.

A key figure in the successful drive for fluoridation was Oscar R. Ewing, who was appointed by President Truman in 1947 to head the Federal Security Agency, which encompassed the Public Health Service (PHS) and which later blossomed into our beloved cabinet office of Health, Education and Welfare. One reason for the Left’s backing of fluoridation – in addition to its being socialized medicine, for them a good in itself – was that Ewing was a certified Truman Fair Dealer and leftist, and an avowed proponent of socialized medicine. He was also a high official in the then-powerful Americans for Democratic Action, the nation’s central organization of “anti-communist liberals” (read: Social Democrats or Mensheviks). Ewing mobilized not only the respectable Left, but also the Establishment center. The powerful drive for compulsory fluoridation was spearheaded by the PHS, which soon mobilized the nation’s establishment organizations of dentists and physicians.

PR Drive

The mobilization, the national clamor for fluoridation, and the stamping of fluoridation opponents with the right-wing kook image, was all generated by the public relations man hired by Oscar Ewing to direct the drive. For Ewing hired none other than Edward L. Bernays, who had the dubious honor of being called the “father of public relations.” Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was called “The Original Spin Doctor” in an admiring article in the Washington Post on the occasion of the old manipulator’s 100th birthday in late 1991.

As a retrospective scientific article pointed out about the fluoridation movement, one of its widely distributed dossiers listed as opponents of fluoridation “in alphabetical order reputable scientists, convicted felons, food faddists, scientific organizations, and the Ku Klux Klan.” In his 1928 book Propaganda, Bernays laid bare the devices he would use. Speaking of the “mechanism which controls the public mind,” which people like himself could manipulate, Bernays explained, “Those who manipulate the unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country … our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” And the process of manipulating leaders of groups, “either with or without their conscious cooperation,” will “automatically influence” the members of such groups.

In describing his practices as PR man for Beech-Nut Bacon, Bernays related how he would suggest to physicians to say publicly that “it is wholesome to eat bacon.” For, Bernays added, he “knows as a mathematical certainty that large numbers of persons will follow the advice of their doctors because he [the PR man] understands the psychological relationship of dependence of men on their physicians.” Add “dentists” to the equation, and substitute “fluoride” for “bacon,” and we have the essence of the Bernays propaganda campaign.

Before the Bernays campaign, fluoride was largely known in the public mind as the chief ingredient of bug and rat poison; after the campaign, it was widely hailed as a safe provider of healthy teeth and gleaming smiles.

After the 1950s, it was all mopping up – the fluoridation forces had triumphed, and two-thirds of the nation’s reservoirs were fluoridated. There are still benighted areas of the country left, however (California is less than 16 percent fluoridated) and the goal of the federal government and its PHS remains “universal fluoridation.”

Doubts Accumulate

Despite the blitzkrieg victory, however, doubts have surfaced and gathered in the scientific community. Fluoride is a non-biodegradable substance, which, in people, accumulates in teeth and bone – perhaps strengthening kiddies teeth; but what about human bones? Two crucial bone problems of fluorides – brittleness and cancer – began to appear in studies, only to be systematically blocked by governmental agencies. As early as 1956, a federal study found nearly twice as many premalignant bone defects in young males in Newburgh as in unfluoridated Kingston; but this finding was quickly dismissed as “spurious.”

Oddly enough, despite the 1956 study and carcinogenic evidence popping up since the 1940s, the federal government never conducted its own animal carcinogenicity test on fluorides. Finally, in 1975, biochemist John Yiamouyiannis and Dean Berk, a retired official of the federal government’s own National Cancer Institute (NCI), presented a paper before the annual meeting of the American Society of Biological Chemists. The paper reported a five to ten percent increase in total cancer rates in those U.S. cities which had fluoridated their water. The findings were disputed, but triggered congressional hearings two years later, where the government revealed to shocked congressmen that it had never tested fluoride for cancer. Congress ordered the NCI to conduct such tests.

