Protesters demonstrate against western intervention in Syria, outside the US embassy in central London, Saturday, June 15, 2013.(Photo: Lefteris Pitarakis/ AP) The White House’s claim of ‘proof’ that the Syrian government is using chemical weapons faces growing skepticism as many, questioning the faulty evidence and lack of transparency, begin to challenge the motives of an administration clearly eager to intervene.

“You’d be an idiot if you didn’t approach this thing with a bit of caution,” said former UN weapons inspector David Kay, who led the US search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

This growing mistrust follows the Obama administration’s announcement last week that officials have ‘proof’ that the Syrian government under President Bashar al-Assad has been using chemical weapons, thus crossing Obama’s “red line” and justifying US military action.

Critics and other skeptical parties are comparing this alleged evidence to America’s incorrect claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003.

The so-called proof includes blood, tissue and soil samples “smuggled out of the country by rebels or intelligence operatives,” reports The Washington Post, adding, “precisely who acquired the evidence and what methods were used to guard against tampering may be unknowable.”

In a story published Thursday, The Washington Post quotes a number of officials who cite this “lack of transparency” as reason to question the credibility of the Obama administration’s chemical-weapons claims.

“If you are the opposition and you hear” that the White House has drawn a red line on the use of nerve agents, “you have an interest in giving the impression that some chemical weapons have been used,” Rolf Ekeus, a Swedish scientist who formerly led UN weapons inspections in Iraq, told the Post.

The lack of transparency over how the evidence has been collected and analyzed further prevents independent experts from assessing the authenticity of these findings.

Some of the published reports of chemical weapons “make certain alarm bells ring,” said Jean Pascal Zanders, former research fellow at the European Union Institute for Security Studies.

“We don’t have the barest of information. There is not even a fact sheet documenting the samples,” he added. “This is an immensely political process, and there is no way of challenging the findings.”

Raising a few eyebrows, this fact has prompted some, including The Nation’s Greg Mitchell, to posture that the claims may simply be “used as an excuse for stepping up Syrian intervention.” 

The United Nations has also remained unconvinced thus far.

“The validity of any information cannot be ensured without convincing evidence of the chain of custody,” said UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon following the White House’s announcement of plans to arm the rebel army. According to the UN terms of reference, only evidence personally collected by its inspectors can be used to issue a final judgment.

Zanders told the Post that he’s been independently scouring the internet for “photographs, video and news reports” documenting any trademark symptoms of chemical weapon use in Syria. They report:

In a paper he presented last week to the E.U. Non-Proliferation Consortium, he compared photographs documenting Iraq’s 1998 chemical weapons attack against Kurds in the town of Halabja.

The Halabja victims appeared to have died instantaneously from chemical agents, he said, and their bodies showed telltale signs of exposure to sarin: blue lips and fingertips caused by suffocation and a pink hue brought on by excessive sweating and high blood pressure. “No press reports from Syria refer to those descriptions, which is one of the reasons why I am skeptical about those reports,” he said.

“There are so many people who would like us to believe that the regime used chemical weapons,” quipped a former senior US intelligence official who chose not to be identified. “You have to question whether any of those advocates were involved in collecting the evidence.”

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(Image: Danny Dougherty/McClatchy Washington Bureau)A program being implemented by the Obama administration titled “Insider Threat” requires millions of federal employees to keep a close watch on each other–a “sweeping” effort to crackdown on whistleblowers and leakers across the U.S. government, McClatchy reports Friday after obtaining a series of government documents.

The program, which has largely gone unmentioned in the media, spans all government agencies and mandates that employees and their superiors seek out “high-risk persons or behaviors” tied to someone who might expose government wrongdoing. Those who fail to expose someone they belief to be a leaker face penalties that include criminal charges.

As McClatchy reports Friday, the program creates a “sweeping” government-wide crackdown on federal employees who may find certain harmful actions or policies of their employer worthy of public knowledge. 

The program was launched in October 2011 directly after Army Pfc. Bradley Manning leaked military documents that exposed U.S. war crimes to the website WikiLeaks.

“Hammer this fact home . . . leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States,” says one of the documents–a June 1, 2012 Defense Department strategy written for the program.

As the documents reveal, any “leaks to the media” are officially “equated with espionage,” through the administration’s eyes.

As McClatchy reports:

President Barack Obama’s unprecedented initiative, known as the Insider Threat Program, is sweeping in its reach. It has received scant public attention even though it extends beyond the U.S. national security bureaucracies to most federal departments and agencies nationwide, including the Peace Corps, the Social Security Administration and the Education and Agriculture departments. It emphasizes leaks of classified material, but catchall definitions of “insider threat” give agencies latitude to pursue and penalize a range of other conduct.

Government documents reviewed by McClatchy illustrate how some agencies are using that latitude to pursue unauthorized disclosures of any information, not just classified material. […]

The McClatchy piece goes on to detail the individualized implementations of the program within differing government agencies–all with their own tactics for identifying the “spy in our midst,” as The Defense Department puts it.

According to McClatchy, the Obama administration is expected to hasten the implementation of the program in the wake of the recent earth-shattering revelations leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden that exposed the NSA’s vast and unconstitutional–as many have argued–spying programs.

According to current and former officials and experts who spoke with McClatchy, the Insider Threat Program is making it “easier for the government to stifle the flow of unclassified and potentially vital information to the public,” as McClatchy writes, “while creating toxic work environments poisoned by unfounded suspicions and spurious investigations of loyal Americans.”

“It was just a matter of time before the Department of Agriculture or the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) started implementing, ‘Hey, let’s get people to snitch on their friends.’ The only thing they haven’t done here is reward it,” said Kel McClanahan, a Washington lawyer who specializes in national security law. “I’m waiting for the time when you turn in a friend and you get a $50 reward.”

“The real danger is that you get a bland common denominator working in the government,” warned Ilana Greenstein, a former CIA case officer who says she quit the agency after being falsely accused of being a security risk. “You don’t get people speaking up when there’s wrongdoing. You don’t get people who look at things in a different way and who are willing to stand up for things. What you get are people who toe the party line, and that’s really dangerous for national security.”

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Steve Wozniak speaking with Piers Morgan this week. (Screenshot)Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has cheered NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and admonished the rise of the surveillance state.

Speaking with CNN‘s Piers Morgan on Thursday, Wozniak expressed support for the whistleblower and said, “I felt about Edward Snowden the same way I felt about Daniel Ellsberg, who changed my life, who taught me a lot with a book he wrote…” He continued:

Read the facts–it’s a government of, by and for the people. That sorta means we own the government. We’re the ones that pay for it, and then we discover something that our money is being used for. That just can’t be, that level of crime.

On the proliferation of computers made possible by geniuses like him that enables widespread surveillance, Wozniak told Morgan:

I actually feel a little guilty about that but not totally. We created the computers to free the people up, give them instant communication anywhere in the world, any thought you could share it freely. That it was going to overcome a lot of the government restrictions. We didn’t realize that in the digital world there are a lot of ways to use the digital technology to control us, to snoop on us. In the old days of mailing letters, you licked it, and when you got an envelope that was still sealed, nobody had seen it. You could have private communication. Now they say because it’s e-mail it cannot be private, anyone can listen.

In another recent interview, however, Wozniak offered a more in-depth look at his thoughts on government snooping.Photo: The DEMO Conference/cc/flickr

A chance run-in with Wozniak at an airport last week offered Spanish language technological news site FayerWayer the opportunity to get the tech giant’s thoughts on the widespread government spying exposed by Snowden. In the interview, Wozniak lamented the current state of surveillance in the U.S..

When asked what he thought about the NSA’s PRISM program, Wozniak said:

I was brought up, for example, and my dad taught me that other countries when they got prisoners in a war, they tortured them. But we Americans didn’t torture them; we gave them good food and clothing and everything. And I was so proud of my country, you know? And now I find out it’s just the opposite, you know.

And I just wish all these things I thought about the Constitution that made us so good as people — they’re kinda nothing. They all disolved with the Patriot Act.

There’s all these laws that say we can just sorta call anything terrorism and do anything we want without all these rights of courts to get in and say we aren’t doing the wrong things. 

There’s not even a free, open court anymore. And I read the Constitution and I don’t know how all this stuff happened. It’s so clear what the Constitution says. It’s extremely clear in the Bill of Rights. One thing after another, after another. It just got overturned, and that’s what a king does. 

The king just goes out and has anyone rounded up, killed, put in secret prisons. 

When I was brought up, I was taught that communist Russia was the ones that were gonna kill us and bomb our country and all this. And communist Russia was so bad because they followed their people, they snooped on them, they arrested them, they put them in secret prisons, they disappeared them. These kind of things were part of Russia.

You know, we’re getting more and more like that. […]

Look at the guy who just turned over the information on what the NSA program was.

He said that anyone like him sitting at a terminal could instantly go and grab all the data of anyone they felt like, with no courts […] no warrants, nobody having to approve it. 

That means there’s a thousand people in the CIA that could just sit and whoever they want … they could just go look at. 

That sort of structure is wrong. But troubles come from the top.

Watch Morgan’s interview with “Woz” below:

Wozniak’s interview with FayerWayer is below:

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(Photo: Creative Commons/RetailByRyan95)Prominent U.S. charities, businesses, and even high schools, are paying disabled workers far below minimum wage–in some cases a fraction of a dollar per hour–thanks to a long-standing law that says employers can suppress wages because of disability.

In an ironic twist, some of the the employers who take advantage of this law–such as Goodwill Industries–have built their reputations on helping the ‘needy.’

The 1938 law allows employers to petition the U.S. Department of Labor to pay disabled workers below minimum wage if the employer claims the worker’s ‘productive capacity is impaired’ by disability.

The petition declares that employers can pay ‘special minimum wages’ to people with disabilities that include ‘blindness, mental illness, mental retardation, cerebral palsy, alcoholism and drug addiction’.

There is no set minimum for this ‘special minimum wage’: if the petition is granted, employers can pay as little as they want.

A majority of those who petition for low wages are nonprofit organizations. However, a public list shows that the number of for-profit businesses that pay disabled people below minimum wage is not small and includes big names such as Ramada Inn, Holiday Inn, McDonald’s, and 7 Eleven. High Schools and universities are also numbered among institutions that petition to suppress wages for disabled people

The result? Some disabled workers make as little as 22, 38, and 41 cents per hour.

NBC reports that disabled Goodwill employees are outraged at what they call a civil rights disaster at the hands of an employer that is not short on money:

“If they really do pay the CEO of Goodwill three-quarters of a million dollars, they certainly can pay me more than they’re paying,” said Harold Leigland, who is legally blind and hangs clothes at a Goodwill in Great Falls, Montana for less than minimum wage.

“It’s a question of civil rights,” added his wife, Sheila, blind from birth, who quit her job at the same Goodwill store when her already low wage was cut further. “I feel like a second-class citizen. And I hate it.”

(Photo: Justseeds)

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(Image via The Guardian)Always seemingly in lockstep with the United States, new reports reveal that the UK’s spy agency, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), has gained covert access to the “world’s communications” and has amassed an infinite database, which they freely share with their US counterpart, the NSA.

“It’s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight,” former NSA contractor Edward Snowden told the Guardian. “They [GCHQ] are worse than the US.”

This information, revealed in a Guardian exclusive published Friday, was gleaned from documents leaked to the news outlet by Snowden earlier this month.

The documents reveal a five-year-old government surveillance system that dwarfs all others in its scale and capacity to collect metadata on “the world’s communications.”

The spy agency’s programs, appropriately called Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation, tap transatlantic fiber-optic cables that “carry the world’s phone calls and internet traffic” by attaching “intercept probes” where the cables meet British soil before “carrying data to western Europe from telephone exchanges and internet servers in North America.”

The sheer scale of the program trumps any other that has yet to come to light. As the report notes, the GCHQ “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA.”

In the US, officials have downplayed the value and scope of information that can be gleaned from such mass swathes of data. However, as Jay Stanley and Ben Wizner of the ACLU explained following earlier revelations of the NSA spy program:

Even without intercepting the content of communications, the government can use metadata to learn our most intimate secrets — anything from whether we have a drinking problem to whether we’re gay or straight. The suggestion that metadata is “no big deal” — a view that, regrettably, is still reflected in the law — is entirely out of step with the reality of modern communications.

“The public doesn’t understand,” adds mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau. “It’s much more intrusive than content.”

The UK spy agency collects 600 million “telephone events” each day, and with over 200 tapped cables carrying information at a rate of 10 gigabits per second, they are capturing the equivalent of “all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours.”

Also, the amount of data they are able to collect is constantly growing, as more cables are tapped and storage capabilities continue to grow.

As the Guardian reports:

One key innovation has been GCHQ’s ability to tap into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30 days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora, has been running for some 18 months.

GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people, as well as targeted suspects.

This includes recordings of phone calls, the content of email messages, entries on Facebook and the history of any internet user’s access to websites — all of which is deemed legal, even though the warrant system was supposed to limit interception to a specified range of targets.

Not unlike the United States’ rational for the allegedly legal NSA surveillance system, the GCHQ justifies these programs by applying old laws to new technology. Under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa), the tapping of “defined targets” must be authorized by a warrant signed by the home secretary or foreign secretary.

However, as the Guardian explains, the GCHQ has taken advantage of “an obscure clause” which allows the foreign secretary to sign a certificate for the interception of broad categories of material, as long as one end of the monitored communications is abroad. 

In this case, they write, the “criteria at any one time are secret and are not subject to any public debate.”

Beginning in May 2012, 300 analysts from GCHQ and 250 from the NSA began the process of sifting through this “flood of data,” and a reported 850,000 NSA employees and US private contractors have access to the growing database.

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A banner supporting Edward Snowden is displayed at Central, Hong Kong’s business district on June 19, 2013. Photo: AP

The US is hacking Chinese mobile phone companies to gather data from millions of text messages, whistleblower Edward Snowden told the South China Morning Post in a report published in China Saturday. And Snowden claims he has the evidence to prove it.

National Security Agency (NSA) spies have also been hacking China’s prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing and Asia Pacific fiber-optic network operator Pacnet, the South China Morning Post quoted Snowden.

Snowden has been charged with espionage by the Obama administration after revealing the US governments massive data and phone spying program.

“There’s far more than this. The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cell phone companies to steal all of your SMS data,” Snowden said.

Chinese government data shows almost 900 billion text messages were exchanged in China in 2012 alone.

The South China Morning Post also reported that Snowden is not under police protection but is in a “safe place’’ in Hong Kong.

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) drew boos and heckling from members of the crowd at a progressive conference on Saturday while defending President Barack Obama’s administration and the recently-discovered surveillance policies by the National Security Agency (NSA). (Arturo Garcia)

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) drew loud and vocal backlash Saturday for her comments on National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Speaking at ‘Netroots Nation’, a national gathering of progressive Democratic activists and bloggers, Pelosi claimed it was unfair to label this President George W. Bush’s “fourth term.”

As she spoke about the need to “balance” privacy and security, Marc Perkel, a 57-year-old California blogger who’s called for Obama’s impeachment over the NSA revelations yelled out: “It’s not a balance! It’s not constitutional! No secret laws!” Perkel continued to decry “secret courts,” and staffers began to escort him from the room.

As security guards were dragging Perkel away. “Leave him alone!” shouted other activists. “No secret courts!” yelled Perkel as he moved out of the room. “No secret laws!”

Pelosi continued: “Snowden, you may disagree with me, but he did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents. The fact is, we have to have a balance between security and privacy.”

Loud boos then erupted throughout the room. “It’s a bad law!” yelled one Netsroots attendee. “You suck!,” “Leave him alone!” and “That’s what a police state looks like right there!” yelled others.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

SAN JOSE – House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was heckled and booed by liberal activists Saturday when she said that Edward Snowden broke the law when he revealed classified information about secret surveillance programs.

Another round of disapproval came when the former House speaker said Americans’ rights to privacy must be balanced with the nation’s security needs.

Snowden “did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents,” she said during a luncheon Q-and-A on the closing day of Netroots Nation, an annual gathering of thousands of liberal activists and bloggers.

The crowd erupted in boos.

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A series of violent clashes between security forces and militants have claimed the lives of at least eight people in different violence-wracked regions of Pakistan.

Local security officials say at least one security man was killed and two others injured in a militant attack in northwestern town of Bannu on Sunday.

The causalities come after heavily armed militants targeted a security forcesâ„¢ vehicle with a remote- controlled bomb in Khawa Khawar area of Bannu.

A volunteer has transferred the injured security personnel to a nearby hospital in the troubled region.

In another incident, a blast near a check post in Sateen area of Kurram tribal region killed one security personnel and injured six others.

Separately, at least six militants, including their commander, were killed during a security forces’ operation in Dera Bugti district of southwestern Balochistan Province on Sunday.

The local security personnel also discovered explosives and heavy weaponry from the militants’ hideout in the region.

The Pakistani army has launched several fresh operations in the troubled northwestern and southwestern regions in a bid to flush out militants from the volatile areas.

Despite the Pakistani government’s operations against Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) militants and associated groups, they have still been able to spread their influence in various regions of the country and kill thousands of people.

Thousands of Pakistanis have lost their lives in bombings and other militant attacks since 2001 when Pakistan entered an alliance with the US on the so-called war against terrorism, according to local media.

Thousands others have been displaced by the wave of violence and militancy sweeping across the country.

Since late 2009, there has been a surge in militant attacks in Pakistan.

JR/PR

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

It’s no surprise that this latest announcement hardly registered on the US media who were busy covering Obama’s latest flip-flop on Syria, and the US royal family’s visit to Ireland. It’s deception on a grand scale this time, and here’s how it’s done…

For the second time in as many years, Iran has once again made the right moves towards proving to the world that it is not, and will not be pursuing a nuclear weapons program. This time it announced it’s halting its 20% enriched uranium, and has a solid partner in Russia to help make this happen. As one would expect, the US-led axis bloc has completely ignored this important development, opting instead to soldier forward on a predictable war path which the bellicose Israeli lobby running the US Congress and Senate has been campaigning for all these years.

When lawyers become Presidents

You can see why Obama was the candidate of choice for the Democratic Neoliberal machine in the US. As a lawyer-cum-salesman, he is a master in NLP, and casting verbal smokescreens — very generous with words, but very stingy when it comes to conclusions. White House spin doctors and focus group pollsters have already established that Obama’s core supporters don’t actually listen to the content of his speeches, most will suspend critical thought in favour of the joy they receive by simply hearing the sound of his voice. This allows the President to deliver a style, featuring a well-rehearsed cadence, rather than any specific meaning.  By the time you finish listening to one of his long-winded conversations, it’s hard to actually recall what’s actually been said. Another aspect of this technique is to stretch out the answers to questions, before eventually contradicting one’s self, leaving the average TV viewer in an induced state of intellectual paralysis.

During the President’s recently staged interview with the CFR, Trialteral Commission and Bilderberg’s own embedded ‘journalist’, Charlie Rose, Obama was asked directly whether or not he thought that Iranian voters choice of moderate President-elect Hassan Rowhani, was significant and could this a be positive development in terms of US diplomacy with Iran. In typical Obama style, he gave a verbose, highly vague, nonspecific answer, followed by:

“Our bottom lines have been: show the international community that you are abiding by international treaties and obligations — that you are not developing a nuclear weapon, based on that, there are a whole range of measure that can be taken to normalise relations between Iran and the whole world, but we don’t know yet if they are going to take up that offer, they have not been during my entire my first term when we showed ourselves open to these discussions.”

“My general view is we are open to discussions, both through the P5+1, and through potential bilateral channels, and we recognise that you’re not going solve problems all up front as a pre-condition for talks, but  There has to be a serious recognition that the sanctions we put in place against Iran — the most power economic sanctions  that have ever been applied against Iran, that those will not be lifted in the absence of significant steps in showing the international community that Iran is not pursuing a  nuclear weapon. As long as there is an understanding about the basis of the conversation, then I think there is no reason why we should not proceed… “

Incredible. The ambiguity in Obama’s answers and the classic NLP ‘anchoring’ techniques used throughout the interview are not accidental, they’re intentional. Constant fuzziness and communicative misdirection. This has become the hallmark of nearly every Obama public statement. Unfortunately for Americans, Iranians and the rest of the peace-loving world, this is what we are stuck with as a President in America for now.

Obama is a microphone for K Street

Not surprisingly, the White House has completely ignored the significant announcement that  Iran has confirmed it will halt its enrichment of 20-percent uranium, with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov still urging the West to end their sanctions against Tehran. Still, no answer from the west. Maybe Obama’s speech writers need a few weeks to figure out ‘what it all means’. They should have a statement ready by the time the Obamas return from their $100 million African safari vacation.

General thinking in the neocortex of Washington, which takes place within the CFR,  neoconservative think tanks and on the kosher end of K Street, is that Iranian claims  are all lies, made up as part of Iran’s campaign of international propaganda designed to conceal its evil plans to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

Sounds like a comic book plot, doesn’t it? That’s because it is.

So we have lawyers making deals with lobbyists. This is how they don’t want you to see the Iranian narrative…

The brains of Washington might pretend to not fully understand the idiosyncracies underpinning the fact that Iran’s having nuclear reprocessing capabilities does not automatically imply a nuclear weapons program, but of course, you should know by now that the facts of this matter are of little concern to them. They are merely shilling for an international energy and financial cartel who seek total dominance in their sectors.

The International Nuclear Mafia

The other huge issue in all of this that might be too deep, and too complex for the brains of Washington and its media surrogates to get their heads around, is the international nuclear energy lobby, a powerful cartel, who is more or less dictating Anglo-Franco-American foreign policy regarding anything to do with the nuclear industry.

After being burnt in business trying to deal with countries like France in the past, Iran is seeking total energy and technological independence.

The timing of Iran being declared as “Axis of Evil” amazing coincided with their movement forward in breaking the international nuclear monopoly stronghold currently being held between the US, Great Britain and France. The nuclear industry operates like a global cartel with three main players who divide the trade amongst themselves exclusively. Production material is handled by France. Production systems are handled by the United States. Reprocessing is done by the British. There are some minor exceptions to these, but overall, that’s how it has worked over the years.


PHOTO: For Tehran, a nuclear program is a matter of national pride.

On the oil and gas front, here another reason why Iran are persona non grata: the US agenda remains to somehow force Iran to accept a private central bank and sell all of their oil only for US dollars. Again, it’s an issues of operating outside of the monopoly.

Anglo-Franco-American dominance over the UN and the IAEA also mean that these agencies can be manipulated in order to frame the conversation only in terms of the threat of nuclear weapons in the future, and completely divorced from the real economic battles taking place. In addition, the UN has a built-in blind spot for Israel who is somehow exempt from any jurisdiction regarding nuclear weapons.

Of course, you have never heard the White House answer a question on any of that, nor will you ever hear Charlie Rose ask those questions, and you probably never will.

US ‘diplomacy’ based on public deception

President Obama and his advisers are well aware that Iran is not on track to produce any nuclear weapons, so Obama’s line that he understands that ‘you’re not going solve problems all up front as a pre-condition for talks’ is disingenuous at best, and a cynical lie targeting American voters at its worst. Washington is afraid of diplomatic talks with Iran because it would force the west to voice their true demands in public which appears to be something along the lines of, “Shut down your nuclear power program first, and then we can begin talking.”

The reality, of course, is that the Anglo-American foreign policy on Iran has never been and will never feature (under the current rulings powers anyway) any real political diplomacy, or “bilateral discussions” as Obama refers to them. Obama’s intentionally ambiguous comments should reiterate this obvious fact. Rather, the policy is, was, and will be that of its two client state powers in the region Israel and Saudi Arabia — which is a policy of war, designed to maintain hegemony by either eliminating or severely crippling their chief economic and political rival in the region.

The US, its allies and Israel have already declared war on Iran by imposing binding economic sanctions in the absence of any actual evidence of Iran having a nuclear weapons program. Yes, you heard that right  – the war has already begun. The timing of their game in Syria is design to cripple each of Iran’s remaining allies in the region, Syria, and then Hezbollah in Lebanon — all in advance of their final push towards Iran.

It’s also worth pointing out that the loud mouth on Iran’s still nonexistent nuclear threat is Israel — a country who have refused to allow nuclear inspectors into its country and who, unlike Iran, refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, making Israel’s leading role in all of this highly suspect to say the least.

Understand when you watch this tedious interview (below), that all of Charlie Rose’s questions were vetted in advance, and those that weren’t, were given to Rose by the White House. After nearly an hour, nothing conclusive could be determined from the President of the United States. That, is this administration in a nutshell.

In short, this was nothing more than a staged a corporate interview with CEO Obama…

(The first reader who you can correctly count how many times Barack Obama says “Uhhhh….” during Barack’s interview, could win a T-shirt. Please leave your guess in the comment section below)–

What now Barack? Iran ready to halt 20% uranium enrichment, West must reciprocate.

A recent report from RT explains:

Iran has confirmed it is prepared to halt its enrichment of 20-percent uranium, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, urging Western nations to end their sanctions against Tehran.

“For the first time in many years, there are encouraging signs in the process of settlement of the situation with the Iranian nuclear program,” he said in the interview to Kuwait’s KUNA news agency, that was published on  Russian Foreign Ministry’s website.

“Without going into details, the Iranians confirm the most important [point]: Their readiness to stop 20 percent uranium enrichment at its current levels,” Lavrov said.“This could become a breakthrough agreement, significantly alleviating existing problems, including concerns about the possibility of advanced uranium enrichment to a weapons-grade level.”

Such a move “implies significant reciprocal steps by the Six,” the minister added, referring to the group of world powers seeking to peacefully resolve the issue of Iran’s nuclear program.

“The international community must adequately respond to the constructive progress made by Iran, including gradual suspension and lifting of sanctions, both unilateral and those introduced by the UN Security Council. It would be a shame not to take advantage of this opportunity,” Lavrov concluded.

News of Iran’s possible concessions over its nuclear program comports with promises made by Iranian President-elect Hassan Rowhani, who vowed to make the program more transparent.

Still, the moderate cleric stressed on Monday that Tehran would not consider halting the country’s uranium enrichment activities entirely. Rowhani insisted that Iran’s nuclear activities are“within the framework of law,” and dubbed the international sanctions “baseless.”

Despite numerous accusations by Israel and the US that it is secretly conducting military nuclear research, Iran has maintained that its nuclear program is only for civilian purposes.

At his first media conference since winning the presidential elections, Rowhani — who previously headed Iran’s delegation during nuclear talks with the six world powers — said that Tehran’s nuclear activities “are already transparent,” but “the only way to end the sanctions is to increase the transparency and trust” between Iran and the international community.

Washington has been expecting changes in Iran’s hardline stance on the nuclear issue following the country’s presidential elections. White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough said Sunday on ‘Face the Nation’ that Washington is ready to work with the new administration in Tehran, “If he lives up to his obligations under the UN Security Council resolution to come clean on this illicit nuclear program.”

But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu remained unconvinced: “The international community must not become caught up in wishes and be tempted to relax the pressure on Iran to stop its nuclear program,” he said.

President-elect Rowhani will assume office in August. He believes that he can heal the “old wound” of troubled US-Iran relations if Washington stops interfering in Tehran’s internal affairs and permanently ends its “bullying” practices towards Iran.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) drew boos and heckling from members of the crowd at a progressive conference on Saturday while defending President Barack Obama’s administration and the recently-discovered surveillance policies by the National Security Agency (NSA). (Arturo Garcia)

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) drew loud and vocal backlash Saturday for her comments on National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Speaking at ‘Netroots Nation’, a national gathering of progressive activists and bloggers, Pelosi claimed it was unfair to label this President George W. Bush’s “fourth term.”

As she spoke about the need to “balance” privacy and security, Marc Perkel, a 57-year-old California blogger who’s called for Obama’s impeachment over the NSA revelations yelled out: “It’s not a balance! It’s not constitutional! No secret laws!” Perkel continued to decry “secret courts,” and staffers began to escort him from the room.

As security guards were dragging Perkel away. “Leave him alone!” shouted other activists. “No secret courts!” yelled Perkel as he moved out of the room. “No secret laws!”

Pelosi continued: “Snowden, you may disagree with me, but he did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents. The fact is, we have to have a balance between security and privacy.”