Incredibly, it took the NCI 12 years to finish its tests, finding “equivocal evidence” that fluoride causes bone cancer in male rats. Under further direction of Congress, the NCI studied cancer trends in the United States, and found nationwide evidence of “a rising rate of bone and joint cancer at all ages,” especially in youth, in counties that had fluoridated their water, but no such rise was seen in “non-fluoridated” counties.

In more detailed studies, for areas of Washington state and Iowa, NCI found that from the 1970s to the 1980s bone cancer for males under 20 had increased by 70 percent in the fluoridated areas of these states, but had decreased by four percent in the non-fluoridated areas. All of this sounds pretty conclusive, but the NCI set some fancy statisticians to work on the data, who concluded that these findings, too, were “spurious.” Dispute over this report drove the federal government to one of its favorite ploys in virtually every area: the allegedly expert, bipartisan, “value-free” commission.

“World-Class” Review

The government had already done the commission bit in 1983, when disturbing studies on fluoridation drove our old friend the PHS to form a commission of “world-class experts” to review safety data on fluorides in water. Interestingly, the panel found to its grave concern that most of the alleged evidence of fluoride’s safety scarcely existed. The 1983 panel recommended caution on fluoridation, especially for fluoride exposure for children. Interestingly, the panel strongly recommended that the fluoride content of drinking water be no greater than two parts per million for children up to nine, because of worries about the fluoride effect on children’s skeletons, and potential heart damage.

The chairman of the panel, Jay R. Shapiro of the National Institute of Health, warned the members, however, that the PHS might “modify” the findings, since “the report deals with sensitive political issues.” Sure enough, when Surgeon General Everett Koop released the official report a month later, the federal government had thrown out the panel’s most important conclusions and recommendations without consulting the panel. Indeed, the panel never received copies of the final, doctored, version. The government’s alterations were all in a pro-fluoride direction, claiming that there was no “scientific documentation” of any problems at fluoride levels below eight parts per million.

In addition to the bone cancer studies for the late 1980s, evidence is piling up that fluorides lead to increased bone fractures. In the past two years, no less than eight epidemiological studies have indicated that fluoridation has increased the rate of bone fractures in males and females of all ages. Indeed, since 1957 the bone fracture rate among male youth has increased sharply in the United States, and the U.S. hip fracture rate is now the highest in the world. In fact, a study in the traditionally pro-fluoride Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), August 12, 1992, found that even “low levels of fluoride may increase the risk of hip fracture in the elderly.” JAMA concluded that “it is now appropriate to revisit the issue of water fluoridation.”

Predictable Conclusion

Clearly, it was high time for another federal commission. During 1990-91, a new commission, chaired by veteran PHS official and longtime pro-fluoridationist Frank E. Young, predictably concluded that “no evidence” was found associating fluoride and cancer. On bone fractures, the commission blandly stated that “further studies are required.” But no further studies or soul-searching were needed for its conclusion: “The U.S. Public Health Service should continue to support optimal fluoridation of drinking water.” Presumably, they did not conclude that “optimal” meant zero.

Despite the Young whitewash, doubts are piling up even within the federal government. James Huff, a director of the U.S. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, concluded in 1992 that animals in the government’s study developed cancer, especially bone cancer, from being given fluoride – and there was nothing “equivocal” about his conclusion.

Various scientists for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have turned anti-fluoridation, toxicologist William Marcus warning that fluoride causes not just cancer, but also bone fractures, arthritis, and other diseases. Marcus mentions, too, that an unreleased study by the New Jersey Health Department (a state where only 15 percent of the population is fluoridated) shows that the bone cancer rate among young males is no less than six times higher in fluoridated than in nonfluoridated areas.

Even coming into question is the long-sacred idea that fluoridated water at least lowers cavities in children aged five to nine. Various top pro-fluoridationists highly touted for their expertise were suddenly and bitterly condemned when further study led them to the conclusion that the dental benefits are really negligible.

In the early 1980s, New Zealand’s most prominent pro-fluoridationist was the country’s top dental officer, Dr. John Colquhoun. As chairman of the Fluoridation Promotion Committee, Colquhoun decided to gather statistics to show doubters the great merits of fluoridation. To his shock, he found that the percentage of children free of dental decay was higher in the non-fluoridated part than in the fluoridated part of New Zealand. The national health department refused to allow Colquhoun to publish these findings, and kicked him out as dental director. Similarly, a top pro-fluoridationist in British Columbia, Richard G. Foulkes, concluded that fluoridation is not only dangerous, but that it is not even effective in reducing tooth decay. Foulkes was denounced by former colleagues as a propagandist “promoting the quackery of anti-fluoridationists.”

Why the Fluoridation Drive?

Since the case for compulsory fluoridation is so flimsy, and the case against so overwhelming, the final step is to ask: Why? Why did the Public Health Service get involved in the first place? How did this thing get started? Here we must keep our eye on the pivotal roll of Oscar R. Ewing, for Ewing was far more than just a Social Democrat Fair Dealer.

Fluoride has long been recognized as one of the most toxic elements found in the earth’s crust. Fluorides are byproducts of many industrial processes, being emitted in the air and water, and probably the major source of this byproduct is the aluminum industry. By the 1920s and 1930s, fluoride was increasingly being subjected to lawsuits and regulations. In particular, by 1938 the important, relatively new aluminum industry was being placed on a wartime footing. What to do if its major byproduct is a dangerous poison?

The time had come for damage control, or even to reverse the public image of this menacing substance. The Public Health Service, remember, was under the jurisdiction of the Treasury Department, and the Treasury Secretary during the 1920s and until 1931 was none other than billionaire Andrew J. Mellon, head of the powerful Mellon interests, and founder and virtual ruler of the Aluminum Corporation of America (ALCOA), the dominant firm in the aluminum industry,

In 1931, the PHS sent a dentist named H. Trendley Dean to the West to study the effect of concentrations of naturally fluoridated water on people’s teeth. Dean found that towns high in natural fluoride seemed to have fewer cavities. This news galvanized various Mellon scientists into action. In particular, the Mellon Institute, ALCOA’s research lab in Pittsburgh, sponsored a study in which biochemist Gerald J. Cox fluoridated some lab rats, decided that cavities in those rats had been reduced, and immediately concluded that “the case [that fluoride reduces cavities] should be regarded as proved.”

The following year, 1939, Cox, the ALCOA scientist working for a company beset by fluoride damage claims, made the first public proposal for mandatory fluoridation of water. Cox proceeded to stump the country urging fluoridation. Meanwhile, other ALCOA-funded scientists trumpeted the alleged safety of fluorides, in particular the Kettering Laboratory of the University of Cincinnati.

During World War II, damage claims for fluoride emissions piled up as expected, in proportion to the great expansion of aluminum production during the war. But attention from these claims was diverted when, just before the end of the war, the PHS began to push hard for compulsory fluoridation of water. Thus the drive for compulsory fluoridation of water accomplished two goals in one shot: It transformed the image of fluoride from a curse to a blessing that will strengthen every kid’s teeth, and it provided a steady and substantial monetary demand for fluorides to dump annually into the nation’s water.

Suspicious Connection

One interesting footnote to this story is that whereas fluorine in naturally fluoridated water comes in the form of calcium fluoride, the substance dumped into every locality is instead sodium fluoride. The Establishment defense that “fluoride is fluoride” becomes unconvincing when we consider two points: (a) calcium is notoriously good for bones and teeth, so the anti-cavity effect in naturally fluoridated water might well be due to the calcium and not the fluorine; and (b) sodium fluoride happens to be the major by-product of the manufacture of aluminum.

Which brings us to Oscar R. Ewing. Ewing arrived in Washington in 1946, shortly after the initial PHS push began, arriving there as longtime counsel, now chief counsel, for ALCOA, making what was then an astronomical legal fee of $750,000 a year (something like $7,000,000 a year in present dollars.) A year later, Ewing took charge of the Federal Security Agency, which included the PHS, and waged the successful national drive for water fluoridation. After a few years, having succeeded in his campaign, Ewing stepped down from public service, and returned to private life, including his chief counselship of the Aluminum Corporation of America.