Loud boos then erupted throughout the room. “It’s a bad law!” yelled one Netsroots attendee. “You suck!,” “Leave him alone!” and “That’s what a police state looks like right there!” yelled others.

The Los Angeles Times reports:

SAN JOSE – House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was heckled and booed by liberal activists Saturday when she said that Edward Snowden broke the law when he revealed classified information about secret surveillance programs.

Another round of disapproval came when the former House speaker said Americans’ rights to privacy must be balanced with the nation’s security needs.

Snowden “did violate the law in terms of releasing those documents,” she said during a luncheon Q-and-A on the closing day of Netroots Nation, an annual gathering of thousands of liberal activists and bloggers.

The crowd erupted in boos.

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Infowars.com
June 23, 2013

A panel of scientists and legal experts appointed by the Japanese government will be gathering together to begin drafting guidelines governing Japan’s historic embryonic research. If all goes according to plan, scientists hope to begin growing human organs in animals within the next 12 months.

The research sounds like something out of a science fiction novel. Scientists place a human stem cell into the embryo of an animal to create a “chimeric embryo” that can be implanted into the animal’s womb. According to the Telegraph, the animal in question will most likely be a pig.

Once the embryo is implanted it will grow into a perfect human organ — a heart, a kidney, a pancreas, and so on. Then, when the adult pig is slaughtered, the organ will be harvested and transplanted into someone who needs a new one.

Professor Hiromitsu Nakauchi, head of the center for stem cell biology and regenerative medicine at the University of Tokyo, says he and his team have already succeeded in injecting stem cells from rats into the embryos of mice that had been genetically altered.

“We can apply the same principles to human stem cells and pigs, although the guidelines have not permitted us to do this yet,” he said.

Currently, Japanese guidelines allow the researchers to develop chimeric embryos in laboratory conditions for up to 14 days, but they’re prohibited from implanting the embryos into an animal. The process to revise the guidelines is expected to take up to 12 months and Professor Nakauchi believes the first pig carrying a human organ can be produced “quite quickly, because the technique has been established already.”

Nakauchi believes that within 5 years the technique will be implemented on a practical basis and he eventually hopes to be able to have numerous human organs within each donor animal that can all be harvested at the same time.

Not everyone is as excited about the possibilities as Professor Nakauchi. For example, animal rights activists want to know if the animal will be slaughtered and used for food or if it’s just being used as an incubator to grow human organs.

Of course there are the ongoing theological and ethical debates about human cloning, as well, and we’re already slowly dying from eating genetically modified food.

Aside from all that, consider the implications for the New World Order:

Members of the elite, uber-rich ruling class could simply set aside a little piece of Real Estate to raise their own replacement organs. The national data base for organ donors would be eliminated because the ruling class would be raising their own organs. Murder-for-organs and back-street transplants would become commonplace and nobody would stop it because the elite already have their organs and they’re happy to watch us cull the herd.

On the surface this organ-cloning technique sounds like it would be truly beneficial for mankind, but the potential for abuse is terrifying.

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This article was posted: Sunday, June 23, 2013 at 7:45 am

Tags: technology

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Newly-appointed governor of Egyptâ„¢s smallest and ancient governorate of Luxor has quit his post after his appointment caused a huge outcry and the resignation of the tourism minister.

“We will not accept that one drop of blood be spilt because of a position that I did not personally aspire to at any time,” Adel Mohammed al-Khayat said at a news conference broadcast live on television on Sunday.

“After consultations with other members of the Construction and Development Party, I decided to tender my resignation to Prime Minister Hisham Qandil, because we want to push away any more conflicts,” he noted.

Khayat is a member of the Construction and Development Party, which is the political wing of the ultra-conservative al-Gamaa al-Islamyia group.

Al-Gamaa al-Islamyia is responsible for an attack that killed at least 58 tourists and four Egyptians in 1997 in the famed temple city of Luxor, located 635 kilometers (394 miles) south of Cairo.

The massacre crippled Egyptian tourism industry for several years, and resulted in the crackdown on the group under the rule of former dictator Hosni Mubarak.

Khayat has denied any personal role in the militant attack, and stated that he had a brief association with al-Gamaa al-Islamyia.

The appointment of Khayat as governor of Luxor last week provoked public uproar. Hundreds of protesters gather outside the Luxor governorâ„¢s office, and expressed their strong opposition to the move.

Political activists and tourism workers in the governorate said they would force touristic sites in Luxor to shut down if Khayat was not dismissed from office.

Tourism Minister Hisham Zaazou resigned on June 20 in protest at the appointment of Khayat.

Egypt’s tourism industry has suffered a major blow following the 2011 public uprising as political instability ensued in the North African country. Many countries have advised their nationals to exercise caution when travelling to Egypt.

MP/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

One of the nation’s best-known charities is paying disabled workers as little as 22 cents an hour, thanks to a 75-year-old legal loophole that critics say needs to be closed. Goodwill Industries, a multibillion-dollar company whose executives make six-figure salaries, is among the nonprofit groups permitted to pay thousands of disabled workers far less than minimum wage because of a federal law known as Section 14 (c). Labor Department records show that some Goodwill workers in Pennsylvania earned wages as low as 22, 38 and 41 cents per hour in 2011.

“If they really do pay the CEO of Goodwill three-quarters of a million dollars, they certainly can pay me more than they’re paying,” said Harold Leigland, who is legally blind and hangs clothes at a Goodwill in Great Falls, Montana for less than minimum wage.

“It’s a question of civil rights,” added his wife, Sheila, blind from birth, who quit her job at the same Goodwill store when her already low wage was cut further. “I feel like a second-class citizen. And I hate it.”

Section 14 (c) of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which was passed in 1938, allows employers to obtain special minimum wage certificates from the Department of Labor. The certificates give employers the right to pay disabled workers according to their abilities, with no bottom limit to the wage.

Most, but not all, special wage certificates are held by nonprofit organizations like Goodwill that then set up their own so-called “sheltered workshops” for disabled employees, where employees typically perform manual tasks like hanging clothes.

For more on disabled workers and sub-minimum-wage pay watch ‘Rock Center’ tonight.

The non-profit certificate holders can also place employees in outside, for-profit workplaces including restaurants, retail stores, hospitals and even Internal Revenue Service centers. Between the sheltered workshops and the outside businesses, more than 216,000 workers are eligible to earn less than minimum wage because of Section 14 (c), though many end up earning the full federal minimum wage of $7.25.When a non-profit provides Section 14 (c) workers to an outside business, it sets the salary and pays the wages. For example, the Helen Keller National Center, a New York school for the blind and deaf, has a special wage certificate and has placed students in a Westbury, N.Y., Applebee’s franchise. The employees’ pay ranged from $3.97 per hour to $5.96 per hour in 2010. The franchise told NBC News it has also hired workers at minimum wage from Helen Keller. A spokesperson for Applebee’s declined to comment on Section 14 (c).Helen Keller also placed several students at a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Manhasset, N.Y., in 2010, where they earned $3.80 and $4.85 an hour. A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman defended the Section 14 (c) program as providing jobs to “people who would otherwise not have [the opportunity to work].”

Most Section 14 (c) workers are employed directly by nonprofits. In 2001, the most recent year for which numbers are available, the GAO estimated that more than 90 percent of Section 14 (c) workers were employed at nonprofit work centers.

Critics of Section 14 (c) have focused much of their ire on the nonprofits, where wages can be just pennies an hour even as some of the groups receive funding from the government. At one workplace in Florida run by a nonprofit, some employees earned one cent per hour in 2011.

“People are profiting from exploiting disabled workers,” said Ari Ne’eman, president of the Autistic Self Advocacy Network. “It is clearly and unquestionably exploitation.”

Defenders of Section 14 (c) say that without it, disabled workers would have few options. A Department of Labor spokesperson said in a statement to NBC News that Section 14 (c) “provides workers with disabilities the opportunity to be given meaningful work and receive an income.”

Terry Farmer, CEO of ACCSES, a trade group that calls itself the “voice of disability service providers,” said scrapping the provision could “force [disabled workers] to stay at home,” enter rehabilitation, “or otherwise engage in unproductive and unsatisfactory activities.”

Harold Leigland, however, said he feels that Goodwill can pay him a low wage because the company knows he has few other places to go. “We are trapped,” he said. “Everybody who works at Goodwill is trapped.”

Leigland, a 66-year-old former massage therapist with a college degree, currently earns $5.46 per hour in Great Falls.

His wages have risen and fallen based on “time studies,” the method nonprofits use to calculate the salaries of Section 14 (c) workers. Staff members use a stopwatch to determine how long it takes a disabled worker to complete a task. That time is compared with how long it would take a person without a disability to do the same task. The nonprofit then uses a formula to calculate a salary, which may be equal to or less than minimum wage. The tests are repeated every six months.

Copyright: Rock Center with Brian Williams, 2013

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Iranians technicians installing equipment at a refinery. (File photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Zero Hedge
June 23, 2013

Edward Snowden is no longer in Hong Kong. About an hour ago, the Hong Kong Authority released a statement which says that the NSA whistleblower has left Hong Kong today “on his own accord through a lawful and normal channel” which was yet another slap in the face of the US, saying the US provisional arrest warrant “did not fully comply with the legal requirements under Hong Kong law.”

In fact, not only did the HK authority defy the US arrest warrant, but it officially demands that the US clarify its own hacking of Hong Kong computer systems:

 “Meanwhile, the HKSAR Government has normally written to the US Government requesting clarification on earlier reports about the hacking of computer systems in Hong Kong by US government agencies. The HKSAR Government will continue to follow up on the matter so as to protect the legal rights of the people of Hong Kong.”

So having been given the blessing of HK (and thus China) to defy the US, Snowden is now en route to Moscow (see flight tracker below), from where he is said he may continue further to Iceland, although according to a conflicting report from Russia’s Interfax his ultimate destination is Havana, Cuba, while some note that he may be headed to Caracas Venezuela instead. Of course, he may just remain in Moscow: it’s not as if Putin will comply with any American extradition order.

Somewhat surprisingly, Wikileaks appears directly involved:

More From SkyNews:

 The whistleblower Edward Snowden, who leaked details about US snooping, has left Hong Kong for Russia, according to reports.

His departure was revealed on the website of the Hong Kong newspaper the South China Morning Post, which said that Russia was not thought to be his intended final destination.

It is thought that the eventual destination could end up being Iceland or Ecuador. 

He is understood to have left on the Russian airline Aeroflot flight SU213.

The paper said it left Hong Kong around 11am local time (4am UK time) and was due to arrive in Moscow around 5.15pm local time (1pm UK time). It is believed to be currently in the air.

“Moscow will not be his final destination.”

The Russian President’s office said it has not been given any information about Mr Snowden’s imminent arrival.

Track Snowden’s flight in real time via Flightradar 24: flight AFL213.

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This article was posted: Sunday, June 23, 2013 at 7:19 am

Tags: big brother, domestic spying, government corruption

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Over the past week, Brazil has witnessed its largest protests since the end of the military dictatorship in 1985. This eruption of mass struggles has exposed, above all, the crisis of revolutionary leadership in the working class.

The initial trigger for the escalating protests was an increase in bus fares, which was subsequently rolled back in an attempt to dissipate social unrest. Nonetheless, Thursday saw somewhere between one and two million people take to the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and dozens of other cities across the country, pressing demands for greater investment in education and health care and venting popular anger over the billions being lavished on World Cup stadiums at the expense of the people.

In many instances, demonstrators were met with brutal repression, including tear gas, rubber bullets and cavalry charges.

Popular mobilizations of such sweeping dimensions cannot be explained merely by the immediate events that triggered them–in this case, a 20-cent rise in bus fares; in the case of Turkey, the move to bulldoze Istanbul’s Gezi Park. They are rooted in the deep-going contradictions of these societies, which have been immensely sharpened by the historic crisis of global capitalism.

Brazil, like Turkey, has been hailed in recent years as an economic success story. Yet the “Brazilian miracle” appears to have hit the wall.

While it has created some 50 billionaires and over 150,000 millionaires, it has proven incapable of resolving the legacy of imperialist oppression and economic backwardness in relation to the basic social infrastructure. Limited social assistance programs that have been hailed for reducing the rate of extreme poverty and creating a new “middle class” have done little to alter Brazil’s status as one of the most socially unequal countries on the face of the planet.

There are growing signs of economic crisis, with the growth rate falling to 0.9 percent in 2012 and 0.6 percent for the first quarter of this year. Industrial production has fallen 0.3 percent, bringing with it layoffs and hiring freezes. Consumer spending is falling, as the majority of the population faces mounting debts. Inflation has risen to an official rate of 6.5 percent, with the cost of basic necessities rising far more steeply.

While the number of university graduates has doubled in the last decade, the majority of those leaving university are unable to find jobs that require their degrees or pay decent salaries.

These young people, university students and recent graduates, made up a substantial portion of the demonstrators who poured into the streets across Brazil this week, with the bulk of them participating in mass social action for the first time in their lives.

The inevitable political confusion of such a mass spontaneous movement was exploited, particularly on Thursday, by forces of the extreme right. Bands of thugs set upon groups of left-wing marchers and a small number of union members who joined the demonstrations, tearing down and burning their banners, attacking them with pepper spray, stun grenades and metal pipes, and ultimately forcing them out of the march. This happened in Sao Paulo, Rio and a number of other cities, indicating a well-organized campaign, undoubtedly coordinated with the police and possibly the military.

The right wing sought to steer the political direction of the protests away from a struggle for social equality, chanting the slogan “no parties” and denouncing political corruption, high taxes and crime.

While the majority of those who marched were unaware of these sinister events, the fact that the fascist thugs could act with impunity is politically significant.

Most of those who demonstrated have lived all of their politically conscious lives under the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores–PT) governments of former union leader Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his handpicked successor as president, Dilma Rousseff. The Workers Party has been in power for the entire last decade.

Formed in 1980 in the wake of tumultuous mass strikes that shook the military dictatorship, the Workers Party and the trade union federation with which it was affiliated, the CUT, served from the outset as a means of diverting this militant movement of the Brazilian working class back under the domination of the bourgeois state.

Nonetheless, a whole range of pseudo-left organizations dedicated themselves to sowing illusions that the PT could be turned into a revolutionary vehicle for establishing socialism in Brazil.

As the PT won elected office on the municipal and state level, its politics shifted further and further to the right, until ultimately Lula was elected president in 2002 based on a guarantee to continue the IMF-dictated economic policies of his predecessors. Brazilian and international capital came to see the PT as the best instrument for protecting their interests against a revolt from below.

Some of the pseudo-left outfits were expelled from the PT, while others stayed, with their members rising to leading positions. In the case of the Pabloite United Secretariat, both things were true.

Part of its Brazilian section was expelled, going on to set up a new party along the same lines as the original PT, the PSOL (Socialism and Freedom Party), while others stayed, with one member, Miguel Rossetto, becoming minister of agrarian reform and a stooge of the big landed interests.

Others who had previously proclaimed themselves Trotskyists included Antonio Palocci, who became finance minister, and Luiz Gushiken, who was the director of the Lula government’s office of social communication. Both have since been criminally charged in connection with the wave of corruption and vote-buying scandals that surround the PT government.

The criminal political role played by these pseudo-left elements, all of them thoroughly nationalist in their orientation, was to provide a “socialist” veneer to a right-wing capitalist party that worked systematically to subordinate every social struggle to the interests of big business and the Brazilian state. They did so, in part, by promoting the trade unions, which have long since ceased to be seen by the population as a vehicle for social change and have been noticeably absent from the current mass protest movement.

This has provided political space for the Brazilian right to engage in the kind of reactionary populism seen in the recent protests, exploiting popular anger against the corrupt, pro-capitalist political apparatus of the PT. The dangers posed by this development in a country that was ruled for two decades by a military dictatorship, where none of those responsible for the killings, torture, illegal detentions and other crimes it committed have ever been charged, are all too real.

As in Turkey and elsewhere, the limits of spontaneous mass actions, no matter how large, will soon become apparent in Brazil. The decisive political task posed by these events and by the crisis of Brazilian and global capitalism is a turn to the working class and the building within it of a new revolutionary leadership based on the program of socialism and internationalism.

This means a ruthless political criticism of the PT and the pseudo-left groups and trade unions that are in its orbit. This is necessary to rearm the Brazilian workers with a revolutionary perspective and forge their political independence from all sections of the economic elites.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Afghan govt. seeks US explanation over peace talks with Taliaban

The photo shows the new office of the Afghan Taliban in Doha This photo was taken on June 20, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

[unable to retrieve full-text content]A 53-year-old Albanian man has been killed and several others wounded in an exchange of gunfire near a polling station in the northwestern part of Albania.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Catherine Herridge, Pamela Browne
Fox News
June 23, 2013

Watch the latest video at video.foxnews.com

The decision to keep U.S. personnel in Benghazi with substandard security was made at the highest levels of the State Department by officials who have so far escaped blame over the Sept. 11 attack, according to a review of recent congressional testimony and internal State Department memos by Fox News.

Nine months before the assault that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others, State Department Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy signed off on an internal memo that green-lighted the Benghazi operation.

The December 2011 memo from Jeffrey Feltman – then-Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (NEA) – pledged “to rapidly implement a series of corrective security measures.” However, no substantial improvements were made, according to congressional testimony to the House oversight committee from Regional Security Officer Eric Nordstrom.

Full article here

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This article was posted: Sunday, June 23, 2013 at 7:18 am

Tags: foreign affairs, government corruption, terrorism

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Michael Jansen
Irish Times
June 23, 2013

Syrian insurgents have received fresh supplies of weapons that could halt recent advances made by government forces, according to Selim Idriss, head of the Free Syrian Army’s military command.

He said if his army received “enough training and arms and [is] well organised, I think we need about six months to topple the regime”.

“We’ve received quantities of new types of weapons, including some that we asked for and that we believe will change the course of the battle on the ground,” said Free Syrian Army spokesman Louay Muqdad.

Among the arms requested are shoulder-fired ground-to- air-missiles and anti-tank weapons which the West fears could fall into the hands of extremist fundamentalists.

Full article here

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This article was posted: Sunday, June 23, 2013 at 7:16 am

Tags: terrorism, war

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Jennifer Martinez 
The Hill
June 23, 2013

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was booed onstage Saturday when she said former government contractor Edward Snowden broke the law by leaking classified documents on National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs.

Speaking at the NetRoots Nation conference in San Jose, Calif., Pelosi told the audience to reject comparisons between President Barack Obama and his predecessor, President George W. Bush, on their oversight of surveillance programs. The top House Democrat said Obama is poised to reveal “in another few days, a few more proceedings” of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Pelosi received the loudest boos and heckles from the crowd when she said Snowden had run afoul of the law by leaking documents to the media on a pair of secret NSA surveillance programs.

Full article here

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This article was posted: Sunday, June 23, 2013 at 7:19 am

Tags: big brother, domestic spying

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

AAP
June 23, 2013

THE head of a UN human rights investigation on Syria said it was still impossible to tell for sure who has used chemical weapons in the country’s devastating conflict.

Paulo Pinheiro, chairman of the investigation committee, said he would not comment on evidence sent by the United States, Britain and France to UN experts which they say shows Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have used chemical arms.

“We are not able to say who has used chemical agents or chemical weapons and we are very much worried about the chain of custody of the substances,” Pinheiro told reporters after an informal meeting with UN Security Council ambassadors.

A team of experts set up by the UN has also said that it needs access to Syria to determine where chemical arms have been used. The Syrian government has however refused to give the UN experts access to the country.

Full article here

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This article was posted: Sunday, June 23, 2013 at 7:17 am

Tags: terrorism, war

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

J. D. Heyes
Natural News
June 23, 2013

As bad as it was that the Internal Revenue Service targeted conservative and Tea Party groups filing for tax-exempt status, it appears now that the IRS wasn’t the only federal agency doing so.

According to June 4 Fox News report, the Environmental Protection Agency – itself used by successive administrations to harass and punish Americans — was also targeting conservative groups:

The allegations concern the [EPA], which is being accused of trying to charge conservative groups fees while largely exempting liberal groups. The fees applied to Freedom of Information Act requests — allegedly, the EPA waived them for liberal groups far more often than it did for conservative ones.

‘This cannot be tolerated’

The report said the allegations are now under investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as well as the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the latter of which has been extra busy lately, given the ever expanding number and scope of Obama Administration scandals.

“I don’t think it is fair at all. It is not fair to the American taxpayer — the American taxpayer should expect and demand that the EPA treats everyone equally in regard to these requests,” Rep. Tim Murphy, R-Pa., a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, told the news network. “This cannot be tolerated. As we see more federal agencies with this kind of bias, it is and should be a concern for all of us.”

Such institutional bias is routine, however, because it is ingrained in most of the federal bureaucracy, according to research by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, itself a conservative think tank based in Washington, D.C., especially when it comes to deciding which groups have to pay a fee and which of them do not.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Christopher Horner, senior fellow at CEI, says liberal groups tend to have their fees for documents waived nine out of 10 times — though conservative groups tend to have to pay document fees just as often.

“The idea is to throw hurdles in our way,” Horner told Fox News. He went onto say that he decided to examine the fee structure after the EPA repeatedly turned down his group for waivers.

“In 20 cases of ours, since the beginning of last year, we were expressly denied, or denied by them simply refusing to respond, in 18 out of 20 cases,” Horner said.

EPA — We didn’t do that’

“Earth Justice was batting 17 out of 19, the Sierra Club was the worst, at 70 percent granted, 11 out of 15. You add up some other groups and we found that 75 out of 82 groups granted, because these are the groups that the EPA has decided are the favored groups,” he said.

Of course the EPA denies any favoritism, but the agency’s obsession with progressive “green” issues belies its political bent.

Bob Perciasepe, the EPA’s acting administrator, said to the House energy panel May 16 that “our policy is to treat everybody the same,” and that the agency is considering pursuing an investigation. Only considering; so don’t expect much.

“The Office of Inspector General received from the Environmental Protection Agency the official request to look into this matter just over a week ago, so the request is currently under review by the OIG at this early stage,” the EPA said in a statement.

Next up: Health care reform

Horner remains unconvinced. He says fees or outright denials for information are tactics used by government agencies to thwart groups in which senior leaders disagree politically or to keep certain information from being made public.

“This is no different than denying a group that you don’t agree with … whether you are the IRS or the EPA, their tax-exempt status,” said Horner. “You’re talking about essentially making or breaking them, or at a minimum, snuffing out their ability to pursue their objectives.”

Have you noticed a trend here? All of these abuses are being committed by tenured bureaucrats who believe in a big, all-powerful federal government. Doubt me? Then why aren’t we hearing stories about how federal agencies are getting smaller and less intrusive?

Still think health care reform should be a government function?

Sources for this article include:

http://www.foxnews.com

http://www.naturalnews.com/040173_factory_farmers_EPA_privacy.html

http://www.nationalreview.com

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This article was posted: Sunday, June 23, 2013 at 7:18 am

Tags: environment, government corruption

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Protesters in support of Edward Snowden, a contractor at the National Security Agency (NSA), hold a photo of him during a demonstration outside the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong in this June 13, 2013 file photo. Snowden, left Hong Kong on a flight for Moscow on June 23, 2013 and his final destination may be Ecuador or Iceland, the South China Morning Post said. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

Edward Snowden, the NSA whistleblower sought by US authorities on espionage charges, departed the Chinese territory by commercial airliner on Sunday morning local time and is en route to Moscow, the South China Morning Post reported.

Russia will not be his eventual destination, the report said. The paper quoted Hong Kong’s government as saying the 30-year-old left “of his own accord for a third country through a lawful and normal channel”.

Snowden is reported to be on Aeroflot flight SU23, scheduled to arrive in Moscow at 5.15pm local time (2.15pm BST).

Russian news agencies Interfax and Itar-Tass reported Snowden is booked on a flight from Moscow to Cuba on Monday. Itar-Tass said Snowden would fly from Havana to Caracas, Venezuela.

Wikileaks has issued the following statement early Sunday morning:

Mr Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower who exposed evidence of a global surveillance regime conducted by US and UK intelligence agencies, has left Hong Kong legally. He is bound for a democratic nation via a safe route for the purposes of asylum, and is being escorted by diplomats and legal advisors from WikiLeaks.

Mr Snowden requested that WikiLeaks use its legal expertise and experience to secure his safety. Once Mr Snowden arrives at his final destination his request will be formally processed.

Former Spanish Judge Mr Baltasar Garzon, legal director of Wikileaks and lawyer for Julian Assange has made the following statement:

“The WikiLeaks legal team and I are interested in preserving Mr Snowden’s rights and protecting him as a person. What is being done to Mr Snowden and to Mr Julian Assange – for making or facilitating disclosures in the public interest – is an assault against the people”.

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

The Government’s Hypocrisy Is the Core Problem

Congress has exempted itself from the prohibition against trading on inside information … the law that got Martha Stewart and many other people thrown in jail.

There are many other ways in which the hypocrisy of the politicians in D.C. are hurting our country.

Washington politicians say we have to slash basic services, and yet waste hundreds of billions of dollars on counter-productive boondoggles. If the politicos just stopped throwing money at corporate welfare queens, military and security boondoggles and pork, harmful quantitative easing, unnecessary nuclear subsidies, the failed war on drugs, and other wasted and counter-productive expenses, we wouldn’t need to impose austerity on the people.

The D.C. politicians said that the giant failed banks couldn’t be nationalized, because that would be socialism. Instead of temporarily nationalizing them and then spinning them off to the private sector — or breaking them up — the politicians have bailed them out to the tune of many tens of billions of dollars each year, and created a system where all of the profits are privatized, and all of the losses socialized.

Obama and Congress promised help for struggling homeowners, and passed numerous bills that they claimed would rescue the little guy. But every single one of these bills actually bails out the banks … and doesn’t really help the homeowner.

The D.C. regulators pretend that they are being tough on the big banks, but are actually doing everything they can to help cover up their sins.

Many have pointed out Obama’s hypocrisy in slamming Bush’s spying programs … and then expanding them (millions more).

And in slamming China’s cyber-warfare … while doing the same thing.

And — while the Obama administration is spying on everyone in the country — it is at the same time the most secretive administration ever (background).   That’s despite Obama saying he’s running the most transparent administration ever.

Glenn Greenwald — the Guardian reporter who broke the NSA spying revelations — has documented for many years the hypocritical use of leaks by the government to make itself look good … while throwing the book at anyone who leaks information embarrassing to the government.

Greenwald notes today:

Prior to Barack Obama’s inauguration, there were a grand total of three prosecutions of leakers under the Espionage Act (including the prosecution of Dan Ellsberg by the Nixon DOJ). That’s because the statute is so broad that even the US government has largely refrained from using it. But during the Obama presidency, there are now seven such prosecutions: more than double the number under all prior US presidents combined.

***

Please read this rather good summary in this morning’s New York Times of the worldwide debate Snowden has enabled — how these disclosures have “set off a national debate over the proper limits of government surveillance” and “opened an unprecedented window on the details of surveillance by the NSA, including its compilation of logs of virtually all telephone calls in the United States and its collection of e-mails of foreigners from the major American Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Skype” — and ask yourself: has Snowden actually does anything to bring “injury to the United States”, or has he performed an immense public service?

The irony is obvious: the same people who are building a ubiquitous surveillance system to spy on everyone in the world, including their own citizens, are now accusing the person who exposed it of “espionage”. It seems clear that the people who are actually bringing “injury to the United States” are those who are waging war on basic tenets of transparency and secretly constructing a mass and often illegal and unconstitutional surveillance apparatus aimed at American citizens — and those who are lying to the American people and its Congress about what they’re doing — rather than those who are devoted to informing the American people that this is being done.

The Obama administration leaks classified information continuously. They do it to glorify the President, or manipulate public opinion, or even to help produce a pre-election propaganda film about the Osama bin Laden raid. The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone.

What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing. Those are the only kinds of leaks that are prosecuted. It’s a completely one-sided and manipulative abuse of secrecy laws. It’s all designed to ensure that the only information we as citizens can learn is what they want us to learn because it makes them look good. The only leaks they’re interested in severely punishing are those that undermine them politically. The “enemy” they’re seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists. It’s the American people.