There is an instructive lesson in this little saga, a lesson of how and why the Welfare State came to America. It came as an alliance of three major forces: ideological Social Democrats, ambitious technocratic bureaucrats, and Big Businessmen seeking privileges from the State. In the fluoridation saga, we might call the whole process “ALCOA Socialism.” The Welfare State redounds to the welfare not of most of society, but of these particular venal and exploitative groups.

Dr. Rothbard, who heads academic affairs for the Ludwig yon Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama 36849-5301, is professor of economics at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He also co-edits the Rothbard-Rockwell Report. For a free copy, phone 1-800-325-7257.

Republished with permission from:: The New American

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An Iraqi policeman inspects the damage outside a supermarket following a bomb blast in central Baghdad on June 25, 2013.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

United States investigators paid an Icelandic teenager $5,000 to work as a paid informant within the ranks of WikiLeaks for around two months in late 2011, the turncoat tells Wired magazine.

According to an article published Thursday by Wired’s Kevin
Poulsen, Sigurdur “Siggi” Thordarson, now 20, approached the
Federal Bureau of Investigation in August 2011 and offered to
provide American intelligence with information about the
antisecrecy website that he had been assisting with for the
previous year and a half.

When Thordarson’s ties with the website were eventually severed
by editor Julian Assange himself in November 2011, the long-time
volunteer who sustained several rifts within the organization
emailed the FBI to say, “No longer with WikiLeaks – so not
sure how I can help you more.”

The relationship between Thordarson and US authorities didn’t end
as abruptly as the one between the presumably loyal WikiLeaks
volunteer and Mr. Assange, however. Shortly after Thordarson
approached the FBI, he found himself engaged in 20 hours’ worth
of conversations with the agents over the course of five days
before being let-go by Assange for unrelated matters that
November. Four months later the FBI flew Thordarson from Iceland
to Washington, DC for another round of meetings, and during one
of those conferences he handed investigators eight computer hard
drives containing chat logs, video and other data.

Now nearly two years after Thordarson first approached American
agents at the US Embassy in Iceland and asked to help out, that
material could be crucial to the United States’ investigation of
WikiLeaks and the likely indictment of Mr. Assange.

The US Justice Department has been conducting a secretive grand
jury investigation into WikiLeaks since shortly after the website
began publishing classified documents, and a New York Times
article published earlier this week confirmed that the probe
remains ongoing. Assange suspects he will be charged with
espionage by the US, then extradited to stand trial and
potentially executed.

Army Private first class Bradley Manning, an admitted source of
hundreds of thousands of files published by WikiLeaks, is
currently being tried before a military judge in Ft. Meade,
Maryland. He’s been charged with aiding the enemy, an allegation
that Army prosecutors have lobbed at him because they attest that
uploading secret files to WikiLeaks and thus the Internet allowed
al-Qaeda terrorists to access them and plot attacks against
America. Crucial so far to the prosecution’s case has been what
influence, if any, Assange and other WikiLeakers had with Manning
during the months he spent supplying them with documents. The
latest revelation in Wired invites the possibility that the
government has already accumulated evidence from Thordarson that
may bring them one step closer to indicting Assange.

In a tweet sent by WikiLeaks on Thursday, the organization wrote,
“At no time did Sigurdur Thordarson ‘work’ for WikiLeaks,”
and “At no time did he have access to sourcing or publishing
systems.” Poulsen notes that the chat logs provided to him
alleged to be from the inner circle of WikiLeaks during
Thordarson’s time there have yet to be independently verified,
but most aspects of the mole’s accusations so far are adding up.

At one point, Thordarson said the FBI asked him to secretly
record Assange saying something incriminating on tape, perhaps
about Pfc. Manning. “I like Assange, even considered him a
friend,” he told Wired. “I just didn’t want to go that
way.” He was eventually compensated $5,000 for the time he
missed from his day-job during his chats with the FBI, and his
links with US investigators was touched upon in the New York
Times article published on Monday. In that piece, the Times wrote
that Thordarson “told a closed session of Iceland’s Parliament
this year that he had been cooperating with United States agents
investigating WikiLeaks at the time of the FBI’s visit in
2011.” When the WikiLeaks Twitter account linked to the
article the next day, Thordarson retweeted it.

Not only does the latest Wired article come just three days after
the New York Times confirmed the status of the DoJ investigation
into WikiLeaks, but merely a week after two other former
associates of Assange went public with the ordeals they’ve had to
endure thanks to Uncle Sam. Now with the latest piece of the
puzzle in place, even more is unraveling about a Justice
Department attempts to infiltrate the organization.

Last week, Herbert Snorrason and Smári McCarthy both learned that
they had the contents of their email inboxes subpoenaed under a
US-issued court order that has since expired. Both men were
publically affiliated with WikiLeaks during 2010, and McCarthy is
credited with assisting with “Collateral Murder,” a graphic video
of US troops shooting civilians that Pfc. Manning admitted to
sending to the website.

“All this is pretty much par for the course; I had assumed
that I was caught in the dragnet cast around Julian Assange,”
Snorrason wrote in a blog post last week.

With regards to recent revelations involving the United States’
pursuit of WikiLeaks by way of Iceland, these cases are not
alone.

In February, the Icelandic minister of the Interior confirmed
that the FBI visited his country in August 2011, allegedly to
investigate a major hacking case. When this information became
public five months ago, WikiLeaks issued a statement saying
“the aim of the visit was to interrogate an Icelandic
citizen.”

“The person in question was an 18-year-old individual who had
offered his assistance to WikiLeaks as a volunteer. For a period
of some months he did manage several minor tasks for the
organization as one of hundreds of volunteers all over the world
assisting the organization,” WikiLeaks wrote.

“In light of the relentless ongoing persecution of US
authorities against WikiLeaks it is not surprising that the FBI
would try to abuse this troubled young man and involve him in
some manner in the attempt to prosecute WikiLeaks staff,” the
organization continued. “It is an indication of the great length
these entities are willing to go that they will disrespect the
sovereignty of other nations in their endeavor. There is strong
indication that the FBI used a combination of coercion and
payments to pressure the young man to co-operate.”

At the time, WikiLeaks said they would not identify the man
“in light of information that he has recently received
institutional medical treatment.” Mr. Ossur Skarphedinsson,
the Icelandic minister of foreign affairs, told a local newspaper
in February that the FBI’s stay in Iceland was illegal
“because the conversations took place at very unusual places
and without authorization.”

With the latest revelation, however, light is being shined
further on a shadowy investigation that has so far involved
double-agents, secret subpoenas and a closed-door grand jury,
likely combing over terabytes of data provided by a paid FBI
informant.

Republished with permission from:: RT

Riot police take positions as demonstrators gather near the Castelao stadium in Fortaleza, Brazil, on June 19, 2013.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_limited_reach_of_the_supreme_courts_gay_marriage_rulings_20130627/

Posted on Jun 27, 2013

Republished with permission from:: TruthDig

An Egyptian anti-government protester attacks a bloody pro-government protester (L) during clashes in the Nile Delta city of Mansura, on June 26, 2013.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

Leaders of the European Union member states have met in Brussels to discuss ways to tackle youth unemployment across the bloc.

On Thursday, the 27 EU governments kicked off a two-day summit to come up with some job creation plans.

“We are here today to take concrete action on… issues that matter to millions of people. We’re here to fight youth unemployment, a most urgent concern for our societies,” said European Council President Herman Van Rompuy.

Among the countries attending the summit, Greece has the highest unemployment rate of 62.5 percent.

“Unemployment in countries like mine has really sky-rocketed… Solutions should have drastic measures that take place immediately. That’s the most important thing,” Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras said as he arrived at the venue.

Shortly before the summit, the leaders agreed on a deal on the EU’s hotly contested trillion-euro budget.

“Today we have agreed on this budget that will make investment in Europe possible,” said European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.

The compromise still needs to be approved by the EU’s 754 lawmakers to take effect.

Europe plunged into financial crisis in early 2008. Insolvency now threatens heavily debt-ridden countries such as Greece, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, and Spain.

The worsening debt crisis has forced EU governments to adopt harsh austerity measures and tough economic reforms, which have triggered massive demonstrations in many European countries.

Public service workers in Portugal went on strike on Thursday to protest government austerity measures that have led to the nationâ„¢s worst economic slump since the 1970s.