The Terrorists already knew, and have long known, that the US government is doing everything possible to surveil their telephonic and internet communications. The Chinese have long known, and have repeatedly said, that the US is hacking into both their governmental and civilian systems (just as the Chinese are doing to the US). The Russians have long known that the US and UK try to intercept the conversations of their leaders just as the Russians do to the US and the UK.

They haven’t learned anything from these disclosures that they didn’t already well know. [He’s right.] The people who have learned things they didn’t already know are American citizens who have no connection to terrorism or foreign intelligence, as well as hundreds of millions of citizens around the world about whom the same is true. What they have learned is that the vast bulk of this surveillance apparatus is directed not at the Chinese or Russian governments or the Terrorists, but at them.

And that is precisely why the US government is so furious and will bring its full weight to bear against these disclosures. What has been “harmed” is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability. If anything is a crime, it’s that secret, unaccountable and deceitful behavior: not the shining of light on it.

It has gotten so blatant that even New Yorker comic Andy Borowitz is lampooning the hypocrisy coming out of Washington:

At a press conference to discuss the accusations, an N.S.A. spokesman surprised observers by announcing the spying charges against Mr. Snowden with a totally straight face.

“These charges send a clear message,” the spokesman said. “In the United States, you can’t spy on people.”

***

“The American people have the right to assume that their private documents will remain private and won’t be collected by someone in the government for his own purposes.”

“Only by bringing Mr. Snowden to justice can we safeguard the most precious of American rights: privacy,” added the spokesman, apparently serious.

Similarly, journalists who act as mere stenographers for the government who never criticize in more than a superficial fashion are protected and rewarded … but reporters who actually report on government misdeeds are prosecuted and harassed.

Further, the biggest terrorism fearmongers themselves actually support terrorism. And see this.

In the name of fighting terrorism, the U.S. has been directly supporting Al Qaeda and other terrorists and providing them arms, money and logistical support in Syria, Libya, Mali, Bosnia, Chechnya, Iran, and many other countries … both before and after 9/11. And see this.

The American government has long labeled foreigners as terrorists for doing what America does.

Moreover, government officials may brand Americans as potential terrorists if they peacefully protest, complain about the taste of their water, or do any number of other normal, all-American things.

This is especially hypocritical given that liberals like Noam Chomsky and conservatives like the director of the National Security Agency under Ronald Reagan (Lt. General William Odom) all say that the American government is the world’s largest purveyor of terrorism.

As General Odom noted:

Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today’s war on terrorism merely makes the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world.

These are just a couple of ways in which the D.C. politicians are hypocrites.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

UK MPs spent nearly £500K of public money on business class flights in three years.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Clashes have erupted between Salafists and Lebanon security forces in southern Lebanese city of Sidon with injuries reported.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

At least five people have been killed after foreign-backed militants attacked two security compounds in the Syrian capital, Damascus.

Reports say one of the attacks targeted a police station in the northern Damascus neighborhood of Rukn al-Din. Three people, including civilians and police officers, were killed in the first explosion which went off behind a bakery near the police station.

The second incident involved mortar rounds which targeted a security compound in Bab Musalla, leaving at least two others dead.

Syria has been gripped by a deadly unrest since March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of government forces, have been killed in the violence.

On June 22, foreign ministers of the countries supporting the militants fighting the Syrian government, including Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United States, agreed to provide the insurgents with weapons.

The top officials agreed to “provide urgently all the necessary materiel and equipment to the opposition on the ground, each country in its own way in order to enable them to counter brutal attacks by the regime and its allies and protect the Syrian people.”

They also agreed “to channel all military support by relevant countries through the Staff Chairmanship of the Syrian Supreme Military Council.”

On Friday, the militants announced that they had received new weapons that could lead to “change” in the war against the Syrian government.

On June 14, US President Barack Obama ordered his administration to provide the militants in Syria with more sophisticated weapons, claiming that the Syrian government had used Å“chemical weapons” against the militants and thus crossed Washingtonâ„¢s Å“red line.”

Last month, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said militants from as many as 29 different countries were fighting against Syria.

MYA/SZH/PR/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The militants in Syria will eventually turn into a threat to the global community, including the West, as a result of the support they are constantly receiving from the US and its allies, a political analyst tells Press TV.

Danny Makki pointed to the Westâ„¢s support for the militants in Syria, saying, Å“While … arming these extremist jihadists movements, you essentially create a Frankenstein monster similar to the type that was created in Afghanistan.”

Å“What about the threats to European security or regional security, especially when theyâ„¢re up to one thousand European jihadists in Syria? Imagine the techniques, the fighting which they would have learned. This would essentially expound regional and global terrorism in a much wider scale,” he added.

The crisis in Syria began in March 2011 and many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security forces, have been killed in the foreign-sponsored militancy.

In May, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said militants from as many as 29 different countries were fighting against Syria.

The West and its regional allies – especially Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey – are supporting the militants.

Makki pointed to the gruesome video that emerged on the Internet in mid-May and showed a militant in Syria cutting out the body organs of a Syrian soldier and biting into it, saying, Å“Americans and the British want to essentially arm cannibal extremists, the so-called Syrian moderate rebels, the same moderate rebels who essentially eat the insides of captured soldiers.”

Å“When Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United States discuss arming the rebels, they are essentially arming the al-Nusra front, who are the biggest rebel forces and the affiliates of al-Qaeda,” the analyst pointed out.

On Friday, a spokesman for the foreign-backed Takfiri militants in Syria said the armed groups have been supplied with heavy weapons including anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles by Ëœbrotherly nations.â„¢

The Los Angeles Times reported on the same day that CIA operatives have been secretly providing the militants with training on the use of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons for months.

Since the opening of a new US military base southwest of Jordan in November 2012, the CIA operatives and US special operations troops have covertly trained the militants in groups of 20 to 45 at a time in two-week courses, the American daily said.

ASH/HJL

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

French President Francois Hollandeâ„¢s popularity rating has dropped to 26 percent, putting it back to a record low, according to a new opinion poll.

The pollster Ifop recently conducted the survey, and the results were published by French newspaper Journal du Dimanche on Sunday.

The study was based on telephone interviews of 1,865 French people aged 18 or over between June 14 and June 22.

The June figure was a three-point drop from the registered rating of 29 percent in May.

The poll also revealed that 73 percent of the French were dissatisfied with President Hollande.

Hollandeâ„¢s low popularity rating is worse than almost all previous French presidents at the same time in their terms.

The Socialist government has been struggling with a worsened economy as France fell back into recession on May 15, after its gross domestic product dropped 0.2 percent in the first quarter of 2013.

French national statistics agency (INSEE) forecasted on June 20 that the countryâ„¢s economy is to contract by 0.1 percent this year.

The country has also been hit with a record high number of 3.26 million jobseekers in April, despite campaign promises by Hollande to curb the rise in unemployment by the end of 2013.

CAH/HSN

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

British Energy Minister Michael Fallon and Russian energy firm Gazpromâ„¢s CEO Alexei Miller have discussed Britainâ„¢s bigger natural gas imports from Russia during talks at St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

Fallon said during the meeting that London is interested to increase its natural gas imports from Russia, which stood at 11.7 billion cubic meters last year.

The British minister also called for greater cooperation with Gazprom in the fields of power industry and infrastructure projects as well as gas storage.

This comes as Russian president Vladimir Putin had earlier said Gazprom and its British partners are considering plans to build an extra Nord Stream extension to carry natural gas to Britain.

The Nord Stream pipeline is Gazprom’s offshore project that carries Russian gas through the Baltic Sea to Germany.

Gazprom announced last year that British energy company BP has shown interest in extending the pipeline, which is owned 51 percent by Gazprom.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A Saudi activist has died of injuries sustained in a police shooting in the town of Awamiyah in Eastern Province.

Saudi Arabiaâ„¢s official news agency SPA said on Sunday that regime forces opened fire at Morsi Ali Ibrahim al-Rabah when they tried to arrest him over allegations of involvement in anti-regime protests.

An interior ministry spokesman said that Rabah was on a list of 23 Shia activists wanted in connection with protests in Awamiyah.

Å“He was wounded and died in hospital,” the spokesman said.

Rabah was the 18th victim of the Saudi regimeâ„¢s crackdown on protesters in the Qatif region since 2011.

On June 21, Saudi regime forces killed a young man during a raid on the houses of anti-regime activists in the village of al-Tubi in Qatif. Police shot the 19-year-old in the head and shoulder.

On the same day, human rights activists told Press TV that more than 120 prisoners in Saudi Arabia had gone on hunger strike to express their anger at inhumane prison conditions.

The hunger strikers are also objecting to their detention without charge or trial, the activists said.

More than 70 inmates stopped eating last week in a bid to draw international attention to their plight. Recently, around 50 more have joined the campaign.

The strike will continue for at least five weeks, according to human rights activists.

More than 40,000 political prisoners, mostly prisoners of conscience, are reportedly in jails across Saudi Arabia.

Families and relatives of political prisoners have held several public gatherings in major cities, including Riyadh, Mecca, Medina and Buraidah. However, their protests have failed to bear any results.

In Saudi Arabia, protests and political gatherings of any kind are prohibited.

Since February 2011, protesters have held demonstrations on an almost regular basis in Saudi Arabia, mainly in Qatif and Awamiyah, primarily calling for the release of all political prisoners, freedom of expression and assembly, and an end to widespread discrimination.

However, the demonstrations turned into protests against the repressive Al Saud regime, especially after November 2011, when Saudi security forces killed five protesters and injured many others in Eastern Province.

According to Human Rights Watch, the Saudi regime Å“routinely represses expression critical of the government.”

DB/HSN

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Several former members of the terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) stage a rally in the Saint-Michel Square in Paris, June 22, 2012.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A soldier serving with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

File photo shows Muslims in France protesting against the hijab ban by the government.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Newly-appointed Palestinian authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah has resigned.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Saudi activist has died of injuries sustained in a shooting by the regime’s police in the town of al-Awamiyah in Eastern Province.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

June 18, 2013
 |

Edward Snowden’s disclosures, the New York Times reported on Sunday, “have renewed a longstanding concern: that young Internet aficionados whose skills the agencies need for counterterrorism and cyberdefense sometimes bring an anti-authority spirit that does not fit the security bureaucracy.”

Agencies like the NSA and CIA, and private contractors like Booz Allen, can’t be sure that all employees will obey the rules without interference from their own idealism. This is a basic dilemma for the warfare/surveillance state, which must hire and retain a huge pool of young talent to service the digital innards of a growing Big Brother.

With private firms scrambling to recruit workers for top-secret government contracts, the current situation was foreshadowed by novelist John Hersey in his 1960 book The Child Buyer. When the vice president of a contractor named United Lymphomilloid, “in charge of materials procurement,” goes shopping for a very bright 10-year-old, he explains that “my duties have an extremely high national-defense rating.” And he adds: “When a commodity that you need falls in short supply, you have to get out and hustle. I buy brains.”

That’s what Booz Allen and similar outfits do. They buy brains. And obedience.

But despite the best efforts of those contractors and government agencies, the brains still belong to people. And, as the Times put it, an “anti-authority spirit” might not fit “the security bureaucracy.”

In the long run, Edward Snowden didn’t fit. Neither did Bradley Manning. They both had brains that seemed useful to authority. But they also had principles and decided to act on them.

Like the NSA and its contractors, the U.S. military is in constant need of personnel. “According to his superiors…Manning was not working out as a soldier, and they discussed keeping him back when his unit was deployed to Iraq,” biographer Chase Madar writes in The Passion of Bradley Manning. “However, in the fall of 2009, the occupation was desperate for intelligence analysts with computer skills, and Private Bradley Manning, his superiors hurriedly concluded, showed signs of improvement as a workable soldier. This is how, on October 10, 2009, Private First Class Bradley Manning was deployed…to Iraq as an intelligence analyst.”

In their own ways, with very different backgrounds and circumstances, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden have confounded the best-laid plans of the warfare/surveillance state. They worked for the “security bureaucracy,” but as time went on they found a higher calling than just following orders. They leaked information that we all have a right to know.

This month, not only with words but also with actions, Edward Snowden is transcending the moral limits of authority and insisting that we can fully defend the Bill of Rights, emphatically including the Fourth Amendment.

What a contrast with  New York Times columnists David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Bill Keller, who have responded to Snowden’s revelations by siding with the violators of civil liberties at the top of the U.S. government.

Brooks denounced Snowden as a “traitor” during a June 14 appearance on the PBS News Hour, saying: “He betrayed his oath, which was given to him and which he took implicitly and explicitly. He betrayed his company, the people who gave him a job, the people who trusted him. …He betrayed the democratic process. It’s not up to a lone 29-year-old to decide what’s private and public. We have–actually have procedures for that set down in the Constitution and established by tradition.”

Enthralled with lockstep compliance, Brooks preached the conformist gospel: “When you work for an institution, any institution, a company, a faculty, you don’t get to violate the rules of that institution and decide for your own self what you’re going to do in a unilateral way that no one else can reverse. And that’s exactly what he did. So he betrayed the trust of the institution. He betrayed what creates a government, which is being a civil servant, being a servant to a larger cause, and not going off on some unilateral thing because it makes you feel grandiose.”

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

A helicopter throws flares as it participates in Eager Lion military exercises, held 290 kilometers (180 miles) south of the Jordanian capital, Amman, June 19, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]An explosion in the northern areas of Syria’s capital, Damascus, has caused casualties, the Syrian state TV reports.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A senior Iranian diplomat says the US and Britain have committed numerous strategic errors in the region and in Syria especially by supporting anti-government terrorists.

Iranian deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told Fars News Agency that the US and its western allies should stop insisting on support for terrorism, killing of people and destruction of Syriaâ„¢s infrastructures.

Å“The [intâ„¢l] parties, which back delivery of weapons to Syria [militants], are responsible for the carnage of innocent people and the insecurity in the region,” he stressed.

Amir-Abdollahian added Syria is well past the security crisis and the remaining terrorists are paralyzed but some foreign parties are still pursuing Å“special objectives” in the country by pushing for arms deliveries and encouraging terrorist operations.

The deputy Foreign Minister also condemned the foreign interventions in Syria stressing the US should rather support ending of violence and national dialogue in Syria so that Å“Syrian people can decide on their own fate”.

His remarks on Saturday came as US Secretary of State John Kerry said at a conference on Syria in Qatar that Syrian foreign-backed militants should be given further support Å“to be able to address the imbalance on the ground.

Kerry claimed during the conference of the so-called Friends of Syria group, comprising of Britain, the US, Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, on Saturday that the participants will Å“increase the scope and scale of assistance to the [Syrian] political and military opposition”.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague had claimed before the conference that London has not yet made a decision to Å“give lethal aid” to Syrian militants.

This is while, foreign sides, including Britain, are accused of having already delivered major arms shipments to Syrian terrorists and even operating special agents there to train the terrorists.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

June 18, 2013
 |

For New York City schoolchildren, the process of visiting schools in search of a good match, worrying about assessments and tests, filling out applications and writing long essays starts long before preparing for college. Some kids begin competitive testing and applications as early as pre-K, hoping to get into gifted and talented programs.

The opportunity to get into the best programs the city has to offer continues throughout elementary and middle school, and culminates with the high school application process. This is when all of the hundreds of thousands of students in the city rank their favorite schools, both public and charter, and compete in hopes of gaining admission to a school that will put them on the track toward a bright future.

This spring, a set of reformsby the New York City Department of Education (DOE) allowed an expanded group of students entry into the very best programs in the city. These students include about 900 general-ed and 300 special-ed students. The city’s “special education” designation spans an extraordinarily broad spectrum, from physical, developmental or intellectual disability to emotional and behavioral disorders. The decision has angered parents and community members, who feel the students didn’t deserve the spots.

As part of the DOE admissions for the 2013-2014 school year, more than 1,000 students were placed in 71 selective high schools around the city. Admissions for these high schools – selective for their exceptional artistic programs, rigorous academic standards or other types of specialized class offerings – are competitive, offering a limited amount of seats compared to the demand for kids who hope to attend. Admissions depend on standardized test scores, middle school report cards, interviews, essays and auditions for performing arts programs.

The students in question, though, were admitted to the selective schools without fully completing the application process; for example, some children were let into performing arts schools without auditioning.

The media coverage of the outrage surrounding the DOE’s decision has centered largely around employing disparaging, disrespectful and judgmental language to describe children with special needs. New York City education blog Inside Schools published a story titled “Selective schools forced to take special ed kids,” and Queens representative Dmytro Fedkowskys wrote in the Daily News that the decision will “force the programs to be watered down.”

The city, on the other hand, insists that the students had comparable academic standards to the rest of those admitted, and that they expressed strong interest in those schools when they ranked them to apply. In order to understand the controversy of selective schools being “forced” to admit kids they didn’t choose, it’s helpful to take a look at the city school system. Besides functioning as a microcosm of certain popular “education reform” ideas sweeping the country, NYC schools illustrate the disparity in access and opportunity for children with support and advocacy and those without.

New York City schools operate on a “choice” system, a model popular amongst Michelle Rhee-style education reformers and taking steam all over the country that encourages students to apply around the city in search of the best fit, rather than simply attend the school in their community. As used by “reformers” like Rhee, emphasis on choice often functions as a dog-whistle for neglecting or closing neighborhood public schools and opening charter schools.

Besides employing non-union teachers and privatizing education, charters accept fewer special needs students and English Language Learners, and struggle with children with behavioral challenges. And while plenty of New York City’s exceptional schools are public, not charter, they remain far more difficult for some children to access than traditional community schools. The choice system presents itself as an equalizing force, so that a bright or talented kid in a poor neighborhood in the Bronx could attend an elite school in Manhattan. Meanwhile, her neighborhood – or “zoned” – school in the Bronx is not prioritized; her peers who attend it may see the budget slashed, after-school programs cut, and face nonstop test prep to get scores up and keep the school off the chopping block. When choice is emphasized, community is not.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 20, 2013
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I’m late for one of my jobs and after noting my empty gas tank and fighting with a broken car door, I pray to a god I don’t believe in to get me through the first traffic light, which is the longest light on the earth. Children have been conceived, born, and taught to read while waiting for it to turn green. I need to breeze through it.

Of course, this means some pinhead not only cuts me off but then pokes along in front of me at 10mph, assuring that we’ll both be sitting at that light until Mars is colonized. My blood pressure escalates while he drifts lazily into the turn lane and I realize, I know that guy! Suddenly he’s not the enemy. He’s just another harried driver, like I am, and I wonder where he’s going instead of how late I might be. Everything gets calmer. The light even turns green.

In a phone interview I tell an abridged version of this story to Joseph Shrand , instructor of psychiatry at Harvard, director of the CASTLE program (Clean and Sober Teens Living Empowered) in Brockton, MA and author of the new book Outsmarting Anger: 7 Strategies for Defusing Our Most Dangerous Emotion. (He’s also Joe from the 1972 PBS kids’ show Zoom , which in itself could make you feel better about whatever was bugging you a minute ago.) He laughs and spots instantly why my brain went from furious to friendly in a matter of seconds.

“They’re part of your group!” Shrand says. That being the case I don’t mind sharing what he describes as the three areas critical to our human sense of survival: residence, resources and relationships. Because the other driver and I have a relationship (we’re friends) and share a residence (our city) I don’t mind sharing my resources with him (the road). Those things are necessary to us, and our brains have evolved strategies over the years for protecting them.

But as our circumstances changed, our brains evolved, so we have a much bigger bag of tricks than we once did to manage a constant influx of new stimuli, some of it truly infuriating. The limbic system, the more primitive part of our brains (though not the most primitive), generator of “fight or flight” might react one way (“Run him off the road!”), while the more developed part, the prefrontal cortex, or PFC, seat of reason, might tally the consequences and react differently (“I’m not going to jail because of that idiot”). These two confer all the time, and in my case, the PFC kept me calm long enough to see the other driver was a friend, which triggered a rush of oxytocin, the chemical of bonding and trust, which makes us want to build relationships, not tear them down –an important element of survival for humans.

“As evolving animals just a few million years ago we weren’t the biggest, we weren’t the fastest, we weren’t the strongest. We were prey! And then we began to form these small social groups and our survival potential increased so dramatically that human beings are now pretty much everywhere on the planet,” Shrand says.

“But to be part of that group you have to have value,” and if you don’t feel valued, you feel vulnerable. The respect we give to others leads us to have value, he says. “Value leads to trust and trust is oxytocin, which binds us together.”

Bottom line: we have a pharmacy between our ears capable of producing a drug that aids in building alliances, if we have the power to nudge it into action in ourselves and in others. It’s a quietly revolutionary idea, especially when a lot of us are used to taking a pill for everything from our sniffles to our temperaments, but one that feels very likely to catch on, especially as our understanding of our own brains and the chemicals they produce increases .

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 21, 2013
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We are all subjects of the American Empire.  Whether we live in North America, South America, Asia, Europe, the Middle East . . .  we are all under the thumb of neo-liberal capitalism that puts concentrated corporate power in control of our lives. For decades, American Empire and wealthy elite have forced privatization of resources in developing countries and austerity measures on public programs. Now, we are also experiencing these same policies in wealthier nations like the US and Europe.

All but the wealthiest are now members of the “Global South.” And, more and more people realize this. People from all over the world recognize that we must stand together in solidarity to challenge the tiny minority that dominates us.  The revolts in Turkey, Brazil, Europe, the Middle East and Asia — as well as in the United States — are all connected.

These struggles share common messages that people are more important than profit, that human rights must be respected and that we want to live in peace with dignity. We see that capitalism is failing and that the people must take control to create the kind of world in which we want to live. The Afghan Peace Volunteers said this clearly in their recent open letter: “accomplishing these actions hinges on us, on climate change citizens, Arab Spring citizens, Occupy citizens and the ‘awakening’ citizens of every country to free ourselves from the unequal dominance of corporate governments with their laws and weapons of self-interest.”

And it’s happening. People from around the world are working in solidarity and protesting on behalf of others. Across the US, people are taking action to stop the drone warfare that kills innocent Afghans, Pakistanis and others. In Maine, they are taking a legislative approach along with protest and in Iowa, people are walking 195 miles to the Capital, Des Moines.

The campaign to close Guantanamo stretches from the living rooms of US veterans to the Washington, DC to Yemen. Three veterans, Elliott Adams, Diane Wilson and Tarak Kauff are on a solidarity hunger strike with the prisoners. They are coming to Washington, DC next week to protest and invite you to join them. Codepink recently traveled to Yemen to learn from the families of the prisoners about the impact of Guantanamo on their families.

People in Hong Kong marched in support of Edward Snowden and to oppose his extradition. Japanese railroad workers in Tokyo protested a lockout in Oregon, nearly 5,000 miles away, of American dockworkers who load grain ships headed for Asia.

Before the G8 Leaders met this week in the UK, protesters held a Carnival Against Capitalism. Last year, we protested the G8 in the US with an Occupy G8 Peoples Summit. President Obama traveled to Germany after the G8. His visit was preceded by a large march that looked like it could have taken place in the US. Protest signs had messages around issues of mass incarceration, Guantanamo, Bradley Manning and illegal spying with a play on Obama’s campaign message, “ Yes We Scan!”

In fact, thanks to the courage and sacrifice of Edward Snowden, we are learning more about the extent of spying by the National Security State and that we are subjected to it, in the US and around the world. Author, Nafeez Ahmed writes that this is part of preparation by the government for a citizen’s revolt in case of a climate and energy crisis as well as economic collapse. This includes new powers claimed by the DoD to use the military “to engage temporarily in activities that are necessary to quell large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances.”

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 22, 2013
 |

Disease: a disordered or incorrectly functioning organ, part, structure, or system of the body resulting from the effect of genetic or developmental errors, infection, poisons, nutritional deficiency or imbalance, toxicity, or unfavorable environmental factors; illness; sickness; ailment.

“Overweight and obesity are defined as abnormal or excessive fat accumulation that presents a risk to health,” according to both the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization. “A crude population measure of obesity is the body mass index (BMI), a person’s weight (in kilograms) divided by the square of his or her height (in meters). A person with a BMI of 30 or more is generally considered obese. A person with a BMI equal to or more than 25 is considered overweight.”

So is obesity a disease?

All of a sudden, the American Medical Association thinks it is; the House of Delegates, the principal policy-making body of the AMA, recently voted to officially label obesity a disease. It is interesting to note that the “vote of the AMA House of Delegates went against the conclusions of the association’s Council on Science and Public Health, which had studied the issue over the last year,” according to the New York Times. “The council said that obesity should not be considered a disease mainly because the measure usually used to define obesity, the body mass index, is simplistic and flawed.”

The body mass index or BMI is categorized as follows:

Underweight BMI < 18.5
Normal or Ideal BMI 18.5 — < 25
Overweight BMI 25 — < 30
Obese — Grade 1 (or mild) BMI 30 — < 35
Obese — Grade 2 BMI 35 — < 40
Obese — Grade 3 (or morbid) BMI > 40

The BMI is indeed a poor measure of obesity. Because it does not take into account lean body mass such as muscle, it can overestimate obesity in certain ethnic groups while underestimating it in others. Many physically fit people, including actors and athletes with very low percentages of body fat, register as obese when judged solely by their BMI.

There are economic implications of the AMA’s decision. If everyone who has a BMI equal to or over 30 now has a disease, then doctors can get reimbursed to treat it as such. A disease that affects over one-third of the population will generate an expensive prescription to be filled. And everyone who is labeled “obese” will have a pre-existing condition, which can surely affect premiums.

But there is more at stake here than just the BMI or other obesity measures. Cardiologists are still grappling to understand a phenomenon known as the obesity paradox. In short, obesity is generally recognized as a risk factor for the development of cardiovascular disease. But many studies of patients with the disease have shown that the best survival rates occur not in the ideal body weight but in those groups that are either overweight or mildly obese–counter-intuitive, obviously, to the conventional wisdom. Dr. Carl Lavie, one of the first researchers to describe this phenomenon, has shown that the survival benefit is related to a greater percentage of body fat, not due to a misleading BMI.

And the paradox is growing. A recent meta-analysis of almost three million people around the world–one of the most comprehensive analyses to examine the relationship between mortality and BMI–found that the lowest mortality rates were not in the ideal BMI group. It was the overweight group that had the lowest mortality rate, with a statistically significant six percent reduction over the ideal group. In fact, the mortality rate of the ideal group was actually the same as the Grade 1 (or mildly obese) group. Grades 2 and 3 did show a significantly risk, but individuals in those groups represent a small fraction of the 67 percent of all Americans who are classified as either overweight or obese (though they are among the faster growing classifications). At some level of increasing weight, there is always going to be an increased risk of mortality, but where that boundary is is far from clear.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 22, 2013
 |

Almost two weeks ago, I wrote an article: ” 4 Plagues – Getting a Handle on the Coming Apocalypse.” Reader response was strong, and the article quickly shot to top of our most-read list. I detailed the “plagues” that dominate our economy and way of life: financialization, militarization, and criminalization – forces that exacerbate the huge array of problems we face–poverty, unemployment, mass incarceration, climate destruction, gun violence, financial corruption, spying and privacy, and much more. They threaten democracy, fray our social order, worsen conditions in communities round the world, and damage our psychological health.

As a result, many of us are alarmed at the direction of our country, and rightly so. By many measures, our society is a depressing mess. Tens of millions are severely suffering economically, while many more are stressed out and traumatized, desperately attempting to cope with both chronic and acute problems they have never faced before.

Things Must Change

Clearly things must change. But what can really deliver the scope of change we need? The progressive response to the mounting array of negatives in our society is inadequate. The progressive movement lacks teeth. The focus is dispersed. Often tactics are based on outdated assumptions or illusions, even nostalgia for past approaches that no longer deliver. We need to fight back more effectively– but how do we hone the right strategy?

The great movements of the past decades – civil rights, gay and women’s rights, the environmental movement, great anti-war marches – they all are inspiration. But we are now in a very different reality. Many of us have been working hard to change things for a long time. We are dedicated and persistent. And there is much going on across the country, primarily in small protests and grass roots activities. AlterNet reports on these activities every day. They give us small doses of hope.