IA/MHB

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

I was the first to point out that the Federal Reserve was rigging all markets, not merely bond prices and interest rates, and that the Fed is rigging the bullion market in order to protect the US dollar’s exchange value, which is threatened by the Fed’s quantitative easing. With the Fed adding to the supply of dollars faster than the demand for dollars is increasing, the price or exchange value of the dollar is set up to fall.

A fall in the dollar’s exchange rate would push up import prices and, thereby, domestic inflation, and the Fed would lose control over interest rates. The bond market would collapse and with it the values of debt-related derivatives on the “banks too big too fail” balance sheets. The financial system would be in turmoil, and panic would reign.

Rapidly rising bullion prices were an indication of loss of confidence in the dollar and were signaling a drop in the dollar’s exchange rate. The Fed used naked shorts in the paper gold market to offset the price effect of a rising demand for bullion possession. Short sales that drive down the price trigger stop-loss orders that automatically lead to individual sales of bullion holdings once their loss limits are reached.

According to Andrew Maguire, on Friday, April 12, the Fed’s agents hit the market with 500 tons of naked shorts. Normally, a short is when an investor thinks the price of a stock or commodity is going to fall. He wants to sell the item in advance of the fall, pocket the money, and then buy the item back after it falls in price, thus making money on the short sale. If he doesn’t have the item, he borrows it from someone who does, putting up cash collateral equal to the current market price. Then he sells the item, waits for it to fall in price, buys it back at the lower price and returns it to the owner who returns his collateral. If enough shorts are sold, the result can be to drive down the market price.

A naked short is when the short seller does not have or borrow the item that he shorts, but sells shorts regardless. In the paper gold market, the participants are betting on gold prices and are content with the monetary payment. Therefore, generally, as participants are not interested in taking delivery of the gold, naked shorts do not need to be covered with the physical metal.

In other words, with naked shorts, no physical metal is actually sold.

People ask me how I know that the Fed is rigging the bullion price and seem surprised that anyone would think the Fed and its bullion bank agents would do such a thing, despite the public knowledge that the Fed is rigging the bond market and the banks with the Fed’s knowledge rigged the Libor rate. The answer is that the circumstantial evidence is powerful.

Consider the 500 tons of paper gold sold on Friday. Begin with the question, how many ounces is 500 tons? There are 2,000 pounds to one ton. 500 tons equal 1,000,000 pounds. There are 16 ounces to one pound, which comes to 16 million ounces of short sales on Friday.

Who has 16 million ounces of gold? At the beginning gold price that day of about $1,550, that comes to $24,800,000,000. Who has that kind of money?

What happens when 500 tons of gold sales are dumped on the market at one time or on one day? Correct, it drives the price down. Investors who want to get out of large positions would spread sales out over time so as not to lower their sales proceeds. The sale took gold down by about $73 per ounce. That means the seller or sellers lost up to $73 dollars 16 million times, or $1,168,000,000.

Who can afford to lose that kind of money? Only a central bank that can print it.

I believe that the authorities would like to drive the gold price down further and will, if they can, hit the gold market twice more next week and put gold at $1,400 per ounce or lower. The successive declines could perhaps spook individual holders of physical gold and result in actual net sales of physical gold as people reduced their holdings of the metal.

However, bullion dealer Bill Haynes told kingworldnews.com that last Friday bullion purchasers among the public outpaced sellers by 50 to 1, and that the premiums over the spot price on gold and silver coins are the highest in decades. I myself checked

with Gainesville Coins and was told that far more buyers than sellers had responded to the price drop.

Unless the authorities have the actual metal with which to back up the short selling, they could be met with demands for deliveries. Unable to cover the shorts with real metal, the scheme would be exposed.

Do the authorities have the metal with which to cover shorts? I do not know. However, knowledgeable dealers are suspicious. Some think that US physical stocks of gold were used up in sales in efforts to disrupt the rise in the gold price from $272 in December 2000 to $1,900 in 2011. They point to Germany’s recent request that the US return the German gold stored in the US, and to the US government’s reply that it would return the gold piecemeal over seven years. If the US has the gold, why not return it to Germany?

The clear implication is that the US cannot deliver the gold.

Andrew Maguire also reports that foreign central banks, especially China, are loading up on physical gold at the low prices made possible by the short selling. If central banks are using their dollar holdings to purchase bullion at bargain prices, the likely results will be pressure on the dollar’s exchange value and a declining market supply of physical bullion. In other words, by trying to protect the dollar from its quantitative easing policy, the Fed might be hastening the dollar’s demise.

Possibly the Fed fears a dollar crisis or derivative blowup is nearing and is trying to reset the gold/dollar price prior to the outbreak of trouble. If ill winds are forecast, the Fed might feel it is better positioned to deal with crisis if the price of bullion is lower and

confidence in bullion as a refuge has been shaken.

In addition to short selling that is clearly intended to drive down the gold price, orchestration is also indicated by the advance announcements this month first from brokerage houses and then from Goldman Sachs that hedge funds and institutional investors would be selling their gold positions. The purpose of these announcements was to encourage individual investors to get out of gold before the big boys did. Does anyone believe that hedge funds and Wall Street would announce their sales in advance so the small fry can get out of gold at a higher price than they do?

If these advanced announcements are not orchestration, what are they?

I see the orchestrated effort to suppress the price of gold and silver as a sign that the authorities are frightened that trouble is brewing that they cannot control unless there is strong confidence in the dollar. Otherwise, what is the point of the heavy short selling and orchestrated announcements of gold sales in advance of the sales?

NOTE: Gold weights are based on metric tons and Troy ounces. 500 metric tons of gold would be 16,075,000 troy ounces.

Republished with permission from:: Global Research

I was the first to point out that the Federal Reserve was rigging all markets, not merely bond prices and interest rates, and that the Fed is rigging the bullion market in order to protect the US dollar’s exchange value, which is threatened by the Fed’s quantitative easing. With the Fed adding to the supply of dollars faster than the demand for dollars is increasing, the price or exchange value of the dollar is set up to fall.

A fall in the dollar’s exchange rate would push up import prices and, thereby, domestic inflation, and the Fed would lose control over interest rates. The bond market would collapse and with it the values of debt-related derivatives on the “banks too big too fail” balance sheets. The financial system would be in turmoil, and panic would reign.

Rapidly rising bullion prices were an indication of loss of confidence in the dollar and were signaling a drop in the dollar’s exchange rate. The Fed used naked shorts in the paper gold market to offset the price effect of a rising demand for bullion possession. Short sales that drive down the price trigger stop-loss orders that automatically lead to individual sales of bullion holdings once their loss limits are reached.

According to Andrew Maguire, on Friday, April 12, the Fed’s agents hit the market with 500 tons of naked shorts. Normally, a short is when an investor thinks the price of a stock or commodity is going to fall. He wants to sell the item in advance of the fall, pocket the money, and then buy the item back after it falls in price, thus making money on the short sale. If he doesn’t have the item, he borrows it from someone who does, putting up cash collateral equal to the current market price. Then he sells the item, waits for it to fall in price, buys it back at the lower price and returns it to the owner who returns his collateral. If enough shorts are sold, the result can be to drive down the market price.

A naked short is when the short seller does not have or borrow the item that he shorts, but sells shorts regardless. In the paper gold market, the participants are betting on gold prices and are content with the monetary payment. Therefore, generally, as participants are not interested in taking delivery of the gold, naked shorts do not need to be covered with the physical metal.

In other words, with naked shorts, no physical metal is actually sold.

People ask me how I know that the Fed is rigging the bullion price and seem surprised that anyone would think the Fed and its bullion bank agents would do such a thing, despite the public knowledge that the Fed is rigging the bond market and the banks with the Fed’s knowledge rigged the Libor rate. The answer is that the circumstantial evidence is powerful.

Consider the 500 tons of paper gold sold on Friday. Begin with the question, how many ounces is 500 tons? There are 2,000 pounds to one ton. 500 tons equal 1,000,000 pounds. There are 16 ounces to one pound, which comes to 16 million ounces of short sales on Friday.