  
But We Have Not Been Successful

Still, we have not won in the larger sense. We have not slowed the corporate juggernaut that crushes everyday Americans at every turn. The worst of corporate America effectively uses the radical conservatives as their shock troops to achieve economic policies that exploit 90% of Americans, and the corporate media joins in. 

But it isn’t just the evil doers who are responsible. We must face the music as well for what we have failed to do. Are we trying new approaches, bridging long-term divisions, challenging our own privileges? We need fresh thinking and strategies that go beyond petitions, exchanges among ourselves, and reluctant support for often mediocre Democratic candidates who so often disappoint us when in office.

AlterNet doesn’t have the answers. But we have a lot of questions. And concerns about our future. 

We are a non-profit media company that has published tens of thousands of articles over the years by the smartest critics and analysts. There are lots of ideas. But there is not remotely enough energy invested in how we might get those ideas implemented. All the creative things that people write don’t lead to enough action, mobilization, resistance. We have to do more.

It’s Time To Do Things Differently

We at AlterNet are not going to keep doing what we have always done. We are going to do more than publish great writing, investigations, and analysis. We are going a step further to challenge ourselves and our readers and supporters, along with progressive thinkers and organizers.

It’s time for a consciousness-raising, and so AlterNet is going to invest time and resources in examining and evaluating strategies for change. Not just the ideas. But how to get there. How to bridge the huge gap between the ideas and the action, between theory and practice.

 We are going to engage our best thinkers and challenge them. We are going to take a close look at our most prominent social change activities and evaluate what they are accomplishing.

This is work beyond what we usually do, so we need to raise some extra money to do it. Will you help us? â€¨â€¨ We can’t guarantee that we will come up with great solutions. But we are going to try. And we will start by kicking off conversations that look for strategies that are inclusive and not primarily for elites. We will be exploring ways that progressives can marshal necessary resources for an independent politics without being heavily dependent on foundations.

And we want to hear from you. This is an open-ended process. No one person’s or group’s ideas will trump the rest of us. Hopefully we will end up with a clearer picture of what it will take to make progress toward a fair humane future we can believe in.

We very much appreciate your support as donors, readers, and promoters of AlterNet content. Now we are asking for something a little bit extra. We need your support as we take a tough look at progressive politics in America and see how it could be more effective and successful. Please join us.
 

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

An opinion poll indicates that an overwhelming majority of Press TV‘s audience slam the Western campaign against Iranian media channels.

The survey conducted by Press TV shows that 93 percent of the participants believe the ban on Iranian media by Western satellite companies is a gross violation of free speech.

On June 19, communications satellite services provider Intelsat said it will no longer provide services to Iranian channels, including the English-language news channel, Press TV. The decision has been made under the pretext that the company should be abiding by the sanctions against the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB).

Intelsat noted that it has been ordered by the US government to avoid extending IRIBâ„¢s license, saying that it will stop providing services to Iranian channels as of July 1.

Press TV and other Iranian channels have come under an unprecedented 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 satellite companies say they are complying by anti-Iran sanctions. However, EU foreign policy chief’s spokesman, Michael Mann, has told Press TV that sanctions do not apply to media.

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.

The Israeli lobby in the United States has also publicly supported European attempts to shut down Press TV.

Media activists call the attacks on Iranian channels a campaign against free speech launched by the same European governments that preach freedom of expression.

ASH/HJL/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Italyâ„¢s minister for sports and equal opportunities has rejected accusations of tax dodging, resisting calls by her own party members to resign.

Josefa Idem from the center-left Democratic Party said on Saturday that any irregularities were oversights and that she would Å“put right what needs to be put right.”

The Italian minister also insisted on not stepping down.

Å“It is my intention to continue in my commitment for the good of the country.”

Idem reportedly avoided paying property taxes on a gym in 2008 to 2011 by declaring it as her primary home in the city of Ravenna, while the rest of her family was registered in a house nearby.

She changed her address just before being elected for the first time to parliament in February.

The case was uncovered after local authorities on June 11 carried out an inspection of her gym.

In an attempt to rectify the situation, a few days after the inspection was conducted, Idem made a payment to tax authorities.

Meanwhile, Democratic Party lawmaker Dario Ginefra pushed for Idem to Å“seriously consider” quitting as minister to save the government Å“from the embarrassment of having to make the choice for her.”

The accusations against Idem came days after Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta vowed to constrain the prevalent occurrence of tax evasion in the country.

CAH/HSN

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Chinaâ„¢s official news agency has slammed the United States as the world’s Å“biggest villain” following new revelations about Washingtonâ„¢s cyber espionage against Chinese companies and institutions.

Å“These, along with previous allegations, are clearly troubling signs. They demonstrate that the United States, which has long been trying to play innocent as a victim of cyber attacks, has turned out to be the biggest villain in our age,” said a commentary published in the Xinhua news agency on Sunday.

In his latest revelation published by the South China Morning Post on Saturday, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden said US spying agencies have been hacking Chinese phone companies in order to access millions of private text messages in China.

According to the report, the NSA has also hacked China’s top Tsinghua University and Pacnet headquarters in Hong Kong, which operates one of the Asia-Pacific region’s largest fiber-optic networks, by using an electronic surveillance government program known as PRISM.

Å“But for other countries, Washington should come clean about its record first”” the Xinhua commentary added.

Å“It (Washington) owes too an explanation to China and other countries it has allegedly spied on. It has to share with the world the range, extent and intent of its clandestine hacking programs.”

US federal prosecutors have filed charges of Å“theft of government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information and willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person” against Snowden.

The charges against Snowden, who is reportedly seeking asylum in Hong Kong, were based on his extraction of classified documents from servers of the NSA, which led to revelations about the agencyâ„¢s spying programs.

The documents, disclosed to the Guardian and Washington Post revealed two major NSA spying programs, one for gathering US phone records and another one, called PRISM, for tracking the use of US-based web servers by Americans and other nationals.

The leaks also exposed Å“Boundless Informant,” a powerful tool developed by the NSA, which enables it to record and categorize intelligence it secretly collects from countries around the world.

MYA/HJL

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Russia says the controversial Ëœprompt global strikeâ„¢ system in possession of the United States must be taken into account when Moscow and Washington hold talks on nuclear arsenal reductions.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said talks on further nuclear reductions than those specified in a 2010 treaty should include discussions on the new types of US weapons, such as the so-called prompt global strike system, which has a capability comparable to nuclear weapons.

Lavrov made the remark in response to a speech by US President Barack Obama on June 19 in Berlin, where he called for the United States and Russia to reduce their nuclear stockpile by one-third.

Å“Imagine a weapon which is delivered to any part of the Earth in one hour, that is the goal,” Lavrov said.

Å“It does not have an inhumane effect of a nuclear weapon, but militarily it is much more efficient. We have to take this into account before we decide on any further reductions,” the Russian foreign minister stated.

Lavrov also said Washingtonâ„¢s missile defense plans have remained a top concern for Moscow, and the US refusal to draft a treaty that would ban space-based weapons has worried Russia.

Moscow is also concerned about NATOâ„¢s edge in conventional forces, which Lavrov said should also be addressed during discussions.

Å“And besides, if we speak about further reductions, provided we agree on all these things comprehensively, then the reductions would already be meant at a level which would be very commensurate with the level of the nuclear weapons of other states, not just the Russian Federation and the United States,” Lavrov said. Å“It has all to be taken into account.”

Russia and the United States signed a nuclear arms reduction agreement known as New START (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty) in 2010. The START treaty calls for each country to restrict its nuclear warhead arsenal to 1,550 by 2018.

The United States was the first country to build atomic weapons and the only country to drop nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II.

CAH/HSN

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]China’s official news agency have slammed the United States as the world’s “biggest villain” for IT espionage after new details about Washington’s cyber attacks against Chinese companies and institutions.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranâ„¢s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi (R) and his visiting Lebanese counterpart Adnan Mansour are seen at a press conference in the Iranian capital, Tehran, June 22, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Rescuers transfer a body from a blast site in Pakistanâ„¢s northwestern city of Peshawar, June 21, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

German Justice Minister has demanded explanation from London over reports that British intelligence services have been tapping global internet traffic and phone calls, saying the allegations are a Å“nightmare out of Hollywood”.

The Guardian revealed on Friday that the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has been secretly accessing the network of cables, which carry the worldâ„¢s phone calls and internet traffic and is sharing the data with its American counterpart the National Security Agency (NSA).

Å“The allegations against Great Britain sound like a nightmare out of Hollywood,” German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said.

“European institutions should shed light on this immediately,” she added.

The paper cited documents leaked to it by American whistleblower Edward Snowden as showing that GCHQ has been running the operation codenamed Tempora for the past 18 months.

The agencyâ„¢s controversial plan is to scoop up as much online and telephone traffic as possible, under its Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation program.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Brazilians hold an anti-government protest in the city of Belo Horizonte, June 22, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Political commentator Scott Rickard says Iranâ„¢s English news channel Press TV reveals information suppressed by media in the United States.

Å“The kind of Information that Press TV is revealing is a kind of information that is being suppressed in American media. There is a lot of things that are being suppressed… Thankfully, RT (Russia Today), Press TV and some of the international media outlets are covering this in detail,” the former US intelligence linguist told Press TV on Saturday.

On June 19, communications satellite services provider Intelsat said it will no longer provide services to Iranian channels, including the English-language news channel, Press TV. The decision has been made under the pretext that the company should be abiding by the sanctions against the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB).

Intelsat noted that it has been ordered by the US government to avoid extending IRIBâ„¢s license, saying that it will stop providing services to Iranian channels as of July 1.

Referring to the US crackdown on whistleblowers that Å“reveal war crimes and reveal crimes against humanity and also reveal crimes against the United States citizens with illegal surveillance,” Rickard said there is no freedom of speech in the United States.

The Israeli lobby in the United States has openly supported the attempt to silence the voice of Iranian media in Europe.

Rickard said Israel is greatly influencing the recent trend against the Press TV and is welcoming any anti-Iranian move.

Å“You cannot discount the influence of the pro-Israeli lobby in American media, in American foreign policy and also in American industry, especially in American finance,” the political commentator added.

Å“The financial community is extremely pro-Israeli, the media community is extremely pro-Israeli… and to be critical of the United States almost cost[s] you your job,” Rickard added.

MYA/HJL

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Britain’s data regulator says Google must delete all personal data it has gathered using its Street View project or face court action by the watchdog.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (IOC) has given Google Inc. an enforcement notice demanding that the company remove the data it had offered to delete back in 2010.

“Google has…confirmed that it still has in its possession a small portion of…data collected by our Street View vehicles in the UK,” Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel … Google apologizes for this error,” Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel, wrote in a letter released by the IOC in April 2012.

The revelation was not welcomed by IOC as it had signed an agreement with Google in November 2010, based on which the firm had to remove all Street View data on Britain-based residents.

The data were collected by vehicles taking Google map images as they used local Wi-Fi outlets to place exactly place the properties so that the Goggle map software could make sense of the pictures.

The privacy watchdog has now given the company 35 days to kill the material or face criminal offense for contempt of court.

AMR/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

File photo shows foreign-backed militants in Aleppo, northwestern Syria.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

ObamaCare, Americans were assured, would create millions of jobs and be a boon to small businesses. But according to a recent survey, as full implementation of the healthcare law rapidly approaches, small-business owners, rather than rejoicing at their good fortune, are slashing jobs, work hours, and expansion plans.

The Gallup poll, commissioned by the law firm Littler Mendelson, found that because of ObamaCare, 41 percent of small businesses have instituted a hiring freeze, 19 percent have shrunk their workforces, and 18 percent have “reduced the hours of employees to part-time.” Nearly four in 10 small businesses – 38 percent – told pollsters they “have pulled back on their plans to grow their business” in anticipation of the law’s implementation.

“We were startled because we know that employers were concerned about the Affordable Care Act and the effects it would have on their business, but we didn’t realize the extent they were concerned, or that the businesses were being proactive to make sure the effects of the ACA actually were minimized,” Littler Mendelson attorney Steven Friedman told CNBC.

“To think that [nearly] 20 percent of small businesses have already reduced the numbers they have in their business because they’re concerned about the medical coverage is significant, and a bit troubling,” he said.

These businesses, however, have good reason to take such measures. ObamaCare’s employer mandate requires businesses with 50 or more full-time employees either to offer “affordable” health insurance to their full-timers or to pay a $2,000 fine for each employee obtaining subsidized insurance on an exchange. What’s more, the law defines a full-time employee as one who works at least 30 hours per week on average. Employers thus have a strong incentive to keep their head counts below 50 and their employees’ weekly work hours under 30 – something that major restaurant and theater chains and some state and local governments have already begun to do. And since expanding a business entails hiring new employees, which in turn could trigger the employer mandate, owners now have a disincentive to grow their businesses, retarding economic growth and forestalling job opportunities.

This may explain why even though the economy has been adding jobs in recent months, nearly half those jobs have been part-time, and the average work week has been shrinking. Forced to choose between subjecting themselves to the employer mandate – which means either increasingly expensive health insurance or hefty fines – and staying in business, employers are quite rationally opting for the latter.

It doesn’t help matters that the one piece of ObamaCare that was specifically designed to help small businesses afford coverage – an insurance exchange of their own – has been delayed a year.

“Lots of small businesses struggle with providing insurance for their workers so this was supposed to facilitate it and make it easier for small business to do this,” Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center told Fox News. “It was a huge portion of the sale job. When they passed the law in 2010 there were many senators and members of Congress who were saying ‘I am doing this because it’s going to help small businesses.’”

Between this and the manifold uncertainties surrounding ObamaCare’s ever-changing rules and regulations – “requirements of the health care law are now the biggest concern for small businesses,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found in its first-quarter survey – it’s no wonder that small employers have a highly negative view of the law. Gallup found that 48 percent of small-business owners think the law will hurt them, while just nine percent think it will help them. (Another 39 percent expected “no impact.”) Fifty-five percent of owners believe the law will make healthcare more costly, while a mere five percent think it will cut costs. And 52 percent think ObamaCare will reduce the quality of care, as opposed to 13 percent who expect an improvement.

“I can’t say that the fears appear overstated, because the potential for big problems seems rather large,” Friedman told CNBC, echoing the concerns of Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who warned that implementation of ObamaCare could be a “huge train wreck.”

“We don’t know until 2014 and beyond what the impact of the ACA will be on businesses,” added Friedman, whose firm recently formed a healthcare-reform consulting group. “There is tremendous fear that the premiums will be much higher, for small businesses especially. At this point we can’t look a client straight in the eye and say, ‘Don’t worry about it. Everything will be fine.’”

Indeed, all indications are that everything won’t be fine. Besides the delay of the small-business exchange, the state exchanges are behind schedule and over budget, and another ObamaCare program, the Basic Health Plan, has also been pushed back a year. According to the American Action Forum, the Obama administration has missed 29 of the ACA’s regulatory deadlines, adding to the uncertainty surrounding the law; and those rules it has managed to issue have vastly increased the paperwork and financial burdens on businesses. Then there are the new taxes, some of which have already cost jobs, and the steeply rising health-insurance premiums. Only the uninformed (and Democrat loyalists) would claim that everything with ObamaCare is going swimmingly.

Of course, there are those who argue that the problem is not that the law’s implementation is going badly but that the public simply needs to be educated about its vast (alleged) benefits. One such group, the Small Business Majority, “said the findings reflect misconceptions about [ObamaCare’s] true effects as well as the need for continued outreach by reform advocates to the small business community,” writes CNBC.

This is also the Obama administration’s tack. The problem, as far as the administration is concerned, lies not in the law itself but in its advocates’ public-relations campaigns.

Yet the more facts – as opposed to administration spin – Americans learn about the law, the less attractive it becomes. And as this latest poll shows, small-business owners, whose very livelihood is threatened by ObamaCare, may be the most aware of its impending terrible consequences.

This article originally appeared on: The New American

Heavy floods hit western Canada on June 21, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/truthdigger_of_the_week_michael_hastings_20130622/

Posted on Jun 22, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

Infowars.com
June 22, 2013

In the video below, Dr. Kathleen Fisher, a DARPA program manager, talks about the ability to hack into car computer systems. She explains how it is possible to remotely control modern cars through Bluetooth and smart phone technology.

DARPA, short for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is the Department of Defense agency responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military.

Her talk demonstrates that such an ability exists and the Pentagon has researched it.

Fisher makes the comments within the first three minutes of the following video.

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This article was posted: Saturday, June 22, 2013 at 9:01 pm

Tags: domestic news, technology, terrorism

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

A leaked secret report has implicated some of Britainâ„¢s most respected industries into routinely employing criminals to hack, blag and steal personal information on business rivals and members of the public.

The report revealed that the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) knew six years back that law firms, telecoms giants and insurance companies were hiring private investigators to break the law and further their commercial interests, yet the agency did next to nothing to disrupt the unlawful trade.

Soca, dubbed Å“Britainâ„¢s FBI”, knew six years ago that blue-chip institutions were hiring private investigators to obtain sensitive data – yet did next to nothing to disrupt the unlawful trade, according to the report.

Å“What is astonishing about this whole murky affair is that Soca had knowledge of massive illegal invasions of privacy in the newspaper industry – but also in the supply chains of so-called blue-chip companies”, said Tom Watson, the campaigning Labour MP.

Å“I believe they are sitting on physical evidence that has still not been disclosed fully to forensic investigators at the Metropolitan Police. The law should also be rigorously applied to other sectors that have got away with it”, he added.

One of five police investigations reviewed by Soca found private detectives listening in to targetsâ„¢ phone calls in real-time.

The report said a Å“telephone interception specialist manufactured several devices which were physically attached to the targetâ„¢s landline at the relevant signal box by a British Telecom-trained telecommunications engineer.”

MOL/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Shafiullah Nooristani, a member of the Afghan High Peace Council, speaks during an interview in Kabul, Afghanistan, June 19, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A public transport motorcylist carrying four passengers driving past a mosque in central Maiduguri, capital of Borno State, Nigeria. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A UN report condemns Israelâ„¢s use of Palestinian children as human shields and torturing them while in custody. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Labour party chief admits to maintaining spending cuts if opposition wins next election

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

People march toward the Mineirao stadium during a demo in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Saturday, June 22, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters have again taken to the streets in several cities across Brazil, a day after President Dilma Rousseff promised reforms.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Turkish police use water cannons to disperse protesters in Istanbulâ„¢s Taksim Square on June 22, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Drug production in Afghanistan up 40% since foreign invasion of country: Official

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Special operations forces from Jordan and the US conduct a combined demonstration at the King Abdullah Special Operations Training Center (KASOTC) in Amman, Jordan, June 20, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The Government Actually DID Spy On the Bad Guys Before 9/11 … and the Boston Bombing

Preface: The Bush and Obama administrations both claimed that spying on Americans was justified by 9/11. Specifically, they said that they could have caught one of the 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego if they could have spied on phone calls on American soil.

However — as demonstrated below — that claim is totally false.

ProPublica notes:

***

Indeed, the Obama administration’s invocation of the Mihdhar case echoes a nearly identical argument made by the Bush administration eight years ago when it defended the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program.

The reality is different.

Initially, an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to Mihdhar and another 9/11 hijacker in 2000.

Investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House.

As the New York Times notes:

Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who is a former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the White House on Tuesday of covering up evidence ….The accusation stems from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s refusal to allow investigators for a Congressional inquiry and the independent Sept. 11 commission to interview an informant, Abdussattar Shaikh, who had been the landlord in San Diego of two Sept. 11 hijackers.

So mass surveillance of Americans isn’t necessary, when the FBI informant should have apprehended the hijackers.

Moreover, the NSA actually did intercept Mihdhar’s phone calls before 9/11.

We reported in 2008:

We’ve previously pointed out that the U.S. government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers’ own mouth. Most of what we wrote about involved the NSA and other intelligence services tapping top Al Qaeda operatives’ phone calls outside the U.S.

However, as leading NSA expert James Bamford – the Washington Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings for almost a decade, winner of a number of journalism awards for coverage national security issues, whose articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and the only author to write any books (he wrote 3) on the NSA — reports, the NSA was also tapping the hijackers’ phone calls inside the U.S.

Specifically, hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi lived in San Diego, California, for 2 years before 9/11. Numerous phone calls between al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego and a high-level Al Qaeda operations base in Yemen were made in those 2 years.

The NSA had been tapping and eavesdropping on all calls made from that Yemen phone for years. So NSA recorded all of these phone calls.

Indeed, the CIA knew as far back as 1999 that al-Mihdhar was coming to the U.S. Specifically, in 1999, CIA operatives tailing al-Mihdhar in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, obtained a copy of his passport. It contained visas for both Malaysia and the U.S., so they knew it was likely he would go from Kuala Lumpur to America.

We asked top NSA whistleblower William Binney — a highly-credible 32-year NSA veteran with the title of senior technical director, who headed the agency’s digital data gathering program (featured in a New York Times documentary, and the source for much of what we know about NSA spying) — what he thought of the government’s claim that mass surveillance of Americans would have caught Mihdhar and prevented 9/11.

Binney responded:

Of course they could have and did have data on hijackers before 9/11. And, Prism did not start until 2007. But they could get the data from the “Upstream” collection. This is the Mark Klein documentation of Narus equipment in the NSA room in San Francisco and probably other places in the lower 48. They did not need Prism to discover that. Prism only suplemented the “Upstream” material starting in 2007 according to the slide.

Details here and here.

Indeed, widespread spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here, here, here and here.

And U.S. and allied intelligence heard the 9/11 hijackers plans from their own mouths:

• The National Security Agency and the FBI were each independently listening in on the phone calls between the supposed mastermind of the attacks and the lead hijacker. Indeed, the FBI built its own antenna in Madagascar specifically to listen in on the mastermind’s phone calls

• According to various sources, on the day before 9/11, the mastermind told the lead hijacker “tomorrow is zero hour” and gave final approval for the attacks. The NSA intercepted the message that day and the FBI was likely also monitoring the mastermind’s phone calls

• According to the Sunday Herald, two days before 9/11, Bin Laden called his stepmother and told her “In two days, you’re going to hear big news and you’re not going to hear from me for a while.” U.S. officials later told CNN that “in recent years they’ve been able to monitor some of bin Laden’s telephone communications with his [step]mother. Bin Laden at the time was using a satellite telephone, and the signals were intercepted and sometimes recorded.” Indeed, before 9/11, to impress important visitors, NSA analysts would occasionally play audio tapes of bin Laden talking to his stepmother.

• And according to CBS News, at 9:53 a.m on 9/11, just 15 minutes after the hijacked plane had hit the Pentagon, “the National Security Agency, which monitors communications worldwide, intercepted a phone call from one of Osama bin Laden’s operatives in Afghanistan to a phone number in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia”, and secretary of Defense Rumsfeld learned about the intercepted phone call in real-time (if the NSA monitored and transcribed phone calls in real-time on 9/11, that implies that it did so in the months leading up to 9/11 as well)

But even with all of that spying, the government didn’t stop the hijackers … even though 9/11 was entirely foreseeable.

ProPublica notes:

“There were plenty of opportunities without having to rely on this metadata system for the FBI and intelligence agencies to have located Mihdhar,” says former Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who extensively investigated 9/11 as chairman of the Senate’s intelligence committee.

These missed opportunities are described in detail in the joint congressional report produced by Graham and his colleagues as well as in the 9/11 Commission report.

***

Mihdhar was on the intelligence community’s radar at least as early as 1999. That’s when the NSA had picked up communications from a “terrorist facility” in the Mideast suggesting that members of an “operational cadre” were planning to travel to Kuala Lumpur in January 2000, according to the commission report. The NSA picked up the first names of the members, including a “Khalid.” The CIA identified him as Khalid al Mihdhar.

The U.S. got photos of those attending the January 2000 meeting in Malaysia, including of Mihdhar, and the CIA also learned that his passport had a visa for travel to the U.S.

***

Using their true names, Mihdhar and Hazmi for a time beginning in May 2000 even lived with an active FBI informant in San Diego.

***

Let’s turn to the comments of FBI Director Robert Mueller before the House Judiciary Committee last week.

Mueller noted that intelligence agencies lost track of Mihdhar following the January 2000 Kuala Lumpur meeting but at the same time had identified an “Al Qaida safe house in Yemen.”

He continued: “They understood that that Al Qaida safe house had a telephone number but they could not know who was calling into that particular safe house. We came to find out afterwards that the person who had called into that safe house was al Mihdhar, who was in the United States in San Diego. If we had had this [metadata] program in place at the time we would have been able to identify that particular telephone number in San Diego.”

In turn, the number would have led to Mihdhar and potentially disrupted the plot, Mueller argued.

(Media accounts indicate that the “safe house” was actually the home of Mihdhar’s father-in-law, himself a longtime al Qaida figure, and that the NSA had been intercepting calls to the home for several years.)

The congressional 9/11 report sheds some further light on this episode, though in highly redacted form.

The NSA had in early 2000 analyzed communications between a person named “Khaled” and “a suspected terrorist facility in the Middle East,” according to this account. But, crucially, the intelligence community “did not determine the location from which they had been made.”

In other words, the report suggests, the NSA actually picked up the content of the communications between Mihdhar and the “Yemen safe house” but was not able to figure out who was calling or even the phone number he was calling from.

***

Theories about the metadata program aside, it’s not clear why the NSA couldn’t or didn’t track the originating number of calls to Yemen it was already listening to.

Intelligence historian Matthew Aid, who wrote the 2009 NSA history Secret Sentry, says that the agency would have had both the technical ability and legal authority to determine the San Diego number that Mihdhar was calling from.

“Back in 2001 NSA was routinely tracking the identity of both sides of a telephone call,” [9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow] told ProPublica.

***

There’s another wrinkle in the Mihdhar case: In the years after 9/11, media reports also suggested that there were multiple calls that went in the other direction: from the house in Yemen to Mihdhar in San Diego. But the NSA apparently also failed to track where those calls were going.

In 2005, the Los Angeles Times quoted unnamed officials saying the NSA had well-established legal authority before 9/11 to track calls made from the Yemen number to the U.S. In that more targeted scenario, a metadata program vacumming the phone records of all Americans would appear to be unnecessary.

And see this PBS special.

In other words, the NSA had the technical ability and legal authority to intercept calls between Midhar and Yemen before 9/11 … and it actually did so.

In addition,Wikipedia notes:

Mihdhar was placed on a CIA watchlist on August 21, 2001, and a note was sent on August 23 to the Department of State and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) suggesting that Mihdhar and Hazmi be added to their watchlists.

***

On August 23, the CIA informed the FBI that Mihdhar had obtained a U.S. visa in Jeddah. The FBI headquarters received a copy of the Visa Express application from the Jeddah embassy on August 24, showing the New York Marriott as Mihdhar’s destination.

On August 28, the FBI New York field office requested that a criminal case be opened to determine whether Mihdhar was still in the United States, but the request was refused. The FBI ended up treating Mihdhar as an intelligence case, which meant that the FBI’s criminal investigators could not work on the case, due to the barrier separating intelligence and criminal case operations. An agent in the New York office sent an e-mail to FBI headquarters saying, “Whatever has happened to this, someday someone will die, and the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’” The reply from headquarters was, “we [at headquarters] are all frustrated with this issue … [t]hese are the rules. NSLU does not make them up.”

The FBI contacted Marriott on August 30, requesting that they check guest records, and on September 5, they reported that no Marriott hotels had any record of Mihdhar checking in. The day before the attacks, the New York office requested that the Los Angeles FBI office check all local Sheraton Hotels, as well as Lufthansa and United Airlines bookings, because those were the two airlines Mihdhar had used to enter the country. Neither the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network nor the FBI’s Financial Review Group, which have access to credit card and other private financial records, were notified about Mihdhar prior to September 11.

***

Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Congressman Curt Weldon alleged in 2005 that the Defense Department data mining project Able Danger identified Mihdhar and 3 other 9/11 hijackers as members of an al-Qaeda cell in early 2000.

Similarly, even though the alleged Boston bombers’ phones were tapped — and NBC News reports, “under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the U.S.” — mass surveillance did not stop the other terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.

In reality — despite the government continually grasping at straws to justify its massive spying program — top security experts say that mass surveillance of Americans does not keep us safe.  Indeed, experts say that mass surveillance interferes with catching bad guys.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Will the biotech companies ever give up on trying to sell Europe their genetically modified crops? Their latest PR man is the UK’s Minister for the Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), Owen Paterson. His website (very bland and uninformative apart from his list of engagements) says he is “a passionate supporter of localism, free enterprise and less interference in people’s lives”. But he also loudly supports Monsanto et al, and wants all of Europe to grow and eat GM foods. I would say that thoroughly destroys any localism, interferes in the most basic way with our lives, and any enterprise is freely handed to big corporations that already have far too much power over people.

Paterson has had environmentalists tearing their hair out since he became Minister. As I wrote in Unnatural England, he’s promoted the destruction of buzzards and supports the killing of badgers. He’s also greatly in favour of fracking for shale gas regardless of the damage it would do. His statements on environmental matters display strongly-held views that are disastrous for the environment but kind to big business. To that end he will only look at the facts as presented by companies such as Monsanto.

He failed to persuade Europe that neonicitinoid pesticides (as produced by Monsanto et al) are good for bees; he said that the scientific evidence linking the decline in bee numbers to neonicotinoids was faulty; and that Europe should see the results of Defra’s own field trials. The UK Parliament’s environmental audit committee said the government was relying on ‘fundamentally flawed’ studies to push its case for preventing the Europe-wide precautionary ban of these pesticides. It turned out these studies were not peer-reviewed or published in any reputable scientific journal, merely published on Defra’s own website — for which the EU Commission critisised the British government.

Paterson’s online information is remarkably devoid of detail: he went to school and university; his family had a background of farming and leather; he went into the leather business; he is married, with children; he became an MP, and so on. No business interests or links of any kind are listed yet he is acting as cheerleader for the GM companies. And he made a small Freudian slip during his speech. He used the word ‘we’, as in “We have not come up with any evidence of human health being threatened by these products.” Just what Monsanto and Syngenta say.

On more than one occasion he has tried to persuade the public that we should all accept a diet of GM food and we stubbornly refuse to be converted. But his speech last week on the wonders of GM crops topped them all. He said he was ‘certain’ that GM crops are safer than conventional varieties because “These products go through the most rigorous system. It is extraordinarily closely regulated…” Do I hear hollow laughter from all those independent researchers into GM foods?

He went on: “…you have the biggest field trial in human history when you think of the colossal volume of GM material that has been eaten in all those countries growing GM food.”

Sorry, Mr Paterson, but the biggest field trial in human history took place over millennia when the world was growing and eating organic food. And perhaps he hadn’t read, or was ignoring, the very recent Friends of the Earth Europe-wide study that found weedkiller residues in over 40% of human urine samples (glyphosate, the biggest producer of which is Monsanto).

Mistake after mistake was recited as fact, and faithfully reported by most of the rightwing media — except for the Daily Mail. Normally great supporters of all things Conservative, the Mail pulled his speech to pieces.

One of his most outrageous claims was this: “Over the last 15 years… every attempt to deploy Golden Rice (modified to boost Vitamin A) has been thwarted and in that time seven million children have gone blind or died.” The Mail struck that down with this riposte: “Earlier this year, the International Rice Research Institute, which is working on the Golden Rice project, denied reports that it was available for commercial planting, saying it has yet to pass safety tests or prove it could reduce vitamin A deficiency.”

The Channel4’s FactCheck Blog had this to say: “(Paterson) can’t claim that by not providing the rice the blindness and deaths have occurred, as we don’t know what would have happened had the rice been provided.” Health experts say the problem is a lack of Vitamin A, not Golden Rice — a problem solved by educating mothers how to feed their children on easily available foods containing Vitamin A.

Paterson claimed GM food was safer; “There is no substantiated case of any adverse impact on human health.” The Mail pointed out that: “In May 2011, independent doctors in Canada reported that toxins implanted into GM crops to kill pests were reaching the bloodstreams of women and unborn babies.”

Paterson claimed that GM was good for the environment. He said: “There is a very strong environmental case for GM, We can farm more efficiently, using new technology and using less land. It gives a wonderful opportunity to free up land for wilderness and forestry.” And presumeably for pheasant shoots as well, that being another of Paterson’s passions.

He said there is no evidence of GM crops harming the environment but ignored, among other problems, ‘superweeds’ that are resistant to the herbicides designed to kill them. Farmers across North America could have told him. Farmers could tell him too of the dangers of feeding GM to their animals, but as the biotech companies dismiss such evidence, so too will their mouthpiece. The Mail said the evidence showed real damage to the environment. Following GM crop trials in the UK, where fields had been heavily sprayed with a powerful weedkiller, the result was that it not only wiped out weeds, but also wild plants and insects.

He insisted that GM crops produce higher yields than conventional crops. He could ask Indian cotton farmers, the ones that haven’t committed suicide that is, after seeing their livelihoods ruined. And the Mail pointed out that recently published research showed that “increases in crop yields have been much greater in countries which have not adopted GM.”

When asked by the Daily Mail he said (with some hesitation) that he would be happy to feed a GM tomato to his family, not that one tomato shared between his wife and three children would go that far. But when the Mail contacted 17 government ministers, none of them would own to being comfortable with GM food. They also found that all the restaurants in the Houses of Parliament have had a ‘no GM food’ policy for quite some years. Customer choice rules, even in Westminster, despite government ministers wanting the public to eat the foods they refuse to.

This constant dishonest pressure on the public from people like Paterson to accept something they do not want must stop. It is dishonest because their ‘facts’ are at the least unproven, and at worst, untrue. Nor do they really care about feeding the world. If they did they’d stop the waste of so much food and ensure people had equal access to what the earth can provide. This is all about giving the biotech companies control over the world’s food.

Why do I personally care so much about stopping GM food? I live in a rural area of great natural beauty. There is a strong organic presence here, in local growers, producers and shops. The village is full of gardeners. We grow our own vegetables and fruit. And we love our environment. My own garden is full of weeds. I call them wild flowers. They plant themselves, helped by the birds. They grow happily among the ‘cultivated’ plants and they provide a rich environment for bees and all the other pollinating insects. I don’t want this rich celebration of natural life turned into the kind of wasteland that comes from growing GM crops and the accompanying heavy use of pesticides and herbicides.

This garden, this land, is my home. I value every tiny flower and fly. This is their home too, and they are important. If I’m honest, I have to admit they have a more important place in the cycle of natural life than I or any human does.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

The Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) between the US and EU is currently being negotiated. The deal plans to create the world’s largest free trade area, ‘protect’ investment and remove ‘unnecessary regulatory barriers’. All well and good for big business, but the treaty poses a serious threat for ordinary people as it could weaken labour, social, environmental and consumer protection standards. Given the issues at stake, just how much transparency and democratic accountability is there regarding these negotiations and who is driving the agenda?

The deal has been masterminded by the ‘High Level Working Group on Jobs and Growth‘ (HLWG), which was set up in 2011 and chaired by European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht and the then US Trade Representative Ron Kirk. In its final report, the Group not only recommended entering into the negotiations, but went into some detail as to what should be put on the table, with the far-reaching aim of moving towards a “transatlantic marketplace.”

With so much at stake, the public should know just who sat on the HLWG which set the whole process in motion. According to the European Commission (EC), the group has no identifiable members. The EC has also stated that “several departments” contributed to the discussion and the reports of the (memberless) group, but added that “there is no document containing the list of authors of the reports.”

A request by Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) to disclose membership/report authors was met with the response: “Unfortunately we (the EC) are not in a position to provide you with the information requested.”

CEO argues that the group should be subject to the transparency requirements set up in EC’s rules on ‘expert groups’, including transparency about who participated. But it is patently not.

When asked about the ‘outside expertise’ (as the EC calls it) that had influenced the reports produced by the HLWG, CEO was told that the impact assessment of the proposed EU-US trade deal contained a summary of the expert evidence gathered since its inception. CEO was also directed to the Commission’s overview page for public consultations, where it is stated that more than 65 percent of the input to the first two consultations on the proposed EU-US deal came from companies and industry associations.

CEO has also requested information about the EC’s contacts with industry lobby groups wanting to influence the trade pact. It asked for a list of meetings with such lobby groups, minutes and related correspondence. The Commission responded that this “concerns a very large number of documents” and asked CEO to “narrow down the scope of your request, so as to reduce it to a more manageable amount of documents.” Six weeks after CEO’s request and after several email exchanges, CEO was told that the Commission was “currently in the early stages of assessing your request and […] not yet in a position to give a detailed estimate of the number of documents potentially covered.” The Commission official added: “Our best guess for the moment is that we will only have a first overview of the situation during the middle of June and will update you at that point.”

While still waiting for more information on what seems to be hundreds of documents related to big business lobbying around the EU-US trade deal, CEO fared better with an access to information request to the United States Trade Representative.

Based on the information provided, CEO discovered that the authoritative-sounding ‘high level working groups on growth and jobs’ was nothing but a bunch of unelected and unaccountable, notorious pro-free-trade bureaucrats from both sides of the Atlantic.

Of course, even without access to various sources of information, we already know who supports the negotiations. CEO notes that in addition to the biotech sector, groups lobbying for the deal have included Toyota,General Motors, the pharmaceutical industry, IBM and the Chamber of  Commerce of the US, one of the most powerful corporate lobby groups in the US. Business Europe, the main organization representing employers in Europe, launched its own strategy on an EU-US economic and trade partnershipin early 2012. Its suggestions were widely included in the draft EU mandate.

An increasing number of politicians and citizens groups are demanding that the looming EU-US negotiations be conducted in an open way, not least because there are concerns that the deal will open the floodgate for GMOs and shale gas (fracking) in Europe, threatens digital and labour rights and will empower corporations to legally challenge a wide range of regulations which they dislike. One of the key aspects of the negotiations is that both the EU and US should recognize their respective rules and regulations, which in practice could reduce regulation to the lowest common denominator. The official language talks of “mutual recognition” of standards or so-called reduction of non-tariff barriers. For the EU, that could mean accepting US standards in many areas, including food and agriculture, which are lower than the EU’s.

The US wants all so-called barriers to trade, including highly controversial regulations such as those protecting agriculture, food or data privacy, to be removed. Even the leaders of the Senate Finance Committee, in a letter to U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, made it clear that any agreement must also reduce EU restrictions on genetically modified crops, chlorinated chickens and hormone-treated beef.

Demands include an “ambitious liberalisation of agricultural trade barriers with as few exceptions as possible”. Similarly, food lobby group Food and Drink Europe, representing the largest food companies (Unilever, Kraft, Nestlé, etc.), has welcomed the negotiations, with one of their key demands being the facilitation of the low level presence of unapproved genetically modified crops. This is a long-standing industry agenda also supported by feed and grain trading giants, including Cargill, Bunge, ADM, and the big farmers’ lobby COPA-COGECA.. Meanwhile, the biotech industry on both sides of the Atlantic is offering its “support and assistance as the EU and the US government look to enhance their trade relationship.”

As with the EU-India Free Trade Agreement*, it is easy to conclude that there is a deliberate ploy to bar the public from any kind of meaningful information about or input into the world’s biggest trade deal ever to be negotiated. Europeans could well end up becoming the victims of one of the biggest corporate stitch ups ever. As CEO notes, the trade deal appears to be a unique opportunity to achieve through closed and non-transparent negotiations what hasn’t been possible so far in a transparent and democratic way.

Little wonder that many millions throughout Europe now regard the EU an unaccountable proxy allowing powerful private  private interests free rein to dig their profiteering snouts into the trough of corporate greed at the expense of ordinary people.

Notes

* http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-eu-india-free-trade-agreement-corporate-driven-neocolonial-plunder/5338049

Information source for this article: http://corporateeurope.org/blog/who-scripting-eu-us-trade-deal (Trade and Agribusiness website sections)

To prevent GM crops in Europe, visit ‘stop the crop’ campaign at: http://www.stopthecrop.org/about-stop-crop-campaign

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

British Prime Minister David Cameron has uncovered his governmentâ„¢s conspiracy to launch a military coup in Syria after failing to rally support for invasion idea at the recent G8 summit.

According to some Arab media reports, David Cameron is encouraging members of Syrian Army and security forces to launch a coup against legitimate government of President Bashar al-Assad.

He also has shamelessly promised that members of the army and security forces would not be prosecuted for what he called Å“atrocities committed against the Syrian people”, if they took part in the coup.

The British premier failed as the host of the recent summit of Group of Eight (G8) leaders, which was held in Northern Ireland, to rally support for attempts to oust Bashar al-Assad through providing heavy weapons to foreign terrorists fighting the Syrian Army or get involved directly in the conflict militarily.

The London-based daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported that Cameron is attempting to Å“launch a new diplomatic effort geared at [President] Assadâ„¢s supporters, promising to ensure their survival when their leader is forcibly removed from power”.

The question here is how on earth is conspiring for a military coup in a third country defined as Å“a new diplomatic effort” as cited in the London-based newspaper. Of course, British authorities have a long hand in interfering in other countriesâ„¢ internal issues from diplomatic interference to military intervention as evidenced in countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Iran and so forth.

The leading editorial in Al-Quds Al-Arabi entitled Å“Britain and the option of a military coup in Syria” explained Cameronâ„¢s rationale for suggesting a military coup.

Å“Cameron wants to eliminate the strength of jihadi groups and strengthen the moderate Syrian opposition government,” the editorial reads, Å“so that a dialogue can be held with the leaders of such a coup. . . But what happens if such efforts fail? The only resort will be for Britain and its allies to invade.”

Syria has been gripped by a deadly unrest since March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of government forces, have been killed in the violence.

Damascus says the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the militants are foreign nationals.

The Syrian government says the West and its regional allies including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey are supporting the militants.

Several international human rights organizations have accused militants operating in Syria of committing war crimes.

MOL/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The Obama administration Friday charged National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden with espionage.

Snowden, 29, leaked to the Washington Post and to the Guardian (U.K.) a cache of documents exposing the NSA’s wholesale violation of the Fourth Amendment through the dragnet surveillance of phone records and monitoring of internet traffic.

The Washington Post reports that U.S. officials have requested that Hong Kong detain Snowden on “a provisional arrest warrant.”

According to the criminal complaint filed by the federal government against Snowden in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the former NSA networking contractor will be charged with theft, “unauthorized communication of national defense information” and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person.”

The last two counts are violations of the Espionage Act of 1917.

The Washington Post story on the filing of the espionage charges against Snowden reports that the district court chosen by the Justice Department because Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, is headquartered within that jurisdiction and it is “a district with a long track record of prosecuting cases with national security implications.”

With the formal filing of the charges against him, Snowden becomes the eighth person to be charged under the Espionage Act by the Obama administration.

Another former government employee, James Hitselberger was working as a linguist for the U.S. Navy when he became the seventh to be charged under the nearly-century old law.

President Obama has targeted each of these men – including Edward Snowden – for their efforts to expose government corruption. In fact, the others charged with espionage are targets of an apparent vendetta against whistleblowers in direct contradiction of the president’s promise to protect them.

In 2008, then-president-elect Obama declared, “We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government.”

Not that politicians have a habit of keeping campaign promises, but President Obama’s policy of zealously pursuing, prosecuting, and punishing those who report abuses in government is remarkable for its relentlessness.

Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists’ government secrecy project, is quoted in a story published by Reason magazine online, explaining, “The administration’s aggressive pursuit of leaks represents a challenge to the practice of national security reporting, which depends on the availability of unauthorized sources if it is to produce something more than ‘authorized’ news.”

This ferocity has come to the attention of others, as well. Speaking at a symposium on investigative reporting held in April 2012 at Berkeley, Edward Wasserman powerfully chronicled the chilling effect that the Obama administration’s pursuit of whistleblowers is having on such disclosures and against the journalists who report them.

Wasserman, the Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington & Lee University, informed the audience,

[The Obama] Justice Department has conducted six prosecutions over leaks of classified information to reporters. Five involve the Espionage Act, a powerful law that had previously been used only four times since it was enacted in 1917 to prosecute spies.

The first whistleblower cited in Wasserman’s address was Thomas Drake. Drake was a senior executive at the National Security Agency who made the mistake of revealing to the Baltimore Sun that the NSA’s Trailblazer Project, a project intended to analyze data carried on in the United States and elsewhere through the Internet, cellphones, and e-mails, not only violated the Fourth Amendment’s proscription against unwarranted searches and seizures, but it was a “billion-dollar computer boondoggle.”

In April 2010, Drake was indicted by a federal grand jury of several crimes, including violation of the Espionage Act. A spokesperson for the Government Accountability Project reported that the government’s prosecution of Drake left him devastated. “His intelligence career is over, his finances are drained and he is personally spent,” said Jesselyn Radack.

Early in the summer of 2011, after several exposés ran in newspapers and on television, the Obama administration dropped all the charges against Drake in return for Drake’s guilty plea to a misdemeanor of misusing NSA computers. Drake was sentenced to one year of probation and community service.

The second target of the government’s attack on whistleblowers was Shamai Leibowitz, an FBI linguist who was eventually sentenced to 20 months in a federal prison for leaking documents to a blogger.

Leibowitz testified that he believed that the papers he transmitted while working for the FBI contained evidence of “violations of the law” including the illegal attempt by the embassy of Israel to influence American foreign policy.

In exchange for his guilty plea to one count of disclosure of classified information, Leibowitz agreed to never file petitions to look at documents related to his case and to “never disclose” any classified or sensitive information to which he had access while on contract with the FBI.

Next on the list of those who believed (wrongly) that President Obama would keep his campaign promise to shield from prosecution those government employees brave enough to bring to light hidden abuses and waste is John Kiriakou.

Kiriakou was an agent with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) who was indicted in 2012 by a federal grand jury for disclosing to reporters the name of another CIA asset who was tasked with interrogating alleged al-Qaeda financier, Abu Zubaydah.

The indictment included one charge of making false statements, which carries a maximum five-year prison sentence, and four counts of violating federal law, including the Espionage Act – an offense punishable by up to 10 years in a federal prison.

In October, Kiriakou pleaded guilty to violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act and will serve up to 30 months in a federal prison.

There is little wonder why the Obama administration would seek to silence Kiriakou: In 2007, Kiriakou told ABC News that he considered waterboarding an “unnecessary” form of interrogation.

Wasserman then mentions two others upon whom the federal government must place the muzzle of prosecution:

Stephen Kim, a State Department analyst, allegedly told a reporter for Fox News – wait for it – that the U.S. was worried North Korea might respond to new U.N. sanctions by testing another A-bomb; and Jeffrey Sterling, who allegedly disclosed a botched CIA operation in Iran that was described in a 2006 book by a Times reporter.

A story published by Politico confirmed that “the case [against Kiriakou] is the sixth of six leak-related prosecutions brought during President Barack Obama’s term – a higher tally than under all previous presidents combined.”

Supporters of the president may wonder why he didn’t think this through a little better and provide the whistleblowers with the protection he promised rather than seek to silence the journalists who break the stories given them by these well-informed sources.

The answer to that question was given in a comment made “rather gloatingly” by “a national security representative” to Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: “We’re not going to subpoena reporters in the future. We don’t need to. We know who you’re talking to.”

Given this president’s propensity for rapidly and relentlessly enlarging the size and power of the surveillance state apparatus, it is certain that Dalglish’s statement is truer than we would like to believe.

The Washington Post reports that after the paper broke the story of Snowden’s impending prosecution, “senior administration officials said late Friday that the Justice Department was barraged with calls from lawmakers and reporters and decided to unseal the criminal complaint.”

Based on his earlier statements, Snowden is likely to fight extradition from Hong Kong to the United States. Should the Chinese authorities in Hong Kong entertain Snowden’s challenge to the request for his arrest, the case could be decided by a Hong Kong court and “could last many months” according to legal experts interviewed by the Washington Post.

^{Photo of banner supporting Edward Snowden: AP Images}

Joe A. Wolverton, II, J.D. is a correspondent for The New American and travels frequently nationwide speaking on topics of nullification, the NDAA, and the surveillance state. He can be reached at
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
.

This article originally appeared on: The New American

Infowars.com
June 22, 2013

In the video here, a woman is told by police showing up at her door that she must present an ID. After she consents to this intrusion, the cops swear at her when she tries to close the door. They then follow her inside without presenting a search warrant.

All of this over government issuing a warrant over uncut grass.

That’s right — uncut grass. In some parts of the country government has nothing better to do than waste taxpayer money on producing court papers and dispatching rude cops to harass and threaten people who have committed such heinous crimes.

Remember: you don’t have to show an ID if you’re not driving a motor vehicle, especially while on your own property. You should NEVER let the police inside your home without a search warrant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-tYTu5xJEek

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

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This article originally appeared on: SHTF Plan

Iraqis rush the wounded away from the site of a bomb attack near Taji, north of Baghdad. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Foreign ministers of the countries supporting the militants fighting the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad have agreed to provide them Å“urgently” with arms.

Top diplomats from Egypt, France, Germany, Italy, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States have attended the talks in the Qatari capital, Doha, on Saturday.

The top officials agreed to “provide urgently all the necessary materiel and equipment to the opposition on the ground, each country in its own way in order to enable them to counter brutal attacks by the regime and its allies and protect the Syrian people.”

Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim Al Thani said at the conference that arming the militants is the only way to achieve what he called peace in Syria.

They also agreed “to channel all military support by the relevant countries through the Staff Chairmanship of the Syrian Supreme Military Council.”

On Friday, the militants announced that they had received new weapons that could lead to “changes” in the war against the Syrian government.

On June 14, US President Barack Obama ordered his administration to provide the militants in Syria with more sophisticated weapons, claiming that the Syrian government had used Å“chemical weapons” against the militants and thus crossed Washingtonâ„¢s Å“red line.”

Syria has been gripped by a deadly unrest since March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of government forces, have been killed in the violence.

Damascus says the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the militants are foreign nationals.

The Syrian government says the West and its regional allies including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey are supporting the militants.

Several international human rights organizations have accused militants operating in Syria of committing war crimes.

SZH/AS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Protestors clash with Turkish riot policemen on May 31, 2013 during a protest against the demolition of the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A Wajir resident walks past carcasses of livestock on July 20, 2011.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A conference in London has demanded an end to the coalition governmentâ„¢s austerity programme, with participants condemning it for creating a widening gap between the poor and the rich.

Thousands of people took part in the first Peopleâ„¢s Assembly Against Austerity that brought together unions, activists and many members of the public from teachers and nurses to the unemployed.

The protest gathering was held on Saturday to launch a new campaign against the governmentâ„¢s unpopular austerity programme by bridging a gap between all affected people in society.

Protest leaders said they are going to plan demonstrations and strike action as well as peaceful civil disobedience in order for their voices to be heard by the authorities.

The conference was very angry at the governmentâ„¢s policy who they said is creating a bigger divide between rich and poor, and making the most vulnerable pay for the mistakes of the rich.

Å“We do not accept that governmentâ„¢s austerity programme is necessary. The banks and the major corporations should be taxed at a rate which can provide the necessary resources. Austerity does not work: it is a failure in its own terms resulting in neither deficit reduction nor growth”, said a statement.

It was stated in the statement that people from all walks of life have, therefore, chosen the path of resistance.

Å“We have a plain and simple goal: to make government abandon its austerity programme. If it will not it must be replaced with one that will work”, the statement added.

The movement against austerity is rising with hundreds of people joining local Peopleâ„¢s Assembly rallies across the country.

Backed by eight national unions, key national campaigns and hundreds of local trade unions, community and anti-cuts groups, the Peopleâ„¢s Assembly Against Austerity provides a key opportunity to co-ordinate a national movement to take on the Tories and their cuts.

The Peopleâ„¢s Assembly Against Austerity is a key opportunity to bring together all those who want to stop the cuts and the devastation they are bringing to millions of people in the UK, and to launch the next steps in the fightback. As students we are committed to confronting the Toriesâ„¢ vandalism of our education system and our futures, said student leaders in an open letter.

MOL/

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A banner supporting Edward Snowden is displayed at Central, Hong Kong’s business district on June 19, 2013. Photo: AP

The US is hacking Chinese mobile phone companies to gather data from millions of text messages, whistleblower Edward Snowden told the South China Morning Post in a report published in China Saturday. And Snowden claims he has the evidence to prove it.

National Security Agency (NSA) spies have also been hacking China’s prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing and Asia Pacific fiber-optic network operator Pacnet, the South China Morning Post quoted Snowden.

Snowden has been charged with espionage by the Obama administration after revealing the US governments massive data and phone spying program.

“There’s far more than this. The NSA does all kinds of things like hack Chinese cell phone companies to steal all of your SMS data,” Snowden said.

Chinese government data shows almost 900 billion text messages were exchanged in China in 2012 alone.

The South China Morning Post also reported that Snowden is not under police protection but is in a “safe place’’ in Hong Kong.

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: ‘You Say What You Like, Because They Like What You Say’ – http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/731-you-say-what-you-like-because-they-like-what-you-say.html

This article originally appeared on: RT

Mac Slavo
SHTFplan.com
June 22, 2013

Last week, Noble Peace Prize winner President Barrack Obama advised that his administration would be arming the Free Syrian Army with weapons to resist the armies of Syria’s President Bashar Assad. Furthermore, they would look to implement a Libya-style no-fly zone over the country, which like Libya, would likely involve widespread carpet bombing of suspected military strongholds and control centers.

With boots on the ground around Syria’s borders, the United States is without a doubt preparing for widespread engagement across the region yet again, with the aim of the new U.S. supplied weapons being more killing and destruction in a civil war that has left tens of thousands dead in the last year.

It is the assumption of the Obama administration that these weapons will tip the scales of power in favor of the rebels, many of whom have been identified as members of America’s arch enemy, Al Queda.

But Russia’s KGB-hardened President Vladimir Putin has other ideas.

This week, according to a British intelligence report, Putin reportedly passed on a diplomatic communique to the United States and France using British Prime Minister David Cameron as the intermediary.

According to the report from Syrian-based Dam Press and the Dyar Newspaper, the Russians aren’t backing off their Syria policy and they are getting ready to double down by supplying Assad’s military with weapons the have never before been seen in the middle east.

If and when Western forces engage the Syrian army you can be assured that it will be nothing like the 1991 conflict in Iraq when a hundred thousand of Saddam Hussein’s soldiers surrendered without firing a shot. Nor will it be a no-fly zone free-for-all where air forces will be able to target military assets as they did in Libya without being challenged.

No, this time will be different.

This time, Russia and America may well being playing with fire. The kind that leads the people of this planet head first into World War III.

Global Research reports:

The Patriot Missiles will be hit and repealed with S 300 SAM [already installed in Syria]. Putin also threatened to deliver the more advanced S400 anti-aircraft missiles (see image below) far superior to the Patriot missiles and ranked as the World’s most advanced air defense system.

He added that Russia will also supply Syria with state-of —the-art 24-Barrell rocket launcherswhich have a range of 60 km ranked as the most developed artillery weapon of its kind.(see video below)

He added that Russia will supply 400 of these launchers which will be able to destroy all targets around Syria’s borders.

…

The British intelligence site stated that Putin threatened to send other secret Russian made weapons to Syria which would tip the balance of power even further in favour of Syria and re-iterated that these weapons will not be used against Israel on condition that Israel will not participate in the war within Syria and neighbouring countries. {Lebanon, Jordan]

…

Putin’s response came just over 24 hours after Obama’s statement on Saturday that he was going to arm the Syrian resistance.

Putin clearly stated that the Middle East is going to witness a significant change. Syria will be armed with weapons that have never been seen before [in the Middle East] including computer guided smart missiles that never miss their target.

He also added that Russia will supply Syria with Skean 5 ground -to-sea missiles that are capable of hitting and sinking any target up to 250 km off the Syrian coast.

Full report: Global Research

In his documentary Strategic Relocation Joel Skousen suggested that one of the most critical threats facing the world right now is the real possibility that Russia and America will engage in a future nuclear exchange.

While the weapons being supplied to Syria by both sides are a far cry from nuclear meltdown, the current policies of both nations can very quickly metastasize into a much more direct confrontation.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Vladimir Putin comes from the old world of Soviet leadership; one that believes in Russian military superiority and rules with an iron fist. He has no qualms about going to war if he finds it necessary to the long-term interests of Russia.