Who has 16 million ounces of gold? At the beginning gold price that day of about $1,550, that comes to $24,800,000,000. Who has that kind of money?

What happens when 500 tons of gold sales are dumped on the market at one time or on one day? Correct, it drives the price down. Investors who want to get out of large positions would spread sales out over time so as not to lower their sales proceeds. The sale took gold down by about $73 per ounce. That means the seller or sellers lost up to $73 dollars 16 million times, or $1,168,000,000.

Who can afford to lose that kind of money? Only a central bank that can print it.

I believe that the authorities would like to drive the gold price down further and will, if they can, hit the gold market twice more next week and put gold at $1,400 per ounce or lower. The successive declines could perhaps spook individual holders of physical gold and result in actual net sales of physical gold as people reduced their holdings of the metal.

However, bullion dealer Bill Haynes told kingworldnews.com that last Friday bullion purchasers among the public outpaced sellers by 50 to 1, and that the premiums over the spot price on gold and silver coins are the highest in decades. I myself checked

with Gainesville Coins and was told that far more buyers than sellers had responded to the price drop.

Unless the authorities have the actual metal with which to back up the short selling, they could be met with demands for deliveries. Unable to cover the shorts with real metal, the scheme would be exposed.

Do the authorities have the metal with which to cover shorts? I do not know. However, knowledgeable dealers are suspicious. Some think that US physical stocks of gold were used up in sales in efforts to disrupt the rise in the gold price from $272 in December 2000 to $1,900 in 2011. They point to Germany’s recent request that the US return the German gold stored in the US, and to the US government’s reply that it would return the gold piecemeal over seven years. If the US has the gold, why not return it to Germany?

The clear implication is that the US cannot deliver the gold.

Andrew Maguire also reports that foreign central banks, especially China, are loading up on physical gold at the low prices made possible by the short selling. If central banks are using their dollar holdings to purchase bullion at bargain prices, the likely results will be pressure on the dollar’s exchange value and a declining market supply of physical bullion. In other words, by trying to protect the dollar from its quantitative easing policy, the Fed might be hastening the dollar’s demise.

Possibly the Fed fears a dollar crisis or derivative blowup is nearing and is trying to reset the gold/dollar price prior to the outbreak of trouble. If ill winds are forecast, the Fed might feel it is better positioned to deal with crisis if the price of bullion is lower and

confidence in bullion as a refuge has been shaken.

In addition to short selling that is clearly intended to drive down the gold price, orchestration is also indicated by the advance announcements this month first from brokerage houses and then from Goldman Sachs that hedge funds and institutional investors would be selling their gold positions. The purpose of these announcements was to encourage individual investors to get out of gold before the big boys did. Does anyone believe that hedge funds and Wall Street would announce their sales in advance so the small fry can get out of gold at a higher price than they do?

If these advanced announcements are not orchestration, what are they?

I see the orchestrated effort to suppress the price of gold and silver as a sign that the authorities are frightened that trouble is brewing that they cannot control unless there is strong confidence in the dollar. Otherwise, what is the point of the heavy short selling and orchestrated announcements of gold sales in advance of the sales?

NOTE: Gold weights are based on metric tons and Troy ounces. 500 metric tons of gold would be 16,075,000 troy ounces.

Republished with permission from:: Global Research

Yemeni police stand guard as Houthis protest outside the headquarters of the National Security Bureau in Sanaâ„¢a on June 9, 2013.

Republished with permission from:: Press TV

Irene Klotz
reuters.com
June 27, 2013

Reports last summer than NASA’s long-lived Voyager 1 space probe had finally left the solar system turned out to be a bit premature, scientists said on Thursday.

Rather, the spacecraft, which was launched in 1977 for a five-year mission to study Jupiter and Saturn, has found itself in a previously unknown region between the outermost part of the solar system and interstellar space.

It is an unusual and unexpected thoroughfare, a place where charged particles from the sun have virtually disappeared and those coming from galactic cosmic rays beyond the solar system are plentiful.

Read more

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 27, 2013 at 5:17 pm

Tags: science, technology

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Republished with permission from:: Infowars