In the United States, President Barrack Obama is embroiled in numerous scandals and is presiding over an economy on the brink of collapse, giving him ample motivation to divert the attention of the public.

Neither of these leaders, given their past, would give pause to the thought of killing millions of people if they believe it was in their interest, or in the interest of their globalist handlers.

Wars in the 20th century, most democidal in origin, claimed the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Just statistics in the history books to leadership circles in the upper echelons of our governing apparatus.

The lives of innocents have been sacrificed on the alters of power, greed and corruption since the dawn of man.

The 21st century is no different.

What IS different is that we have never before had weapons capable of killing every single person on this planet with the press of a button.

War is coming in this century — just as it came to the good people of earth in every century before.

Watch —  ”The Last Day”  – What the first few minutes of World War III will look like:

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This article was posted: Saturday, June 22, 2013 at 2:05 pm

Tags: war

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

washingtonsblog.com
June 22, 2013

Source of 2005 New York Times Spying Expose Says Spy Agency Targeting Highest-Level American Leaders

As we reported yesterday, NSA whistleblower Russel Tice — a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping — told Peter B. Collins on Boiling Frogs Post (the website of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds) that the NSA spied on and targeted for blackmail:

— “Members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the—and judicial”

— “One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court”

— “Two … former FISA court judges”

— “State Department officials”

— “People in the executive service that were part of the White House—their own people”

— “Antiwar groups”

— “U.S. companies that that do international business”

— “U.S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business”

— “NGOs that—like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work”

— “The president of the United States now [i.e. Barack Obama, when he was running for Senate]“

Tice just named some additional names.

Specifically, Tice told radio host James Corbett that the NSA spied on the following government officials for the purposes of gaining leverage over them:

— Top Democratic and Republican congress members, especially on the Intelligence, Armed Services and Judiciary committees, as well as the senior leadership in both the House and the Senate

— General Petraeus and other generals (background)

— Supreme Court justice Alito … and all of the other Supreme Court justices

— White House spokesman Scott McClellan

Those officials were targeted before the NSA started its mass Prism surveillance program. Now, Tice says the NSA spies on everyone. He’s right.

We asked highly-credible NSA whistleblower William Binney what he thought about Tice’s statements. Binney told us:

I can not validate what he is saying. This, however, is not out of the question that our government or parts thereof would in fact do this. Certainly the capability is there.

See this for further background on spying and harassment of government officials and civilians.

Source of 2005 New York Times Spying Expose Says Spy Agency Targeting Highest-Level American Leaders

As we reported yesterday, NSA whistleblower Russel Tice — a key source in the 2005 New York Times report that blew the lid off the Bush administration’s use of warrantless wiretapping — told Peter B. Collins on Boiling Frogs Post (the website of FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds) that the NSA spied on and targeted for blackmail:

• “Members of Congress, both Senate and the House, especially on the intelligence committees and on the armed services committees and some of the—and judicial”

• “One of the judges is now sitting on the Supreme Court”

• “Two … former FISA court judges”

• “State Department officials”

• “People in the executive service that were part of the White House—their own people”

• “U.S. companies that that do international business”

• “U.S. banking firms and financial firms that do international business”

• “NGOs that—like the Red Cross, people like that that go overseas and do humanitarian work”

• “The president of the United States now [i.e. Barack Obama, when he was running for Senate]“

Tice just named some additional names.

Specifically, Tice told radio host James Corbett that the NSA spied on the following government officials for the purposes of gaining leverage over them:

• Top Democratic and Republican congress members, especially on the Intelligence, Armed Services and Judiciary committees, as well as the senior leadership in both the House and the Senate

• Supreme Court justice Alito … and all of the other Supreme Court justices

• White House spokesman Scott McClellan

Those officials were targeted before the NSA started its mass Prism surveillance program. Now, Tice says the NSA spies on everyone. He’s right.

We asked highly-credible NSA whistleblower William Binney what he thought about Tice’s statements. Binney told us:

I can not validate what he is saying. This, however, is not out of the question that our government or parts thereof would in fact do this. Certainly the capability is there.

See this for further background on spying and harassment of government officials and civilians.

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This article was posted: Saturday, June 22, 2013 at 1:27 pm

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

“The innocent have everything to fear, mostly from the guilty, but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear.’” Terry Pratchett (British author), in Snuff (Doubleday, 2011).

For many people, personal privacy vs widespread surveillance has been a major issue for decades. However, some thought it might have been happening but chose to downplay it. Others didn’t want to know and just didn’t care. Edward Snowden’s recent revelations indicate it is happening and that we should all care.    

Former National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden has now turned his attention to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British equivalent of the NSA. On Friday, Snowden released documents to The Guardian newspaper in the UK to back up his claims that GCHQ has secretly accessed fibre optic cables carrying huge amounts of internet and communications data. According to The Guardian, the agency is able to tap into, analyse and store data. Snowden told the newspaper that the NSA has a more prolific British ally in GCHQ. (GCHQ is one of three UK intelligence agencies, alongside MI5 and MI6.)

“It’s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight… They (GCHQ) are worse than the US.” Edward Snowden

Although it is physically impossible for the intelligence agencies to read everyone’s emails, for instance, GCHQ can apparently record phone calls, read email and Facebook postings and review website traffic if they so wish. It can also access entire web use histories on individuals. Although GCHQ can only store certain data for 30 days, the Guardian says the practice is subject to little scrutiny. GCHQ operation can tap cables that carry global communications with the potential to carry 600 million daily ‘telephone events’.

“If GCHQ have been intercepting huge numbers of innocent people’s communications as part of a massive sweeping exercise, then I struggle to see how that squares with a process that requires a warrant for each individual intercept.” Nick Pickles, Big Brother Watch director, as reported in The Guardian, 22 June.

This massive interception effort operates under two programmes: Mastering the Internet and Global Telecoms Exploitation. GCHQ is tapping 200 internet links, each with a data rate of 10Gbps, and the agency has the technical capacity to concurrently analyze 46 of these 200 streams of data at a time.

The revelations come alongside reports of the NSA snooping on US and international citizens via the metadata held on them by telecommunication companies, and secret data-sharing agreements between the NSA and consumer-web giants, such as Facebook, Google, Apple and others under the PRISM scheme.

GCHQ is able to capitalize on the UK‘s position at the edge of Western Europe, by tapping into the vast quantity of data flowing through cables around the UK and abroad. Over 300 GCHQ and 250 NSA analysts sift through the data, which they use to identify communications relating to security, terror, organized crime, and economic well-being.

Britain and the US are the founding members of the Five-Eyes intelligence sharing agreement. The Five-Eyes are members of a special club of former British colonies that gather and intelligence with each other. Australia, Canada and New Zealand are the three other members.

According to The Guardian, Britain‘s ability to tap these fibre-optic cables makes it the web eavesdropping powerhouse of the Five-Eyes, with the documents provided by Snowden saying that of the five, Britain has “the biggest Internet access.”

The Guardian reports that British personnel on the team of 300 GCHQ and 250 NSA analysts sifting through the data have “a light oversight regime compared to the US“

The newspaper reports that 850,000 NSA and employees and private American contractors have been able to access to the information gathered by CGHQ. One of the documents quotes NSA boss Gen. Keith Alexander as urging British spies to collect everything they could.

“Why can’t we collect at the signals, all the time? Sounds like a good summer homework project for Menwith,” is written at the top of a slide shown by the Guardian that supposedly quotes Alexander during a 2008 visit to the UK. The slide is titled, “Collect-it-all.”

Menwith refers to RAF Menwith Hill, a secret signals intelligence gathering facility in the Yorkshire countryside run by the US.

GCHQ operatives tapped the fibre-optic cables over the last five years at the point where the transatlantic cables reach British shores — these cables move Internet and telephone data from North America to Western Europe. All of this was done with agreements with the communications companies, described by the document as “intercept partners.”

Last week, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Robert Cole defended bulk collection of cellphone data and other business records to US lawmakers:

“If you’re looking for a needle in a haystack, you’ve got to get the haystack first,” said Cole during a June 18 House intelligence committee hearing on the matter. “That’s why we have the ability under the [FISA] court order, to acquire . . . all of that data, we don’t get to use all of that data, necessarily.” As reported by John Reed in Foreign Policy on 21 June.

Britain and the US are rapidly perfecting the system to allow them to capture and analyse a large quantity of international traffic consisting of emails, texts, phone calls, internet searches, chat, photographs, blogposts, videos and the many uses of Google.

Writing in The Guardian on Friday 21 June, Henry Porter states:

“Mastering the Internet treats the rights of billions of foreign web users, the possible menace to the privacy of British and American citizens and the duties of their legislators with equal contempt. After Iraq and the banking crash, the world may come to see MTI as further evidence of a heedless delinquency in two of the world’s oldest democracies.”

Porter talks about the lack of meaningful oversight in both countries, the use of commercial companies in the surveillance process and the wholesale disregard for the fundamentals of both countries’ democratic principles. Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights organisation Liberty, says that GCHQ are exploiting the fact that the internet is so international in nature and that what’s holding them back from going further is technological capability, certainly not ethics (1).

Why it matters, really matters

For too long, the majority in Britain has been led to believe that governments in major western liberal democracies operate with benign intentions, that the government acts on our behalf and in our interests and that only those with something to hide have anything to fear. The belief is forwarded that the loss of liberty and intrusions into our personal privacy are small prices to pay for ensuring our safety in a barbaric world that wants to attack and inflict terror on us.

It’s all part of the dominant narrative. It’s all part of a dominant narrative that seeks to mislead and to mask the real essence of power and the true nature of intent behind notions of patriotism, nationalism, bowing down to the flag, militarism and that ‘we’, ‘the nation’ are in united in cause and belief.   

What Snowden’s revelations illustrate is the unaccountable face of power. And this should concern us because it’s not the greater good of humankind, queen, flag or country that this power serves. It ultimately serves capital and the extremely wealthy, whose interests are diametrically opposed to those of ordinary people across the world (2).

Look no further to see who funds the major political parties or individual politicians to do their bidding. Look no further than the backgrounds of many of these politicians. But, most important, look no further to see who owns the major corporations and banks and who sits on the bodies that hammer out major policies (3)(4)(5). It is the powerful foundations and think tanks headed or funded by private corporations that drive US and British policies, whether at home or abroad, and that includes the Project for a New American Century (6) and the resultant ongoing war of terror waged on countries across the world.

Western liberal democracy has been quite successful in making many at home blind to the chains that bind and which make them immune to the falsehoods that underpin the system. However, with the economic meltdown, ‘austerity’, increasing public awareness of corporate crimes, disillusionment with mainstream politics and the ramping up of wars, paranoia and the stripping away of civil liberties, social control is no longer able to operate on the relatively benign level that it once did. The collapse of the economic system and its propping up has laid bare just who that system is set up to benefit. State violence and mass surveillance is now part of the changing agenda of liberal democracy that is no longer able to hide behind the pretence of being liberal or democratic. The mask has slipped and we are right to be concerned.

“The world has evidence of the totally monitored future that GCHQ and NSA plan for us and that political establishments turn a blind eye to…. fear still trumps everything. On Tuesday, the head of NSA, General Keith B Alexander, and the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, insisted that many terror plots had been stopped by surveillance. In Britain, the foreign secretary, William Hague… was joined by three former home secretaries, Jack Straw, Lord (John) Reid and Alan Johnson, to reassure us that mass surveillance was indeed necessary to make interdictions and… that further powers were needed… The point about these latest revelations is that they show there are more than adequate powers for interception on both sides of the Atlantic and that the terror agenda and, to a lesser degree, the fear of paedophilia, may well have been used to elaborate a huge system of espionage and domestic surveillance.” — Henry Porter, The Guardian 21 June.

 Notes

1) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23012910

2) http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/07/live-j01.html)

3) http://landdestroyer.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/tipping-balance-of-power.html

4) http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-four-horsemen-behind-america-s-oil-wars/24507

5) http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/10/22/the-147-companies-that-control-everything/

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

An analyst says recent restrictions imposed by certain European satellite providers on Iranian channels reveal that the West aims to monopolize the information received by the people.

Å“..you see there is a trend of the Wall Street bankers and the Zionists doing everything they can to maintain a monopoly on information to try to control what people hear in order to craft public opinion in the way they would like it,” Caleb Maupin, member of the International Action Center said in an interview with Press TV on Saturday.

The European-based company, Intelsat, suspended services to Iranian news channels on June 19, claiming the measure was taken in recognition of illegal sanctions the United States has declared against the president of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) – that is the countryâ„¢s national broadcasting corporation.

Maupin said that despite their claims about freedom of speech and flow of information, the West and the US in particular Å“very much want to try to suppress the reality, which is [the right] of the people all over the world”.

The analyst noted that the US wants to control the public information in order to suppress the desire of billions of people, who are striving for peace, democracy and equality, against the small group of wealthy people.

The Intelsat suspension of services comes on the heels of a similar decision by Eutelsat and most other satellite operators in taking Iranian TV channels and radio stations off the air in several Western countries including Britain, France, Germany, and Spain.

The Israeli lobby in the United States has openly supported the attempt to silence the voice of Iranian media in Europe.

PG/HGH

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Israel is concerned over the Syrian War’s reach into the Golan Heights which they have been occupying since Six-Day War of 1967. The Golan Heights is a strategic territory for Israel’s security and it is an important source of its water supplies. An attack on Syria could occur if they crossed into Israel’s occupied land. 

It was reported in an NBC news report that correspondent John Ray interviewed top Israeli air force officials about Israel’s monitoring of the Golan Heights of the Syrian border:

The spillover of violence from the Syrian conflict into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights is threatening to jeopardize the decades old cease-fire between the two countries and spark a regional conflict. 

A series of mighty Israeli airstrikes, apparently on weapons convoys heading from Syria towards President Bashar Assad’s allies in the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, has shattered the fragile truce that has existed along the border since 1973   

The Golan Heights, rightfully known as the Syrian Golan is a center of dispute between Syria and Israel since the 1940’s. On June 19^th, 1967 Israel offered to return the Golan Heights to Syria if the Arab world would recognize Israel as a state. The Arab world refused such agreements with the Khartoum Resolution that same year. The 1967 occupation of the Golan Heights and the Upper Mount Hermon allowed Israel to seize the entire Upper Jordan River giving Israel access to the Upper Jordanian waters.

Then another conflict developed in 1973 called the Yum Kipper War or the Arab-Israeli War between Egyptian and Syrian forces who invaded the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights, both territories occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War. The United States supplied Israel and the former Soviet Union supplied Egypt and Syria with weapons during the conflict as both superpowers were fighting the cold war against each other during that time. After the Yum Kipper War, Israel returned 5% of the Golan Heights to Syrian control with a demilitarized zone along the area that is declared a ceasefire zone that extends east under the United Nations Peace Keeping forces.

When an Israeli Air Force official was asked about the situation in the Golan Heights, he said “It’s the kind of thing happening more and more,” one of the uniformed escorts explained.” As he continued “We have for 40 years been training for this exact moment. And we are ready for anything,” said a pilot that can be identified under Israeli military rules only as “Major L.”

The Israeli Air Force official had no comment on whether Israel has been flying missions over Syria, “We are searching for peace, but preparing for war,’’ is all Pilot L would say.

When asked if he had already flown missions across the border, he shook his head slowly: no comment.” If Israel decided to attack Syria based on the Golan Heights, then the US and NATO would support Israel’s incursion into Syria’s borders. It would be a perfect excuse to attack Syria. The Golan Heights is a strategic military location and one of the most important water resources for the state of Israel. Israel would protect its interests with the United States as its principal supporter. The United States Secretary of State John Kerry and the United Nations under Ban-Ki Moon want the remaining UN Peacekeepers who are from the Philippines to stay. According to an Associated Press report:

The United Nations and the U.S. have separately asked the Philippines not to withdraw its more than 300 peacekeepers from the Golan Heights, warning of “maximum volatility” in the region after several other countries decided to pull out their peacekeeping forces amid escalating violence, the Philippines’ top diplomat said Wednesday.

Foreign Secretary Albert del Rosario said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry appealed to him in recent talks. He said he told them security for the forces should be bolstered for the Philippines to consider keeping them in the volatile buffer zone between Syria and Israel.

If the UN Peacekeeping Forces pull out of the zone then Israel will send in their troops antagonizing the Syrian government.

Last month, del Rosario recommended to Philippine President Benigno Aquino III that the peacekeepers be withdrawn from the Golan Heights following two separate abductions of Filipino peacekeepers and the wounding of another in fighting between Syrian government and rebel forces.

The Philippines Foreign Secretary knows that an Israeli strike into Syria is near; therefore his recommendation to remove forces is being challenged by both the US and the UN.  According to del Rosario:

“This, of course, will create a vacuum in the Golan, that separation stretch which keeps Israel away from Syria,” del Rosario said in a news conference in Manila. He said Kerry and Ban told him that if the Philippines also withdraws, that would “create maximum volatility for the area.” Albert del Rosario did stress that “Aquino said last week the changes he was looking for included additional equipment and enhanced security for the peacekeepers, and different rules of engagement. He continued “If there is no change in the conditions, it might be an undoable mission and our poor troops will be in the middle of two potentially clashing forces and they cannot defend themselves.”

Israel’s concern with the Golan Heights would allow it to launch a definitive strike that would try to cripple Syria’s military capabilities. With the Obama administration willing to supply the Anti-Assad rebels with weapons it would allow Israel to enter a full-fledged war into the Golan Heights. Any artillery shells that lands on the occupied territory would allow Israel to launch a full scale war into Syria with America’s blessing. The Obama administration would support Israel and the rebels with supplies and possibly even US troops already on Jordan’s northern border. The Golan Heights has been an area of tension that resulted in numerous conflicts between Israel and Syria for decades. The Golan Heights has numerous interests for the state of Israel that involves a military advantage over its enemies including Hezbollah and an important commodity for its citizens, water.

If Israel feels that its occupied territory is threatened, it will respond with its military power to remove the Assad government. But Syria will respond to any attack by Israel with full-force along with the Hezbollah forces based in southern Lebanon. The Golan Heights dispute can ignite World War III if the Obama administration aids the rebels on one-side allowing Israel to attack Syria on the other. It was also reported in The Jerusalem Post that the Israel Defense Forces just completed a drill combining the Air Force, Army and Naval forces against possible conflicts against Syria, Hezbollah and even Hamas in the Palestinian territory:

On Wednesday, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon addressed an end-of —training event for IDF officers at a base in Mitzpe Ramon, “At this time, the IDF is dealing both at home and abroad, near and far, with a considerable number of fronts of uncertainty,” he said.

Ya’alon cited the Lebanese front where Hezbollah continues to arm itself and plans on harming Israeli civilians in a future conflict, and the front with Syria, “where a civil war continues to exact a heavy price of human lives, and a (civil) war is nearing our borders, placing us before a complex test that is full of significance.”

He added that there was “a front of uncertainty with the Gaza Strip, where the Hamas terrorist group continues to rule, and which has placed as its goal the destruction of the state of Israel.”

Israel is preparing to launch a war starting with Syria, Palestine and Hezbollah which will last for a very long time. Israel is the occupying force that is waging war across the Middle East.  It would result in mass civilian deaths on both sides of the conflict.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

[unable to retrieve full-text content]At least 13 people have been killed in bomb attacks in north of the Iraqi capital, Baghdad, as the latest spate of violence continues in the country.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranâ„¢s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Araqchi has rejected the recent remarks by French Defense Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian about Tehranâ„¢s nuclear energy program as Å“unrealistic”.

On Thursday, Le Drian said that Iranâ„¢s possible obtaining of a nuclear weapon posed a major threat to the world. “The real issue is nuclear proliferation … it’s the future risk of Iran getting a nuclear weapon,” he said.

Araqchi said that such remarks were unrealistic and resulted from ignorance of Iranâ„¢s constructive role in strengthening regional peace and stability.

Å“The peaceful nuclear policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran are totally transparent and clear and they are under the constant surveillance of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),” he said.

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.

AR/HGH

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Qatari Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs Ali bin Fahd al-Hajri (R) and Jan Mohammad Madani (L), one of the Taliban officials, cut the ribbon at the official opening ceremony of the Taliban office in Doha, Qatar, June 18, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Thousands of people have once again gathered at the iconic Taksim Square in the Turkish city of Istanbul in protest against the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Clashes have erupted between riot police and anti-government protesters at Istanbul’s Taksim Square as police use tear gas and water cannons to disperse protesters.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Rohani forms evaluation committees to offer strategies for next admin.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Communications satellite services provider Intelsat has suspended services to Iranian TV channels.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The US special representative on Afghanistan and Pakistan has arrived in Qatari capital city of Doha to hold controversial peace talks with the Taliban militants.

James Dobbins, the US envoy in charge of nascent dialogue with the group, arrived in Doha on Saturday after the militants opened an office in the Persian Gulf Arab monarchy.

The US officials said Dobbins will also take part in meetings between Secretary of State John Kerry and Qatari leaders scheduled for later Saturday. The discussions will lay the ground for a full-scale dialogue with the militant group.

President Barack Obama’s administration has supported peace talks with the Taliban after the US-led forces lost ground against the militants in recent months across Afghanistan.

Senior Pakistani officials have welcomed the dialogue between Taliban and the United States in Doha, but the Afghan government has expressed serious concerns about the ongoing US-led peace process with Taliban militants in Qatar.

On Thursday, Afghan Foreign Ministry released a statement expressing Kabulâ„¢s anger and frustration at the opening of Taliban office in Qatar.

“The manner in which the office was established was in clear breach of the principles and terms of references agreed with us by the US government,” the statement read.

Senior officials in Kabul say the move contradicts the US security guarantees, noting that the Taliban militants will be able to use the office to raise funds for their campaign in Afghanistan.

The Kabul government has suspended strategic talks with Washington to discuss the nature of US presence after foreign troops withdraw in 2014.

President Hamid Karzai has also announced that his government will not join any US negotiations with the Taliban unless the talks are led by the Afghans.

Meanwhile, Afghanistanâ„¢s High Peace Council stated that none of its members will travel to Qatar to sit at talks with the Taliban.

The council has been making efforts to initiate dialogue with discontented Afghans and militants who have engaged in warfare with the US-led forces and Kabul’s Western-backed government.

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 more than 11 years, insecurity remains across the country.

JR/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Turkish government has summoned German ambassador to Ankara amid rising tensions between the two countries over Turkish police heavy crackdown on anti-government protesters.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranâ„¢s Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi (R) and his Lebanese counterpart Adnan Mansour attend a joint press conference in Tehran on June 22, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The following report by the Israeli Intelligence news outlet Debka acknowledges that Al Nusrah rather than Syrian government forces have chemical weapons in their possession:

Turkish police round up Al Qaeda-linked Syrian Al Nusra terrorists in raids in Istanbul and southern cities near the Syrian border, Turkey police Friday arrested 12 members of al Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, Al Nusra Front. Found in their possession were four and a half pounds of sarin nerve gas, hand guns, grenades, bullets and documents for what the Turkish daily Zaman reported was a bomb attack on the Turkish town of Adana. (Debka, June 15, 2013, emphasis)

The Israeli intelligence news report quoted above contradicts the authoritative memo of the US intelligence community. It refutes the claims of US intelligence community which accuse Syrian government forces of using chemical weapons against the rebels.

It was on the basis of this US intelligence memo that Obama accused President Bashar Al Assad of having crossed the redline:

“Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year,”

White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said in a statement. “Our intelligence community has high confidence in that assessment given multiple, independent streams of information.”

“Obama has give notice to President Bashar Al Assad of ‘enormous consequences’ for having crossed the ‘red line’” by allegedly using chemical weapons.

In an unusual twist, the Israeli Debka report largely upholds the position taken by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin at the G-8 Summit in Northern Ireland.

Of significance, Debka also acknowledges that Al Nusrah —which is also supported covertly by Israel— is a terrorist organization. Moreover, Debka also confirms (without explicitly referring to Al Nusrah) that the US and NATO have delivered heavy weapons to the same Al Qaeda affiliated rebels in the Aleppo region bordering onto Turkey:

NATO and a number of European governments, most significantly the UK, have started airlifting heavy weapons to the Syrian rebels poised in Aleppo to fend off a major Syrian army offensive, according to debkafile’s exclusive military sources. They disclose that the first shipments were landed Monday night, June 17, and early Tuesday in Turkey and Jordan. They contained anti-air and tank missiles as well as recoilless 120 mm cannons mounted on jeeps. From there, they were transferred to rebel forces in southern Syria and Aleppo in the northwest. (Debka, June 18, 2013)

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Infowars.com
June 22, 2013

An Irish socialist politician called Obama out as a war criminal following the conclusion of the G8 in her country earlier this week.

Clare Daly told the Irish Parliament Obama is a “war criminal” and “hypocrite of the century” for his remarks concerning the Northern Ireland peace process while supporting al-Qaeda in Syria and conducting a drone program responsible for killing thousands, including innocent women and children.

“Is this person going for the hypocrite of the century award?” Daly asked. “Because we have to call things by their right names, and the reality is that by any serious examination, this man is a war criminal.”

The Irish Taoiseach, or prime minister, Enda Kenny, responded forcefully to Daly’s criticism of Obama and his visit to the country.

Kenny said the comments were a “disgrace” because Obama “wants to support [the Irish peace process] visibly, personally and with assistance from the US where 35 million Irish-Americans want this peace process to continue.”

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/corporatizing_national_security_what_it_means_20130622/

Posted on Jun 22, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/fact-check_the_nsa_and_sept_11_20130622/

Posted on Jun 22, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you’re reading it on someone else’s site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: ‘You Say What You Like, Because They Like What You Say’ – http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/alerts-2013/731-you-say-what-you-like-because-they-like-what-you-say.html

This article originally appeared on: RT

British government has not yet made a decision to provide arms to insurgents in Syria, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague says ahead of the so-called “Friends of Syria” meeting in Qatari capital Doha.

“On the much debated question of whether we should give lethal aid of any kind to the Syrian opposition, the position remains the same. We have taken no decision to do that,” Hague told reporters.

He also said any such decision would have to be debated in the parliament, adding that Britain has no immediate plans to supply weapons for the foreign-backed insurgents in the Arab country.

Hague and US Secretary of State John Kerry were among the top officials attending the Doha meeting to decide on Syria conflict.

Earlier on Friday, the militants announced that they had received new weapons that could lead to “changes” in war against the Syrian government.

The influx of new arms comes right after British media revealed that Saudi Arabia had sent the first batch of anti-tank missiles to the militants in the flashpoint city of Aleppo.

MOS/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Head of Iranâ„¢s Expediency Council Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (L) and Iranian president-elect Hassan Rohani meet on June 22, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Syrian government forces run along a street strewn with debris in Aleppo (file photo).

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Senior Egyptian opposition figure, Mohamed ElBaradei, has urged President Mohamed Morsi to resign ahead of mass anti-government protests scheduled to be held on June 30.

“For Egypt’s sake, I call on President Mohamed Morsi to resign and give us the opportunity to begin a new phase based on the principles of the revolution, which are freedom and social justice,” he said on Saturday.

ElBaradei added, “I would like to call on President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood to respond to the cries from all over Egypt.”

ElBaradei further noted that June 30 protests are intended to “correct the path” of the popular uprising that toppled former dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

The former UN nuclear agency chief also said it was time for “national reconciliation” to move forward.

“What is needed is a system based on free and fair elections with international and local monitoring (and) parliamentary elections to have all segments of society represented,” ElBaradei noted, adding, “We want the Egypt that the revolution rose up for.”

On Saturday, Morsi repeated his call for dialogue with the Egyptian opposition groups to forge a roadmap and eliminate the existing disagreements.

“I invite everyone for a balanced dialogue without preconditions to discuss what would achieve the interests of our nation, and to meet the aspirations of our people,” he said in an interview published in the state-owned Akhbar al-Youm newspaper.

Morsi also noted, “The dialogue shouldn’t start with crippling conditions, and it should come up with recommendations, not orders.”

“The call for protests on June 30 reflects an atmosphere of freedom granted to us by 2011 revolution.”

The Egyptian president also stated that Cairo government will however take all the necessary legal measures to face violence and vandalism.

“If the Egyptians choose someone else in the coming presidential elections, I will hand him the power in accordance with the constitution and the law,” Morsi said.

Egyptian activists and opposition leaders have gathered millions of petitions, calling for Morsiâ„¢s ouster.

They also seek to press him for an early presidential election through the June 30 demonstrations.

MP/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranâ„¢s Ambassador to Beirut Ghazanfar Roknabadi (L) meets with Lebanese Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A criminal complaint indicates former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden has been charged with three felonies. Two of the felonies are charges under the Espionage Act.

The complaint, filed on June 14, shows he was charged with “unauthorized communication of national defense information”–an Espionage Act violation–and “willful communication of classified communications intelligence information to an unauthorized person,” a violation of United States Code 798 prohibiting the disclosure of classified information and an offense under the Espionage Act.

Each charge carries a ten-year maximum sentence if convicted.

The Washington Post further reports that the complaint was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia. Not only is this jurisdiction where Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton, happens to be headquartered, but it is also where key prosecutions for espionage have been filed under President Barack Obama.

Snowden is the eighth person to be charged under the Espionage Act under Obama. This is more than all previous presidential administrations combined.

NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake was charged for espionage in April 2010 after he communicated information on surveillance programs to a Baltimore Sun reporter.

For disclosing classified information on FBI wiretaps to a blogger, FBI translator named Shamai Leibowitz was charged under the Espionage Act.

Pfc. Bradley Manning was charged with multiple violations of the Espionage Act in July 2010 after disclosing US government information to WikiLeaks.

Stephen Kim, a former State Department contractor, was charged in August 2010 for revealing classified information on North Korea to Fox News reporter James Rosen. (Rosen was labeled an “aider, abettor and co-conspirator” in the leak.)

In December 2010, a former CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, was charged under the Espionage Act after he communicated with New York Times reporter James Risen about Iran’s nuclear program in the 1990s. (The Obama Justice Department has fought in the courts to have a judge require Risen to testify against Sterling.)

John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, was charged under the Espionage Act in January 2012 after he shared information related to a rendition operation with reporter Matthew Cole.

A much lesser-known individual, James Hitselberger, a former Navy linguist, was charged with violating the Espionage Act for providing classified documents to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

The Espionage Act charges were dropped in the cases of Drake, Kiriakou and Leibowitz. Manning has pled guilty to lesser offenses but not the espionage charges. Hitselberger, Kim and Sterling’s cases are all still pending. [Kiriakou’s serving a 30-month sentence in a prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, after pleading guilty to violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.]

Both Drake and Kiriakou’s cases went through the Eastern District of Virginia. Sterling’s case is pending in the same jurisdiction.

“The Eastern District of Virginia is the most conservative court in the country,” according to Jesselyn Radack, a director of the Government Accountability Project’s national security and human rights division who has defended national security whistleblowers. “My experience with espionage cases there is that, even if you get assigned a progressive judge, the deck is still stacked against you.”

This jurisdiction is also where a grand jury investigation into WikiLeaks has been empaneled. The investigation has been broad and, as Sam Knight reported for The Nation, it has used “subpoena powers rarely wielded against bloggers and journalists.”

The Espionage Act is a law from 1917 that was intended to criminalize individuals who engaged in spying, not leakers or whistleblowers. It was not initially used to prosecute government employees who passed on information to a reporter or a media organization. But, under Obama, the Justice Department has exercised wide discretion and interpreted the law as one that can be used to criminalize government employees who blow the whistle on corruption or share information on operations, policies or programs with the press. They have used to prosecute them as if they are “insiders,” “informers,” or “spies.”

President Barack Obama came into office committed to “protecting” whistleblowers.

Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

However, when Congress passed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, the White House coordinated with Congress so that employees at national security or intelligence agencies would not be covered. That means, when Obama had the opportunity to make it easier for employees to go through proper channels when exposing corruption or wrongdoing, he did the exact opposite.

Radack and her colleague at GAP, Kathleen McClellan, have written:

These “leak” prosecutions send a chilling message to public servants, as they are contrary to President Barack Obama’s pledge of openness and transparency. The vast majority of American citizens do not take issue with the proposition that some things should be kept secret, such as sources and methods, nuclear designs, troop movements, and undercover identities. However, the campaign to flush out media sources smacks of retaliation and intimidation. The Obama administration is right to protect information that might legitimately undermine national security or put Americans at risk. However, it does not protect national security interests when it brings cases against whistleblowers who divulge information that communicates important information to the public; sparks meaningful dialogue; or exposes fraud, waste, abuse, illegality, or potential dangers to public health and safety. A free and open democratic government welcomes debate. Stifling information violates that democratic principle.

The Justice Department does not have to identify or prove that any harm to national security has occurred. They only have to prove that a person had ”reason to believe” information could be used to the injury of the United States.”

The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer highlighted, when Drake was still charged with violating the Espionage Act:

…Because reporters often retain unauthorized defense documents, Drake’s conviction would establish a legal precedent making it possible to prosecute journalists as spies. ‘It poses a grave threat to the mechanism by which we learn most of what the government does,’ [Mort] Halperin [of the Open Society Institute] says…

That shows what these “leak” prosecutions can do to freedom of the press.

Now, the “theft of government property” charge falls under United States Code 641 or a code against the “embezzlement of government property.” This is also a code that Manning is accused of violating multiple times.

The defense in Manning’s case has argued that the prosecutors must prove that the information disclosed without authorization was a “thing of value” and Manning intended to deprive the government of the use or benefit of this “property” in order for him to be convicted of this offense.

Snowden is still in Hong Kong. He has reportedly considered seeking asylum and/or citizenship in Iceland. There have been reports about a businessman connected to WikiLeaks being willing to fly Snowden on a private jet to Iceland. However, Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jonsdottir has urged Snowden not to board any private jet to Iceland.

“I have worked with asylum seekers in Iceland. I would not recommend that path for #Snowden. Citizenship offers the only real protection,” she tweeted. She added that Iceland had a “terrible track record when it comes to turning back asylum seekers.” And, “There is much general support for Snowden among the general public in Iceland, thus it is still an option to seek citizenship.” But she hoped he would not take any risks with jets.

Going forward, the US has asked the Hong Kong detain Snowden but a very real problem the United States government may have is that Snowden has been charged with espionage.

The extradition treaty the United States has with Hong Kong happens to have an exception for political offenses. Espionage is considered a political offense. So, Hong Kong is more likely to push back on an extradition request because the charges are not limited to the charges of theft and conversion of government property.

Update 

The three individuals charged under the Espionage Act prior to the eight under Obama were Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower charged under President Richard Nixon, Samuel T. Morison, a Navy civilian analyst who was charged under President Ronald Reagan and Lawrence Franklin, a Pentagon analyst charged under President George W. Bush.

Morison leaked photographs of Soviet ships to alert America to what he perceived as a new threat. Franklin leaked information on Iran to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

These are not the only people charged under the Espionage Act under previous presidents. These are just the ones charged with leaking information.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Training for rebel forces covers the use of anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons and has been carried out at bases in Jordan and Turkey since late last year, the newspaper reported, citing unnamed US officials and rebel commanders.

The two-week courses, for about 20 to 45 fighters at a time, began last November at a new US base in the desert in southwest Jordan, it said.

The report came days after the Obama administration announced it had approved the arming of Syrian rebels, though analysts said the United States likely would avoid providing sophisticated guided anti-tank or anti-aircraft weapons.

The Central Intelligence Agency typically leads covert training and arming of fighters in foreign conflicts, while military special operations forces can be assigned to covert missions overseen by the spy agency.

The CIA and the White House declined to comment on the report.

Rebels from the Free Syrian Army were being trained on Russian-designed 14.5-millimeter anti-tank rifles, anti-tank missiles, and 23-millimeter anti-aircraft weapons, according the report, citing an unnamed rebel commander in the Syrian province of Dara helping with weapons acquisitions.

“Those from the CIA, we would sit and talk with them during breaks from training and afterward, they would try to get information on the situation,” the commander was quoted as saying.

US special operations troops selected the rebels to be trained as the American military was setting up supply lines in the region to channel non-lethal items, such as uniforms and radios, to the opposition forces.

The rebels were promised powerful anti-tank weapons and other arms but shipments from Qatar, Saudi Arabia and other Arab states took months to arrive and failed to live up to the expectations of the opposition, the commander told the paper.

But on Friday a rebel spokesman said the opposition fighters have received new types of weapons that could “change the course of the battle.”

The announcement came a day before a meeting in Qatar of the “Friends of Syria” group of nations that support the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

“We’ve received quantities of new types of weapons, including some that we asked for and that we believe will change the course of the battle on the ground,” Free Syrian Army spokesman Louay Muqdad told AFP.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

In Brazil, protest organizers have announced that they will continue with their anti-government demonstrations in the city of Sao Paulo.

The Sao Paulo Movement, MPL, made the announcement on Friday, also denying reports suggesting that the gatherings have been suspended in the countryâ„¢s largest city.

On Friday, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff offered a series of reforms in order to bring to an end days of anti-government protests across the country.

She has promised to invest oil revenues in education and invite foreign doctors to areas lacking proper health system.

The demonstrations started on June 2, in protest against hikes in transport fares, however, they continued after the government reversed the increase in bus and subway fares.

Brazilian cities of Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo have witnessed heavy clashes between police and the protesters. At least one person has been killed.

Protesters have now broadened their demands asking the government to address such issues as high taxes, inflation, corruption, and poor public services.

On June 20, some 300,000 people protested in the city of Rio de Janeiro, while in Sao Paolo more than 100,000 demonstrators took to the streets.

The protesters are also angry at more than USD 26 billion of public money that will be spent on the two major sporting events, the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, slated to be held in Latin Americaâ„¢s largest country.

SZH/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

On Friday evening, the Obama administration announced that it had filed three charges under seal on June 14 in US District Court in Alexandria, Virginia. The charges are stealing government property, unauthorized communication of national defense information, and willful communication of classified information.

These charges carry, in aggregate, a maximum sentence of 30 years in prison. In the course of any indictment, however, additional charges can be added. Prominent Democrats and Republicans have denounced Snowden for “treason,” an offense that carries a potential death sentence.

Since Snowden’s initial revelations of massive and illegal government spying on millions of people in the US and around the world, the American ruling class, abetted by the media, has carried out a systematic campaign of vilification. After revealing himself to be the source of leaks to the Guardian and Washington Post concerning secret National Security Agency (NSA) spying programs, Snowden has gone into hiding, quite justifiably fearing for his safety.

There is not a shred of legitimacy in the charges against Snowden. He is not a criminal. He is an individual who, at immense personal risk, has sought to reveal to the population of the United States and the world a state conspiracy against the democratic rights of the people.

The real criminals are the accusers. No amount of mudslinging or lies can cover up the criminality that Snowden has exposed. The young whistleblower is being charged as a spy for revealing the biggest spying operation in American history.

The documents released to date by Snowden expose spying programs that seize the records of all phone calls made in the US, allowing the government to quickly determine the social and political connections of every person in the country. Other programs intercept and store billions of Internet communications, which are made accessible without a warrant to US spy agencies.

These programs directly violate the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which bans warrantless searches and seizures.

On Friday, the day the charges were filed, the Guardian reported new documents showing that the UK government is directly accessing the communications, emails, Facebook messages and Internet history of tens of millions of people for examination by government agencies in both the United States and Britain.

These revelations show that top government officials in both countries–including President Obama himself–have lied deliberately and repeatedly. There is more than enough evidence for impeachment proceedings.

The government has rushed to extradite and jail or kill Snowden because it knows he has thus far revealed only a portion of the vast police state apparatus it is concealing from the population.

The administration bringing espionage charges is the same administration that kills American citizens without warrant or trial, indefinitely detains prisoners without due process, and spies on the communications of the press and the public.

In being charged under the reactionary Espionage Act, Snowden joins other targets of state repression such as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Victor Berger, Jacob Abrams, Daniel Ellsberg, Anthony Russo, Thomas Drake and Bradley Manning. He is the seventh person to be tried for espionage by the Obama administration–more than all previous administrations combined.

Underlying the assault on democratic rights in the United States are powerful historical and social processes. Democratic forms of rule are not compatible with endless war and historically unprecedented levels of social inequality.

In preparation for mass working class opposition to its reactionary policies, the American ruling class, under the cover of the bogus “war on terror,” is effectively declaring the US Constitution and its Bill of Rights null and void.

The Socialist Equality Party and the World Socialist Web Site call on workers and youth to come to the defense of Snowden, along with Bradley Manning, who is currently facing potentially capital charges of “aiding the enemy,” and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been taking refuge for more than a year in the Ecuadorian embassy in Britain.

All sections of the political and media establishment–“liberal” and conservative, Democratic and Republican–have joined in witch-hunting Snowden and defending the NSA, CIA and Pentagon. Their complete indifference to massive violations of constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties underscores the absence of any serious commitment to democratic rights within the ruling class.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed on Friday that the UK intelligence agency GCHQ and the NSA record the content of phone calls, email messages, Facebook posts and browser histories of tens of millions of people. By tapping into fiber-optic cables–the infrastructure through which all Internet traffic must pass–the two agencies have created a systematic procedure for procuring, filtering and storing private communications.

The leak is the latest in a series that have left the US and UK governments scurrying to cover up their deeply antidemocratic maneuvers with scripted lies. It comes one day after the release of secret FISA Court documents showing the NSA has almost complete latitude to monitor the communications of US residents (See, “NSA monitoring US communications without a warrant, documents show”)

Hours after the release of the latest documents, the US government announced that it was filing charges against Snowden under the Espionage Act, which contains a possible penalty of execution.

“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls,” President Obama said in a public speech two weeks ago. UK Foreign Minister William Hague told MPs last week that there is “a strong framework of democratic accountability and oversight” within the national intelligence apparatus.

According to documents leaked to the Guardian, and reported by Glenn Greenwald, however, GCHQ and the NSA have set up a complex scheme by which the intelligence agencies collect data and content from the communications of at least tens of millions of people. Officials monitor the data and content of those communications and then store what they deem valuable.

Described by GCHQ with the revealing titles “Mastering the Internet” and “Global Telecoms Exploitation,” the programs expose the repeated claims of President Obama and his coconspirators as outright lies.

Through the “Tempora” program, the two agencies have been tapping and storing hundreds of petabytes of data from a majority of the fiber-optic cables in the UK over the past 18 months. The NSA has a similar program in the US, as revealed in an Associated Press report last week.

First, GCHQ handles 600 million “telephone events” each day by tapping over 200 fiber-optic cables, including those that connect the UK to the US. According to the Guardian, GCHQ is able to collect data at a rate “equivalent to sending all the information in all the books in the British Library 192 times every 24 hours” by processing data from a minimum of 46 fiber-optic cables simultaneously.

The data is then transmitted to a government database and shared with the NSA, which is given top clearance. Lawyers for the GCHQ told their American counterparts that it was “your call” as to what limitations should be in place for data sifting and storage.

According to the leaked documents, these massive databases have been built up over the past several years through widespread corporate collaboration. GCHQ colludes with an array of companies it calls “intercept partners,” and sometimes forces them to hand over huge quantities of data for inspection and storage. The corporate agreements were kept highly guarded under fears that public knowledge of the collusion would lead to “high-level political fallout.”

Once the data is collected, the agencies then filter information through a process known as Massive Volume Reduction (MVR). Through this process, information is pared down to specific individuals, email addresses, or phone numbers. The NSA identified 31,000 “selector” terms, while GCHQ identified 40,000. The leaked documents reveal that a majority of the information extracted is content, including word-for-word email, text and phone recordings.

Through Tempora, GCHQ and the NSA have set up Internet buffers that allow the agencies to watch data accumulate in real-time and store it for less than a week for content or 30 days for metadata.

“Internet buffers represent an exciting opportunity to get direct access to enormous amounts of GCHQ’s special source data,” agents explained in the leaked documents. Valuable information is presumably removed from this temporary buffer and kept on file in intelligence storage facilities.

This information filtration system is not aimed at eliminating the possibility of storing the data of innocent people. In fact, this is precisely the purpose of the surveillance programs. Rather, unnecessary information is sifted out because the governments do not yet have the ability to store such vast quantities of communications content and metadata.

Despite these technological limitations, the immensity of the Tempora program was best described by GCHQ attorneys who acknowledged that listing the number of people targeted by the program would be impossible because “this would be an infinite list which we couldn’t manage.”

GCHQ officials bragged that its surveillance program “produces larger amounts of metadata than NSA,” and were told by GCHQ attorneys that “[w]e have a light oversight regime compared with the US.” The latter statement is extraordinary given the fact that the FISA Court allows the NSA to operate almost entirely without constraint.

Friday’s revelations highlight the international character of the global surveillance programs. Far from being satisfied by storing the content of the communications of its own residents, the US and UK governments are working together to create an unprecedented database of international intelligence.

The intimacy of the two spy agencies is evidenced by an order given by NSA head Keith Alexander in 2008: “Why can’t we collect all the signals, all the time? Sounds like a good summer homework project for [British and American spy center] Menwith!”

Snowden noted Friday that “it’s not just a US problem. The UK has a huge dog in this fight. They [GCHQ] are worse than the US.”

Just like their American counterparts, the GCHQ attorneys have attempted to place a legal veneer over the facially illegal spying operations of the government.

GCHQ lawyers have invoked paragraph four of section 8 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) to run around the legal requirement that intelligence officials acquire a warrant before performing a wiretap. Since this would have required GCHQ to acquire a warrant for every person in the UK, the attorneys instead have claimed that they can perform indiscriminate data mining operations with a “certificate” from a minister.

In a briefing document released by Snowden, GCHQ attorneys claim that these certificates “cover the entire range of GCHQ’s intelligence production.”

Under Ripa, GCHQ officials may also seek a Sensitive Targeting Authority (STA), which would allow them to spy on any UK citizen “anywhere in the world” or on a foreign person in the UK.

A lawyer for GCHQ also noted in the secret documents that the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, which oversees the intelligence agencies, has “always been exceptionally good at understanding the need to keep our work secret,” and that a tribunal set up to monitor the agencies has “so far always found in our favor.”

Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, to which the UK is a signatory, states: “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence,” and that “[t]here shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society…”

In Britain as much as the United States, the ruling class is engaged in activity that is in flagrant violation of these democratic principles.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Railway workers in Northern Ireland will take part in the strike action over pay and terms of conditions, it has been revealed.

Over 150 railway staff, employed by Translink on Northern Ireland Railways, will go on strike for 24 hours on Monday June 24, GMB union says.

According to GMB, members who are mainly from the conductor and station staff grades believe they are being asked to give away too much to fund increases for other groups who have not.

MB Regional Organizer said: “GMB members in Translink on Northern Ireland Railways have voted to take part in action, up to and including strike action,” Michael Mulholland, GMB Regional Organizer said.

Å“The action is in relation to an ongoing dispute with the employer over pay and terms and conditions, as well as a history of poor industrial relations,” he added.

MOS/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

On March 21, Obama received Israel’s Medal of Distinction. It’s also called the President’s Medal.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
June 22, 2013

Despite FBI assertions to the contrary, journalist Michael Hastings was under investigation by the FBI. In an email sent out hours before his death, Hastings said his “close friends and associates” were being harassed by the FBI and he was going to “go off the radar for a bit,” in other words into hiding.

At 2:32 into this video, Michael Hastings says the Obama administration is at war with the press.

“Perhaps if the authorities arrive” at the news website Buzzfeed, they “may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues,” he wrote.

Buzzfeed editor Ben Smith added that Hastings had told friends and family “he was concerned that he was under investigation” for his journalism.

Wikileaks also confirmed that Hastings was under investigation by the FBI.

The establishment media is attempting to portray theories about the journalist’s death as unfounded and irresponsible conspiracies. “Since Hastings’ death early Tuesday, wild conspiracy theories have bloomed on the Internet, implying that he was murdered by powerful forces wanting to silence him,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported on Thursday, insinuating that Wikileaks is attempting to exploit the journalist’s death.

During a Reddit interview last year, Hastings said the military had repeatedly investigated him. “The Pentagon has launched three investigations into stories I’ve done over the past 18 months under the pretense of finding the wrongdoing we were exposing. But the investigations were really about creating a Pentagon approved official document to criticize journalism they don’t like,” he said.

Hastings also talked about government attempts to control the internet. “On the one hand, we’re already bombarded with so much government propaganda, it might be hard to notice,” he wrote. “But I think we’d definitely see a more direct targeting of certain communities within the U.S. with propaganda that was produced overseas. I think what we’d also see is all sorts of disturbing online and internet initiatives produced by the government. The Pentagon is already trying to do this.”

Prior to his death, Hastings was working on a story about Jill Kelly, the military socialite who received email messages from Paula Broadwell, the biographer who had an affair with former general and CIA director David Petraeus. Kelly believes the FBI leaked her name to the media to discredit her.

Earlier this month, Buzzfeed posted a final article by Hastings, “Why Do Democrats Love to Spy On Americans.”

As we noted on Thursday, Hastings was renowned for being “only interested in writing stories someone didn’t want him to write – often his subjects,” according to Buzzflash editor Ben Smith. “He knew that there are certain truths that nobody has an interest in speaking, ones that will make you both your subjects and their enemies uncomfortable. They’re stories that don’t get told because nobody in power has much of an interest in telling them.”

The front cover of a local magazine shows Edward Snowden, a former CIA employee who leaked top-secret documents about sweeping U.S. surveillance programs, in Hong Kong Saturday, June 22, 2013. Hong Kong was silent Saturday on whether the former National Security Agency contractor should be extradited to the United States now that he has been charged with espionage. (AP Photo/Kin Cheung)

The US Department of Justice has filed criminal charges against Edward Snowden, the young whistleblower who revealed details of the US governments’ massive secret surveillance operations.

The charges against Snowden include espionage, theft, and conversion of government property.

The Washington Post reported Friday night that the Obama Administration is preparing an extradition request to the Hong Kong authorities.

The Guardian is reporting that legal experts say that any attempt by the US to extradite Snowden from Hong Kong for espionage could take years and be blocked by China.

The US criminal complaint was filed with a federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia and a provisional arrest warrant had been issued, officials said.

Mr Snowden was also charged with ‘unauthorized communication of national defence information’ and ‘willful communication of classified communications intelligence.’

Each of the charges carries a maximum 10-year prison sentence. The complaint is dated June 14th but it was made public only on Friday by the Washington Post.

Snowdens current whereabouts are unknown.

Julian Assange, founder of the Wikileaks, issued a statement supporting Mr Snowden.

“The US government is spying on each and every one of us, but it is Edward Snowden who is charged with espionage for tipping us off,” said Mr Assange.

* * *

Meanwhile, the petition to the Obama White House to pardon Edward Snowden has surpassed the 100,000 signature benchmark need to receive an official White House response.

# # #

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

The aggressor nations in the war on Syria are now talking about “humanitarian aid” to support the Al Qaeda rebels they themselves sent into the country.

But, as Michel Chossudovsky argues, the imperial powers need to be held accountable for their part in fomenting the conflict in the country, and should be made to pay war reparations.

Find out more in this week’s GRTV Feature Interview.

 Is president Obama setting the stage for a “humanitarian intervention” by casually accusing the Syrian president of killing his own people?

“Following a deliberative review, our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin, on a small scale against the opposition multiple times in the last year,”

White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said in a statement. “Our intelligence community has high confidence in that assessment given multiple, independent streams of information.”

“Obama has give notice to President Bashar Al Assad of ‘enormous consequences’ for having crossed the ‘red line’” by allegedly using chemical weapons.

Read more:

The Forbidden Truth: The U.S. is Channeling Chemical Weapons to Al Qaeda in Syria, Obama is a Liar and a Terrorist By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, June 14, 2013

The Broader Implications of Obama’s Support of Al Nusrah

The blowback thesis is now defunct. The US has never ceased to support Al Qaeda. These terrorist organizations were created by US intelligence and supported by Washington. The blowback thesis is refuted not only by Obama’s “overt support” of Al Nusrah but also with regard to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), an Al Qaeda affiliate, which was directly supported by NATO from the outset of the insurgency and Libya bombing campaign in 2011.

The “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) has become an increasingly fragile concept. Waging a “War on Terrorism” with the active participation of an Al Qaeda affiliated organization constitutes an obvious fallacy, a big lie, a non sequitur.

The propaganda and media disinformation campaign behind the “Global War on Terrorism” has also entered a dead alley. Going after the terrorists by supporting the terrorists? Will the American public support a government which funnels billions of tax dollars to a terrorist organization as a means to “combating terrorism”?

The Pentagon’s post-911 military doctrine is predicated on the “Global War on Terrorism”. It is a consensus within US military. It is used in the recruitment, training and indoctrination of US forces.

Will American servicemen and women accept to swallow the big lie and fight in what visibly constitutes a fake “war on terrorism”.

The Criminalisation of the US State

President Obama’s “overt” support to Syria’s Al Qaeda rebels “opens up a can of worms”.

How are we to categorize an American President who says he is committed to fighting Al Qaeda, while at the same time supporting Al Qaeda?

The entire Homeland Security doctrine tumbles like a deck of cards.

The US government is in blatant violation of its own counter-terrorism legislation.

 To read more click here

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Senior Egyptian opposition figure, Mohamed ElBaradei, has urged President Mohamed Morsi to resign ahead of mass anti-government protests on June 30.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has once again called for dialogue with the opposition in order to reduce political tensions ahead of an upcoming rally planned by his opponents.

On Saturday, in an interview published in the state-run Akhbar al-Youm newspaper, Morsi called upon all political parties and factions to engage in dialogue in order to settle their differences.

“I have said it before. I urge everyone to sit together to discuss what would achieve the interests of our nation,” he said.

Morsiâ„¢s call for a nationwide dialogue comes a day after thousands of his supporters took to the streets of the capital Cairo on Friday to renew allegiance with him.

Meanwhile, Egyptian security officials say the countryâ„¢s airports will raise their alert level to “high” ahead of June 30 event by opposition-backed protesters.

“An emergency plan will be put in place from June 28 until July 1,” the head of Cairo airport security, General Magdy al-Yussri, told reporters.

Airport officials have also announced plans to provide security personnel with the necessary arms and equipment Å“to protect these vital establishments,” fearing that the opposition rally could get violent.

The opposition protest rally is expected to call for the immediate resignation of Morsi and a snap presidential election.

The president’s supporters have strongly condemned the upcoming opposition rally as a coup against democracy.

On June 30, Morsi marks one year in power as Egypt’s first freely elected president.

Egypt has witnessed anti-government protests since Morsi took office in June 2012 in landmark elections held following the ouster of the country’s former dictator, Hosni Mubarak.

The opposition groups accuse the government of being dominated by Muslim Brotherhood.

Morsiâ„¢s supporters, however, say the president is cleansing Egyptian institutions of corruption. They also believe that he needs time to put into practice the principles of the 2011 revolution.

MT/JR/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Greece govt. holds reshuffle talks after party defects

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Two Indian policemen have been killed in a militant attack in the Indian-administered Kashmir region, officials say.

Senior superintendent of police in Srinagar, Syed Ashiq Hussain Bukhari, said the police officers came under attack on Saturday, adding that the militants, armed with pistols, fired shots at two constables as they were on duty at Hari Singh High Street market.

He added that one constable died on the spot and another succumbed to his injuries later at hospital.

A girl also sustained gunshot wounds in her arm during the assault. Doctors say she is in a stable condition at hospital.

Security forces immediately cordoned off the busy market area, and launched a search for the attackers.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack, but Indian security officials suspect the Kashmiri militant group Hizbul Mujahideen of having a hand in the attack.

Saturday’s shootout took place just three days ahead of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s two-day visit to the Kashmir region, and has sounded the alarm in Indiaâ„¢s security circles.

Sonia Gandhi, chairwoman of the ruling United Progressive Alliance, is expected to accompany Singh.

Kashmir lies at the heart of more than 60 years of hostility between India and Pakistan. Both countries claim the region in full but each only has control over a section of the territory.

Over the past two decades, the conflict in Kashmir has left over 47,000 people dead by the official count, although other sources say the death toll could be as high as 90,000.

MP/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has granted clemency to 1,249 prisoners ahead of the birthday of the 12th Shia Imam, Mahdi.

On Saturday, the Leader agreed to a request by Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani to pardon 1,249 prisoners or commute their remaining jail terms.

Imam Mahdi was born the 15th of Sha’ban, the eighth month of the lunar calendar.

Every year numerous festivities are held across the country to mark the revered Imam Mahdi’s birthday, one of Iran’s most important national holidays.

MYA/HGH

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

UK regulator identifies £27.1 billion bank capital deficits.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

File photo shows extent of damage to the Shia Muslim mosque in Peshawar on June 21, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranâ„¢s ambassador to Syria says the election of a new president in Iran will not change the Islamic Republicâ„¢s foreign policy on strategic issues.

Å“Iran’s foreign policy on strategic issues is determined based on unchanging values and principles and it does not change when people [in different positions] change,” Mohammad-Reza Raouf-Sheibani said on Saturday.

The ambassador said that the principles of the Iranâ„¢s foreign policy are constant and any elected president in the country will continue to uphold the policies of the Islamic Republic.

Commenting on the upcoming Geneva II conference on Syria, Raouf-Sheibani said that the meeting Å“could both be an opportunity and a threat to Syria.”

Å“The US and the West fear Iranâ„¢s position and power in the region and are trying to prevent the Islamic Republic from attending the meeting so that it (Iran) will not ruin their plans for the region.”

The unrest in Syria erupted over two years ago and many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security personnel, have been killed in the violence.

On May 7, Russia and the United States agreed in Moscow to convene an international conference on Syria, which will serve as a follow-up to an earlier Geneva meeting held in June 2012.

Iran has repeatedly expressed its opposition to any foreign intervention in Syria’s internal affairs, stressing that dialog, national reconciliation and free elections are the keys to resolving the unrest.

Reports show the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country and a large number of the militants fighting in Syria are foreign nationals.

PG/HGH

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Protesters clash with Turkish riot police during a protest against the demolition of the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul on May 31, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

File photo shows extent of damage to the Shia Muslim mosque in Peshawar on June 21, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranâ„¢s ambassador to Syria says the election of a new president in Iran will not change the Islamic Republicâ„¢s foreign policy on strategic issues.

Å“Iran’s foreign policy on strategic issues is determined based on unchanging values and principles and it does not change when people [in different positions] change,” Mohammad-Reza Raouf-Sheibani said on Saturday.

The ambassador said that the principles of the Iranâ„¢s foreign policy are constant and any elected president in the country will continue to uphold the policies of the Islamic Republic.

Commenting on the upcoming Geneva II conference on Syria, Raouf-Sheibani said that the meeting Å“could both be an opportunity and a threat to Syria.”

Å“The US and the West fear Iranâ„¢s position and power in the region and are trying to prevent the Islamic Republic from attending the meeting so that it (Iran) will not ruin their plans for the region.”

The unrest in Syria erupted over two years ago and many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security personnel, have been killed in the violence.

On May 7, Russia and the United States agreed in Moscow to convene an international conference on Syria, which will serve as a follow-up to an earlier Geneva meeting held in June 2012.

Iran has repeatedly expressed its opposition to any foreign intervention in Syria’s internal affairs, stressing that dialog, national reconciliation and free elections are the keys to resolving the unrest.

Reports show the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country and a large number of the militants fighting in Syria are foreign nationals.

PG/HGH

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Protesters clash with Turkish riot police during a protest against the demolition of the Taksim Gezi Park in Istanbul on May 31, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A UN official says 71 members of the terrorist Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MKO) have been transferred from Iraq to Albania following a rocket attack on Camp Liberty.

The attack on Camp Liberty a week ago has “once again shown how important it is to relocate the residents to third countries as quickly as possible,” UN special envoy to Iraq Martin Kobler said in a statement.

“A total of 71 men and women now have safely arrived in Albania and have benefited from the government of Albania’s offer to accept 210 of the camp’s residents,” he said.

Kobler added that Germany had also proposed to accept around 100 MKO members.

On June 20, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki requested the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) to remove MKO terrorists from the country as soon as possible.

Reuters reported on June 14 that two MKO members were killed and more than 17 were wounded in a rocket attack on Camp Liberty in western Baghdad.

In another attack on Camp Liberty near the Iraqi capital on February 9, at least seven MKO members were killed and more than 50 others were wounded.

The MKO — listed as a terrorist organization by much of the international community — fled Iran in 1986 for Iraq, where it enjoyed the support of Iraq’s executed dictator Saddam Hussein, and set up its camp near the Iranian border.

The group is notorious for carrying out numerous terrorist acts against Iranian civilians and officials, involvement in the bloody repression of the 1991 Shia Muslims in southern Iraq, and the massacre of Iraqi Kurds in the country’s north under Saddam.

In December 2011, the United Nations and Baghdad agreed to relocate some 3,000 MKO members from Camp New Iraq, formerly known as Camp Ashraf, in Diyala Province to Camp Liberty — a former US military base near Baghdad International Airport.

Tehran has repeatedly called on the Iraqi government to expel the terrorist group, but the US has been blocking the expulsion by pressuring the Iraqi government.

MYA/HGH

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranian energy official Ahmad Tavalaei has rejected reports about a cyberattack shutting down the Oil Ministryâ„¢s websites.

The head of the Communications and Information Technology of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) said on Saturday that no cyberattack had been carried out against the Internet and communication systems of the Oil Ministry.

Å“The website of the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and Oil Ministry were temporarily shut down due to a technical problem that is being resolved,” Tavalaei explained.

The Iranian official pointed to the high network security of the Oil Ministryâ„¢s website and said the ministryâ„¢s information will not be compromised even in the event of a cyberattack.

In late 2011, Iran launched a cyber defense headquarters tasked with preventing computer worms from breaking into or stealing data from the country’s maximum-security networks, including nuclear facilities, power plants, data centers and banks.

In June 2010, Iranian officials had identified another virus called Stuxnet, and averted damage to the country’s industrial sites and resources.

MYA/HGH/SL

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Tens of thousands of workers and jobless people have taken part in a rally in the Italian capital, Rome, in protest against the countryâ„¢s rising unemployment rate and unfair taxes.

Italyâ„¢s three largest labor union confederations, the CGIL, CISL, and the UIL, organized the Saturday rally.

The protesters slammed the government of Prime Minister Enrico Letta for imposing tough austerity measures, while also calling for an end to the high jobless rate.

They demanded Lettaâ„¢s government to deliver more than empty rhetoric with regard to the crisis.

“We can’t accept these continuous promises that aren’t translated into decisions that give a change of direction,” the countryâ„¢s largest union CGILâ„¢s Susan Camusso said.

The protest on Saturday is the first of such demonstrations to be held since Letta took office two months ago.

Italy has an unemployment rate of 12 percent, with more than 40 percent of Italians under the age of 24 being without a job.

Italians have been staging protests against high unemployment, economic adversity, and hardship over a series of government-imposed austerity packages in the recent past.

Tough austerity measures, spending cuts, and pension changes have stirred serious concerns for many people already grappling with the European countryâ„¢s ailing economy.

Italy started to experience recession after its economy contracted by 0.2 percent in the third quarter of 2011 and by 0.7 percent in the yearâ„¢s fourth quarter.

Over the past decade, Italy has been the slowest growing economy in the eurozone.

The worsening debt crisis has forced EU governments to adopt harsh austerity measures and tough economic reforms, triggering incidents of social unrest and massive protests in many European countries.

SZH/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

US Secretary of State John Kerry addresses the so-called “Friends of Syria” meeting in the Qatari capital, Doha, on June 22, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Britainâ„¢s Labour Party Leader Ed Miliband has said he would not make any promises on changes to the spending plans due to be unveiled by the Chancellor George Osborne next week.

Speaking at Labour’s National Policy Forum in Birmingham, Miliband said he would not be able to reverse the £11.5 billion of spending cuts to be set out by the Chancellor unless he can be Å“crystal clear” where the money would come from

Å“Our starting point for 2015-16 is that we won’t be able to reverse the cuts in day to day, current spending unless it is fully funded from savings elsewhere or extra revenue, not from more borrowing,” Miliband said.

He also added that the party needs to be Å“ruthless” about pursuing Labour’s public spending priorities if it wins next general election in 2015.

British Chancellor George Osborne is looking to find £11.5 billion in savings before making his Spending Review announcement on June 26.

MOS/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

DEBKAfile
June 22, 2013

The US decision to upgrade Syrian rebel weaponry has run into a major setback:DEBKAfile reveals that Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan phoned President Barack Obama in Berlin Wednesday, June 19, to report his sudden decision to shut down the Turkish corridor for the transfer of US and NATO arms to the Syrian rebels.

Against this background, the US President informed Congress Friday, June 22, that 700 combat-equipped American military personnel would remain in Jordan at the end of a joint US-Jordanian training exercise.

They would include crews of two Patriot anti-aircraft missile batteries and the logistics, command and communications personnel needed to support those units. The United States is also leaving behind from the war maneuver a squadron of 12 to 24 F-16 fighter jets at Jordan’s request. Some 300 US troops have been in Jordan since last year.

Erdogan’s decision will leave the Syrian rebels fighting in Aleppo virtually high and dry. The fall of Qusayr cut off their supplies of arms from Lebanon.

Full article here

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This article was posted: Saturday, June 22, 2013 at 7:15 am

Tags: terrorism, war

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

The White House refuses to confirm but says ‘substantial assistance’ is being provided.

David S. Cloud and Raja Abdulrahim
LA Times
June 22, 2013

WASHINGTON – White House officials refused to comment Friday on a Los Angeles Times report that CIA operatives and U.S. special operations troops have been secretly training Syrian rebels with anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons since late last year, saying only that the U.S. had increased its assistance to the rebellion.

The covert U.S. training at bases in Jordan and Turkey began months before President Obama approved plans to begin directly arming the opposition to Syrian President Bashar Assad, according to U.S. officials and rebel commanders.

“We have stepped up our assistance, but I cannot inventory for you all the elements of that assistance,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said. “We have provided and will continue to provide substantial assistance to the Syrian opposition, as well as the Supreme Military Council.”

The Supreme Military Council is the military arm of an umbrella group that represents more moderate rebel factions, including the Free Syrian Army.

Full article here

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This article was posted: Saturday, June 22, 2013 at 7:14 am

Tags: terrorism, war

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Related: Sheeple Waking Up To NSA Spying: Privacy Search Engines Booming

RT
June 22, 2013

Revelations about mounting government surveillance has people the world over looking for other, more private ways of going online.

Dr Katherine Albrecht, is a veteran privacy advocate and a spokesperson for StartPage, an alternative search engine…

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This article was posted: Saturday, June 22, 2013 at 7:16 am

Tags: big brother, domestic spying

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Paul Craig Roberts
Infowars.com
June 22, 2013

On June 19, 2013, US President Obama, hoping to raise himself above the developing National Security Agency (NSA) spy scandals, sought to associate himself with two iconic speeches made at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.

Fifty years ago, President John F. Kennedy pledged: “Ich bin ein Berliner”. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan challenged: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

Obama’s speech was delivered to a relatively small, specially selected audience of invitees. Even so, Obama spoke from behind bullet proof glass.

Obama’s speech will go down in history as the most hypocritical of all time. Little wonder that the audience was there by invitation only. A real audience would have hooted Obama out of Berlin.

Perhaps the most hypocritical of all of Obama’s statements was his proposal that the US and Russia reduce their nuclear weapons by one-third. The entire world, and certainly the Russians, saw through this ploy. The US is currently surrounding Russia with anti-ballistic missiles on Russia’s borders and hopes to leverage this advantage by talking Russia into reducing its weapons, thereby making it easier for Washington to target them. Obama’s proposal is clearly intended to weaken Russia’s nuclear deterrent and ability to resist US hegemony.

Obama spoke lofty words of peace, while beating the drums of war in Syria and Iran. Witness Obama’s aggressive policies of surrounding Russia with missile bases and establishing new military bases in the Pacific Ocean with which to confront China.

This is the same Obama who promised to close the Guantanamo Torture Prison, but did not; the same Obama who promised to tell us the purpose for Washington’s decade-long war in Afghanistan, but did not; the same Obama who promised to end the wars, but started new ones; the same Obama who said he stood for the US Constitution, but shredded it; the same Obama who refused to hold the Bush regime accountable for its crimes against law and humanity; the same Obama who unleashed drones against civilian populations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen; the same Obama who claimed and exercised power to murder US citizens without due process and who continues the Bush regime’s unconstitutional practice of violating habeas corpus and detaining US citizens indefinitely; the same Obama who promised transparency but runs the most secretive government in US history.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The tyrant’s speech of spectacular hypocrisy elicited from the invited audience applause on 36 occasions. Like so many others, Germans proved themselves willing to be used for Washington’s propaganda purposes.

Here was Obama, who consistently lies, speaking of “eternal truth.”

Here was Obama, who enabled Wall Street to rob the American and European peoples and who destroyed Americans’ civil liberties and the lives of vast numbers of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans, Pakistanis, Syrians, and others, speaking of “the yearnings of justice.” Obama equates demands for justice with “terrorism.”

Here was Obama, who has constructed an international spy network and a domestic police state, speaking of “the yearnings for freedom.”

Here was Obama, president of a country that has initiated wars or military action against six countries since 2001 and has three more Muslim countries—Syria, Lebanon, and Iran—in its crosshairs and perhaps several more in Africa, speaking of “the yearnings of peace that burns in the human heart,” but clearly not in Obama’s heart.

Obama has turned America into a surveillance state that has far more in common with Stasi East Germany than with the America of the Kennedy and Reagan eras. Strange, isn’t it, that freedom was gained in East Germany and lost in America.

At the Brandenburg Gate, Obama invoked the pledge of nations to “a Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” but Obama continues to violate human rights both at home and abroad.

Obama has taken hypocrisy to new heights. He has destroyed US civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. In place of a government accountable to law, he has turned law into a weapon in the hands of the government. He has intimidated a free press and prosecutes whistleblowers who reveal his government’s crimes. He makes no objection when American police brutalize peacefully protesting citizens. His government intercepts and stores in National Security Agency computers every communication of every American and also the private communications of Europeans and Canadians, including the communications of the members of the governments, the better to blackmail those with secrets. Obama sends in drones or assassins to murder people in countries with which the US is not at war, and his victims on most occasions turn out to be women, children, farmers, and village elders. Obama kept Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for nearly a year assaulting his human dignity in an effort to break him and obtain a false confession. In defiance of the US Constitution, Obama denied Manning a trial for three years. On Obama’s instructions, London denies Julian Assange free passage to his political asylum in Ecuador. Assange has become a modern-day Cardinal Mindszenty. [Jozsef Mindszenty was the leader of the Hungarian Catholic Church who sought refuge from Soviet oppression in the US Embassy in Budapest. Denied free passage by the Soviets, the Cardinal lived in the US Embassy for 15 years as a symbol of Soviet oppression.]

This is the Obama who asked at the orchestrated event at the Brandenburg Gate: “Will we live free or in chains? Under governments that uphold our universal rights, or regimes that suppress them? In open societies that respect the sanctity of the individual and our free will, or in closed societies that suffocate the soul?”

When the Berlin Wall came down, the Stasi Spy State that suffocates the soul moved to Washington. The Stasi is alive and well in the Obama regime.

Obama’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/06/19/remarks-president-obama-brandenburg-gate-berlin-germany

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the father of Reaganomics and the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury. He is a columnist and was previously the editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,” details why America is disintegrating.

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This article was posted: Saturday, June 22, 2013 at 7:15 am

Tags: big brother, domestic spying

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Mike Masnick
Tech Dirt
June 22, 2013

There’s been plenty of commentary concerning the latest NSA leak concerning its FISA court-approved “rules” for when it can keep data, and when it needs to delete it. As many of you pointed out in the comments to that piece – and many others are now exploring – the rules seem to clearly say that if your data is encrypted, the NSA can keep it. Specifically, the minimization procedures say that the NSA has to destroy the communication it receives once it’s determined as domestic unless they can demonstrate a few facts about it. As part of this, the rules note:

In the context of a cryptanalytic effort, maintenance of technical data basesrequires retention of all communications that are enciphered or reasonably believed to contain secret meaning, and sufficient duration may consist of any period of time during which encrypted material is subject to, or of use in, cryptanalysis.

In other words, if your messages are encrypted, the NSA is keeping them until they can decrypt them.

Full article here

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This article was posted: Saturday, June 22, 2013 at 7:17 am

Tags: big brother, domestic spying

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Infowars.com
June 22, 2013

If you don’t agree with President Obama, exercise your 1st amendment rights so together we can save our 4th amendment rights before it’s too late.

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This article was posted: Saturday, June 22, 2013 at 7:17 am

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Qatar, KSA as culpable as US in crimes committed in Syria: Iran cmdr.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A soldier serving with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A former security officer at Facebook was hired by the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2010, US media are reporting in a revelation that further blurs the line between social media and intelligence-gathering networks.

The controversy surrounding user privacy in the nebulous world of social media became more pronounced after it was revealed this week that Max Kelly, former chief security officer for Facebook, resigned from the social-media site to work for the NSA.

While some consider Kelly’s quiet job change a conflict of interest and a breach of trust, others say it is part of the “Neuland” (virgin territory), as German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the Internet, being mapped out by lightning advances in technology, and, by extension, intelligence-gathering requirements.

Kelly’s switch to the agency, which was first reported by The New York Times just this week, highlights the increasingly cozy relationship between Silicon Valley and the NSA. It also presents a deep dilemma for social media subscribers who enjoy all the advantages of on-line free assembly, yet must submit to the understanding that all of their personal information is free game for intelligence data-mining.

“Both hunt for ways to collect, analyse, and exploit large pools of data about millions of Americans,” The New York Times explained. “The only difference is that the NSA does it for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money.”

Although rumors have long persisted of some sort of unseemly relationship between Facebook, Yahoo, and other social media sites and the US intelligence community, the truth of the matter came home with a vengeance when CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden, 29, handed over hundreds of NSA documents to The Guardian and The Washington Post early this month.

Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong shortly after divulging his information, blew the whistle on an NSA program called Prism that collects correspondence and video conversations of foreigners using Internet services like Google, Skype, Yahoo, and Facebook.

The former CIA employee also provided documents showing the intelligence agency collects data on phone calls handled by the major US telephone companies. The Guardian reported of a top-secret court order telling telecoms provider Verizon to hand over the phone records of millions of US customers.

Snowden was charged with espionage by US federal prosecutors on Friday.

President Barack Obama defended the intelligence gathering work, saying his primary concern has always been accountability to the American people.  

“To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve abandoned freedom,” Obama told Charlie Rose, a talk show host. “My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather, are we setting up a system of checks and balances?”

James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said that the surveillance programs had helped thwart “dozens” of terrorist plots in the US and more than 20 other countries.

While the NSA collects and stores the phone records of millions of US citizens annually, it only pries into the contents when there is suspicion of a connection to terrorism, the letter said, adding that in 2012, fewer than 300 phone records were examined. 

Despite such assurances, the major social media sites were forced to respond to a wave of public nausea following the revelations. Facebook, with the government’s blessing, this month became the first social media provider to release aggregate numbers of requests by intelligence agents. The site devoted to connecting friends and family revealed in a blog that it received between 9,000 and 10,000 US requests for user data information in the second half of 2012, canvassing up to 19,000 of its users’ accounts.  

Facebook has more than 1 billion users worldwide.

According to The Times, quoting an anonymous source, the majority of the requests were “routine police inquiries.”

Facebook, however, is prohibited from revealing how many were orders issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which determines procedures for the surveillance and collection of “foreign intelligence information” between “foreign powers” and “agents of foreign powers” on US territory.

Some of the world’s internet powerhouses have allegedly been part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft jumped on board first, with collection beginning in December 2007, The Guardian reported. It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook, and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; then Apple in 2012.

Taming the internet beast

Technology analysts and intelligence officials seem generally unanimous in the opinion that the relationship between Silicon Valley and the US intelligence community will only continue to grow, albeit, they say, with an appropriate set of checks and balances, as Obama has recommended.

That is because Silicon Valley produces the goods — mountains of social media pages, as well as the sophisticated tools to sift through them — that intelligence agencies need in their endless fight against the handful of evildoers in the world.

The NSA is “one of Silicon Valley’s largest customers for what is known as data analytics, one of the valley’s fastest-growing markets,” The Times reported. In an effort to acquire the latest software technology, “US intelligence agencies invest in Silicon Valley start-ups, award classified contracts, and recruit technology experts like Mr. Kelly,” it continued.

In other words, the US intelligence community is investing into the very industries that can be later turned around and spied on.  

“We are all in these Big Data business models,” Ray Wang, a technology analyst and chief executive of Constellation Research, based in San Francisco, told the paper. “There are a lot of connections now because the data scientists and the folks who are building these systems have a lot of common interests.”

Naturally, this level of collaboration between two seemingly incongruent industries — the intelligence agencies on the one hand, and the freedom-loving social media sites on the other — is bound to raise many eyebrows among watchdog groups, especially since more fruit may yet fall from the intelligence cart that Snowden hauled away with him.

The most recent fallout from Snowden’s shenanigans involved Skype, the Internet-based calling service. According to information acquired by The New York Times, the company had its own secret program, dubbed Project Chess, “to explore the legal and technical issues in making Skype calls readily available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials.”  

One of the documents made public by Edward Snowden says that Skype joined Prism on Feb. 6, 2011.

In light of such revelations, it is going to take some time for the major Internet companies to prove that, despite the damaging information provided by Snowden, social media providers, like Facebook, Yahoo, and Skype really are working on behalf of the public rather than the intelligence agencies.

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This article originally appeared on: RT

Biotech giant Monsanto says that its unapproved experimental wheat ended up growing at an Oregon field through what most likely was an isolated act of sabotage.

“What happened in this field… is suspicious,” said Monsanto Chief Technology Officer Robb Fraley on Friday, reporting on the ongoing investigation into the scandal.

In late May, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced the discovery of bioengineered wheat, which had been made resistant to Roundup, a Monsanto-sold pesticide. The plant was developed by Monsanto between 1998 and 2005, but was never approved and made into a commercial product. 

The company has thus far failed to determine how the crop entered the environment, and insisted that all genetically modified seeds were incinerated after testing.

The fact that the ‘Roundup Reade’ wheat was found growing at only one spot of the 80-acre farm instead of being spread across it indicates that contamination of seed supplies is unlikely, Fraley argued. The crop was apparently planted there separately, he said, adding that the farmer was “a victim” in the case.

He added that investigations conducted by the company, the USDA, and Washington State University found no signs of contamination in other Oregon fields after sampling over 97 percent of the state’s farmland.

“The grain is clean,” Fraley said. “This situation is extremely isolated, with all the testing data again concluding that this is isolated to a single field in Oregon.”

Monsanto earlier pointed to sabotage as one of possible scenarios in the incident.

USDA spokesman Ed Curlett said on Friday that the probe is focusing on the three varieties of soft white wheat seed that the farmer in Oregon who found Monsanto’s experimental wheat had planted on his farm since 2009.

Investigators identified over 250 farmers who purchased the same seed varieties and obtained samples of those seeds, he said.

The contamination scandal has hurt US grain exports, as Japan and South Korea issued import restrictions in the wake of the discovery. US farmers have filed several lawsuits seeking damages from Monsanto.

Meanwhile, food safety advocates are preparing for a new round of protests against GMO-companies, primarily Monsanto, which is viewed globally as a champion of bioengineered foods. In an action dubbed the Monsanto Video Revolt next month, critics of the company are preparing to upload videos explaining why they are against GM crops to major video websites such as Vimeo or YouTube and to use social media to publicize the action.

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This article originally appeared on: RT

[unable to retrieve full-text content]More than 30 people have been arrested by police in Turkey during anti-government demonstrations in the capital, Ankara, and Istanbul.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]A foreign soldier serving with the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) has been killed in a militant attack in the troubled southern Afghanistan, Press TV reports.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

US fighter jets conduct an airstrike in an area of Afghanistan. (File photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Chocolate giant Cadbury has been blamed for Å“aggressively avoiding tax” in the UK.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki says his country supports any effort aimed at creating unity and promoting convergence among Muslim nations.

Marzouki made the remark in a meeting with Secretary General of the World Forum for Proximity of Islamic Schools of Thought in Iran Grand Ayatollah Mohsen Araki in the Tunisian capital, Tunis, on Friday.

The Tunisian president praised the forumâ„¢s measures to reinforce unity among Muslims across the world and counter plots aimed at causing sectarian and religious rifts, particularly at the current sensitive juncture.

He stressed the importance of bolstering Tehran-Tunis relations and urged Å“serious interaction” between the two countries to strengthen ties.

Marzouki also expressed his congratulations on the recent presidential election in Iran.

Hassan Rohani emerged victorious in the presidential election of June 14 – which was marked by a high voter turnout – winning 50.7 percent of a total of 36,704,156 ballots counted.

The voter turnout in the election was 72.7 percent, according to Iranâ„¢s Interior Ministry.

Nearly 50.5 million Iranians, including more than 1.6 million first-time voters, were eligible to participate in the presidential, and City and Village Islamic Council elections.

In a telephone conversation with Iranâ„¢s President-elect on Wednesday, the Tunisian president congratulated Rohani on his election victory and wished him success.

Marzouki stated that his country has pinned its hopes on Iran’s president-elect to solve the problems that the region and the Muslim world are currently grappling with, including the conflict in Syria.

SF/NN/HJL

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Separate shootings have killed three police officers and two laborers north of Baghdad in a spate of deadly violence in Iraq.

In the ethnically mixed town of Tuz Khurmatu, gunmen opened fire on a police patrol, killing three police officers and wounding one more, security and medical officials said on Saturday.

In another incident in the city of Tikrit, located about 140 kilometers (86 miles) northwest of Baghdad, militants fired on laborers waiting near a grain silo, killing two and wounding four, officials said.

According to police officials, at least seven people were killed in a bomb attack which took place Thursday evening at an Iraqi vote-counting center in the city of Ramadi.

On June 19, at least 31 people were killed in two coordinated bomb attacks inside and near a Shia Muslim mosque in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

On June 16, at least 51 people lost their lives and many others were injured in a spate of bomb attacks and a shooting across the violence-hit country.

The United Nations says a total of 1,045 people were killed and nearly 2,400 were injured in violent incidents across Iraq in May.

Earlier this week, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moonâ„¢s Special Representative for Iraq Martin Kobler called on the Iraqi leaders to Å“sit together” to address the countryâ„¢s problems, including car bomb attacks throughout Iraq.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has said that militant groups and the remnants of the former Baâ„¢athist regime are responsible for the latest wave of violence.

IA/NN

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Thousands of people have demonstrated in the Bulgarian capital for the eighth straight day, demanding the resignation of the government of Prime Minister Plamen Oresharski.

Up to 10,000 protesters gathered in front of the government headquarters in downtown Sofia on Friday, shouting slogans against the government.

The protestors called for reform of the political system in the European Union’s poorest country.

Å“We demand that the oligarchy resign from political office so that Bulgaria can conform to European Union standards,” organizers of the rally wrote on Facebook.

The protests started last week, when the three-week-old government appointed media mogul Delyan Peevski as the chief of Bulgariaâ„¢s National Security Agency (DANS).

Oresharski has said the appointment was a mistake, but that his government will not resign over it.

Shortly after the appointment, President Rosen Plevneliev said he had lost confidence in the government and demanded an immediate review of the controversial appointment.

The appointment was controversial since Peevski runs one of the country’s major media groups and has no experience in national security.

In February, the countryâ„¢s previous conservative-led government was forced to resign after massive protests were held against high-energy bills and low salaries in the poorest EU member state.

YH/HN

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

US Ambassador to Qatar Susan Ziadeh (L) walks with US Secretary of State John Kerry (C) and Ambassador Ibrahim Fakhroo, the Qatari Chief of Protocol, on Kerry’s arrival in Doha, June 22, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird has reversed his recent remarks about the June 14 presidential election in Iran.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

UK spy agency GCHQ has been secretly accessing the worldâ„¢s phone calls and internet traffic.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV