Protestors hold up banners, Jordanian national flags and shout slogans demanding political and economic reform, and access to corruption cases, during a demonstration after Friday prayers in Amman on June 14, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Argentine-French actress Bérénice Bejo (L) and Iranian actor Ali Mosaffa in a scene from ˜The Past™

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Three American soldiers have been injured in heavy gunfire with Taliban militants in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Wardak, Press TV reports.

According to local officials, the gunfire erupted between the Taliban and American forces in Saeed Abad district of Maidan Wardak province on Friday.

Five Taliban militants were also killed in the fighting.

Saeed Abad is a very dangerous area where most US military convoys as well as their supply trucks are being attacked by the Taliban there.

Attacks on foreign troops have increased recently as Taliban militants have announced the beginning of their spring offensive across Afghanistan.

The militant group said it would use “every possible tactic” to inflict casualties on Afghan and US-led forces, specifically mentioning insider and bomb attacks.

The rising death toll of US-led foreign forces in Afghanistan has also prompted growing opposition to the Afghan war in NATO member states and other countries that have contributed troops to the military occupation.

On Friday, the commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan said that the gains made during about 12 years of war are not yet sustainable.

US General Joseph Dunford made the remarks during a meeting on Friday in Kabul with a group of foreign correspondents based in the Afghan capital.

He asked the international community not to abandon Afghanistan after foreign forces occupying the country leave next year.

“The gains that we have made to date are not going to be sustainable without continued international commitment,” Dunford stated. “We are not where we need to be yet”.

“The continued presence of the international community politically, in development and in security is necessary to sustain the progress that we have made.

“Is the effort we have had to date sustainable? I would say no, not until we develop the procedures (and) the institutions necessary to sustain a modern national army.”

FKH/MSH/HN

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The voter turnout in Iranâ„¢s 11th presidential election, held on June 14, 2013, has been around 80 percent.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Pakistanâ„¢s Federal Investigation Agency prosecutor Chaudhry Zulfiqar (C) was in charge of the murder case against former military ruler Pervez Musharraf. Zulfiqar was assassinated in Islamabad on May 3, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
var pCount = $(‘#content’).children(‘p’).length;
var position = Math.floor(pCount*0.1);
$(‘#content’).children(‘p’).eq(position).before(html);
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}

function appendBottomAppeal() {
if (!$(‘#content’).is(‘.width72,.category’)) {
var htmlArray = [
‘

‘
];
var html = htmlArray.join(”);
if ($(‘#article-tools’).length > 0) {
$(‘#article-tools’).before(html);
} else {
$(‘#content’).append(html);
}
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘form’).children(‘.more-options’).children(‘a’).click(function() {
$(‘#inline-appeal’).children(‘.initially-hidden’).show();
$(this).parent().hide();
return false;
});
}
}
$(document).ready(function(){
appendInlineAppeal();
appendBottomAppeal();
});

This article originally appeared on: World Socialist Web Site

Amnesty International says Malian forces are detaining children, who were recruited as soldiers by armed groups during a French-led war on the country, along with adults.

The rights organization said on a report released on Friday that during a four-week visit to the West African country, it spoke to nine child soldiers aged between 13 and 17, who were held along with adults at the prison in Camp I of the gendarmerie of Maliâ„¢s capital, Bamako.

The organization said some of these children have complained of torture and ill-treatment.

Å“They hung me up to the ceiling for 15 minutes and they threatened to give me electric shocks. They threatened to kill me,” one of the detainees the Amnesty.

These children have been charged with offences that include undermining internal and external state security and acts of terrorism, the rights group said.

Gaetan Mootoo, Mali Researcher at Amnesty International said, Å“Under international law, children should be detained separately from adults, and Malian law also prohibits detaining them with adults.

He added that Å“the Malian authorities should give notice to the UNICEF (the UN Children’s Fund) when arresting children suspected of association with armed groups so that their families can be identified and their cases handled by child protection professionals.”

Amnesty further called on Malian authorities to secure the release of all children held by both Malian forces and armed groups.

France launched a war in the resource-rich West African country in January 11,2013 under the pretext of halting the advance of rebel fighters in the country.

The French-led war on Mali has caused a serious humanitarian crisis in the northern areas of the country and has displaced thousands of people, who now live in deplorable conditions.

On February 1, Amnesty said Å“serious human rights breaches” — including the killing of children — were occurring in the French war in Mali.

Some political analysts believe that Maliâ„¢s abandoned natural resources, including gold and uranium reserves, could be one of the reasons behind the French war.

YH/HN

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranian ensemble for contemporary Persian folk music Rastak has been warmly welcomed during its tour concert held in some European countries.

The concert was performed in different cities of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Paris in France, Stockholm in Sweden, London in England, Koln, Hamburg, Berlin and Frankfort in Germany.

The groupâ„¢s programs were performed in a number of Iranian ethnic languages, dialects during music concerts held from May 18 to June 8, 2013.

The translation of some Iranian poems and songs into the host countriesâ„¢ languages during a particular section was presented at the program that gained acclaim by the foreign audience.

Established in 1997, Rastak is an experimental music group that aims to introduce the ancient and contemporary culture of Iran through embracing diverse regions with unique indigenous customs, dialects and music.

Led by Siamak Sepehri, the ensemble tries to merge traditional instruments and forms with contemporary rhythms.

The ensemble is slated to hold concerts in different Iranian cities after the holy month of Ramadan.

Sornaye Nowrouz, All my Ethnic Groups, Ancient Colors are Rastakâ„¢s better known records.

FGP/FGP

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranâ„¢s system of religious democracy serves as a new paradigm capable of changing the prevailing hegemonic discourse in the international political arena, an Islamic scholar tells Press TV.

Å“The idea of religious democracy, which is now being practiced in Iran, apart from the rights of the people for determining their destiny in terms of political system and having the president, has a very important point in stating that religion can now play an important role in the world of politics,” said Mohammad Saeed Bahmanpour in a Friday interview.

Bahmanpour pointed to the onrushing tide of the Islamic Awakening across the Arab world, arguing that the Islamic Republic can serve as a Å“good model” for Muslim nations.

Å“I think all the pressures which are being put against Iran [aim] to suppress this model. This model is going to change the system, the hegemony in the world,” he added.

On Friday, millions of Iranian voters headed for polling stations to cast their ballots and choose the countryâ„¢s 11th president as well as their representatives in the City and Village Councils.

Nearly 50.5 million Iranians, including more than 1.6 million first-time voters, were eligible to vote in the June 14 poll.

Å“The number of people coming and voting, the turnout in Iran, especially in Iranian democracy, is quite important for this concept. No matter who will be elected, it would assert a new idea in both the world of religion and the realm of democracy,” Bahmanpour said.

Å“The measure of turnout would give the elected president more force, more power to practice the power of president internally and in international relations,” the analyst pointed out.

ASH/NN/HJL

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

File photo shows the splash page for the social networking website Facebook.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iraqi boys inspect the site of a car bomb attack in Baghdad’s district of Sadr City on April 16, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]At least three Libyan soldiers have been killed in Benghazi where Libyan special forces have clashed with armed protestors after the demonstrators attacked army and police building.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Syrian army has inflicted heavy losses on foreign-backed militants fighting against the government during mop-up operations on the outskirts of the capital Damascus.

On Friday, a number of militants were killed during intense clashes with Syrian troops in the town of al-Ziyabiyeh, the official SANA news agency reported.

A militant commander, identified as Talal al-Mandil, was among the slain gunmen.

Syrian troops also stormed several terrorist hideouts in the towns of al-Khamasia and al-Ahmadia, and shot dead scores of militants. Majid Kahal, leader of the militant group Shabab al-Baraa Battalion was killed in the process.

Additionally, Syrian troops clashed with militants in the town of al-Hejjeira. Dozens of gunmen were killed in the heavy exchange of fire.

A mortar launcher used by foreign-backed militants was also destroyed.

Syrian troops engaged gunmen affiliated to the terrorist group Ansar al-Souna Battalion in the town of Yalda. Dozens of gunmen were killed and wounded during the heavy clashes.

A unit of government forces also killed a number of foreign-backed militants in the town of Daraya, located 8 kilometers (5 miles) southwest of Damascus.

Separately, Syrian army troops clashed with militants in the town of Jobar, located 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) northeast of Damascus, killing and injuring a number of them.

In the city of Douma, located about 10 kilometers (six miles) northeast of Damascus, Syrian soldiers raided a terrorist hideout and shot dead scores of militants.

Syrian forces also killed scores of armed men near the court house building in the town of Harasta, which is located northeast of Damascus.

In addition, Syrian army troops fully purged the al-Rasafa district in eastern Deir Ezzor province of foreign-backed militants on Friday.

Earlier in the day, government forces had established their control over the towns of Akash, al-Khreija, Abu Dali and Abu Ramal in the western province of Hama.

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.

MP/HN

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Congolese officials sit in a conference hall during a second day of meetings with the M23 rebels in Kampala on December 10, 2012.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

An American cargo plane taking off from Incirlik Air Base in southeastern Turkey. (File photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]The voter turnout in Iran’s 11th presidential election has been around 80 percent, Press TV reports.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The White House says establishing a no-fly zone over Syria is not within the bounds of possibility as it faces formidable obstacles not experienced in the implementation of such a measure in Libya in 2011.

“It’s dramatically more difficult and dangerous and costly in Syria, for a variety of reasons,” Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said on Friday.

In Libya, the opposition forces controlled most of the country and that made it easier to protect those portions from the air, Rhodes said.

This is while in Syria militants are being pushed out of the areas they controlled. The Syrian forces have regained control of the strategic town of Qusayr and have launched a massive offensive against the militants in the northern city of Aleppo.

Syria, unlike Libya, enjoys advanced air defense systems that make it difficult to set a no-fly zone over the country, the US official said.

Rhodes announced on Thursday that the United States would expand its military support for the militants in Syria, hinting at Washingtonâ„¢s plan to directly send weapons to the anti-Syria groups.

He made the announcement after claiming that the US intelligence community is certain that the Syrian government has used chemical arms against the militants on multiple times, an allegation Damascus has rejected as Å“lies.”

MA/ MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Nine Israeli military aircraft have penetrated Lebanese airspace and flown over several areas of the country in blatant violation of a UN Security Council resolution.

An unmanned aerial vehicle entered Lebanese airspace over the southern village of al-Naqoura, situated 91 kilometers (57 miles) south of Beirut, at 8:30 a.m. local time (0530 GMT) on Friday, according to a statement issued by the Lebanese military on Friday.

The remote-controlled aircraft carried out surveillance flights over several areas in southern Lebanon, including the towns of Riyaq and Baalbek, before it left Lebanonâ„¢s airspace at 6:30 p.m. local time (1530 GMT) while flying over the town of Alma al-Shaab.

Later in the day, two Israeli fighter jets crossed into Lebanon’s airspace over the southern border village of Kfar Kila, located 96 kilometers (59 miles) south of Beirut, at 10:50 a.m. local time (0750 GMT).

The warplanes flew over several areas in Lebanon before leaving the countryâ„¢s airspace at 12:20 p.m. local time (0920 GMT) while flying over the town of Alma al-Shaab.

On Thursday, an Israeli drone violated Lebanese airspace over the village of Kfar Kila at 7:15 a.m. local time (0415 GMT) and flew over several areas of southern Lebanon.

The Israeli aircraft left Lebanese airspace at 6:35 p.m. local time (1535 GMT) while flying over the village of al-Naqoura.

Another Israeli unmanned aerial vehicle crossed into Lebanon’s airspace over the village of al-Naqoura at 8 p.m. local time (1700 GMT). The plane carried out surveillance flights over several areas in southern Lebanon and left at 6:10 a.m. local time (0310 GMT) on Friday while flying over the southern village of Rmeish.

Four Israeli warplanes entered Lebanon’s airspace over the village of Kfar Kila at 8:30 p.m. local time (1730 GMT) on Thursday. The fighter jets flew over several areas in Lebanon before leaving the countryâ„¢s airspace at 9:50 p.m. local time (1850 GMT) while flying over the town of Alma al-Shaab.

Israel violates Lebanon’s airspace on an almost daily basis, claiming the flights serve surveillance purposes.

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

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

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

MP/HGL

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has been formally arrested on suspicion of ordering the killing of Baluch politician Akbar Bugti in 2006, according to a ruling by an anti-terrorism court.

“He has been formally arrested in the Bugti murder case,” Musharrafâ„¢s lawyer Ahmed Raza Kasuri said on Friday.

“An anti-terrorism court has put him on a 14-day judicial remand… He will remain in custody in his Islamabad house,” he added.

Musharraf was president of Pakistan when Bugti, the main leader in the southwestern province of Balochistan, died during an army raid in August 2006.

Kasuri said police officers from the Balochistan capital Quetta had interrogated Musharraf and completed their work on Thursday.

“Musharraf had to appear in court in Quetta, but for security reasons the police team from Quetta came here to Islamabad,” he added. Quetta has been rocked by ethnic and sectarian violence since 2001, when Pakistan joined an alliance with the United States in the so-called war against terrorism.

Musharraf is currently under house arrest at his home in Islamabad in connection with several cases against him, including the Benazir Bhutto case. Former Pakistani Prime Minister Bhutto was killed in a gun-and-bomb attack on December 27, 2007 as she was leaving an election rally in the city of Rawalpindi. Musharraf has been accused of failing to provide enough security for Bhutto after she returned from exile on October 18, 2007.

He is also facing charges of illegally putting judges under house arrest, after he sacked Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, declared a state of emergency, and suspended the constitution, during a crackdown on the judiciary in 2007.

In addition, Musharraf is accused of violating the constitution for giving the order to arrest the judges.

The former army general, who seized power in a bloodless coup in October 1999, stepped down as president of the country in August 2008, about six months after his allies lost parliamentary elections in February 2008 and the new government threatened to impeach him. A year later, he left the country.

In March 2013, Musharraf returned to Pakistan after nearly four years of self-imposed exile in London and Dubai to run in the May 11 parliamentary elections.

GJH/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

US President Barack Obama has ordered his administration to provide militants in Syria with weapons as the Syrian forces regain control of more areas in the country.

The decision came on Friday a day after the US claimed that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against the militants and thus crossed Washingtonâ„¢s Å“red line.” Damascus has rejected the allegation as Å“lies.”

Å“The president has said that the use of chemical weapons would change his calculus, and it has,” said Ben Rhodes, Obamaâ„¢s deputy national security adviser.

The delivery of the weapons, which include assault rifles, shoulder-fired rocket-propelled grenades and anti-tank missiles, would be carried out through the CIA, reports say.

Russia has criticized the US decision to arm the militants in Syria, saying the measure Å“risks escalating (violence) in the region.”

The US decision comes days after the militants suffered heavy losses and lost control of the strategic town of Qusayr. Syrian forces have also started an all-out operation to regain full control of the northern city of Aleppo.

Obama has been under pressure to increase the US involvement in the Syrian conflict.

On Tuesday, Former US President Bill Clinton said Washingtonâ„¢s failure to intervene in the conflict in Syria would be Å“a bad mistake.”

MA/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

US General Joseph Dunford, the commander of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The picture shows Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) seen under an electron microscope.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Israeli forces have shot and injured a Palestinian farmer in the Gaza Strip, Press TV reports.

Palestinian medical personnel said the farmer sustained moderate injuries in the city of Deir al-Balah, which is located in the center of the territory, on Friday. He was then transported to a nearby hospital to receive medical treatment.

Gaza has been blockaded since June 2007, which is a situation that has caused a decline in the standard of living, unprecedented levels of unemployment, and unrelenting poverty.

The apartheid regime of Israel denies about 1.7 million people in Gaza their basic rights, such as freedom of movement, jobs that pay proper wages, and adequate healthcare and education.

UN Humanitarian Coordinator James W. Rawley said on April 10 that a new round of Israeli restrictions on the Gaza Strip is impacting food supplies and would have “serious” effects if continued.

“Israel has announced a series of heightened restrictions on the movement of people and goods to and from the Gaza Strip, including closures of the Kerem Shalom crossing,” he said in a statement.

Rawley added, “These measures are resulting in the depletion of stocks of essential supplies, including basic foodstuffs and cooking gas, and undermine the livelihoods and rights of many vulnerable Gazan families.

“If these restrictions continue, the effect upon the Gaza population will be serious.”

MP/HGL

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Reformist candidate Hassan Rohani is in the lead in the Iranian presidential election, according to early results, with Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf coming in second place.

An Iranian Interior Ministry official announced on Saturday that 1,759,079 valid ballots – from a total of 1,819,984 ballots – have been counted at 58,764 polling stations so far.

Following are the vote totals from the early results:

Hassan Rohani: 834,859

Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf: 320,562

Saeed Jalili: 257,822

Mohsen Rezaei: 214,368

Ali Akbar Velayati: 106,144

Mohammad Gharazi: 25,324

On Friday, millions of Iranian voters headed for polling stations to cast their ballots and choose the countryâ„¢s 11th president as well as their representatives in the city and village councils.

Nearly 50.5 million Iranians, including more than 1.6 million first-time voters, were eligible to vote in the June 14 elections.

NT/HGL/HJL

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Hezbollah Secretary General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah has congratulated Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei, and the Iranian nation on the huge turnout in the presidential and city and village council elections.

Nasrallah made the remarks in a televised speech on Friday, the Fars News Agency reported.

Å“Iran demonstrated an example of public participation and national victory at the event (elections),” the Hezbollah secretary general noted.

The leader of the Lebanese resistance movement also described the Islamic Republic of Iran as a democratic country, in which everyoneâ„¢s vote is equal.

Nasrallah expressed hope that such Å“celebration of democracy” becomes prevalent in all Arab and Islamic countries.

Vote counting has been underway in Iran since late Friday. Hassan Rohani is in the lead in the Iranian presidential election, according to early results, and Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf is in second place. Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar announced early on Saturday that 861,866 votes have been counted at 1,631 polling stations so far.

On Friday, millions of Iranian voters headed for polling stations to cast their ballots and choose the countryâ„¢s 11th president as well as their representatives at the city and village councils.

Nearly 50.5 million Iranians, including more than 1.6 million first-time voters, were eligible to vote in the June 14 elections.

Hassan Rohani, who is the president of the Expediency Councilâ„¢s Center for Strategic Research, Supreme National Security Council Secretary Saeed Jalili, Expediency Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, and former Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Gharazi were the six candidates running for the presidential election.

Over 200,000 candidates also ran in the city and rural councils elections.

NT/MHB

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A man walks among the debris of buildings destroyed by anti-Muslim mobs in Myanmar. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The US Supreme Court ruled over Association for Molecular Pathology et al. v. Myriad Genetics unanimously deciding that naturally occurring DNA cannot be patented; however synthetic versions of DNA can.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that natural DNA is the “basic tools of scientific and technological work” and patenting them would “inhibit future innovation premised upon them.

Concerning synthetic DNA (cDNA), developed in laboratories by selecting specific sections of DNA constitutes a product and not found under naturally occurring circumstances.

cDNA is considered “distinct from the DNA from which it was derived.”

For Myriad Genetics (MG) this decision means that cDNA which is used to create synthetic proteins (components of biological pharmaceuticals) in the process known as recombinant DNA.

Thomas pointed out that “Myriad did not create anything. To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.”

Dr. Robert Darnell, president and scientific director of the New York Genome Center, explained that the Supreme Court’s decision “sets a fair and level playing field for open and responsible use of genetic information. At the same time, it does not preclude the opportunity for innovation in the genetic world, and should be seen as an important clarifying moment for research and the healthcare industry.”

MG released a statement regarding the decision: “Importantly, the Court noted that many of Myriad’s unchallenged claims are method claims applying knowledge about the BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 genes. While these method claims were not at issue in this case, the Court highlighted Federal Circuit Judge Bryson’s opinion that, ‘[a]s the first party with knowledge of the [BRCA1 and BRCA2] sequences, Myriad was in an excellent position to claim applications to that knowledge.

We believe the Court appropriately upheld our claims on cDNA, and underscored the patent eligibility of our method claims, ensuring strong intellectual property protection for our BRACAnalysis test moving forward,’ said Peter D. Meldrum, president and CEO. ‘More than 250,000 patients rely upon our BRACAnalysis test annually, and we remain focused on saving and improving peoples’ lives and lowering overall healthcare costs.’”

Angelina Jolie became the spokesperson for genetic testing as a cancer identifier and subsequent double mastectomy to prevent developing the assumed genetic disease with the publishing of an op-ed piece .

In addition, Jolie plans to have a full hysterectomy preformed to further reduce her statistical likelihood of contracting cancer. Jolie said that before she turns 40, she will have the procedure done to completely sterilize herself in the name of preventing cancer.

Is the only bio-tech pharmaceutical corporation that offers a blood test that can determine whether or not a patient is susceptible to the BRCA1 gene.

MG “discovered” and quickly patented the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. This meant that research on these genes would necessitate the scientists and laboratories pay MG fees, which discourages independent testing.

Of course, MG claims that they invested $500 million in finding the genes; they deserve to recoup those costs.

A little understood fact is every human is born with the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes given to us by our mother and father. What scientists call “mutations” increase the possibility of cancer — either ovarian or breast — and the thought is that if the patient undergoes a hysterectomy or mastectomy than the possibility is reduced.

Genetic counselors, who are hired to sell the product , recommend that testing be part of the patient’s inquiry process. Once the test results are finished, it is a matter or the numbers game; reading to the patient statistical data that supposes their fate-rate.

There is a theory that the BRCA 1 & 2 genes may be more influential in some genetic types than others due to a specific type of mutation.

Stated on the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) website concerning the BRCA 1 & 2 genes, “Not all gene changes, or mutations, are deleterious (harmful). Some mutations may be beneficial, whereas others may have no obvious effect (neutral).”

Further, the NCI clearly explains: “Not every woman in such families carries a harmful BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation, and not every cancer in such families is linked to a harmful mutation in one of these genes. Furthermore, not every woman who has a harmful BRCA1 or BRCA2 mutation will develop breast and/or ovarian cancer.”

Dr. C.k. Naidu, senior surgical oncologist at the Basvatarakam Indo-American Cancer Hospital and Research Centre explained that “only 5 to 6 per cent of breast cancers were linked to genetic factors and 95 per cent had no genetic causes.”

There are factors such as lifestyle, nutrition and other environmental factors that play into the development of cancer.

One such culprit is parabens. When biopsies of breast tumors are researched, it is found that they contain 99% parabens.

This chemical is found in food, packaging and healthcare products.

Indeed, a recent study conducted by researchers at the New York State Department of Health in conjunction with the Department of Environmental Health Services and the University of New York at Albany found that there is an alarming amount of parabens in the US food supply which has drastically increased the propensity of the public to develop cancer — with an emphasis on breast cancer.

When random food samples were taken from various local grocery stores, 90% of the samples dangerously high levels of parabens were detected.

Those found were:

– Butyl-parabens
– Benzyl-parabens
– Propyl-parabens
– Methyl-parabens
– Ethyl-parabens

These deadly chemicals were discovered in:

– Juices
– Soft drinks
– Seafood
– Chicken
– Vegetables
– Fruits
– Breads
– Baked goods

Common every day products such as deodorant, shampoo, conditioner, cosmetics, baby formula all contain parabens which have been linked to the development of cancer.

Deodorant and antiperspirants cause breast cancer through the sweat glands and located in the upper areas of the breast.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

The U.S. government has turned to 9/11 again in order to justify its program of spying on all Americans and to support a new, expanded war in Syria. Yet as Americans are distracted by these ongoing crimes, the deception behind the origin of the War on Terror is being more fully revealed.

Were the crimes of September 11, 2001 solely the work of Osama bin Laden and nineteen troubled young Arabs, or were more powerful people involved? After a decade of investigation Kevin Ryan, the co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, offers an evidence-based analysis of nineteen other suspects.

With the support of victim’s families and leading 9/11 researchers, Another Nineteen looks at who was in position to accomplish major elements of the crimes that have yet be explained. Detailed evidence is presented that reveals how each of the alternative suspects had the means, motive and opportunity to accomplish one or more aspects of the 9/11 attacks.

 “Finally a comprehensive and meticulously researched book that thoroughly details what occurred before and on 9/11. Without a doubt, Another Nineteen should be required reading for those who want the real story.” — Robert McIlvaine, father of Bobby McIlvaine, who was killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11

“Kevin Ryan has written a book that reminds us that the attacks of September 11, 2001 and their details have never really been investigated. Kevin has laid out the historical framework in a way that has never been done before. The importance of this cannot be overstated.” — Lorie Van Auken, member of the Family Steering Committee for the 9/11 Commission and widow of Kenneth Van Auken, who was killed at the World Trade Center

Starting with what should have happened that did not, and what should not have happened that did, Another Nineteen reveals that certain powerful people had the means, motive and opportunity to make 9/11 happen exactly as it did. Those people represented private networks and government programs that came together in surprising ways on 9/11.

To get the book, go to the secure E-store: https://www.createspace.com/4289114 or look for it on Amazon (by June 21).

For more information and updates, visit http://www.another19.com.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

‘;
jQuery(‘div.media-image’).each( function(index){
src = String(jQuery(this).children(‘img.media-image’).attr(‘src’));
if( src != ” && src != ‘undefined’ ){
parts = src.split(‘/’);
if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘slideshow’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/slideshow/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘AFP’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/images/AFP/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-3] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-2]+’/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else { new_src = false; }
if( new_src ){ jQuery(this).html(‘‘+jQuery(this).html()+enlarge_html+’‘); }
}
});

var slideshowdiv; var new_html; var img_obj; var sourcediv; var titlediv; var captiondiv; var title; var caption;

jQuery(‘div.slideshow-body div.slideshow div.field-item’).each( function(index){

slideshowdiv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-embedded-gallery’);
img_obj = slideshowdiv.find(‘img’);
src = img_obj.attr(‘src’);

title = slideshowdiv.children(‘div.altslideshow-title’).html();
if( title == null ){ title = ”; }

caption = slideshowdiv.children(‘div.altslideshow-caption’).html();
if( caption == null ){ caption = ”; }

if( src != ” && src != ‘undefined’ ){
// alert( ‘SRC: ‘+src );
parts = src.split(‘/’);
if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘slideshow’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/slideshow/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘AFP’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/images/AFP/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-3] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-2]+’/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else { new_src = false; }
// alert( ‘New SRC: ‘+new_src );
if( new_src ){
img_obj.parent().attr(‘href’,new_src).attr(‘rel’,’lightbox[slides]’).attr(‘title’,title+’
‘+caption).append(‘

Click to enlarge.

‘);
}
}

//sourcediv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-source’);
//titlediv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-title’);
//captiondiv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-caption’);
//sourcediv.after( titlediv ).after( captiondiv );

});

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

Mac Slavo
SHTF Plan
June 14, 2013

One day in the near future Americans will finally realize that their money is being devalued at a rapid pace. For the time being the price increases are somewhat muted by official announcements of inflation being under control at around 2% and purported economic recovery on the horizon. The Federal Reserve and the US government are doing everything in their power to maintain a perception of stability.

But what happens when all the machinations are proven to be fruitless during the next stock market crash and currency crisis?

That’s when people panic. That’s when they start mass selling assets that hold no true value, and shift their capital to physical goods that store and preserve wealth.

In China, where the central government has manipulated the currency, economic and financial markets for decades, the people have seen it all before. And they aren’t taking any chances.

While the paper price of gold and silver may have dropped nearly 25% this year, it’s clear that demand in the real world is soaring.

If you want to know what it’s going to look like in front of precious metals dealers when confidence in our government’s ability to manage this crisis is finally lost for good, then look no further than the streets of China.

The following pictures, taken in Jinan in the last 48 hours, depict some 10,000 Chinese citizens lining up to buy physical gold, providing all the evidence you need for the argument that gold is, in fact, money.

These are absolutely stunning.

Images from Caixin via Zero Hedge

The pictures are reminiscent of Americans lining up around the block during the gold buying sprees of the 1980′s in an attempt to get their hands on physical gold and silver.

Just as is the case with food, guns, ammunition, Xboxes, and iPhones, when widespread demand strikes it’s nearly impossible to get your hands on the goods you need at a fair price.

Get yours now, before the panicked masses realize what has happened.

<!–

–>

This article was posted: Friday, June 14, 2013 at 4:41 pm

Tags: economics

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

It was reported last month by the New York Daily News that New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced that all schools will be required to “conduct lockdown drills each year”.  Training will begin this summer according to the report:

The policy revealed by Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott in a letter to principals Wednesday will require school leaders to attend a two-hour training program over the summer and appoint staff response teams and command posts

The policy is intended to prepare students and staff members for emergency situations that involve severe weather conditions, another Sandy Hook Massacre or any suspected acts of terrorism such as the Boston Bombings. “The drills would be a response to severe weather conditions, intruders entering the building or suspicious packages found inside or outside the building, among other crises. No one can enter or exit schools during a lockdown” the report said. Conditioning children to except lockdowns in an emergency situation is social conditioning. It involves the authorities to control the situation in any circumstance.

During the Boston bombings, martial law was declared in search of the suspected terrorists. All of Boston was on lockdown. Many people cheered the actions as a necessary step to find the terrorists. It was also reported in www.metro.us that Department of Education (DOE) spokeswoman Marge Feinberg said “many schools have already been conducting such drills.” The drills will have a major role for school officials “To ensure that all principals are trained to appropriately implement these drills and procedures as well as effectively respond to emergencies, the Office of Safety and Youth Development is providing a two-hour mandatory training focused on emergency readiness during this summer.” 

Social conditioning of children begins in public schools at an early age. You teach children to accept “Lockdown Drills” during school hours, and then they will eventually accept it as part of their lives in their adulthood. In Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ explains what conditioning aims to accomplish with “The Director” as one of the main characters who is head of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. The Director says:

Hot tunnels alternated with cool tunnels. Coolness was wedded to discomfort in the form of hard X-rays. By the time they were decanted the embryos had a horror of cold. They were predestined to emigrate to the tropics, to be miners and acetate silk spinners and steel workers. Later on their minds would be made to endorse the judgment of their bodies. “We condition them to thrive on heat,” concluded Mr. Foster, Our colleagues upstairs will teach them to love it.”                                                            

“And that,” put in the Director sententiously, “that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you’ve got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their un-escapable social destiny.

The “un-escapable social destiny” is describing a future with a government declaring martial law as they will experience in their adulthood or even sooner. Aldous Huxley was quoted at the Tavistock Group in a California Medical School in 1961 predicting what is currently taking place across the United States:

 There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.

Aldous Huxley also describes the “Ultimate Revolution” in a 1962 speech at the University of California, Berkley. Here is part of the speech:

But I think that insofar as dictators become more and more scientific, more and more concerned with the technically perfect, perfectly running society, they will be more and more interested in the kind of techniques which I imagined and described from existing realities in BNW. So that, it seems to me then, that this ultimate revolution is not really very far away, that we, already a number of techniques for bringing about this kind of control are here, and it remains to be seen when and where and by whom they will first be applied in any large scale.

And first let me talk about the, a little bit about the, improvement in the techniques of terrorism. I think there have been improvements. Pavlov after all made some extremely profound observations both on animals and on human beings. And he found among other things that conditioning techniques applied to animals or humans in a state either of psychological or physical stress sank in so to say, very deeply into the mind-body of the creature, and were extremely difficult to get rid of. That they seemed to be embedded more deeply than other forms of conditioning.

And this of course, this fact was discovered empirically in the past. People did make use of many of these techniques, but the difference between the old empirical intuitive methods and our own methods is the difference between the, a sort of, hit and miss craftsman’s point of view and the genuinely scientific point of view. I think there is a real difference between ourselves and say the inquisitors of the 16th century. We know much more precisely what we are doing, than they knew and we can extend because of our theoretical knowledge, we can extend what we are doing over a wider area with a greater assurance of being producing something that really works.

Aldous Huxley predicted what would happen if a major event were to take place such as the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting incident in Newtown, Connecticut. “Everybody is concerned about the security of children, particularly in light of (the) incidents,” said Chiara Coletti, spokeswomen for the principals union. “No one is balking at this (protocol)” the New York Daily News reported. It is understandable to fear another Newtown shooting incident.

However, to subject children and teenagers to “Lockdown Drills” every year is conditioning them to accept martial law regardless of the situation. Will “Lockdown drills” guarantee the safety of the children? Not necessarily, but it is certain that when children are trained to accept martial law in their community or in their city when the government orders a lockdown in the entire area, they will do it willingly, even in their adulthood.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Week in Review: US Elections and the Global Crisis

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Infowars.com
June 14, 2013

When Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer published his memoirs in “Operation Dark Heart” in 2010, the Defense Department found the book so interesting they immediately snapped up the initial run of 10,000 copies to prevent them from getting into the wrong hands and future copies were heavily censored.

This week, Shaffer and co-author William H. Keith are releasing a novel, “The Last Line,” an action-packed thriller that focuses on the dark and twisted cabal known as Bohemian Grove.

The Bohemian Grove is a 2,700 acre campground amid an ancient Redwood forest. outfitted for the rich and famous, itexists not between the pages of a work of fiction but at 20601 Bohemian Avenue in Monte Rio in northern California. Owned by the Bohemian Club, a private San Francisco-based men’s art club, the Bohemian Grove hosts an annual two-week, three-weekend camping event in July for some of the most powerful and influential men in the world.

The Bohemian Club’s membership is all male and includes artists, musicians, prominent business leaders and government officials. The membership list has included every Republican and some Democratic U.S. presidents since 1923. Guests are welcome but must first pass a rigorous screening process before they’re allowed to enter the secretive society.

The annual campfest is generally assumed to be just an opportunity for relaxation and merriment, with members behaving like, well, bohemians, drinking and carousing and peeing on trees. In reality, the goings-on at Bohemian Grove are much more sinister.

A 2011 article by Infowars’ Paul Joseph Watson included excerpts from an interview with Sonoma State sociology Professor Peter Phillips, who attended the Grove in 1994. Phillips said the “elitist encampment was a forum for ‘very important people’ to discuss ‘intimate issues.’”

“They’re very clearly talking politics and business constantly,” Phillips said, completely contradicting the Bohemian Club’s claim that ‘weaving spiders come not here,’ a reference to the notion that members talking shop is severely frowned upon.

“I proved the opposite, quite clearly,” said Philips. “I heard conversations about business. ‘If GE comes in on the deal, we can get the Japanese to join’ — three men walking down a trail together.”

The Manhattan Project was born at Bohemian Grove in 1942, which led to the creation of the atomic bomb, a fact members still brag about today. And the Strategic Defense Initiative, Star Wars, was introduced during a lakeside talk in the early 80′s, before Ronald Reagan publicly proposed the program in March 1983.

In 2000, Alex Jones became the first journalist to capture on film the ritualistic “Cremation of Care” ceremony held at the Grove. “This is like something out of a Hollywood movie, where teenagers are out camping in the wilderness and come over a hill and witness some devil cult in black and red garb sacrificing some poor soul on a bloody altar.”

In his article, Watson said, “The fact that Bohemian Grove is perhaps the ultimate ‘secret room’, in which world and domestic policy is agreed upon in amidst bizarre environment of drunken frivolity, alleged homosexual prostitution, and occult pagan ceremonies should be of utmost concern to any thinking person.

Given that Shaffer’s “Operation Dark Heart” was so heavily censored by the DoD, it’s a safe bet “The Last Line” will be a real page-turner. Shaffer didn’t want to say much for fear of spoiling the plot, but he did tell Alex:

“I’ve seen you when you did the show on Bohemian Grove and I don’t want to say it didn’t influence our thinking because it did. … There’s certain elements of the government who may work against our own people’s interests, and it’s tied to Bohemian Grove.”

Check out Dark Secrets: Inside Bohemian Grove below to see Alex Jones’ historic infiltration of the occult playground of the global elite, or pick it up from the Infowars Shop and help support our growing media operation.

Back in 2011, Alex interviewed novelist, non-fiction writer, and TV show creator Brad Meltzer, host of the History Channel series Brad Meltzer’s Decoded, an American mystery and conspiracy theory investigation series that produced an episode delving into the bizarre rituals and mock sacrifices performed at Bohemian Grove.

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

There comes a point in the analysis of any problem when its escalation turns so blatantly obvious that the disaster is self-explanatory. The economic crisis in the United States and around the globe is one of those problems. While there are still plenty of people out there who remain ignorant to the immediate danger, I think we are very close (at least in America) to a point of maximum velocity. The more accelerated the awakening, however, the faster globalist interests will pull the plug on what remains of our financial system.

Most citizens are at least vaguely concerned with the state of our country and are attempting to learn more. The survival methodology has gone mainstream and grows in popularity daily. Even the annual Bilderberg meeting – a confab of the world’s most influential economic and political power mongers, which mainstream media entities have long refused to publicly acknowledge – is finally being exposed to the light of day. We are now in a race, a mad dash to shape the future battle space before the elites position themselves for the final conflict.

Further economic analysis would merely reaffirm what most of us in the liberty movement already know, but let’s recap our situation for the sake of clarity.

Full-Spectrum Fiscal Disaster Is No Longer Theory; It Is Certain

The U.S. stock market is now in the midst of perhaps the largest artificial bubble in world history. Virtually all movements in the Dow are now determined by the stimulus actions of the private Federal Reserve. Agents of the Fed, including former Chairman Alan Greenspan and current branch head Richard Fisher, have openly admitted in separate interviews that the central bank’s primary directive has been to prop up equities to give the public the illusion of stability, rather than to revamp consumer credit markets as originally promised. Because of the system’s dependence on Fed fiat, whenever the smallest rumor of a possible reduction in stimulus is heard, the markets tumble.

To illustrate how detached and absurd our economic reality has become, investors now actually rally around the Dow whenever bad financial news is released because bad news means there is higher likelihood that the Fed will continue fiat printing.

For example, Reuters reported on June 4: “A report released on Monday showed the Institute for Supply Management’s index of U.S. factory activity fell to its lowest since June 2009 and tempered expectations the Fed would retrace its stimulus measures.”

This indicates that our current economy is so fragile that it is utterly incapable of sustaining concrete investment without the Fed creating dollars out of thin air 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In fact, I have to laugh anytime a mainstream analyst suggests we have entered a phase of recovery. Let the Fed stop all stimulus, and then we’ll see how much legitimate “growth” is actually taking place.

The wealth of most Americans is down 55 percent since the “recession” officially began in 2008. Job creation remains dismal. In 2010, 58.7 percent of working-age Americans were employed. In 2013, that number fell to 58.6 percent (according to official statistics), meaning there has been no improvement in the jobs sector of the U.S. economy following the 2008 collapse, despite all the claims by the Fed and the Administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama that bailout dollars and quantitative easing measures would bring jobs back to life.

Also, keep in mind that a rating of 58 percent employment may have been acceptable in the 1950s and 1960s when the U.S. population was half what is today. However, 42 percent unemployed working-age Americans in a population of 350 million is a dangerous prospect. Add to this the fact that, in those days, high-paying manufacturing jobs were the norm. Today, blue collar business has been replaced by burger-shoveling-wage slavery.

Unknown trillions of dollars have been printed, the dollar has been inflated and devalued, national debt is skyrocketing, and there’s absolutely nothing to show for it.

In the global political sphere, tensions continue under the surface between North Korea and South Korea, while the conflict in Syria appears to be spreading like a plague, drawing in multiple nations and promising a high probability of widespread warfare. Any broad-based disaster at this tenuous time will trigger a breakdown in the U.S. fiscal system. A crisis is inevitable.

Once we accept this fact, we must then ask ourselves a simple question: What can we, as individuals, do about it? In the liberty movement, most activists agree on the causes of our current dilemma as well as the eventual direction we are headed. Unfortunately, the movement completely diverges when it comes to solutions.

Fight Tyranny From The Bottom Up

Though there are as many “silver bullet” ideas as there are people, I would divide the argument over solutions into two basic camps: top-down proponents and bottom-up proponents.

I have heard numerous theories fielded, from suing the Fed to voting Republican to impeachment to leaving the country to marching on Washington, D.C., with rifle in hand. These are what I call top-down solutions, none of which take into account the need for localized independence. If you cannot even sustain yourself where you live and if you are unable to provide your own survival necessities, then what good is voting, suing, impeaching or marching abroad going to do?

The problem with the average solution put forward by well-meaning, but sometimes naïve, activists is that they cannot seem to free themselves from the top-down mentality. For them, all big sociopolitical changes must be made at what they believe to be the epicenter and often by working within the controlled paradigm. They think they can play the game better than the men who created it. They forget all about the periphery, the foundation of localism. They forget that to give independence to the world, they must first give independence to themselves. I am consistently astonished by the number of liberty movement activists who don’t even have food storage, a decent rifle or a worthwhile barter skill, yet seem to think they are ready to march weapon-bound to Washington.

Let’s be clear about something: Even if the masses coalesce to overthrow our currently corrupt political matrix of puppet middlemen, we are still left with an international banking oligarchy as well as a collapsing economy. The fight doesn’t end when you boot out the paid-off politicians; the fight has just begun. It is childish and foolish to believe otherwise. Therefore, one must plan ahead if one wishes to be victorious in the battle for a decentralized society.

This decentralization starts with you – in your personal life and within your community. The last thing the establishment wants is for individuals, neighborhoods and towns to decouple from the mainstream system and provide for themselves. This is what they truly fear – not empty marches without tangible goals or intelligent planning.

One thing that every American can do right now to bolster and inspire real revolution would be to learn a trade or skill that would be highly valuable in a post-collapse environment. If you cannot sustain yourself, then you cannot thrive and you cannot fight. If your neighborhood or town is unable to produce necessities for barter, then there is no trade, no organization, no cooperation and, thus, no organized will to fight. That is to say, global liberty stems from local industry.

During a debt and currency crisis, barter will probably be the most accessible form of local industry. The following is a list of examples of post-collapse skills and trade models that you could learn or construct within the next six months in order to ensure you are a sought-after partner in your own community when breakdown occurs:

• Fresh Water Storage And Filtration: Clean water is a precious commodity, especially in a collapse situation when central treatment plants stop functioning. Whether urban or rural, many people are not equipped to provide ample water supply that is free of contaminants. Those who choose to boil whatever stagnant pools they find still have to contend with disgusting tastes and smells. Fresh, clean water will be sought after, and stockpiling filtration equipment ahead of time means you have a ready-made barter business in place. As long as you have the means to protect that business from looters, you have cemented your position as a vital barter hub within your neighborhood or town.
• Solar Power Bank: Use a well-maintained solar power array to charge deep-cycle batteries for your barter network. The need for electricity will not disappear post-collapse. There are literally hundreds of tools people will need, from flashlights to food dehydrators to night vision. Not everyone can afford to set up his own solar array, but most families can afford to purchase a few deep-cycle batteries. If you have the means to charge those batteries, then you have a valuable service to barter.
• Seed Saving And Storage: The ability to grow food is a talent. A good gardener is a godsend to any survival community. That said, a person who knows how to effectively save and store seeds is even more important. Most people never consider that seed availability (especially heirloom seeds) might dissipate. One person with knowledge could take one good crop and turn it into dozens, or even hundreds. Learn to do this professionally, and you will never be without barter customers.
• Gunsmithing: The establishment has been quite open about its intentions to continue pursuit of gun legislation and, eventually, confiscation. There may come a day very soon when the guns we have in our hands are the only guns we’ll be able to find. We will have to think less in terms of replacing items and more in terms of repairing them. Learn how to fix weapons and invest in the machinery to fashion new parts from scratch, and you will be one of the most sought-after members of your barter network.
• Ammunition Production: I don’t have to tell you that the ammunition market is bone dry lately. I have never seen anything like it in my life, and neither has anyone else. Even during the “assault weapons ban” of the 1990s, parts and ammo were far more available than they are now. In response, smaller companies across the United States are starting to spring up to fill the void, producing higher-quality ammo at affordable prices, but with a reduced output. I would take this model down to the local level. If every survival community had a dedicated ammo smith (or at least a reloading expert), then regional and nationwide supplies might be rejuvenated (unless the Department of Homeland Security buys another 1.6 billion “practice rounds”). Making ammo can be slow and tedious (starting with scratch brass and lead is even more so). Output would be limited, but having some is better than having none. Also, I have no doubt that ammo will be treated like a currency in the near future.

There are numerous trade skills that one can learn to become more viable within a post-collapse economy. No one can provide every necessity or foresee every eventual need. Therefore, a barter community of tradesmen is essential and is the foundation of a truly free and prosperous society. The pursuit of a post-collapse skill should be at the top of every survivalist’s to-do list. It is not something to be put off or shelved for a later date. Learn one today – not tomorrow. This solution is within your power to make happen now. Do not waste the opportunity, especially in pursuit of top-down schemes that serve only to give false hope and zero returns.

You can contact Brandon Smith at:  brandon@alt-market.com

Alt-Market is an organization designed to help you find like-minded activists and preppers in your local area so that you can network and construct communities for mutual aid and defense. Join Alt-Market.com today and learn what it means to step away from the system and build something better.

To contribute to the growth of the Safe Haven Project, and to help us help others in relocating, or to support the creation of barter networks across the country, visit our donate page here

This article originally appeared on: SHTF Plan

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/on_civil_liberties_comparing_obama_with_bush_is_easy_–_and_mostly_wrong_20/

Posted on Jun 14, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

[unable to retrieve full-text content]

read more

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

A group of Kurdish victims of the 1988 chemical attack against the Iraqi city of Halabja are filing a lawsuit against two French companies for supplying chemical weapons to Iraqâ„¢s former dictator Saddam Hussein, Press TV reports.

The group has requested France to launch a formal investigation into the criminality of the companies.

The plaintiffs say the French companies were definitely aware of how Saddam was using their tons of chemical shipments.

Å“These companies working with Saddam Hussein to commit genocide against the Iraqi people must be held responsible and must pay for the terrible damage they caused against the innocent Kurds,” said Iraqi journalist Saif al-Khayat.

Å“There are 427 companies from around Europe that helped Saddam Hussein regime build his military arsenal. The victims of Halabja have 100,000 documents to prove it. It is amazing that many European leaders make grand speeches about human rights, but they also support their destructive arms industry,” he added.

Nearly 5,000 people, mostly women and children, immediately died a horrific death in the biggest poison gas attack in history.

Another 7,000 were injured, crippled, or suffered long-term health problems in the Halabja poison gas attack.

Since 1983, Saddam had illegally used chemical weapons against Iranians during the 1980-1988 Iraqi-imposed war, without facing any significant reaction from the international community.

France is the worldâ„¢s fourth-largest arms exporter, and for decades, it has shipped weapons to dictators across the Middle East, West and North Africa and other parts of the world. Moreover, eight of the worldâ„¢s top 12 arms exporters are European nations.

Twenty-five years later, the survivors are demanding justice and financial help with their myriad of health problems.

ASH/KA

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranians line up to cast their ballots minutes after the presidential as well as city and rural councils elections opened in Iran, June 14, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei (C) accompanied by the Head of the Leaderâ„¢s office, Hojjatoleslam Mohammad Mohammadi Golpayegani (R), cast an early ballot on June 14, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) has criticized the British government of having Å“confusing” energy policy after a study reveals the publicâ„¢s concern over the issue.

According to the survey by IMechE, 64 percent of 2,000 people polled said they were worried about the risk of electricity blackouts, while 93 percent said they are concerned about higher electricity and gas bills.

Å“These results show there is a severe lack of public confidence in the Governmentâ„¢s confused energy policy,” said Tim Fox, head of energy and environment at the institution.

Moreover, he said that the investment in new energy infrastructure is not sufficient, adding that the country could face Å“a future of high energy prices” for the public.

Earlier in March, a study by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed energy bills and fuel costs pushed Consumer Prices Index (CPI) inflation to 2.8 percent in February, up from 2.7 percent in May last year.

This comes as leading energy supplier RWE Npower admitted paying zero corporation tax for three years at a time when British households have been hit hardest by soaring energy bills.

MOS/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says arming either side in Syria conflict will not be helpful and will only lead to the disintegration of the Arab country.

Å“Providing arms to either side would not address this current situation…. There is no military solution to this conflict.… The military path points directly towards the further disintegration of the country,” Ban said on Friday.

The UN chief made the remarks in response to the US decision to provide new weapons to militants fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

The New York Times reported on June 13 that US President Barack Obama decided to begin supplying the militants in Syria with small arms and ammunition. The assistance, coordinated by the CIA spy agency, could include antitank weapons, the paper said.

Ban also said he could not verify the US allegations about the use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government, adding that UN experts will continue to gather information and material on the case.

On June 13, US Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes claimed in a White House statement that the Syrian government Å“has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent, sarin, on a small scale” against the foreign-backed Takfiri militants Å“multiple times in the last year.”

Hawkish US Senator John McCain, who is a staunch supporter of arming the militants in Syria, said Washington should even think of plans other than sending weapons to the militants Å“to change the equation on the battleground.”

Syria strongly rejects such claims and says the militants have used chemical weapons on several occasions, including during an attack in the region of Khan al-Assal in the northwestern province of Aleppo on March 19, where over two dozen people died.

The foreign-sponsored militancy, which started in Syria more than two years ago, has been taking its toll on the lives of many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security personnel.

MAM/KA/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The Taliban has expressed satisfaction with the outcome of a recent visit of its delegates to Iran, Press TV reports.

In a Thursday report, the Taliban described the visit as an important political achievement for the group.

The visit dealt a severe blow to the US and its puppets in Kabul, the group pointed out.

It also denounced efforts to create rift among Shias and Sunnis, noting that such a division, which is favored by Israel and the West, among the Islamic sects, will inflict irreparable damage on the Muslim world.

On June 2, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Abbas Araqchi dismissed reports about a Taliban political delegation visiting Iran from their office in Qatar.

Taliban militants have recently opened a mission in the Persian Gulf state to provide a venue for peace negotiations with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and find a peaceful end to the 12-year war in Afghanistan.

The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 under the pretext of fighting terrorism.

The invasion removed the Taliban from power, but the country remains insecure despite the presence of tens of thousands of US-led forces there.

AZA/ASH/KA

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Hezbollah Secretary-General Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah says the Lebanese resistance movement’s presence in Syria is aimed at defending the Syrian and Lebanese people against extremists.

Nasrallah said in a televised speech on Friday that there is an American, Israeli and Takfiri project to destroy not only Syria but the entire region.

Hezbollah chief went on to say that foreign intervention in neighboring Syria began before the resistance movement got involved in the conflict.

Nasrallah noted that most Syrians support their government, but ironically tens of thousands of militants are sent to the Arab country from undemocratic states in the region to allegedly fight for democracy.

He also emphasized that Hezbollah will not change its position on Syria in the face of threats.

Å“The world is coming to fight in Syria with their money, with their weapons, and with their media,” Nasrallah added.

The turmoil in Syria erupted in March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security personnel, have been killed so far.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said on June 13 that at least 93,000 people have been killed since the outbreak of the foreign-sponsored militancy against the Syrian government.

In May, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said militants from 29 different countries are fighting against the government in different parts of the country.

MAM/KA/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Israeli forces have shot and injured a Palestinian farmer in the besieged Gaza Strip, Press TV reports.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The Department of Justice and the state of Arkansas are suing Exxon Mobil over the March 29 rupture of the company’s Pegasus pipeline which spilled thousands of barrels of crude tar sands oil over the town of Mayflower, Ark.

A dead American Coot covered in oil lies among leaves near the Bell Slough Wildlife Management Area near Mayflower, AK, on April 2. (Photo: Courtney Dunn / Greenpeace) The government offices are seeking civil penalties from the Oil Giant for violations of state waste and pollution laws.

As a statement by the Environmental Protection Agency explains:

The complaint alleges six causes of action against the defendants. The U.S., on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, seeks civil penalties and injunctive relief under the federal Clean Water Act for the oil spill. The state of Arkansas, on behalf of the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality by the authority of the Arkansas Attorney General, seeks civil penalties for violations of the Arkansas Hazardous Waste Management Act and the Arkansas Water and Air Pollution Control Act. The state also seeks a declaratory judgment on ExxonMobil’s liability for payment of removal costs and damages related to the spill pursuant to the federal Oil Pollution Act.

The impact of the spill have been ongoing and widespread. Following the rupture, the oil poured into a residential neighborhood before making its way into nearby waterways, including a creek, wetlands and Lake Conway, an important source of water and recreation for the area.

Some residents of Mayflower and the surrounding area were forced to evacuate their homes while others suffered from headaches, dizziness, trouble breathing and other health problems from the perpetual presence of “toxic benzene” in the air surrounding the spill.

Glen Hooks, senior campaign representative for the Sierra Club in Arkansas, described one neighborhood where none of the 22 evacuated families have been able to return as a “sea of ‘For Sale’ signs.”

“This spill disrupted lives and damaged our environment,” said Arkansas Atty. Gen. Dustin McDaniel. “It sullied our previously pristine water and our clean air. As the party responsible for this incident, Exxon is also responsible for the penalties imposed by the state for the damage to our environment, and the company should foot the bill for the state’s cleanup costs.”

According to the Los Angeles Times,

if the court rules against ExxonMobil, it would be liable under the Clean Water Act for $1,100 for each barrel spilled, or more than $4,300 per barrel if the court determines that the spill occurred due to gross negligence or misconduct.

The spill released an estimated 5,000 barrels into Mayflower. Under Arkansas law, the company could be charged an additional $10,000 per violation per day for every day that oil is in the environment, according to the complaint.

And Reuters adds:

Federal pipeline regulators this month gave Exxon time to conduct a second round of testing on Pegasus after the company said an initial investigation into why the nearly 70-year-old line failed was inconclusive. […]

Exxon installed a new section of the pipeline in April after it removed a 52-foot-long (15.8 meter) damaged section, but it has yet to file a restart plan with federal regulators.

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Kit Daniels
Infowars.com
June 14, 2013

The domestic spy grid enslaving Americans’ personal data into perpetual, digital archives was planned well before 9/11 in a manner much like the early 2001 planning for the invasion of Iraq.

A 42-page, declassified memo called Transition 2001, published in December 2000 to brief newly elected President Bush on the National Security Agency, declares that the agency’s mission demands “a powerful, permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host ‘protected’ communications of Americans as well as the targeted communications of adversaries.” [emphasis added]

The word “protected,” surrounded by double quotations in the memo, refers to all of the personal, private data of Americans protected by the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Simply put, prior to the post-9/11 War on Terror, the NSA had every intention of ensnaring the phone conversations, e-mails, chat logs, search history, etc. of all Americans into their wide net of domestic surveillance. Even the double quotations imply a veil of contempt towards our rights.

Predating the Transition 2001 memo by three months, and 9/11 by an entire year, a report entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century calls for the U.S. Department of Defense to aggressively embrace information technologies but warns of a slow implementation unless a “new Pearl Harbor” ushers in an era of high-tech intelligence gathering.

This report also calls on the U.S. armed forces to control cyberspace, in the same vein of navies controlling the high seas, in order to protect American’s global political leadership in the “infosphere.” The report is structured upon a demand for “national leadership that accepts the United States’ global responsibilities.”

This report was published by the now-extinct Project for the New American Century, a think tank founded by former State Department staff member Robert Kagan and neoconservative William Kristol, the latter known for his statements suggesting the GOP would be better off without Ron Paul.

Although Kristol is now spinning the NSA’s end run around the Fourth Amendment as targeting foreign terrorists with proper oversight, Ron Paul on the other hand predicted the dangers of this Orwellian surveillance state over a quarter-century ago, ironically in the year 1984.

Unfortunately Ron Paul’s warning was completely ignored by our government. Not too long after the Transition 2001 memo and the Rebuilding America’s Defenses report, the U.S. Department of Defense moved towards integrating existing information on American citizens and aliens into a centralized, virtual database, as reported in a December 15, 2002 article in the New York Times by Jeffrey Rosen, entitled Total Information Awareness. According to this article, the Total Information Awareness program sought to analyze Americans’ criminal, financial, educational, medical, and travel records and could have included the development of “risk profile” technologies to determine “suspicious” patterns of behavior in individuals.

The current surveillance state was not born out of the post-9/11 world but simply thrived in it.

Other sources:
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/06/13/193487/the-government-is-watching.html#Intro
http://www.globalresearch.ca/undermining-the-fourth-amendment-nsa-memos-expose-obama-administrations-lies-about-wiretapping/5338901

<!–

–>

This article was posted: Friday, June 14, 2013 at 2:52 pm

Tags: 9/11, big brother, constitution, domestic news, domestic spying, government corruption, internet, technology, war

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

A bird? A plane? Nope. A Superman remake. And a darn good one. Man of Steel is an exciting superhero flick with some very strong Christian elements. In fact, it is easily the most spiritual of all of the Superman films.  

Similar to its 1970s predecessor, Man of Steel begins on the planet Krypton. Superman’s father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) helps Superman’s mother give birth to Kal-El (Superman) during the first natural birth to take place on Krypton in a long time, as Krypton’s society is highly technological. (The fact that Superman is born naturally as opposed to engineered like most other Kryptonians is actually a significant element in the film, and contributes to the religious parallels).

Like in the original film, the planet Krypton is being destroyed by its own people in their quest for energy. Superman’s father, recognizing that his planet is doomed, has issued several warnings to stop the planet’s course to annihilation, but to no avail. Wanting a better life for their son, Superman’s parents decide to send him on a spaceship to Earth.

Meanwhile, the nefarious General Zod (Michael Shannon) had been focusing his efforts on taking control of Krypton, but has been halted by Jor-El. Zod and his officers are arrested and sentenced to the Phantom Zone. Unfortunately, Jor-El is killed in the process.

The film skips forward a few years, and we find ourselves in Kansas, where the young Kal-El, who is now Clark Kent (Henry Cavill), resides with a loving set of parents, Jonathan (Kevin Costner) and Martha (Diane Lane) Kent.  

Clark has had a difficult time hiding his increasingly evident superpowers in fear that he may be a pariah, advice that he received from his parents who openly articulated concerns that he would not be understood or accepted.

Learning of his Kryptonian origins is not an easy pill to swallow for Clark Kent either, adding further to his confusion and difficulties.

For Clark, the efforts to keep his abilities hidden have left him feeling confused and alone. He wanders often, taking on odd jobs here and there, doing his best to stay under the radar.

Still, that does not stop him from using his powers to help others, displaying his true altruistic nature.

And when General Zod shows up on Earth with an army of soldiers, Clark’s selflessness and desire to aid others takes precedence over his desire to remain invisible.

It is obvious Zod is up to no good, though he attempts to deceive Superman by asking him to surrender himself and spare the human population, a proposition Superman thinks nothing of accepting. It is only when it becomes clear that Zod intends to bring harm to Earth despite Superman’s surrender that Superman resorts to violence against Zod and his soldiers.

It’s a very good thing for the people of Earth that Superman has learned from the fine examples set for him by both his Kryptonian parents and his Earthly parents. Superman thinks nothing of laying his life on the line for the sake of others.

Superman’s natural parents risked their lives to send him to Earth, and put themselves at risk standing up to Zod. And his adoptive parents are equally selfless. His father, Jonathan Kent, risked his own life to save others during a tornado. He often discusses with Clark the importance of making good selfless choices and staying true to one’s humanity.

And it’s obvious from Superman’s choices that the caring parental guidance he received has impacted him significantly. Even when he finds himself in rather dangerous scenarios, he allows his focus to be distracted by the human suffering surrounding him, and stops to deflect harm from innocent bystanders.

Likewise, the people with whom Superman becomes acquainted, most notably Daily Planet reporter Lois Lane (Amy Adams), are admirably selfless.

It is no surprise that good prevails in the end for this film. Superman is a truly good and arguably flawless hero, which is why he is often and easily characterized as Christ-like.

In fact, Warner Bros did not shy away from this parallel, having marketed specifically to Christians.

ManofSteelResources.com serves as a partnership between Warner Bros and MinistryResources.org and presents the sermon “Jesus–The Original Superhero” on its site as an available download to ministers. The site even permitted pastors to screen the film prior to opening weekend.

Warner Bros also provides family resources through the site that makes it easy for families to focus on discussion following the film.

According to Natalie Fertig of Movieguide.org, it is not difficult to see why Warner Bros is making an appeal to the Christian audiences. Fertig writes, “The original writers of Superman were of Jewish decent, and biblical values like unconditional love, sacrifice, and good triumphing over evil are found in the comics.”

And Man of Steel screenwriter David Goyer admits that biblical parallels are “baked into the DNA of the character.”

The parallels between Christ and Superman in Man of Steel can easily be seen in the language found within the film as well as in the details.

In the film, Clark’s mother tells him that the reality of his existence is a beautiful one and that he will serve as truth and hope for mankind. Likewise, Clark grows up enduring bullying and his father explains to him that the world is rejecting him. But like Christ, Clark continues to respond peacefully. At the age of 33, the very same age that many Christians believe Jesus was crucified, Clark learns the truth of his identify and is told by a computerized simulation of his father that he is called to lay down his life. His father also tells him that his role is to “embody both worlds,” referring to his world and that of Earth. His father calls him the “bridge” between the people of Earth and another world, which serves as an allusion for Christians to Christ being the mediator between us and God. When necessary, Clark uses his superhuman powers to heal. There are even moments in the film in which Superman levitates with his arms spread as if on a cross.

The similarities to Christ are undeniable.

There is a moment in the film when Clark visits a church to speak with a priest. In that scene, a vivid image of Christ from a stained-glass window in the background is seen just above Clark’s shoulder. In that scene, the priest discusses the importance of faith.

And there are several times in the film when God is directly invoked.

The Christian elements in the film help sell it as a positive family film. Likewise, there is a significant emphasis on positive parental relationships.

Unfortunately, some of the more harsh violence and the presence of some vulgar language, though not much, may prevent some parents from bringing their children to see the film, at least the younger children. Some of the images from the destruction of Metropolis may be difficult to watch, particularly as it is reminiscent to the attacks of September 11. Some of the violence can be scary for younger audiences, which is likely why it is rated PG-13.

Man of Steel possesses all of the attributes that superhero fanatics look for in a film and the credit for that likely goes to famed producer Christopher Nolan, best known for the fantastic Dark Knight trilogy. It is exciting and theatrical and boasts some spectacular effects.

It features powerful performances by some well-known actors and actresses, all of whom contribute to this heavily character-driven story.

Overall, it is one that I would recommend for all families with a small exception only for very young children.

This article originally appeared on: The New American

Ian Talley
Wall Street Journal
June 14, 2013

The International Monetary Fund lowered its 2014 growth outlook Friday and waded into the hot public debate over the Federal Reserve‘s monetary easing exit strategy by suggesting that the central bank should continue its $85 billion a month bond buying until at least the end of 2013.

“There is no need to rush to exit from monetary accommodation given the still large output gap, given the subdued growth that we have, and given the well-anchored inflation expectations,” said IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde.

In its annual assessment of the U.S. economy, the fund kept its forecast for a slight cooling of growth this year to 1.9%, from 2.2% last year. But it cut its estimate for 2014 growth by 0.3 percentage points to 2.7% because of the automatic budget cuts that have crimped output.

Read full article

<!–

–>

This article was posted: Friday, June 14, 2013 at 2:37 pm

Tags: economics, financial

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Nigel Morris
Independent.co.uk
June 14, 2013

Airlines have been warned by the Home Office not to fly the CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden to Britain as he would be turned away on arrival.

The move signals the Government’s determination to avoid a repeat of the controversy over the Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been living in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for nearly a year, after being granted asylum by the South American nation.

Mr Snowden, a former CIA contractor, is in hiding after admitting being the source of classified documents that revealed the huge extent of US surveillance operations. His current whereabouts is unknown after he disappeared from a Hong Kong hotel this week.

He has not yet been charged with any offence, but the US Government looks certain to attempt to bring him back to the US to face criminal charges. The US Attorney General, Eric Holder, said: “I can assure you we will hold accountable the person who is responsible for these extremely damaging leaks.

“The national security of the United States has been damaged as a result of these leaks. The safety of the American people, the safety of the people who reside in allied nations have been put at risk as a result of these leaks.”

Mr Snowden, 29, a former technical assistant at the CIA, revealed himself as the source of top-secret documents about the National Security Agency’s monitoring of phone and internet data after he quit his job with the security contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

His revelations about the Prism programme provoked uproar on both sides of the Atlantic. Foreign Secretary William Hague was forced to give a statement to MPs after the disclosure this month that data collected by NSA was shared with GCHQ in Cheltenham. Mr Hague insisted all GCHQ operations had been legal.

There is no evidence Mr Snowden wants to travel to Britain, but the Home Office has written to major international airlines to make clear he would not be welcome in this country. They have been told: “Carriers should deny boarding. This individual is highly likely to be refused entry to the UK.” The letter contains Mr Snowden’s photograph, passport number and date of birth. It warns that airlines which allow Mr Snowden to fly could be fined and liable to the costs of detaining and removing him from Britain.

The Home Secretary, Theresa May, has powers to turn away foreign nationals whose presence in the UK is deemed “detrimental to the public good”. The Home Office refused to comment on the letter sent out by the Risk and Liaison Overseas Network, part of UK Border Agency.

But a British official confirmed its authenticity and told Associated Press it was dispatched to airlines. It is not clear if other governments had issued similar warnings to carriers. Civil liberties groups will today protest in Hong Kong in support of Mr Snowden.

The European Commissioner for Justice Viviane Reding said yesterday US security measures should not be conducted at the expense of the public’s rights. She said there were still “fundamental issues” over the use of Prism against targets in Europe.

Mark Koba
CNBC
June 14, 2013

It’s often said that money corrupts. But a new study says that just the thought of getting some hard cash will do the trick.

The report by University of Utah and Harvard researchers found that individuals who could gain monetarily through unethical behavior were more likely to demonstrate that behavior than those who weren’t offered a financial gain.

“Were were interested in why good people would do bad behavior,” said Kristin Smith-Crowe, a management professor and co-author of the study released last month.

“We certainly found that the love of money is corrupting and just the mere exposure to it makes people do bad things,” Smith-Crowe said.

Using 324 undergraduate students from the university, Smith-Crowe and her colleagues conducted four separate “games” in two different groups. One group was told of a financial reward for the behavior, the other was told there was no financial reward for doing the same behavior.

In one game, students were presented with a series of scenarios in which an unethical act was committed. They were asked how likely they would be to engage in the same unethical acts for money. (The other group was asked the same question without the monetary reward.)

In another, they played a “deception game,” in which a group could earn more money by lying rather than telling the truth. (No reward to the second group for lying.)

The third game presented the students with a scenario in which they could choose to hire a candidate who promises to share insider information on a competitor if hired. (No insider information on the decision to hire someone for the second group.)

In the final trial, students engaged in a performance task in which they could earn more money by being dishonest rather than being honest. (No reward to the second group for being dishonest.)

The study found that participants who were merely exposed to the concept of a monetary gain were more likely to demonstrate unethical intentions, decisions, and behavior than the students in the separate controlled condition– without the possibility of a financial reward.

As Western leaders and major media outlets rushed to back the White House’s recent claim that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against its rebel forces–urging increased U.S. “military support” for the rebels–progressive voices emerged Friday to warn against U.S. intervention, which would only escalate the conflict and lead to an even greater loss of life in the region.

A Syrian boy sits in the rubble of house in the town of Taftanaz, Syria. (AP) Firstly, speaking on Democracy Now! Friday morning, Patrick Cockburn reminded viewers that very similar claims, which proved to be false, were made before the U.S. lead invasion of Iraq:

Well, there must be, you know, some doubts about this. You know, they [The White House] say this in a sure voice, but it’s a sure voice which reminds me of what they were saying in 2002 and 2003 about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.

Both Syria and its close ally Russia–who promised to send air-defense missiles to the Syrian government in the wake of Western powers lifting the ban on arms shipments to rebels in the region–denied the accusations Friday.

Alexei Pushkov, leader of the Russian lower house’s international affairs committee, accused the US of fabricating evidence, comparing it to America’s incorrect claims of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003.

“Information about the usage of chemical weapons by [Syrian President Bashar al] Assad is fabricated in the same way as the lie about [Saddam] Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq],” Pushkov tweeted.

Cockburn hightlighted the complexities of the conflict, of which the U.S., Russia, and others have already involved themselves in several ways. According to Cockburn, the conflict has become a “proxy war” between several foreign interests vying for power:

Cockburn states:

Yeah, it already has turned into a proxy war. You can see that with–Hezbollah and Iran were involved, but also the U.S. was–had already combined with Qatar to send weapons. Qatar has sent up to $3 billion to the rebels, 70 loads of flights of weapons, organized by–with the CIA. So, that was already happening. I think one of the–you know, what ought to happen would be to go down the diplomatic road to try and have a ceasefire. I don’t think you can have any solution at this moment in time, because you people are too involved in the war, they hate each other. But they should push for a ceasefire, and then there might be the basis for some talks afterwards. But the decision by the U.S. looks as though it’s going to push this into an all-out and long-running conflict.

Likewise, Phyllis Bennis, Fellow and the Director of the New Internationalism Project, told the Real News Network Friday that “this has been in the works for a while,” including recent U.S. troop movements in Syria’s neighbor, Jordan.

More recently, just in the last few days, we’ve seen 5,000 U.S. troops, as well as a group of Patriot missiles, sent off to Jordan on the Syrian border for a long-planned but conveniently timed, let’s say, military exercise that’s involving troops from a number of countries. But it’s quite likely that at least some of those troops and all of the Patriot missiles that are being sent will be remaining in Jordan after the two-week long exercise is over as part of the preparation for a possible direct military intervention.

Bennis went on to insist that there is absolutely no military “solution” in the region–that increased loss in human life is more than likely, as well as a long drawn out occupation:

The problem here, of course, is that they’re acting as if there is a military solution in Syria when in fact there is no military solution. And the possibility of negotiations in Geneva, something that the U.S. and Russia jointly have been working towards and calling for, is now looking less and less likely, with moves towards escalating the arms sales on both sides. […]

It can absolutely get worse. And it probably will, unfortunately. The reality is that civil wars–and this is partly a civil war. It’s also now a proxy war. There’s actually five separate wars being waged in Syria. But part of it is a civil war. Civil wars, if one side doesn’t qualitatively destroy the other, end with negotiated settlements. The question is: do those negotiations begin now, or do we wait until there’s another 70,000 or 80,000 or 100,000 Syrian casualties before going ahead with negotiations?

“So, I think once you get entangled in this,” Cockburn continued, “rather like Iraq, it’s very different to–difficult to disentangle yourself, and this could go on for years.”

Similarly, Bob Dreyfuss, writing for the Nation, described further U.S. involvement as a “slippery slope” that could lead to all out war:

So yesterday the White House decided to send weapons to the rebels. Reading the White House’s statement on the matter, it’s clear that they’re not quite ready to go all in, but that’s the problem with a slippery slope: once you send in small arms and ammunition, next comes anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles and — oops! — before you know it, you’re bombing Syrian airports and imposing a no-fly zone. […]

U.S. escalation is certain to make things worse for Syrians, Dreyfuss warns:

Saying “coming weeks” makes it sound as if adding the weapons isn’t all that urgent, but the message is clear: the United States will be arming the Supreme Military Council, and it will get worse.

An unnamed “Western diplomat” told Reuters Friday that the U.S. is considering a no-fly zone in Syria.

“Washington is considering a no-fly zone to help Assad’s opponents,” one diplomat said. He said it would be limited “time-wise and area-wise, possibly near the Jordanian border,” giving no further details.

As many Common Dreams contributors have pointed out in the past, including Bennis, a no-fly zone is synonymous with an aggressive air bombing campaign, which often escalates quickly into a full scale invasion.

“How many civilians would die in that bombardment,” asked Bennis recently, “given the widespread presence of anti-aircraft facilities across the country, including in populated areas?”

Watch Bennis on the Real News below:

Watch the Democracy Now! Cockburn interview below:

_______________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

‘;
jQuery(‘div.media-image’).each( function(index){
src = String(jQuery(this).children(‘img.media-image’).attr(‘src’));
if( src != ” && src != ‘undefined’ ){
parts = src.split(‘/’);
if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘slideshow’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/slideshow/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘AFP’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/images/AFP/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-3] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-2]+’/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else { new_src = false; }
if( new_src ){ jQuery(this).html(‘‘+jQuery(this).html()+enlarge_html+’‘); }
}
});

var slideshowdiv; var new_html; var img_obj; var sourcediv; var titlediv; var captiondiv; var title; var caption;

jQuery(‘div.slideshow-body div.slideshow div.field-item’).each( function(index){

slideshowdiv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-embedded-gallery’);
img_obj = slideshowdiv.find(‘img’);
src = img_obj.attr(‘src’);

title = slideshowdiv.children(‘div.altslideshow-title’).html();
if( title == null ){ title = ”; }

caption = slideshowdiv.children(‘div.altslideshow-caption’).html();
if( caption == null ){ caption = ”; }

if( src != ” && src != ‘undefined’ ){
// alert( ‘SRC: ‘+src );
parts = src.split(‘/’);
if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘slideshow’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/slideshow/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘AFP’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/images/AFP/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-3] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-2]+’/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else { new_src = false; }
// alert( ‘New SRC: ‘+new_src );
if( new_src ){
img_obj.parent().attr(‘href’,new_src).attr(‘rel’,’lightbox[slides]’).attr(‘title’,title+’
‘+caption).append(‘

Click to enlarge.

‘);
}
}

//sourcediv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-source’);
//titlediv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-title’);
//captiondiv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-caption’);
//sourcediv.after( titlediv ).after( captiondiv );

});

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 14, 2013
 |

Two weeks ago, dozens of Hawaiians gathered at the Marine Education & Training Center in Honolulu to bid farewell to the Hōkūleʻa as she and her crew embarked on an unprecedented journey. After the group gathered in prayer aboard the Polynesian sea craft, the wind carried the double-hulled canoe onto the open sea.

The Hōkūleʻa had just departed on a voyage to circumnavigate the globe.

This four-year worldwide voyage, which launched on May 29, aims to raise awareness about climate change and its imminent threat to the Polynesian Islands, including Hawaii. Yet, the idea that a traditional Polynesian voyaging canoe has set sail to circumnavigate the globe is all the more significant because this Hawaiian tradition itself nearly went extinct.

The revival

In the 1970s, the islands underwent a “Hawaiian Renaissance.” After more than 70 years of U.S. governance, the Hawaiian people discovered renewed dignity in their ancestral heritage and cultural practices, including music, hula, language, stories, art and farming. Civil resistance also characterized this period, and young Hawaiians occupied the island of Kahoolawe, which was being used as a U.S. military training ground and bombing range.

Perhaps more than anything else, Polynesian voyaging defined the decade. Fearful of cultural extinction, a number of young Hawaiians embarked on a journey to revive the history of their islands’ discovery and the traditional navigational skills of their ancestors.

The Polynesian Voyaging Society crafted the Hōkūleʻa, a replica of the ancient Polynesian double-hulled voyaging canoes that were used thousands of years ago by the ancestors of native Hawaiians. The Hōkūleʻa, whose name means Star of Gladness in Hawaiian, is 62 feet long and 16 feet high. She has no motor and is instead steered by a long paddle and powered by two massive sails. She can travel up to 29 miles an hour in trade winds and carry nearly 20 crewmembers at a time.

After construction, the Hōkūleʻa was set to voyage 2,500 miles to Tahiti, a large island in the South Pacific Ocean. Part of the mission was to challenge the western belief that indigenous Polynesians had simply drifted to Hawaii unintentionally on ocean currents because they were incapable of navigating thousands of miles without European instruments like maps, charts, chronometers and compasses. (Another western theory, later invalidated by DNA evidence, suggested that Polynesians reached Hawaii from the Americas.)

But the Polynesian Voyaging Society couldn’t find a single Hawaiian who still knew the ancient navigation methods – called “wayfinding” – such as remembering the placement of the stars and reading the direction of the waves and swells. So the crew sought the guidance of Mau Piailug, a master navigator from the Satawal Island in the Caroline Islands of Micronesia.

The Hōkūleʻa set sail from Honolua Bay on May 1, 1976. Thirty-one days later, 20,000 elated Tahitians greeted the craft as it neared the island. The Hōkūleʻa became a symbol of Hawaiian pride, and a generation later people still felt the impact of the canoe and that first voyage.

“Now I feel proud to be from Hawaii, because I’m connected to something very real,” said current crewmember Jenna Ishii. “It’s something that has roots, and will be here long after many other technologies come and go.”

Piailug was critical to the success of HōkÅ«leÊ»a, and he taught the next generation of Hawaiian navigators the knowledge and skills necessary to continue wayfinding. Under Hawaiian direction, the HōkÅ«leÊ»a subsequently sailed to New Zealand, Tonga, the continental United States, Japan and the Satawal Island. And now she’s departed for her most ambitious voyage yet: a four-year mission to circumnavigate the globe.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

Please Spread The Word And Share This Post

This article originally appeared on: SHTF Plan

Matt Helms, Joe Guillen and Alisa Priddle
Detroit Free Press
June 14, 2013

Emergency manager Kevyn Orr on Friday laid out an extraordinary, complex and painful path back to solvency for the city of Detroit in a proposed plan to creditors.

It would spin off the city’s water department, reduce city-provided health care for retirees and immediately stop debt payments and then use that money to keep the city operating while reinvesting $1.5 billion over the next decade to boost crucial public services like police and fire, step up blight removal and transform an antiquated, failing city government.

The impact of the document Orr released publicly and to creditors in Friday’s historic meeting cannot be understated.

Read full article

<!–

–>

This article was posted: Friday, June 14, 2013 at 1:18 pm

Tags: domestic news, economics

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Infowars.com
June 14, 2013

Judging by the scant details FBI Director Robert Mueller provided at a House hearing Thursday, it doesn’t look like the investigation into the IRS’s targeting of Conservative, Tea Party and Patriot groups is something the FBI feels very comfortable discussing.

Yesterday, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan grilled the federal bureau’s boss asking basic details on the case, but Mueller supposedly hadn’t been briefed since the investigation began. What followed was an almost comedic exchange between a befuddled FBI director and an angry state Rep. posing some very uncomfortable questions.

The entire exchange was transcribed by Fox News:

Rep. Jim Jordan: Is Mr. [Elijah] Cummings accurate in his assessment?

Mueller: Could you repeat that?

Jordan: Based on everything I’ve seen, quoting Mr. Cummings, “the case is solved” this is regarding the IRS scandal.

Mueller: Which case?

Jordan: The IRS scandal

Mueller: The IRS case? No, the IRS case is currently under investigation and it basically just started.

Jordan: Yeah, what can you tell us, you started a month ago. Have you found the now infamous two rogue agents, have you discovered who those people are?

Mueller: Well I needless to say because it’s under investigation I can’t give out any information

Jordan: Can you tell me some basics, how many investigators you’ve assigned to the case?

Mueller: Well, uh, I may be able to do that but I’d have to get back to you.

Jordan: Can you tell me who the lead investigator is?

Mueller: Off the top of my head, no.

Jordan: This is the most important issue in front of the country in the last six weeks and you don’t know who’s heading up the case? Who the lead investigator is?

Mueller: Uh, at this juncture no I do not know..

Jordan: Can you get that information to us we’d like to know. We’d like to know how many people you’ve assigned to look into this situation.

Mueller: I have not had a recent briefing on it, I had a briefing on it when we first initiated it, but I have not had a recent briefing as to where we are

Jordan: Who’s leading the case?

Mueller: I do not know who is leading the case.

Jordan: Do you know if you’ve talked to any of the victims, have you talked to any of the groups who were targeted by their government? Have you met with any of the Tea Party folks since May 14, 2013?

Mueller: I do not know what the status of the interviews are by the team that’s on it

Jordan: Would expect that that’s been done?

Mueller: Uh, they’re, uh… Certainly, at some point in time of course the investigation will be done but generally to start the investigation you get the documents so that you can have…

Jordan: But don you usually talk to the victims…

Mueller: I do not know specifically what is happening

Jordan: In your extensive record and history in investigative work, don’t you typically talk to victim? It’s a criminal investigation, don’t you talk to the victims pretty soon..

Mueller: Absolutely, and I am sure it will happen.

Jordan: So did the FBI contact any of these same victims, were they contacted by the FBI prior to the investigation when the same groups were applying for tax exemption status did the FBI pay some of these individuals a visit?

Mueller: I do not know.

Jordan: You don’t know?

Mueller: I do not know.

Jordan: Some of them testified that they were paid a visit by the FBI, specifically Catherine Engelbrecht in Texas, said she was contacted by the FBI, she was head of True the Vote. Is that true or not?

Mueller: I do not know.

Jordan: You do not know. Okay. If the FBI did contact people involved in the IRS scandal, victims groups, prior to the investigation when they were applying for tax exemption status. Why was that the case? Why would you be looking into it? And, was there possibly coordination with the IRS in why you targeted them?

Mueller: You’re asking me details about the investigation, I would be happy to get back to you. …

Jordan: I am not asking you details about the investigation. I am saying why were people targeted before the investigation started? Why were they contacted by the FBI? People who are now part of Tea Party groups who were targeted by the IRS.

Mueller: You’re asking details about the investigation. I would be happy to take your questions…

Jordan: That is not a detail about the investigation, that took place before the investigation started.

Mueller: May I please finish, you’re asking detailed about the investigation I’d be happy to get back to you and answer those questions that I can’t understanding that there is an on-going investigation..

Jordan: I am asking you basic questions about the investigation like who’s heading it up? And you can’t tell me that.

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

The largest fire in Colorado history continues to rage today as scientists warn that global warming will lead to bigger and more frequent blazes.

(AP Photo) The Black Forest Fire has so far claimed two lives and 379 homes and forced the emergency evacuation of 38,000 people. The U.S. military, national guard, and over 750 firefighters have been called in to fight the flames that stalled at 25 square miles on Friday.

While the cause of the fire is unknown, drought and heightened Colorado temperatures hastened its spread.

Yet, the danger zone extends far beyond the fire’s destructive path.

The New York Times reports that communities throughout the West face threatening conditions:

After years of drought and a dry winter, communities across the West have been bracing for a brutal summer wildfire season. Thousands of acres are burning in California, and several wildfires erupted in Colorado and New Mexico, burning through a national park, sage and juniper hills and the once-idyllic community of Black Forest.

A February USDA report directly points to global warming as the real culprit behind increasing wild fires that will only worsen as temperatures continue to rise.

This warning is echoed by scientists and scholars. Mother Jones reports:

Big wildfires like Colorado’s thrive in dry air, low humidity, and high winds; climate change is going to make those conditions more frequent over the next century. We know because it’s already happening: A University of Arizona report from 2006 found that large forest fires have occurred more often in the western United States since the mid-1980s as spring temperatures increased, snow melted earlier, and summers got hotter, leaving more and drier fuels for fires to devour.

Thomas Tidwell, the head of the United States Forest Service, told a Senate committee on energy and natural resources recently that the fire season now lasts two months longer and destroys twice as much land as it did four decades ago. Fires now, he said, burn the same amount of land faster.

Meanwhile, Colorado residents fear that this fire threatens a repeat of last year’s particularly destructive fire season, as Denver met a new record of the earliest day in the year to reach 100 degrees.

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

On Thursday the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that patents on human genes are now void, while the successful creation of synthetic genes may continue to be patented. Both sides of the lawsuit celebrated victory.

Mike Adams of Natural News exclaimed:“Sanity prevails: human genes are not eligible for patent protection!” while the ACLU declared: “Victory! Supreme Court Decides Our Genes Belong to Us!”

On the other hand, Myriad Genetics, Inc., the biotechnology company that holds dozens of patents on human genes, wrote:

The Supreme Court of the United States upheld its patent claims on complementary DNA, or cDNA. However, the Court ruled that five of Myriad’s claims covering isolated DNA were not patent eligible. Following today’s decision, Myriad has more than 500 valid and enforceable claims in 24 different patents conferring strong patent protection for its BRACAnalysis® test.

At issue was patent law protecting intellectual property rights that establish a temporary monopoly over an invention to protect the inventor’s discovery, allow him to make his discovery public and to recoup his investment in developing it. The Supreme Court ruled that Myriad’s separation of the genes involved in breast and ovarian cancer, first discovered in the 1990s by Mary-Claire King, was not an invention that could be covered under patent law. In writing the court’s opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said: “Myriad did not create anything. To be sure, it found an important and useful gene, but separating that gene from its surrounding genetic material is not an act of invention.”

King’s discovery had been patented by Myriad and allowed the company a virtual, though temporary (their patents expire in 2015), monopoly to charge up to $4,000 each for genetic testing such as that which led to Angelina Jolie’s decision to have a double mastectomy earlier this year. King was pleased at the decision:

It is splendid news for patients, for physicians, for scientists and for common sense. The marketplace will now be open.

Restriction of competition is one of the primary criticisms of patent law. The owner of the patent is free to market his invention without competition and such freedom often results in prices being charged that are significantly higher than a free market might allow. This, critics say, stifles competition and retards progress, especially in biomedicine. As noted in USA Today, 

The decision represents a victory for cancer patients, researchers and geneticists who claimed that a single company’s patent [Myriad’s] raised costs, restricted research and sometimes forced women to have breasts or ovaries removed without sufficient facts or second opinions.

Since 1984 the U.S. Patent Office has granted more than 40,000 such patents related to genetic material and estimates are that at least 10,000 of them are now invalidated. Almost immediately, competitors who have been watching this case announced plans to offer alternative and much less expensive tests. A spokesman for Quest Diagnostics, Wendy Bost, said:

Based on our initial review of the court’s decision, we expect it will open opportunities for Quest Diagnostics to develop new testing services, including the area of hereditary breast cancer.

As the leader in women’s health and cancer diagnostics, we are very interested in offering a BRCA [the offending gene] testing service. We now intend to … offer … test services to physicians and patients [later on] this year.

Not to be outdone, a Houston-based genetics testing company, DNA Traits, said it would immediately begin offering such tests for $995, about one-quarter of the price charged by Myriad prior to the Supreme Court’s decision.

Adams sees the Supreme Court decision as a landmark case and “a huge loss for the biotech and pharmaceutical industries [which] would love to patent all seeds and food crops – even ones it hasn’t genetically engineered.” He added:

Ultimately, this decision is a tremendous victory for all humankind because it prevents the power-hungry, evil-bent medical and biotech corporations from claiming ownership over genetic sequences that already occur in nature.

This ruling means the biotech industry cannot patent common plants and animals, either. They can’t patent human body parts or human gene sequences. Yes, the industry can still patent synthetically-created genes, said the Supreme Court, but that’s something they would actually have to create rather than merely discover in an already-existing organism….

The ruling also means that other companies can conduct research on those genes without first seeking permission from Myriad. This will actually spur more innovation, potentially leading to more advanced genetic analysis tests that might help people better understand their health risks (and hopefully encourage them to change their diets and lifestyle choices to avoid expressing those genes).

The ACLU also saw the Supreme Court’s decision as a success. By invalidating some of Myriad’s patents (and, by definition, thousands of others as well), price competition can enter the field without snuffing efforts to develop new methods and strategies for fighting diseases. Said the ACLU:

By invalidating these patents, the Court lifted a major barrier to progress in further understanding how we can better treat and prevent diseases. And in fact, the decision will help, not hinder, the biotechnology industry.

Most of the industry is focused on using genes as a starting point to create new tools, tests, and therapeutics. While all of these applications could be patented, the genes themselves should remain in the public storehouse of knowledge, for scientists at universities and corporations to freely study and use….

We celebrate the Court’s ruling as a victory for civil liberties, scientific freedom, patients, and the future of personalized medicine.

And so do we. 

A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. 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

Despite a massive influx of funds from billionaire New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, an anti-gun extremist using his fortune to bankroll nationwide attacks on the Second Amendment, Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (shown) vetoed legislation on Thursday that would have mandated “universal background checks” on gun purchases. Gun-rights activists successfully mobilized to stop the bill, inundating the Republican governor’s office with phone calls asking him to veto it.  

The defeat of the controversial legislation was viewed as a major development with implications that extend far beyond Nevada’s borders. Gun-rights supporters celebrated the veto, saying it showed that out-of-touch billionaires and their bogus polls were losing the nationwide battle to strip Americans’ God-given right to keep and bear arms. Anti-gun zealots, meanwhile, howled about the embarrassing defeat and vowed to press forward with their attack on the Second Amendment.

If the S.B. 221 legislation had been signed into law, all firearm purchases would have to be approved by authorities, essentially making firearm ownership a revocable privilege rather than a constitutionally guaranteed right. Even more alarming to critics were the potential abuses of the background check system to compile records of all gun owners and create a database – historically a precursor to confiscation. Officials continue to claim that records of the check are promptly destroyed in accordance with the law, but experts are not buying it.

“The instant background check is gun registration,” Gun Owners of America chief Larry Pratt told The New American, adding that it was crucial for citizens to continue fighting back against efforts to infringe on the Second Amendment. “The government will not answer when we ask how they are destroying the names and addresses, as required by law, of those that have been checked. They just don’t respond; ‘so sue us’ is kind of the attitude that they have.” 

The controversial bill would have also turned mental-health workers into mandated government informants by requiring them to report patients who may be a threat to themselves or others. Among other major concerns, analysts contend that as soon as a lawsuit is filed against a psychiatrist for failing to report a patient who later did something wrong, the norm will become reporting virtually everyone who seeks therapy.  

Critics of such mental-health provisions come from all across the political spectrum. Among them: psychiatrists and others who warn that people in need of assistance would be less likely to seek it if they could lose their gun rights; advocates of patient confidentiality; experts concerned about Big Psychiatry’s increasingly outlandish claims that almost every sort of human behavior should be labeled a “mental illness;” and more.

Already, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the psychiatric industry claim that some 50 percent of Americans will suffer from mental disorders, an allegation blasted as ludicrous by credible psychiatrists. The potential for abusing “mental health” diagnoses to restrict individual rights is enormous, experts say, citing mountains of data.

In a statement, Gov. Sandoval outlined his reasons for vetoing the legislation. While expressing support for many of the bill’s goals, the governor said the background check provisions would “constitute an erosion of Nevadans Second Amendment rights under the United States Constitution.” It could also subject otherwise law-abiding citizens to prosecution, he added.

Law enforcement leaders in the state agreed with the governor’s analysis and requested a veto. According to the Nevada Sheriffs’ and Chiefs’ Association, the mandatory background check provisions on private sales “place an unreasonable burden on law-abiding citizens, with the potential to make them criminals.” The association also said the scheme would be “unenforceable” by law enforcement and would “do little to keep firearms out of the hands of criminals.”    

Another problem with the legislation, Gov. Sandoval continued, was a change in state law that would shift the burden of proof in prosecutions of people who sell firearms. Current law makes it a crime to transfer firearms if there is “actual knowledge” that the buyer is a “prohibited person.” If the bill had become law, sellers would be prosecuted just for having “reasonable cause to believe” – a radical change that the governor noted could subject law-abiding Nevadans to criminal prosecution.

As such, after receiving at least tens of thousands of calls from citizens seeking a veto, the governor decided not to support the controversial legislation. “Senate Bill 221, while laudable in its efforts to strengthen reporting requirements concerning mentally ill persons, imposes unreasonable burdens and harsh penalties upon law-abiding Nevadans, while doing little to prevent criminals from unlawfully obtaining firearms,” he said in the veto statement.

Gun rights activists who helped rally opposition to the bill promptly celebrated the victory, but warned that the nationwide battle to preserve the Second Amendment was far from over. Gun Owners of America, widely considered the most principled gun-rights organization, pointed out that citizens made the difference – defeating big money from out-of-state Astroturf groups like Bloomberg’s “Mayors Against Illegal Guns,” which spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on its effort in Nevada.   

“Despite Bloomberg’s fortune, his anti-gun MAIG simply doesn’t have the grassroots behind it,” noted Gun Owners of America in an e-mail blast to supporters announcing the victory. “The Governor was inclined to veto the gun control bill all along, but gun owners can be sure that – had the poll results gone the other way – he could have been easily persuaded to bow to Bloomberg’s pressure.”

The implications of the veto extend far beyond Nevada, however. “Nevada is a key state as it is home to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) and to ‘swing vote’ Senator Dean Heller (R),” GOA continued. “Defeating Universal Background Checks in the Silver State – with overwhelming numbers of callers opposing it – sends a powerful message from a Purple State, that Americans do NOT want additional gun control!”

As has become typical in the ongoing assault on gun rights, anti-Second Amendment forces were quick to trot out easily debunked polls claiming that “90 percent” of Americans support schemes to require government permission before a person can exercise his or her unalienable rights. Bloomberg and his gun-control group, which has numerous mayoral members embroiled in outrageous scandals, were particularly furious about the victory for gun rights.

“Rather than sign sensible legislation that keeps guns out of the hands of convicted felons and the mentally ill, Governor Sandoval has decided to preserve the loopholes that they use to buy guns,” whined Bloomberg in a press release, citing bogus statistics and polls to support his extremist views. “The state legislature and 86 percent of Nevadans support comprehensive background checks, but this veto means that criminals and the dangerously mentally ill will continue to get a free pass in Nevada.”

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), a key figure in the crusade to further restrict gun rights who spoke with Gov. Sandoval about the bill, was upset as well. “I am deeply disappointed in Gov. Sandoval’s decision to veto this bill,” he was quoted as saying in the Washington Post. “People convicted of a felony or suffering from a severe mental illness should be prevented from buying a gun with a simple background check.”  

While states like Colorado, New York, and Connecticut have passed statutes infringing on the right to keep and bear arms in recent months, others have gone in the opposite direction, with some expanding gun rights and a few even nullifying unconstitutional federal gun control rules. Kansas, as one recent example, passed nullification legislation earlier this year making it a crime for federal agents to enforce certain unconstitutional restrictions on gun rights within the state. Meanwhile, South Dakota passed a law allowing teachers to carry firearms at school.

However, as The New American has been reporting for months, President Obama and his anti-Second Amendment allies are quietly working to foist more restrictions on America through “executive actions.” Recent news reports also suggest that anti-gun members of Congress are preparing for another showdown after their embarrassing Senate defeat in April. If gun rights are to survive in the long term, analysts say, Second Amendment proponents will have to stay on high alert.

^{Photo of Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval: AP Images}

Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, politics, and more. He can be reached at
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
.

Related articles:

Obama Pursues Gun Control via Executive Action After Senate Blow

Background Checks Open Door to National Gun Registry

“Mental Illness” Diagnoses Are the Slippery Slope to Gun Confiscation

After Crushing Defeat, Obama and Gun Grabbers to Revive Effort

Why is the Federal Government Disarming Veterans?

Critics Blast Big Psychiatry for Invented and Redefined Mental Illnesses

Blasted as Whitewash, Fast and Furious Report Blames ATF and DOJ

Senate Rejects Amendment to Expand Background Checks for Gun Sales

Obama Unveils Assault on Gun Rights

AP Poll Shows Healthy Opposition to Obama Gun Control Scheme

The Real Reason Gun Control Failed

Background Checks Open Door to National Gun Registry

Facing Firm Opposition, Obama Renews Assault on Gun Rights

Gun Owners Refuse to Register Under New York Law

ACLU Raises Concerns Over Sen. Reid’s Gun Bill 

NY Times Calls Gun Owners of America an “Upstart” 

Kansas Gov. Signs Watered-down Second Amendment Protection Act

Sheriffs and Legislators Are Acting to Nullify Obama Gun Controls 

Liberty Coalition Forms to Support Sheriffs Fighting Gun Control 

Counties and Cities Now Nullifying Gun Control

States Aim to Nullify Obama Gun Control

As Obama’s Anti-gun Agenda Emerges, Republican Threatens Impeachment 

Wyoming Bill Would Nullify Obama Gun Control, Jail Feds

Obama Executive Orders on Guns Would Spark Mass Resistance 

Police Chief Seeks Nullification of Unconstitutional Gun Control

Obama Task Force Plotting Extreme Assault on Gun Rights  

This article originally appeared on: The New American

Beirut.

The short answer is Iran and Hezbollah according to Congressional sources. “The Syrian army’s victory at al-Qusayr was more than the administration could accept given that town’s strategic position in the region. Its capture by the Assad forces has essentially added Syria to Iran’s list of victories starting with Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, as well as its growing influence in the Gulf.”

Other sources are asserting that Obama actually did not want to invoke direct military aid the rebels fighting to topple the Assad government or even to make use of American military power in Syria for several reasons. Among these are the lack of American public support for yet another American war in the Middle East, the fact that there appears to be no acceptable alternative to the Assad government on the horizon, the position of the US intelligence community and the State Department and Pentagon that intervention in Syria would potentially turn out very badly for the US and gut what’s left of its influence in the region. It short, that the US getting involved in Syria could turn out even worse than Iraq, by intensifying a regional sectarian war without any positive outcome in sight.

Obama was apparently serious earlier about a negotiated diplomatic settlement pre-Qusayr and there were even some positives signs coming from Damascus, Moscow, and even Tehran John Kerry claimed. But that has changed partly because Russia and the US have both hardened their demands. Consequently, the Obama administration has now essentially thrown in the towel on the diplomatic track. This observer was advised by more than one Congressional staffer that Obama’s team has concluded that the Assad government was not getting their message or taking them seriously and that Assad’s recent military  gains and rising popular support  meant that a serious Geneva II initiative was not going to happen.

In addition, Obama has been weakened recently by domestic politics and a number of distractions and potential scandals not least of which is the disclosures regarding the massive NSA privacy invasion. In addition, the war lobby led by Senators McClain and Lindsay Graham is still pounding their drums and claim that Obama would be in violation of his oath of office and by jeopardizing the national security interest of the United States by allowing Iran to essentially own Syria once Assad quells the uprising.” Both Senators welcomed the chemical weapons assessment.  For months they have been saying that Obama has not been doing enough to help the rebels. “U.S. credibility is on the line,” they said in a joint statement this week. “Now is not the time to merely take the next incremental step. Now is the time for more decisive actions,” they said, such as using long-range missiles to degrade Assad’s air power and missile capabilities. Another neo-con, Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) said the opposition forces risk defeat without heavier weapons, but he also warned that may not be enough. “The U.S. should move swiftly to shift the balance on the ground in Syria by considering grounding the Syrian air force with stand-off weapons and protecting a safe zone in northern Syria with Patriot missiles in Turkey,” Casey said.

According to some analysts, Obama could alternatively authorize the arming and training of the Syrian opposition in Jordan without a no-fly zone. That appears unlikely according to this observers Washington interlocutors because the Pentagon wants to end the Syrian crisis by summers end, the observer was advised “rather than working long term with a motley bunch of jihadists who we could never trust or rely on. The administration has come to the conclusion apparently that if they are in for a penny they are in for a pound, meaning would not allow Iran to control Syria and Hezbollah to pocket Lebanon.”

Secretary of State Kerry had meetings with more than two dozen military specialists on 5/13/13. The Washington Post is reporting that Kerry believes supplying the rebels with weapons might be too little and too late to actually flip the balance on the Syrian ground and this calls “for a military strike to paralyze Al-Assad’s military capacities.” A Pentagon source reported that  the USA, France, and Britain are considering a decisive decision to reverse the current Assad momentum and quickly construct one in favor of the rebels” within a time period not exceeding the end of this summer.

Shortly after the meetings began, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia quickly returned to Saudi Arabia from his palace at Casa Blanca, Morocco after receiving a call from his intelligence chief, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan. Bander reportedly had a representative at the White House during the meetings with President Obama’s team. King Abdullah was reportedly advised by Kerry to be prepared for a rapid expansion of the growing regional conflict.

What happens between now and the end of summer is likely to be catastrophic for the Syrian public and perhaps Lebanon. The “chemical weapons-red line” is not taken seriously on Capitol Hill for the reason that the same “inclusive evidence” of months ago is the same that is suddenly being cited to justify what may become essentially an all-out war against the Syrian government and anyone who gets in the way. Hand wringing over the loss of 125 lives due to chemical weapons, whoever did use them, pales in comparison to the more 50,000 additional lives that will be lost in the coming months, a figure that  Pentagon planners and the White House have “budgeted” as the price of toppling the Assad government.

“We are going to see a rapid escalation of the conflict”, a staffer on the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee emailed this observer: “The president has made a decision to give whatever humanitarian aid, as well as political and diplomatic support to the opposition that in necessary. Additionally direct support to the (Supreme Military Council), will be provided and that includes military support.” The staffer quoted the words of Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes to the media on 5/13/13 to the same effect.

A part of this “humanitarian assistance” the US is going to established in the coming weeks a “limited, humanitarian no-fly zone, that will begin along several miles of the Jordanian and Turkish borders in certain military areas into Syrian territory, and would be set up  and presented as a limited bid  to train and equip rebel forces and protect refugees. But in reality, as we saw in Libya a Syrian no fly zone would very likely include all of Syria.

Libya’s no-fly zones made plain that there is no such thing as a “limited zone”. Put briefly, a “no-fly zone” means essentially a declaration of all-out war. Once the US and its allies start a no fly zone they will expand it and intensify it as they take countless other military actions to protect its zones until the Syrian government falls. “It’s breathtaking to contemplate how this in going to end and how Iran and Russia will respond,” one source concluded.

The White House is trying to assuage the few in Congress as well as a majority of the American public that it can be a limited American involved and that the no-fly zone would not require the destruction of Syrian antiaircraft batteries. This is more nonsense. During the no-fly zone I witnessed from Libya in the summer of 2011 the US backed it up with all manner of refueling, electronic jamming, special-ops on the ground and by mid-July a kid peddling his bike was not safe. Over the 192 days of patrolling the Libyan no-fly zones, NATO countries flew 24,682 sorties including 9,204 bomb strike sorties. NATO claimed it never missed its target but that was also not true. Hundreds of civilians were killed in Libya by no-fly zone attack aircraft  that either missed their targets and emptied their bomb bays before returning to base  while conducting approximately 48 bombing strikes per day using a variety of bombs and missiles, including more than 350 cruise Tomahawks.

At a Congressional hearing in 2011, then US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates got it right when he explained which discussing Libya “a no-fly zone begins with an attack to destroy all the air defenses … and then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down. But that’s the way it starts.”

According to the accounts published in American media, Obama could alternatively authorize the arming and training of the Syrian opposition in Jordan without a no-fly zone. That appears unlikely because the Pentagon wants to end the Syrian crisis by summers end, the observer was advised “rather than working long term with a motley bunch of jihadists who we could never trust or rely on. The administration has come to the conclusion apparently that if they are in for a penny they are in for a pound.”

In response to a question from this observer about how he thought event might unfold in this region over the coming months, a very insightful long-term congressional aid replied: “Well Franklin, maybe someone will pull a rabbit out of the hat to stop the push for war. But frankly I doubt it. From where I sit I’d wager that Syria as we have known it may soon be no more. And perhaps some other countries in the region also.”

Franklin Lamb is doing research in Syria and Lebanon and can be reached c/o fplamb@gmail.com

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

(Photo: Hossein Razaqnejad/ Nasim Intl News Agency)Millions of Iranians are headed to the polls Friday to vote in the first presidential election since the highly controversial 2009 vote. Though many are despairing over a set of candidates which many say present “no alternative” to the conservatives and regime insiders who dominate Iranian politics, other reformist-minded Iranians are determined to find a glimmer of hope.

Reporting from Tehran, the BBC’s Mohsen Asgari Mohsen Asgari describes the long queues outside of the country’s polling places:

As I approach southern parts of Tehran, the lines of people are longer and in some places it is unbelievably crowded. I found Ebrahim Yazdi, a former foreign minister and now a prominent dissident, in one long queue. ‘I vote because I love Iran and I am faithful to the process of democracy,’ he said.

In an election where roughly 50 million people are eligible to vote, reports indicate that “millions” have shown up to cast their ballots. Polls across Iran opened at 08:00 local time (03:30 GMT) and were orginally scheduled to close at 18:00 (13:30 GMT). However Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar later announced voting time will be extended for another two hours due to a “rush of voters.”

Not everyone in the country shares in this enthusiasm.

The early disqualification by the Guardian Council–the conservative body in charge of vetting all election candidates–of reformist candidate Hashemi Rafsanjani left many liberal Iranians divided over whether or not to vote at all for a field of candidates, described by one Iranian writer, as lacking “any sense of major diversity in their policies and ideologies.”

However, a recent rally behind the moderate cleric candidate Hassan Rouhani, including endorsements by Rafsanjani and former president Mohammad Khatami, have given the reformists some hope.

Though described by some as a longtime regime insider, many hope the election of Rouhani–according to Jadaliyya, an independent ezine produced by the Arab Studies Institute–will “create enough breathing room for the country’s diaspora to reignite the same grassroots activism experienced during Khatami’s presidency,” hopefully giving the reformists some “space” for change. 

According to early reports from the Guardian’s live blog of election events, Rouhani’s campaign managers have already “complained of irregularities” with the polling.

“They claim there was deliberate attempt to confuse reformists voters at thousands of polling stations by failing to update election lists to show that reform candidate had dropped out of the race,” the Guardian reports. “They also complained of a delay in the issuing of paper work for their election monitors.”

Following the 2009 election of current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, protesters took to the streets in anger over the results which they said had been rigged.

Ballot counting is expected to start at midnight local time and results are due to be announced in the following 24 hours. Candidates will have up to three days to lodge complaints to the Guardian Council if they are unhappy with the results.

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Turkey’s embattled PM Recep Tayyip Erdoganis told protesters last night that he will halt plans to redevelop Gezi Park until Turkish courts rule on an appeal and launch a public referendum if the rule falls in the government’s favor.

(Photo: Joshua Kahn Russell/Monument at Taksim Square) The move comes a day after European parliament voted to condemn the PM’s violent crackdown on Turkey’s ballooning protests that has left five dead and over 5,000 injured.

Erdogan’s Wednesday threats to shut down the protests in 24 hours were followed by Thursday late-night private meetings with members of the Taksim Solidarity, one organization behind the Taksim Square protests that has gained heightened visibility.

Just outside of the Thursday meetings, police fought back protesters. PressTV reports:

Witnesses said police fired tear gas at some 200 protesters who had gathered in Ankara city centre, near the offices of the prime minister, while the meeting was underway. Five demonstrators were also arrested.

The PM’s gesture towards concession appeared an attempt to quiet Turkey’s mass mobilizations, now well into their third week, as the U.S.-backed head of government faces a growing political crisis.

Taksim Solidarity members who attended the private meeting declared that the question of whether to accept the PM’s latest move ultimately rests with protesters, many of whom are not affiliated with Taksim Solidarity. CBS reports:

Tayfun Kahraman, one of the Taksim Solidarity members who attended the meeting, said he believed Erdogan had offered “positive words,” and that fellow activists would consider them in a “positive manner.” But he said those in Gezi Park would “make their own assessments.”

The Washington Post reports that it is not a given that protesters will be satisfied by Erdogan’s latest move.

Many protesters have been skeptical of plans for a referendum, saying that they do not believe elections can be fair when Erdogan holds tight sway over the media. Others mistrust the judiciary, saying that Erdogan controls them too.

The protests began in late May after activists occupying Gezi Park to protect it from redevelopment were violently evicted by police, sparking mass outrage. Mobilizations have since spread to dozens of cities and broadened to incorporate grievances against what many consider to be the increasingly authoritarian rule of the ruling AKP party.

A poll of Gezi Park protesters released this week finds that approximately half protest due to general dissatisfaction with the government.(Photo: Joshua Kahn Russell: Free Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner Table at Gezi Park)

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Guantanamo will stay open and continue to be a place of “indefinite detention” for individuals cleared for release.

(Photo: Aslan Media/ Flickr) This was the result of a vote Friday by members of the US House of Representatives, who rejected a plan to close the detention facility where 166 individuals are currently being held.

Further, Representatives voted 236 to 188 to add a restriction to the National Defense Authorization Act of 2014 that bars any of the roughly 56 prisoners who have been cleared by military and intelligence officials to be sent to Yemen from being transferred there for one year.

“Not everybody that we rounded up and took to Guantanamo, unfortunately, turned out to be the very dangerous terrorists that we thought they were,” said Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who along with Reps. Jim Moran (D-Va.) and Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) sponsored the failed closure amendment. 

“Determining that if there is any minimal threat whatsoever we’re simply going to hold them forever is, well, quite frankly, un-American. That is contrary to our values to say we’re going to hold somebody indefinitely–I gather forever–because we think there might possibly be some risk,” Smith added. “That’s not the way the Constitution is supposed to work.”

This ruling follows the recent announcement by military officials that, of the 166 detainees, only “20 at most” will ever officially be charged and tried for a crime.

Over 100 of the prison detainees are taking part in an ongoing hunger strike, protesting against the cruelty of their indefinite detention. Over forty of those participating are currently being force-fed, a process denounced by many as being a form of torture.

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Donna Anderson
Infowars.com
June 14, 2013

Appearing with Mike Adams on Infowars Nightly News, Andrea Lalama looks like any other proud mother. But hiding beneath the surface is a strong, outspoken advocate who wants to not only help increase awareness of autism, she wants to help stop it, and she believes that GMO foods are the culprit.

Andrea Lalama is the mother of two autistic children and the founder of the Reversing Autism Foundation. Her Facebook account, and the accounts of many of her followers, was recently suspended for posting pictures of her children holding posters during a rally protesting GMO foods. Lalama believes GMO-giant Monsanto was behind the suspension.

Here’s the photo of the children that caused Facebook to suspend her account.

Lalama is also a homeopath/holistic consultant and she’s done extensive research on the connection between genetically modified foods and autism. It’s her firm belief that autism can sometimes be reversed by eliminating GMO foods from childrens’ diets.

During her research Lalama found that the toxins contained in bio-pesticides are capable of affecting the intestinal walls, causing gastrointestinal problems, such as gastroenteritis and possibly leaky gut condition, which, among other symptoms, typically result in chronic constipation.

A June 10 article in the Atlantic reports that approximately one in 88 children in the U.S. has an autistic spectrum disorder, and up to 70 percent of them have gastrointestinal (GI) abnormalities at some point during childhood or adolescence. They are also “3.5 times more likely to have constipation or chronic diarrhea than children who are not autistic.”

The Atlantic article continues, “A study published last year in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology linked the GI issues with behavior, showing that autistic children who have GI issues often experience extreme anxiety as well as regressions in behavior and communication skills.” Due to the nature of autism, many children are unable to communicate verbally and resort to acting out when they’re uncomfortable or in pain.

Additionally, prescribing psychotropic drugs to control the behavior outburst may intensify the GI problems. “Once the GI issues are treated, aggressive and problematic behaviors sometimes subside.”

Dr. Kara Margolis, a pediatric gastroenterologist at New York Presbyterian Hospital and a researcher at Columbia University Medical Center, says, “These are kids who, their whole lives turned around when we treated the GI issues,” Margolis said. “They’re not miracles. They seem like miracles, but really all it takes is a recognition that GI things happen in these kids and they manifest in very different ways than in kids who are not autistic.”

Psychotropic drugs to control the behavior only irritates the GI problem, and relieving GI problems with medication only solves the problem temporarily. Once medications are discontinued the problems can recur. Lalama’s research indicates that completely removing GMO foods from the diet may have a lasting effect on reversing autism.

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Press TV
June 14, 2013

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has warned against the humanitarian ramifications of the US decision to provide new weapons to militants in Syria, saying the scenario will spark an “arms race” in the Arab country.

“I don’t think the way forward is to get an arms race going in Syria. There’s a risk that that would undermine the conditions for a political process,” Bildt said in a Friday TV interview.

The New York Times reported on June 13 that US President Barack Obama has decided to begin supplying the militants in Syria with small arms and ammunition. The assistance, coordinated by the CIA spy agency, could include antitank weapons, the paper said.

Bildt expressed concern that the US scenario to arm the militants in Syria would prompt Russia to boost its military support for the Syrian government.

“There’s no doubt that that would be very serious and [may] have even more serious humanitarian consequences,” the Swedish foreign minister added.

On Friday, top commander of foreign-backed militants in Syria, Brigadier General Salim Idris, welcomed the US decision, expressing hope that it “will be implemented on the ground as soon as possible.”

The turmoil in Syria erupted in March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security personnel, have been killed so far.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

In May, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said militants from 29 different countries were fighting against the government in different parts of the country.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said on June 13 that at least 93,000 people have been killed since the outbreak of the foreign-sponsored militancy against the Syrian government.

<!–

–>

This article was posted: Friday, June 14, 2013 at 11:33 am

Tags: foreign affairs, government corruption, terrorism, war

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

The national security establishment’s latest domestic spying scandal has galvanized a lightning-fast response where nearly 100 civil liberties-minded advocacy groups and technology companies are calling on Congress to “halt the surveillence and provide a full public accounting of the NSA’s and FBI’s data collection programs.”

In just days after the U.K. Guardian and The Washington Post reported the ongoing domestic data dragnet, the StopWatching.Us coalition has emerged and in its first two days has generated more than 110,000 signers for a letter that will be sent to Congress.

“A little earlier this morning (Thursday), we hit 100,000 sign-ups,” said activist Sina Khanifar. “The response testifies to how deeply the public feel about the recent revelations regarding the NSA’s access to our private data.”

Domestic spying is nothing new, but last week Americans awoke to new disclosures by Edward Snowden, a CIA and NSA whistleblower who distributed a top secret court order from a Justice Department tribunal created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that demanded that Verizon turn over so-called meta data of its domestic telephone customers to federal police and spy agencies. That disclosure was by claims that giant Internet companies, such as Google, also were complying with data mining requests under FISA, even though their lawyers said they did so reluctantly.

These eyebrow-raising revelations that every American’s online lives were accessible to federal law enforcement and spy agencies have prompted an uproar across the political spectrum and not just among more traditional privacy and civil liberties groups.

As noted by the AtlanticWire.com, the coalition “comprises perhaps the most diverse collection of groups in the modern history of American politics. Among the groups and businesses that are signatories to it are: 4Chan, Freedomworks, BoingBoing, CREDO Mobile, Greenpeace USA, Mozilla, reddit, Sunlight Foundation, Taxpayers Protection Alliance, and California’s The Utility Reform Network.”

Tea Party groups and MoveOn.org are also part of the coalition, Khanifar adds, saying that many founding members were attending a Personal Democracy Forum conference in New York City last Thursday and Friday when the whistle-blowing stories appeared.

“It’s incredible how broad it’s grown,” he said.

The coalition is using a script written by the recently deceased Internet activist Aaron Swartz to deliver e-mails to members of Congress via contact forms on their websites.

“The revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance apparatus, if true, represent a stunning abuse of our basic rights,” the coalition’s website says. “We demand the U.S. Congress reveal the full extent of the NSA’s spying programs.”

“The data collected by the NSA includes every call made, the time of the call, the duration of the call, and other ‘identifying information’ for millions of Verizon customers, including entirely domestic calls, regardless of whether those customers have ever been suspected of a crime,” their letter to Congress says. “ The Wall Street Journal has reported that other major carriers, including AT&T and Sprint, are subject to similar secret orders.”

This “blanket data collection” is unconstitutional and “strikes at bedrock American values of freedom and privacy,” the letter continues. “This dragnet surveillance violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect citizens’ right to speak and associate anonymously, guard against unreasonable searches and seizures, and protect their right to privacy.”

The coalition demands that Congress reform the sections of the USA PATRIOT Act that sanction that domestic data mining, and create a special subcommittee to investigate the “extent of this domestic spying” and recommend “legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surviellance.” They also want public officials responsible for the spy programs held accountable.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

“[T]he Anti-Defamation League for many years has maintained a very important, confidential investigative coverage of Arab activities and propaganda….Our information, in addition to being essential for our own operations, has been of great value and service to both the United States State Department and the Israeli government. All data have been made available to both countries with full knowledge to each that we were the source.” —  Letter from Benjamin R. Epstein, National Director, Anti-Defamation League to Saul Joftes, Executive Secretary, B’nai B’rith, July 7, 1961.

Those were the days when snooping usually meant digging through garbage cans, checking other people’s mailboxes, and primitive phone tapping. How the Anti-Defamation League is doing it today one can only imagine.

Over the last three days of April, the ADL celebrated its 100th anniversary in Washington DC in high style with Vice President Joe Biden the featured speaker at its Centennial Gala dinner on April 30 and Attorney General Eric Holder doing the obligatory genuflecting the day before.

Standing next to the ADL’s ubiquitous current national director, Abe Foxman, Biden told the one thousand paying guests, “You have become the conscience of this country, no matter what the issue. You have been a pillar of the Jewish community, but you reach out and you have reached out your embrace for all communities.”

For hundreds of organizations and thousands of individuals the ADL’s embrace has been too close for comfort and “unconscionable” would be a term more befitting the organization’s activities. What is definitely in order is a reminder that this year also marks the 20th anniversary of the exposure of a nation-wide spying operation run by the ADL that went back at least five decades.

In January, 1993, San Francisco newspapers reported that the city’s police department had raided the ADL’s Northern California office and discovered it was keeping files on more than 600 largely liberal civic organizations and over 10,000 individuals whose interests and activities included but also went far beyond those of the Arab-American community.

After examining the sequestered files, San Francisco police inspector Ron Roth, estimated that 75% of the information had been illegally obtained and by November, District Attorney Arlo Smith appeared to be on the verge of indicting the ADL for numerous violations of state and city codes.

The appearance was deceiving. With an eye on being elected California’s attorney general the following year, Smith realized, too late as it turned out, that he would need the financial and political clout of San Francisco’s influential Jewish community that had helped to propel him to his job as the city’s DA. So he threw in the towel mere hours before ADL officials would be called to testify before a grand jury.

In an agreement reached a week earlier but issued Nov. 15, 1993, just before the filing deadline, Smith’s office released a statement explaining his reasoning: “The SFDA and Defendants agree that litigation concerning Defendant’s activities would involve disputed issues of fact and law and that such litigation would be expensive and time-consuming both to the SFDA and Defendants.”

That all litigation involves “disputed issues of fact and law” apparently did not occur to Smith. His dropping of the case, however, made little impression on his erstwhile Jewish backers.

They made it known that they would not forgive him for not only opening the investigation into the ADL’s spying operations but making available to whoever in the public would pay the copying fees, 704 pages of documents that revealed in considerable detail the extent of the ADL’s nation-wide spying operations. (See the Israel Lobby Archive, www.irmep.org/ila)

In exchange for being let off the hook and while admitting no wrong-doing, the ADL agreed that it would no longer do, at least in California, what it was shown to have been doing, i.e., soliciting and/or obtaining non-public information on individuals and organizations from government sources.

In addition, it would “create a Hate Crimes Reward Fund,” in the amount of $25,000, which would “provide monetary rewards for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of the perpetrators of hate crimes.” (The latter seems to be a fetish of the ADL which, incredibly, has just been allowed to trademark the statement, “Imagine a world without hate.”)

What was an important concession by the city, from the ADL’s standpoint, was that its files seized by the SFPD would remain closed to the public and would not be opened without the ADL being given an opportunity to voice its objections.

In California, the ADL’s secret spying and file keeping was mainly the provenance of Roy Bullock, a beefy San Francisco weight-lifter, who went by the code name, “Cal,” and reported to the ADL’s chief spymaster in New York, the now deceased Irwin Suall.

To keep the relationship out of public as well as government eyes, Bullock was paid through a cut-out in Beverly Hills, Bruce Hochman, a lawyer and member of the ADL’s board, also now deceased.

As late as July 19, 1992, Suall had described Bullock as “our Number One fact finder” whose assignments included, in addition to his duties in California, attending and monitoring conferences and conventions of Arab-Americans across the country.

He was, in fact, doing the kind of work that former ADL director Ben Epstein described in the quote at the beginning of this article. At the time, Bullock was receiving close to $25,000 a year for monitoring what he and the ADL considered “antidemocratic” organizations and individuals and he had been doing it for 40 years.

It wasn’t Bullock’s only income, to be sure. He was also an “art dealer” and this provided an explanation for his turning up at Arab-American conferences across the country as I later learned. He “just happened” to be in this or that city at the same time, buying art.

A month after the SFPD had confiscated Bullock’s files, the ADL was still trying to avoid being linked with him, even within the organization. On February 25, 1993, a cover letter for “talking points” to its regional directors referred to Bullock as “an individual who is alleged to have a relationship with the ADL.”

To the public, when its ties to Bullock could no longer be denied, he was described simply as a private contractor and that the files he kept were for his own use. When this attempted cover-up quickly fell apart, he was put directly on the ADL payroll and provided with an attorney.

Bullock had divided the organizations and individuals on which he was keeping tabs into two categories to which he assigned the names, Pinko and Right, the latter made up largely of neo-Nazis and skinheads, the groups usually associated by the public as ADL’s main targets. When questioned by Inspector Roth, Bullock defined “Pinko” as “left wing.”

Among the 647 organizations he so designated were the NAACP, ACLU, Asian Law Caucus, Centro Legal de la Raza, Irish Northern Aid, Japanese-American Citizens League, the National Indian Treaty Council, Earth Island Institute and 20 trade union locals plus the San Francisco Labor Council. Jewish organizations that had taken positions critical of Israeli policies also found their way into his “Pinko” section.

On finding its name on the list, the Asian-Law Caucus quickly notified the ADL that it was withdrawing from a joint event previously planned with the Jewish defense organization. Rather than apologizing, the ADL was defiant, responding with a letter that placed the onus on the Asian Law Caucus for the cancellation.

In a letter addressed to the director of the Asian Law Caucus, dated April 29. 1953, the ADL’s regional director, Elliot Bien, wrote that he was “dismayed on a number of levels when I learned that the Asian Law Caucus felt it necessary to pull out of this program on short notice as a protest of some sort against the ADL…. [T]hat the pullout was completely unjustified and unfair….”

The ADL was and remains more sensitive to Black-Jewish relations. Jews have been heavily involved with the NAACP since its inception in 1909. That they have also been the major source of its funding has been viewed by many observers in the post civil rights era as designed to keep the organization from taking political positions that would offend the Jewish establishment, such as expressing sympathy with the Palestinian cause or criticizing Israel’s arms sales to South Africa.

This was typified by the attitude of long-time NAACP Director Roy Wilkins, widely characterized as an “Uncle Tom” by black activists, who withdrew the NAACP from the National Black Political Convention in 1972, taking exception to a resolution that condemned Israel for “expansionist policies and forceful occupation of the sovereign territories of another state.”

On May 5, 1993, the ADL’s New York headquarters sent a letter to its regional offices, noting that “Abe Foxman wrote newly installed NAACP Director Benjamin Chavis, assuring him that the ADL had never targeted the NAACP for investigation” and recommended that if they had not already done so, the directors should reach out to “local branches of the NAACP” and “do so now.”

“You may note,” the letter went on, “that the news story in which the NAACP was named, cited names in Bullock’s files as ours. [T]he ADL has never targeted nor would it ever target for investigation any individual or organization on the basis of race, religion, ethnic origin, or sexual orientation.” The letter ignored the fact that a year earlier, the ADL had issued a 50-page “ADL Research Report, entitled “The Anti-Semitism of Black Demagogues and Extremists.”

Heading the list were Min. Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, Illinois Congressman Gus Savage, Rev. Al Sharpton, Kwame Ture (the former Stokely Carmichael), poet Amiri Baraka, and rappers Ice Cube and Professor Griff and Public Enemy. Certain black newspapers and radio stations that didn’t feel beholden to the Jewish community also came in for their lumps.

Chavis, with a long history of civil rights activity, was no Roy Wilkins. In an effort to revive what had become a moribund organization and make it more representative of the black community, he sought to involve some of those condemned in the ADL’s booklet, but it was his reaching out to Farrakhan that set off the alarm bells at ADL headquarters and put him at odds with Foxman.

It also caused the NAACP’s major Jewish funders to put away their check books until Chavis, who became caught up in an unrelated personnel matter, tendered his resignation.

Given Foxman and the ADL’s obsession with what it considers to be “black anti-Semitism,” which includes, for example, speaking about the prominent role of Jews in the African slave trade or comparisons of Israel with apartheid South Africa, it was logical that Bullock would an eye on the NAACP and other African-American as well as black African organizations. He was nothing if not thorough, keeping multiple files on the African National Congress and 47 other anti-apartheid organizations.

Bullock also was found to have 77 files on 58 Arab-American organizations besides the thousands of individuals who belonged to those organizations. His modus operandi in infiltrating Arab-American and anti-apartheid organizations, was to pretend he was sympathetic to their respective causes. He succeeded in not only becoming a member of the local chapter of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee but, because of his size and weight, he would be in charge of “security” at all its events.

Bullock was assisted in his endeavors by a San Francisco policeman and former CIA contractor in El Salvador, Tom Gerard, who would take down the license plate numbers of people attending Palestinian and Arab-American events and provide Bullock with their names, addresses, and personal information, all of which was illegal. What made this easy for Gerard was that he was the SFPD’s “official liaison” to the Arab community.

What was particularly embarrassing for the ADL was the release of information that Bullock and Gerard, who had also provided information directly to ADL officials, were also being paid by South African intelligence agents to supply information on the activities of the Bay Area’s anti-Apartheid organizations and South African exiles affiliated with the ANC and other black African organizations.

In one of his depositions, Bullock acknowledged that doing this required no additional work since he was already spying on the anti-apartheid movement for the ADL. Foxman, on his part, had openly condemned the African National Congress as a “terrorist” organization that supported the PLO.

One individual the South African agents were particularly interested in was Chris Hani, the man who was expected to succeed Nelson Mandela as the country’s president. Hani was assassinated in South Africa shortly after a speaking tour in California during which he was trailed by Bullock who prepared a lengthy report on it for the South African government, a copy of which was found in his files.

Foxman, though unapologetic, was anxious to neutralize public discussion of the close ties that existed between Israel and South Africa, particularly the Jewish state’s arms sales to the apartheid regime. Thanks, however, to the willingness of the anti-apartheid movement and the Congressional Black Caucus to bury the issue, he ended up having little to worry about.

While Bullock had, at times, infiltrated neo-Nazi and skinhead groups, none of which posed tangible threats to the American Jews, their images in the organization’s mailings were useful in frightening Jewish donors into contributing to the ADL’s $60 million dollar budget and paying Foxman’s salary which in 2009 amounted to $563,024. The main focus of the ADL was on Palestinians and Arab-Americans and their solidarity groups.

One of the targets Bullock “befriended” was Palestinian-American Alex Odeh, the head of the Orange County chapter of the ADC who would be killed by a terrorist bomb when he opened the door to his Santa Ana office on October 11, 1985.

In Bullock’s files, police found a key to Odeh’s office as well as the floor plan. Although Bullock has not been linked to the unresolved murder, the fact that an ADL spy was in possession of such items is something that Foxman obviously would not want advertised.

There were two law suits filed against the ADL over the 1993 revelations but only one proved to be headache from the ADL’s perspective. This was a class action suit filed on April 14, 1993, by former congressman, Paul “Pete” McCloskey, himself a victim of pro-Israel witch hunters, on behalf of 17 individuals who believed they had been spied upon because of their work on behalf of justice for the Palestinians and/or their active opposition to South African apartheid.

A second suit was filed by a group of targeted organizations, among them the Labor Committee on the Middle East (LCOME) which Labor activist Steve Zeltzer and I co-founded in 1987. That suit, over which the organizations seemed to have little say, was settled by their lawyer in 1999 after the ADL, admitting no wrong doing, agreed to destroy its files, to get out of the spying business, and contribute $50,000 to police departments for racial sensitivity training. Steve and I did not think that an adequate response to the seriousness of the ADL’s transgressions and LCOME refused to be a party to that settlement.

By February, 2002, when the ADL elected to settle McCloskey’s suit out of court, there would be only three individuals remaining in the class: Zeltzer, Anne Poirer, and myself. In addition to our involvement in anti-apartheid activities, Steve and I had launched the Labor Committee on the Middle East in 1987, whose founding meetings at Zeltzer’s home, Bullock had attended. Anne had been a long time anti-apartheid activist.

Our suit charged the ADL with violating a narrow privacy provision of California state law,1798.53, which holds that “Any person, other than an employee of the state or of a local government agency…..who intentionally discloses information, not otherwise public, which they know or should reasonably know was obtained from personal information maintained by a state agency or from ‘records’

… maintained by a federal government agency, shall be subject to a civil action, for invasion of privacy, by the individual to whom the information pertains.”

In this instance, the 9th District Court of California had determined that information on Zeltzer and me had been provided to the governments of Israel and South Africa and that information on Annie Poirier had been given to South Africa.

Over nearly a decade of court appearances and status conferences, what we insisted upon, above all else, and what prevented an earlier settlement, was that under no circumstances would we sign a confidentiality agreement that would forbid us speaking or writing about the suit.

We felt we needed to be free to talk about what we had learned along the way about the ADL’s spying activities, information that the ADL, understandably, preferred to be kept secret.

Until the very last moment, the Friday afternoon before the Monday when the case would have gone to trial, the ADL had balked at making that concession. In the end they gave in. In addition, they agreed to pay a modest cash settlement to the three of us plus McCloskey’s legal expenses. He had taken our case pro bono.

What was, perhaps, the most revealing moment in the legal battle took place in McCloskey’s Redwood City office during the ADL’s questioning of former Mossad agent, Victor Ostrovsky. McCloskey had brought Ostrovsky down from Canada to provide whatever information he might have that would link the ADL to Israel and assist us in our case.

When Ostrovsky left the Mossad, he took with him a number of documents, some of which were the source his “By Way of Deception,” a record of his time with the Israeli spy agency.

As Ostrovsky took his seat next to McCloskey, he faced the usual battery of attorneys representing the ADL and Bullock. The atmosphere, however, was very different. Throughout the many court appearances and the taking of depositions, the ADL’s lawyers had been cordial, if not friendly, to us, even though we were on opposite sides.

This would not be the case with Ostrovsky. It is not an exaggeration to say that their eyes were gleaming with hatred. They made no effort to conceal their hostility to a person they obviously viewed as a traitor to Israel which, at that moment, they clearly viewed as their client as much as was the ADL.

That this was more than conjecture on my part was soon revealed when David Goldstein, the lead attorney, demanded that Ostrovsky turn over to him, in the name of the ADL, all the documents he had taken from the Mossad. Ostrovsky, quite naturally, refused. Later the ADL’s lawyers inveighed upon a judge, without success, to force him to comply with their demand.

Thanks to our refusal to sign the confidentiality agreement, you can read about that on CounterPunch

When the reports of the ADL spying first appeared in the media, there were those who thought the respected Jewish defense organization had simply made a mistake in its zeal to protect Israel and that the spying operation was an anomaly.

Nothing can be further from the truth. But let’s begin at the beginning.

The ADL was formed by B’nai B’rith in 1913 to serve as the leading Jewish defense agency in the wake of the conviction of Leo Frank, an officer of the National Pencil Co. in Atlanta, Georgia for the murder of 13 year old Mary Phagan, a shop floor worker at the pencil factory. It was a verdict that many believed to be a miscarriage of justice, which was compounded by Frank being kidnapped from a prison hospital two years later and lynched. He is the only American Jew known to have suffered that fate.

By 1937, the Anti-Defamation League had embarked on another occupation, keeping files and spying on what it considered to be communist or pro-communist organizations and individuals.

In that year, a 1947 Congressional hearing revealed, it had begun providing information on the recently formed National Lawyers Guild and on individuals applying for federal civil service jobs and some who had not applied for jobs, to the original House Committee on Un-American Activities, chaired by the notorious racist Rep. Martin Dies, which came to be referred to simply as the Dies Committee.

Newly declassified FBI files obtained by IRmep’s Grant Smith reveal that on August 8, 1940, the ADL offered a confidential list of hundreds of undercover ADL investigators to FBI Director J Edgar Hoover. ADL offered the contact list as a resource for FBI informants and additional undercover agents.

Some members of the list, such as Abraham Feinberg, would later be investigated by the FBI as agents of a foreign government and for quashing investigations targeting illegal arms-smuggling from the US to Israel.

Feinberg would become later well known in as the man who delivered an envelope filled with a large amount of cash to Harry Truman—$ 2 million JFK told Gore Vidal— that enabled him to launch the whistle stop campaign that led to his victory in the 1948 presidential elections. Truman had earned Feinberg’s largesse by recognizing Israel minutes after David Ben-Gurion declared the state into existence.

During the anti-communist witch hunts that marked the beginning of the Cold War, the ADL assisted and acted as a go-between for both the Congressional committees and members or former members of the Communist Party who chose to inform on their one-time comrades, friends, and family members.

With the arrival of Israel, the ADL began to redirect its tasks. Arab delegations to the United Nations and Arab-American organizations became its targets. In the letter cited at the beginning of this article, the ADL’s Ben Epstein wrote B’nai B’rith’s Saul Joftes that “we have maintained an information-gathering operation since 1948 relating to activities emanating from the Arab Consular Offices, Arab United Nations Delegations, Arab Information Center, Arab Refugee Office and the Organization of Arab Students.”

In 1969 the ADL infiltrated the 18th annual National Convention the Organization of Arab Students. ADL operatives posed as reporters while strategizing on how to gain control of the OAS’s national headquarters and neutralize its chapters.

After receiving its report, the FBI briefly considered investigating the ADL as an Israeli foreign agent. The ADL effort was ultimately successful to the degree that OAS chapters became less political in the ensuing decades and began serving more as campus clubs with a cultural focus.

In November, 1983, in response to widespread criticism of Israel over its invasion and occupation of Lebanon the previous year, the ADL’s New England office put out a 49 page mimeographed booklet containing the names of individuals and organizations that the league classified as “pro-Arab propagandists.”

It was not intended for the general public, but for Jewish students on college campuses to help them counter these “propagandists” who were trying “to sway Americans from their historically strong support for Israel.” Moreover, the booklet claimed, “many of these propagandists use their anti-Zionism as a guise for their deeply felt anti-Semitism.”

The booklet, with each page stamped “CONFIDENTIAL,” was prepared by Jordan Millstein, the ADL’s local campus coordinator and was sent out with a cover letter from Leonard Zakim, the Executive Director of its New England Office.

“Should you need more information on these individual groups or any others,” wrote Zakim, “please call us. Also, if you have any knowledge of any individuals or groups not listed in the booklet, please pass the information on to us so that we can have a more complete and useful listing.”

One can imagine the outrage had a Palestinian or Arab-American group put out a similar publication containing a list of individuals and organizations that they accused of putting Israel’s interests before those of the United States.

Among the individuals on the ADL list were Professors Edward Said of Columbia, Michael Hudson of Georgetown, Lawrence Michalak of UC Berkeley, Wahlid Khaladi of Harvard, Naseer Aruri of Southeastern U., Israel Shahak of Hebrew University who “contends that Israel practices ‘apartheid’ against Palestinian Arabs,” former Senator James Abourezk of South Dakota, and our lawyer, Pete McCloskey, who served 16 years in Congress, from 1967 to 1983, the year the booklet was published.

The publication came to the attention of the 1400 member Middle East Studies Association the following November which passed a resolution calling on the league to disown the document

When that story was finally reported In the NY Times on Jan.25, two months later, Jeffrey Ross, the ADL’s director of campus affairs, claimed it had been an “unfortunate incident” and would not be repeated.

He said that Millstein, the author, was an “overly zealous student volunteer” who no longer worked for the league. Zakim acknowledged “the document had been careless” as the Times characterized it and that “he would not have written a cover letter for it if he had considered the matter thoroughly.”

In 2002, three years after his death from cancer in 1999, the bridge that serves as the northern entrance and exit from Boston was named the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge after Zakim and the American colonists who fought the British in the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Despite the ADL having promised to get out of the business of illegally obtaining information on its enemies in exchange for not being prosecuted back in 1993, there is no evidence, twenty years later that it has.

What it has done is strengthen its ties with police across the country through its LEARN program (Law Enforcement Agency Resource Network) in which it trains police in dealing with “extremist groups” and “hate crimes.”

As for Bullock, I have heard of no recent citing but I have a hunch that somewhere in the country the aging agent is still going through other people’s garbage cans, peeking in their mailboxes and infiltrating a new generation of “Pinko” organizations for the ADL. If you look for his image on Google you will find three of them, all right next to photos of Abe Foxman.

Jeffrey Blankfort is a journalist and radio host and can be reached at jblankfort@earthlink.net

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Ben Geman
The Hill
June 14, 2013

President Obama intends to unveil a package of second-term climate change policies in July, according to a news account.

Bloomberg reports that Obama, at closed-door fundraisers in recent weeks, “has been telling Democratic party donors that he will unveil new climate proposals in July.”

The story cites sources that attended the events or have been briefed. Bloomberg notes that a person “close to the White House” said final decisions are still being made about the plan.

Read full article

<!–

–>

This article was posted: Friday, June 14, 2013 at 11:22 am

Tags: climate, domestic news

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Licensed gun makers would be forced to register plastic firearms

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
June 15, 2013

The New York City council introduced a bill Wednesday that would make it a crime “to create any firearm, rifle, shotgun, or any piece or part thereof,” using a 3D printer.

The legislation would, for the first time in the US, make it illegal for anyone, other than a gunsmith, to print the parts. Even licensed gun makers would have to notify police and go about registering any printed firearm within 72 hours.

Ars Techinca reports that the bill is squarely aimed at Defense Distributed, an Austin-based nonprofit digital publisher and 3D Printing R&D firm that has developed some of the world’s first 3D Printable gun components.

Last month, the group announced it was in its final stages of testing a functional firearm produced almost entirely out of plastic parts manufactured by a 3D printer, named the “Liberator pistol“. The gun was successfully fired by the group in a test that received widespread media attention.

On May 6, the group began distributing schematics for the single-shot pistol freely online, allowing anyone connected to the Internet to download them from anywhere in the world. Two days later, the group received a letter from the State Department claiming that what they were doing was illegal according to International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

The letter included a take down order, demanding that all the files be removed from the Defense Distributed website. The group’s founder, Cody Wilson, complied with the order. However, the files had already gone viral and spread throughout the internet on sites such as Pirate Bay, meaning they had already been downloaded over 100,000 times.

“I’m waiting for the shoe to drop–there’s probably going to be an indictment of some kind,” Wilson told Ars by phone on Thursday. “They’re going to come back.”

“So this evening [the White House] announces [the] arming of Syrian rebels,” Wilson added via text message minutes later. “[The Department of State] can literally put guns in the hands of terrorists, but fuck me [because] zomg ‘national security.’”

Wilson’s vision has inspired others to copy the idea and create their own 3D printable firearms, including this one, created for just $25 dollars by hobbyists in Wisconsin, which successfully fired nine .380 caliber rounds.

The New York City council’s legislative attack comes in the wake of similar actions at the State level, as well as in other States such as California, and at the national level with the introduction into the House of a bill entitled The Undetectable Firearms Modernization Act, which would ban “any firearm that, after removal of grips, stocks, and magazines, is not as detectable as the Security Exemplar, by walk-through metal detectors calibrated and operated to detect the Security Exemplar.”

Defense Distributed, which has also successfully produced 3D printed AR-15 lower and related magazines, has also recently been targeted by the Department of Homeland Security. Fox News recently reported that a DHS memo is being sent to various state and federal law enforcement agencies cautioning, “Limiting plastic guns may be impossible,” and that 3D guns pose “public safety risks.”

“Significant advances in three-dimensional (3D) printing capabilities, availability of free digital 3D printer files for firearms components, and difficulty regulating file sharing may present public safety risks from unqualified gun seekers who obtain or manufacture 3D printed guns,” warns the bulletin compiled by the Joint Regional Intelligence Center,” the memo states.

“This is a serious threat,” a nervous law enforcement source reportedly told Fox, adding, “These could defeat magnetometers. The only security procedure to catch [the 3D firearms] is a pat down. Is America ready for pat-downs at every event?”

Constitutional experts have stated that although banning the actual manufacture, sale, and possession of plastic weapons is feasible, restricting the schematics of the printable weapons is a violation of the First Amendment.

Defense Distributed owner Cody Wilson has appeared on Infowars programming numerous times. In this appearance from May, Wilson discusses government moves to shut down printable firearms.

–––––––––––––––––––––-

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

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

“It’s déjà vu all over again.” It was Yogi Berra’s classic observation in 1947, and one eminently appropriate for Edward Snowden more than a half century later. Only the subject now is NSA secret operations, not baseball. Specifically, the déjà vu observation refers to an earlier leak of that agency’s secret operations. And this time, unlike before, America is taking notice.

Clandestine snooping by the National Security Agency? A member of an intelligence agency leaking secrets? All that’s new here is the abundant attention focused on this latest example of NSA’s enormous power to play by whatever rules it establishes–or by no rules at all.

Last time around, it was the London Observer revealing NSA’s clandestine operation. This time it’s the Guardian. British press lighting the stage, illuminating an American cast.

Entering into the heated, certainly contentious, discussion about the Snowden disclosure is a panoply of concerns. National security versus civil rights, the extent and powers of the Patriot Act, the sharing of secrets, hero versus criminal, whistleblower versus leaker. All hot topics.

Here’s the déjà vu aspect that deserves our attention: Exactly ten years ago, this same all-powerful agency launched an illegal spy operation against representatives of six members of the UN Security Council in an attempt to convince those members to vote in favor of a US-UK resolution legitimizing the invasion of Iraq. It doesn’t take rocket science to determine just how personal information about the six could be used to influence their vote–according to NSA’s secret memorandum–“to obtain results favorable to US goals.” In the ten-year-old case, newspapers worldwide (except in the US) ran banner headlines reading, “US Dirty Tricks at the UN.” Readers wondered about a game of high-stakes blackmail.

Katharine Gun, a British Secret Service office stationed at GCHQ in Cheltenham, England, received a copy of NSA’s invitation to join in the illegal UNSC operation, and made the same decision as did Snowden. She leaked the information. She was 27 at the time. Snowden is 29.

Within a matter of weeks, Katharine was arrested for high crime against her country, George W. Bush and Tony Blair withdrew the controversial proposed resolution, and we went to war.

Later, looking back, Michael Hayden, the agency’s director at the time, told C-SPAN’s Brian Lamb that the NSA works only within the confines of the law, within “what’s legally permitted.” This would not be the only time he would insist that everything the NSA did was in compliance with the law. But spying on the UN was not legal. One of the questions that will not go away, especially with the present attention focused on the Snowden case, is what US intelligence can do legally and what it cannot.

For the most part, the fact that Hayden’s claim is at best controversial and at worst a lie has escaped public notice until now. But not this time, because the media are watching and Snowden is speaking out. In an extensive interview, he defended his seeking sanctuary in Hong Kong and denied that he was, in fact, defecting to China, “an enemy of America.” China, he observed is not America’s “enemy.” We are significant trade partners. We are not at war. Apparently, he feels safer in Hong Kong than in the US.

Snowden left the country believing he was a target, that he would spend the rest of his life concerned about retribution for having leaked NSA secrets. As for questionable Big Brother behavior by intelligence agencies, “It will only get worse until policy changes,” he said. Seeking a policy paradigm switch that protects both the individual and the nation challenges all Americans–except for those determined to retain the status quo.

Snowden is right to be concerned about the quality of his future life. Katharine Gun didn’t run. After first denying that it was she who leaked the NSA illegal spy operation, she confessed. Married only a few months, she knew at the time that her plans for the future were shattered. After a year awaiting trial, charges against her were dropped the day her trial opened at the Old Bailey. The Government, with her signed confession in hand, chose not to present evidence that the invasion of Iraq was, in fact, legal, a demand by the Defense.

Life for Katharine since she was granted freedom has been difficult. An expert in Oriental languages and a Mandarin translator at the time of her arrest, finding and keeping employment has been difficult. For a time, she tried living in another country. Nothing will ever be the same. Yet, she has no regrets.

As she left the courtroom, Katharine’s response to questions about why she did what she did were very much like Snowden’s. “I only followed my conscience,” she said, adding, “I would do it again.” This holds today.

Actor Sean Penn put it beautifully in speaking about Katharine: “It was a decision of conscience in a world where nobody celebrates that. She will go down in history as a hero of the human spirit.”

In contrast, former Prime Minister Tony Blair saw Gun differently, and would likely see Snowden through the same lens.

“We are going to be in a very dangerous situation as a country if people feel they can simply spill out secrets or details of security operations, whether false or true, and get away with it.”

For Snowden, time will tell what “getting away with it” really means.

Marcia Mitchell is co-author of The Spy Who Tried to Stop a War: Katharine Gun and the Secret Plot to Sanction the Iraq Invasion

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

(Photo: Hossein Razaqnejad/ Nasim Intl News Agency)Millions of Iranians are headed to the polls Friday to vote in the first presidential election since the highly controversial 2009 vote. Though many are despairing over a set of candidates which many say present “no alternative” to the conservatives and regime insiders who dominate Iranian politics, other reformist-minded Iranians are determined to find a glimmer of hope.

Reporting from Tehran, the BBC’s Mohsen Asgari Mohsen Asgari describes the long queues outside of the country’s polling places:

As I approach southern parts of Tehran, the lines of people are longer and in some places it is unbelievably crowded. I found Ebrahim Yazdi, a former foreign minister and now a prominent dissident, in one long queue. ‘I vote because I love Iran and I am faithful to the process of democracy,’ he said.

In an election where roughly 50 million people are eligible to vote, reports indicate that “millions” have shown up to cast their ballots. Polls across Iran opened at 08:00 local time (03:30 GMT) and were orginally scheduled to close at 18:00 (13:30 GMT). However Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar later announced voting time will be extended for another two hours due to a “rush of voters.”

Not everyone in the country shares in this enthusiasm.

The early disqualification by the Guardian Council–the conservative body in charge of vetting all election candidates–of reformist candidate Hashemi Rafsanjani left many liberal Iranians divided over whether or not to vote at all for a field of candidates, described by one Iranian writer, as lacking “any sense of major diversity in their policies and ideologies.”

However, a recent rally behind the moderate cleric candidate Hassan Rouhani, including endorsements by Rafsanjani and former president Mohammad Khatami, have given the reformists some hope.

Though described by some as a longtime regime insider, many hope the election of Rouhani–according to Jadaliyya, an independent ezine produced by the Arab Studies Institute–will “create enough breathing room for the country’s diaspora to reignite the same grassroots activism experienced during Khatami’s presidency,” hopefully giving the reformists some “space” for change. 

According to early reports from the Guardian’s live blog of election events, Rouhani’s campaign managers have already “complained of irregularities” with the polling.

“They claim there was deliberate attempt to confuse reformists voters at thousands of polling stations by failing to update election lists to show that reform candidate had dropped out of the race,” the Guardian reports. “They also complained of a delay in the issuing of paper work for their election monitors.”

Following the 2009 election of current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, protesters took to the streets in anger over the results which they said had been rigged.

Ballot counting is expected to start at midnight local time and results are due to be announced in the following 24 hours. Candidates will have up to three days to lodge complaints to the Guardian Council if they are unhappy with the results.

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Voting deadline for Iran’s 11th presidential as well as fourth city and village councils elections has been extended for one more hour to 2100 local time (1630 GMT).

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi has reacted to Canadaâ„¢s move to prevent the opening of polling stations for Iranian expatriates in the country, urging Ottawa to exercise Å“wisdom” and resort to dialogue.

Å“I am not aware what has happened to make Canada take such a decision, and I advise Canadian officials to [exercise] rationality and wisdom,” Salehi told reporters on Friday.

Å“We want to have the best [bilateral] relations with Canada … and if there is a misunderstanding, it could be settled through dialogue,” Salehi noted, urging Canada to give up unjustified hostility against the Iranian nation.

Over 60,000 polling stations have been set up across Iran as the country holds its 11th presidential vote as well as its 4th city and rural elections. Iranian nationals living abroad can also cast their ballots at 285 polling stations set up overseas.

President of the Expediency Councilâ„¢s Center for Strategic Research Hassan Rohani, Secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Saeed Jalili, Secretary of the Expediency Council Mohsen Rezaei, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati, and former Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Gharazi are the six candidates running in the presidential election.

Over 200,000 candidates are also running for city and rural councils elections.

Nearly 50.5 million Iranians, including more than 1.6 million first-time voters, are eligible to vote in the June 14 elections.

MRS/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Turkey’s embattled PM Recep Tayyip Erdoganis told protesters last night that he will halt plans to redevelop Gezi Park until Turkish courts rule on an appeal and launch a public referendum if the rule falls in the government’s favor.

(Photo: Joshua Kahn Russell/Monument at Taksim Square) The move comes a day after European parliament voted to condemn the PM’s violent crackdown on Turkey’s ballooning protests that has left five dead and over 5,000 injured.

Erdogan’s Wednesday threats to shut down the protests in 24 hours were followed by late-night private meetings Thursday with members of the Taksim Solidarity, one organization behind the Taksim Square protests that has gained heightened visibility.

Just outside of the Thursday meetings, police fought back protesters. PressTV reports:

Witnesses said police fired tear gas at some 200 protesters who had gathered in Ankara city centre, near the offices of the prime minister, while the meeting was underway. Five demonstrators were also arrested.

The PM’s gesture towards concession appeared an attempt to quiet Turkey’s mass mobilizations, now well into their third week, as the U.S.-backed head of government faces a growing political crisis.

Taksim Solidarity members who attended the private meeting declared that the question of whether to accept the PM’s latest move ultimately rests with protesters, many of whom are not affiliated with Taksim Solidarity. CBS reports:

Tayfun Kahraman, one of the Taksim Solidarity members who attended the meeting, said he believed Erdogan had offered “positive words,” and that fellow activists would consider them in a “positive manner.” But he said those in Gezi Park would “make their own assessments.”

The Washington Post reports that it is not a given that protesters will be satisfied by Erdogan’s latest move.

Many protesters have been skeptical of plans for a referendum, saying that they do not believe elections can be fair when Erdogan holds tight sway over the media. Others mistrust the judiciary, saying that Erdogan controls them too.

The protests began in late May after activists occupying Gezi Park to protect it from redevelopment were violently evicted by police, sparking mass outrage. Mobilizations have since spread to dozens of cities and broadened to incorporate grievances against what many consider to be the increasingly authoritarian rule of the ruling AKP party.

A poll of Gezi Park protesters released this week finds that approximately half protest due to general dissatisfaction with the government.(Photo: Joshua Kahn Russell: Free Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner Table at Gezi Park)

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has renewed his call on anti-government demonstrators to end their protests, Press TV reports.

On Friday, Erdogan asked the protesters occupying Istanbul’s Gezi Park near the iconic Taksim Square to leave the area Å“by tonight.”

Å“I hope it will be over by tonight…. Please now leave the Gezi Park and go to your homes,” Erdogan said.

The Turkish premier went on to say that the message of the protesters has been heard.

Å“You have stayed here as long as you could and have relayed your message. If your message is about Taksim Gezi Park, it has been received and evaluated.”

The Taksim protesters say the issue is not just Gezi Park, adding that they will continue their protests against the Ëœincreasingly authoritarian styleâ„¢ of Erdoganâ„¢s administration.

On Thursday, negotiations between Turkish prime minister and the representatives of anti-government protesters ended inconclusively.

The protesters dismissed Erdoganâ„¢s Å“last warning” to evacuate the park.

The unrest in Turkey erupted after police broke up a sit-in staged at Taksim Square on May 31 to protest against a government plan for the redevelopment of Gezi Park.

The Turkish prime minister has faced international condemnation for his handling of the crisis. Turkish police have also been strongly criticized for using excessive force against the peaceful protests.

Five people, including a police officer, have reportedly died in the clashes and more than 5,000 protesters and 600 police officers have been wounded.

MAM/KA/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Britainâ„¢s Treasury signals Scottish budget cuts.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Afghan university students chant slogans as they demonstrate against the presidential decree on womenâ„¢s rights in Kabul. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says arming either side in Syria conflict would not be helpful. Ban made the remarks in response to the US decision to provide new weapons to militants fighting against the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

MAM/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

RIA Novosti
June 14, 2013

A US government report concluding Syria has used chemical weapons against rebels, crossing what US President Barack Obama has previously described as a “red line,” is a fabrication, a senior Russian lawmaker said Friday.

“Information about the usage of chemical weapons by [Syrian President Bashar] Assad is fabricated in the same way as the lie about [Saddam] Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq],” Alexei Pushkov, head of the Russian lower house of parliament’s international affairs committee, said on Twitter.

US intelligence reports presented to the UN and the international community prior to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 claimed Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction including nerve agents, ballistic missiles and a nuclear weapons program. The US claimed the threat posed by those weapons justified the invasion of Iraq, but after the country was occupied, the alleged weapons of mass destruction were never found.

President Obama “is going the same way” as former President George W. Bush did then, Pushkov said.

The White House said on Thursday it now believes with “high confidence” that Syrian government forces have used chemical weapons many times during the two-year conflict there, and vowed to boost US aid to the armed opposition fighting to remove Assad from power.

White House Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said Obama had decided to provide further support, including military support, for Syrian opposition forces as a result of its conclusion that government forces has used such chemical weapons.

Rhodes declined to clarify whether this support would entail providing arms to the Syrian opposition, but said US aid to armed opposition on the ground would differ greatly “in scope and scale” from assistance Washington had previously provided to the rebels. The US goal, Rhodes said, is to “strengthen their effectiveness.”

Syrian government officials have accused opposition forces of using chemical weapons against President Bashar Assad’s military in a March attack in outside of the northern city of Aleppo.

Some 93,000 people are believed to have died since fighting broke out between Syrian government forces and rebels in March 2011, according to the latest UN figures.

I’m guessing that there is more to Edward Snowden’s choice of Hong Kong instead of Iceland as an intial refuge than a matter of dim sum over skyr, hangikjöt, kleinur,laufabrauð, and bollur.

At the very least, Snowden can keep the global media pot boiling with interviews to the avid Hong Kong media about exciting China-related hacking secrets, thereby raising his profile and improving his chances of receiving genuine due process from the courts in Hong Kong and the United States.

It’s a better way to keep the world engaged in Snowden’s situation than giving an interview to the Fréttablaðið (Iceland’s biggest newspaper), watching the international stories slip to the inside page, and waiting for somebody to kick the door in.

But there’s another card he can play, especially if he doesn’t want to get extradited to the United States, albeit after a spectacular and presumably fair trial in Hong Kong, and then spend the rest of his life in a US prison.

That’s for him to make a deal with the US Government not to ignite whatever dynamite he’s got on the four laptops he brought to Hong Kong, in return for brief, easy time in some US penitentiary.

After all, in terms of informing and inflaming the public, Snowden’s work is pretty much done.

And he’s done it without revealing any operational details.

Maybe the best use of the rest of the information he’s got is as a “get out of jail” card.

If the USG doesn’t act interested, maybe its attitude will change after a few more embarrassing tidbits make it into the public domain.

I’ll be interested to see if the US government tries to get some kind of injunction to get the Hong Kong papers not to report his revelations and remove Snowden’s public relations megaphone—and diminish his bargaining power.

In the worst case, Snowden could threaten to turn over his goodies to the PRC if he didn’t get a deal.

That would certainly get Washington’s attention; but it would be immediately leaked to the press, branding Snowden with the “traitor” label, destroy any standing he’s been able to accrue, and make him fair game for whatever skullduggery the US decides to send down the pipe.

I doubt that’s Snowden’s strategy.

But maybe he’s bedeviling the US government with the unnerving prospect that the longer he stays in Hong Kong, the better the chance is that he’ll get snatched by PRC security services; and, if he does get arrested prior to extradition, who knows what will happen to him–and his laptops—during interrogation?

It’s a dangerous game with no guaranteed outcome, but what do you expect if you walk out of the United States with a computer full of secrets?

I think Edward Snowden (and Glenn Greenwald) knew what to expect, and that’s why he’s in Hong Kong.

Since I think CounterPunch readers expect some factual meat and potatoes as well as airy speculation, here are some more thoughts on Edward Snowden’s Panopticon:

For Some People, Edward Snowden’s Panopticon Is Already Here

Critics of Snowden’s leak concerning the extent of NSA surveillance often fall back on the argument that “people who don’t do bad things have nothing to fear”, i.e. extensive/intensive surveillance isn’t an issue for non-wrongdoers.

The “Panopticon” issue raised by Snowden (from a Foucault book) states, on the other hand, that omnipresent surveillance is by its nature oppressive–for everyone, including the “good guys”.

The gold standard for routine, workaday surveillance used to be the post office.

Some of us are old enough to remember the halcyon days when the greatest threat to public safety was the danger that a postal worker would go off and shoot himself and/or his boss and coworkers and/or the public at large.

As was reported in the press in the 1990s, a big part of “going postal” was the stressful work conditions (I’m assuming that some of the same practices prevail today, with some modifications, but we’ve got bigger homicidal fish to fry than the post office now and there isn’t as much reporting on the labor conditions inside the USPS).

A key problem at the post office was rampant Taylorism (industrial time management).

Workers who worked hard and were efficient were not rewarded; they got more work and longer routes. Therefore workers “paced themselves” so they would not conspicuously exceed their quotas.

Management’s main job was squeezing more work out of the employees, and a key task was to identify and push the workers who were “pacing themselves”.

The whole system was underpinned by the surveillance system. It wasn’t just to detect mail theft. It was to catch workers who weren’t giving what the USPS considered 100%.

In 1998, Traci Hikull profiled USPS operations in northern California for the San Jose Metro:

Jan Maddux, president of the 1,000-plus-member American Postal Workers Union Local 73, sits in his San Jose office describing some uncharming but typical managerial tactics. “You’re gone 10 minutes and 30 seconds on your break, and you’re AWOL 30 seconds,” he says. “They’ll stand behind you and watch you to make sure you’re not casing [sorting mail] with one hand because that’s wasting time, see? So they’ll write you up.”

…

“These people work hard. The workload …” [a local postmaster] sighs, not finishing the sentence. When asked if he thinks the pressure to perform makes employees feel like they’re being watched for slipups, he covers his face with his hands and scrubs at it, the same way people do when they’ve been staring at a computer monitor too long.

“We’re supervising them not to catch them messing up but to be sure everything is handled properly,” he says finally.

“We have all these spotlights on us, and that’s why we’ve just gotten better and better,” Cattivera adds. “And isn’t that the way it should be? Shouldn’t we be held accountable to make sure you get your mail every day?”

…

It’s not hard to see why people lose it working for the post office. The constant surveillance alone would drive some people over the edge, and the peculiar logic takes care of the rest.

The fact of being under continual surveillance is, by itself, enough to stress people out.

A study in England concluded that pervasive workplace surveillance increased stress-related complaints by 7 to 10%:

Monitoring noted by the PSI study includes logging emails and internet usage, keystroke loggers, recording and timing calls and measuring shop-till throughput.

Bearing the brunt of the IT scrutiny are administrative and white-collar employees, such as call-centre staff and data-entry workers, who complained of an increase in work strain of 10 percent when they are being watched.

In 2013, the LA Times’ Alana Samuels wrote a two-part piece on today’s “harsh workplace” and the central role of surveillance. She reported:

Phil Richards used to like his job driving a forklift in a produce and meat warehouse. He took pride in steering a case of beef with precision.

Now, he says, he has to speed through the warehouse to meet quotas, tracked by bosses each step of the way. Through a headset, a voice tells him what to do and how much time he has to do it.

It makes the Unified Grocers warehouse in Santa Fe Springs operate smoothly with fewer employees, but it also makes Richards’ work stressful.

“We’re just like human machines,” said Richards, 52. “But with machines, they don’t care whether you feel good, or if you’re having a bad day.”

Technology has eliminated many onerous work tasks, but it’s now one of the factors contributing to a harsher work environment.

Employers are using technology to read emails and monitor keystrokes, measure which employees spend the most time on social networking websites and track their movements inside and outside the office. They can see who works fastest and who talks the most on the phone. They can monitor how much time people spend talking to co-workers – and how much time they spend in the bathroom.

…

The sanitation truck that James Brooker III drives in Raleigh, N.C., has a GPS device that enables his bosses to track his every move. Co-workers have been disciplined for driving too slowly or for taking an extra 10 minutes on a lunch break on a tough day, he said.

“You’re always worried that you’re not doing your job correctly,” he said. “It makes you stressed out, and there’s so much pressure to rush.”

…

Employers can read workers’ email, see what websites they visit and read any emails or text messages stored on work-issued computers or smartphones. In all but six states (California is one of the exceptions), employers can require employees to provide their passwords to social networking sites. And in most states, employers can monitor their employees and are not required by law to tell them it’s happening.

…

Michael Cunningham found this out the hard way.

His employer suspected he wasn’t working when he said he was and put a GPS device on Cunningham’s personal car without telling him. Officials tracked him driving to a diner instead of work, tracked his son driving to an internship and tracked him during an approved vacation in Massachusetts. A year later, they fired him, explaining the GPS had confirmed their suspicions that he was falsifying his time sheets.

With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, Cunningham sued his employer, the New York state Department of Labor, but lost. Judges in New York’s Appellate Division ruled that the law does not prohibit employers from using GPS to monitor employee behavior if it is relevant to the employee’s job performance.

The ruling means that although the government has to get a warrant to use a GPS device to track criminals, it can legally track its employees without approval from the employee or a judge, said Corey Stoughton, the ACLU lawyer on the case.

…

When executives at Dixie Specialty Insurance, a Mississippi company, noticed a few employees were working more slowly than they once had, they installed software from Awareness Technology on company computers to monitor what websites the employees were visiting and block the more popular ones. Productivity jumped, said Cassandra Phillips, the company’s information technology manager.

Software from another company, SpectorSoft Corp., tracks how much time employees spend on certain websites and can measure whether it is “active time” – whether or not the employee is typing or clicking, for example.

In the private sector, the objective of surveillance is enhanced productivity.

And it works best, in true Panopticon style, when employees assume surveillance is universal and pervasive and modify their activity without the local Bill Lumbergh showing up to give them a nudge.

And then the company can lay off Bill Lumbergh! That’d be great! Start chewing those Rolaids, Bill!

In other words, control is internalized together with, of course, the stress.

In private life, I think a similar dynamic will apply as surveillance becomes more pervasive.

The result will not be enhanced productivity; it will be enhanced compliance.

We will experience the Stasi-worthy anxiety that our activities are being continually observed and judged and we may be found wanting.

The slogan could be: “I must do more; what must I do?”

That’s life in the brave new world of the Panopticon.

Safer? Maybe

More stressful? Definitely.

Peter Lee edits China Matters. His ground-breaking story on North Korea’s nuclear program, Big Bang Theory in North Korea, appears in the March issue of CounterPunch magazine. He can be reached at: chinamatters (at) prlee. org.

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

A U.S. Post carrier got caught in the middle of a racist, homophobic prank orchestrated by a fraternity of jackasses at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

About a week after Memorial Day, Iran Becton received an order to deliver 79 boxes to the Phi Delta Theta house on the university’s campus. He “needlessly” carried every single package from his post office truck to the door of the frat house, before a member informed him that his hard labor was all part of an infantile joke.

“I went back to the truck for the boxes about six or seven times,” Becton told the Sun-Times. “After the last trip, one of the frat guys came out and said it was a practical joke. Another guy said that I should read the name backwards and I’ll get the joke.”

Inscribed on all 79 boxes: the name “Reggin Toggaf.” Put that up to a mirror to reveal the sophisticated humor of these fine, fraternal gentleman. Spelled backwards, the intended recipient of each box is the name “F*ggot N*gger.”

Chicago Division Postal Inspection Services, as well as Victory Packaging–the company that shipped the boxes–are both investigating the incident. The university issued a statement calling it “deplorable.” The Chicago Postal Inspection Service spoke with university police, as well as the fraternity vice president, and halted mail delivery to the house until members write a formal apology. However, a spokesperson noted to the Sun-Times that Phi Delta Theta was the “intended target” of the prank, not Becton.

For the mail carrier, an apology isn’t enough. Becton, who is African American, told the ­ Sun-Times he felt “humiliated,” and wants the post officer inspector to “go after the person who ordered all this stuff.”

“This is ridiculous that all you can tell me is that you are sorry it happened,” Becton said. “These are U.S. Postal inspectors. You can’t tell me they can’t do anything.”

The Sun-Times notes that the “joke involved the abuse and possibly the destruction of postal property,” a federal offense.

This isn’t the only example of entrenched prejudice at the prestigious University of Chicago. The Black Youth Project revealed a Facebook page called Politically Incorrect Maroon Confessions, where more than 950 “confessions” from U of C students range from insensitive to flat out hate speech. One entry laments the “onslaught of black people invading UChicago.” Another simply states, “Let’s start a male movement fuck feminists.” And The Huffington Post notes a 2012 incident in which the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity threw a “Conquistadors and Aztec Hoes” party, fraught with racist depictions of Latinos.

As for the U of C members of Phi Delta Theta, no one has yet faced any disciplinary action. Mack Julion, president of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Branch 11, told the Sun-Times that he visited the house and spoke with the fraternity’s former president.

“I gave him my card and told him he may put something in writing,” Julion said. “I told him I would talk to the letter carrier and see how he feels. That was on Saturday and I haven’t heard back.”

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

Recent revelations that the U.S. National Security Agency is conducting massive meta-data vacuuming of the phone calls and Internet transactions of tens of millions of Americans and, perhaps, billions of people around the world, with little or no effective oversight by President Obama, the U.S. Congress, or the federal court system means that the intelligence agency has become, in its own right, a global superpower.

NSA acts like a virtual «state within a state». The director of NSA, a four-star flag officer, also wears the hat of Commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, the chief cyber-warfare echelon within the Department of Defense. Just as any nation-state, NSA also has alliances with similar signals intelligence and cyber-warfare agencies around the world, including Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate (DSD), Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), and the Government Communications Security Board (GCSB) of New Zealand. These English-speaking partners are known as the «Five Eyes» countries and the signals intelligence alliance began after World War II and grew in scope during the Cold War.

NSA also has «third party» intelligence sharing agreements with a number of other signals intelligence agencies, but these smaller agencies are like NSA;’s very own colonial territories. Third party signals intelligence agencies of countries like Germany, Japan, South Korea, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Spain, and Thailand are expected to feed their intelligence «take» into the massive computer databases NSA maintains at its headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, but these Third Party entities receive very little intelligence in return. In fact, the Five Eyes «Second party» partners of NSA receive relatively little intelligence from NSA in exchange for the massive amounts of intercepted communications they make available to NSA. Even  more secretive are NSA’s «Fourth Party» partners, including neutral Sweden, Finland, Austria, and Switzerland and, in what may pose a problem for Snowden, last reportedly in Hong Kong, the People’s Republic of China has been a «Fourth Party» partner of NSA since the early 1980s. NSA maintained two eavesdropping stations in western China directed against the nuclear testing facilities of the Soviet Union and then Russia.

It has been a common practice for NSA and its international partners to keep secret the activities of the NSA from even prime ministers. New Zealand Labor Party Prime Minister David Lange, who served in office from 1984 to 1989, stated that he and other ministers «were told so little « about the activities of NSA and GCSB and that this raised the question as to whom those concerned with international electronic surveillance saw themselves ultimately responsible.  Later found in Lange’s archived papers was  a 31-page TOP SECRET UMBRA HANDLE VIA COMINT CHANNELS ONLY GCSB report on New Zealand’s communications intercepts on behalf of NSA of targets in the South Pacific and Antarctica.

In 1975, when Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Gough Whitlam demanded information on the activities of NSA bases in Alice Springs and Woomera, Australia, the U.S., working with Australian intelligence, prevailed upon the Australian Governor General Sir John Kerr, to depose Whitlam and appoint the conservative and pro-U.S. opposition leader as prime minister. In effect, NSA ensured that a democratically-elected government was overthrown in a bloodless and seemingly constitutional coup d’état.

NSA’s intelligence collections programs, including the PRISM meta-data vacuuming and storage and retrieval system exposed by NSA contractor whistleblower Edward Snowden, allegedly operate under U.S. government «oversight». However, the congressional oversight, the Intelligence Committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, are mere rubber stamp entities, as is the chief judicial oversight body, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). The FISC, which was established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 in response to the surveillance abuses of the NSA, FBI, and CIA during the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon presidencies, was tasked with ensuring that any use of NSA to conduct domestic surveillance was subject to a court order from the FISC. However, the FISC is a secret court and its decisions are classified. It has rarely denied a government request for a surveillance warrant in its entire history.

Internal NSA regulations intended to protect the communications of U.S. citizens from snooping largely went by the wayside after the 9/11 attack, an event that was extremely fortuitous for surveillance enthusiasts in the NSA top hierarchy.

After 9/11, NSA began to expand its operations and capabilities. Due to commence operations in September this year is a massive $2 billion NSA computing facility in Utah, known as «NSA Utah,» that will be able to process and store in a computer space the size of 17 football fields a yottabyte of data, which is equivalent to a quadrillion gigabytes of data. NSA Utah will be the mother lode of the NSA’s PRISM meta-data, including communications intercepts and direct feeds from the servers of Microsoft, Google, Apple, Skype, Yahoo, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Youtube, and DropBox. There are reports that Twitter will soon be pressured to join the surveillance program. As influential as some of the aforementioned companies are, they are miniscule compared to the NSA superpower.

Joining NSA Utah will be an $860 million, 600,000 square feet, High Performance Computing Center at NSA’s Fort Meade «campus» headquarters. There is another new NSA massive computing center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Adding to these are massive Regional Security Operations Centers (RSOCs) at facilities known as «NSA Georgia» in Fort Gordon, «NSA Texas» in San Antonio, and «NSA Hawaii» in Kunia on Oahu. It was at Kunia where Snowden gained access to classified documents on PRISM, NSA access to Verizon phone calls and emails, and a global interception system known as BOUNDLESSINFORMANT.

Classified maps of BOUNDLESSINFORMANT Global Access Operations (GAOs) show that the number one target for NSA surveillance is Iran, followed by Pakistan, with Jordan, Egypt, and India in third, fourth, and fifth place, respectively. Kenya, the country of President Barack Obama’s paternal heritage, was the number one target for NSA surveillance in sub-Saharan Africa. Germany, a «third party» partner of NSA, tops all other countries in Europe as NSA’s number one target. Other major NSA targets are Afghanistan, Iraq, China, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Astoundingly, NSA spies on the United States more than it does on Russia, North Korea, Somalia, Cuba, or Venezuela.

NSA’s largest foreign operational center is in Menwith Hill, England. The Menwith Hill base works closely with GCHQ, which is headquartered in a massive structure in Cheltenham, England, which is nicknamed «The Doughnut» because of its shape. Others say the building looks like an eye. Not to be left behind, CSEC is building a C$880 million, 775,000 square feet new headquarters southeast of Ottawa. Australia’s DSD operates a large satellite communication intercept facility in Geraldton, West Australia.

Rather than curtail the powers of NSA after the Cold War, the U.S. Congress and Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama administrations have presided over the omniscient agency’s expansion and greater powers of surveillance. NSA has an internal security force, the «Q Group,» that conducts its own investigations with or without the assistance of the FBI. NSA is the second largest employer in the state of Maryland, surpassed only by the U.S. Postal Service. NSA’s clout as an employer allows the agency to run roughshod over elected state officials and members of Maryland’s congressional delegation. In Maryland, there is no such thing as saying «no» to the NSA.

NSA’s cyber-warriors have the capability to shut down banking networks, generate power blackouts to major metropolitan regions, throw a «kill switch» on the Internet in particular countries and regions, and manipulate vote counting and election results reporting. There is very little independent oversight of these dangerous operations.

Edward Snowden claims that an NSA operator with the necessary «authorities» or access rights can read the personal email of anyone, including the President of the United States. If a low-level technician like Snowden could read such personal email or listen in on private phone calls, the capability of NSA to blackmail politicians from Maine to California and Argentina to Zambia stands as a stark example of the power that is in the hands of the NSA director. It is also worrisome that NSA’s current commander, U.S. Army General Keith Alexander, attended the elitist and secretive Bilderberg Conference in 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, and 2008. As David Lange once asked, «to whom do those who have the power of total surveillance see themselves ultimately responsible?» NSA’s General Alexander appears to be beholden more to the unelected wealthy and privileged doyens of capitalism than to either the American people or their elected representatives in the Congress.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Mark O’byrne
Gold Core
June 14, 2013

[…] James Steel, chief commodities analyst at HSBC in New York continues to be constructive on gold in the medium and long term and sees gold rising to $1,600/oz in the second half of 2013.

In a Bloomberg audio interview, Steel said that this year the gold market has been under pressure and has experienced a rotational shift out of commodities in general driven by the constant chatter of a tapering off in QE and experienced very steep declines in mid April. He likens it to a rugby scrum pulling back and forth near the $1/400oz level, between ETF outflows and strong physical demand for coins and bars, notably from China.

Steel said that in the past few weeks the heavy ETF outflows have died down, and prior to this year they were mostly static. The peak for ETF’s was 85M ounces at the end of last year. He says most institutions have already exited that wanted to get out.

Market chatter has been nervous about the unwinding of QE3.  Steel points out that unwinding or paring back is very different than an exit.  The Fed many need to do tapering for a long time before it ends their program.

Steel mentions that it was the jewellery market that drove the gold market in the past and now it is investment demand and demand from China. He believes gold will average is $1,542/oz and he is predicting a rally in the second half of the year up to $1,600/oz. Longer term, he is on record  as saying that gold will rise to over $2,000/oz.

Read full article

It was a debate which seemed to dance around the main issue.

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

The United States has criticized the Israeli regimeâ„¢s plan to construct over 1,000 illegal settler units in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Å“The secretary has expressed his concern in the past both publicly and in private conversations.” State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said in a statement on Friday.

Å“We don’t accept the legitimacy of continued settlement activity,” the statement said.

Israel said earlier it is going ahead with plans to build more than 1,000 homes in two illegal settlements deep in the West Bank in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

A regime spokesman said on Thursday that the new homes will be built in Itamar and Bruchin settlements, located in an area of the West Bank which Israel occupied in 1967.

On the same day, Nabil Shaath, an adviser to acting Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas, said the latest Israeli move shows Tel Aviv Å“is destroying the two-state solution and the prospects of a peace deal in deeds and words.”

Last month, the Israeli settlement watchdog Terrestrial Jerusalem reported that Tel Aviv plans to build 1,000 new settler units in East al-Quds (Jerusalem).

The NGO said that contracts for 300 homes in the northeastern settlement of Ramot were signed and another 797 plots were to be offered for sale in the southern settlement of Gilo.

Gilo is also one of five major settlements in East al-Quds that were established by the Israeli regime following the Six-Day War of 1967.

The Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestine have created a major obstacle to the Middle East peace process.

A report released last month revealed that the Israeli regime confiscated 1,977 acres of the Palestinian lands in the occupied West Bank for its settlement activity during 2012.

The settlements, which cover an area roughly equal to 1,035 soccer fields and twice as big as New York’s Central Park, were approved by Å“military order,” the Israeli daily Haaretz reported on May 27.

More than half a million Israelis live in over 120 illegal settlements built since Israelâ„¢s occupation of the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East al-Quds in 1967.

MAM/KA

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Large voter turnout boosts Iran’s intl. power: Cleric

Voters in the Iranian city of Karaj cast their ballots during the countryâ„¢s presidential and city and rural councils elections on June 14, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The European financial crisis began in early 2008.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranian voters throng voting station in the central city of Isfahan on June 14, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

British Foreign Secretary William Hague(L), British Prime Minister David Cameron (R)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Foreign-sponsored insurgents are seen in the northern city of Aleppo. (File photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Head of the Election Committee of Tehran Province says the voter turnout in Iran’s July 14 elections is predicted to hit 70 percent in the province.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

At least five Taliban militants have been killed and three US-led troopers injured in violent clashes in Afghanistan’s eastern province of Wardak.

Afghan security sources said the shooting incident took place between American forces and Taliban militants in the Saeedabad district of the province on Friday.

The volatile area has been the scene of Taliban attacks against American military convoys and supply trucks in the past.

Attacks on foreign troops are expected to rise in the next months, as Taliban militants have announced the beginning of their “spring offensive” across Afghanistan.

The militant group said it would use “every possible tactic” to inflict casualties on Afghan and US-led forces, specifically mentioning insider and bomb attacks.

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 the country is still gripped by insecurity.

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

JR/KA

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The United States and Israel are trying to delegitimize Iran presidential election in order to destabilizing the country as part of their Ëœregime changeâ„¢ agenda, a political analyst says.

Å“The fact of the matter is that the United States like the other imperial powers, particularly its partner in Israel … is attempting to destabilize Iran and delegitimize the elections…,” the founder of the website, stopimperialism.com, in New York, Eric Draitser, said in an interview with Press TV on Friday.

The analyst noted that the Western propaganda against Iranâ„¢s presidential election is aimed at portraying the country as Å“a dictatorship” that Å“is not capable of changing its policy without some kind of Western-initiated regime change.”

Pointing to the US-led sanctions imposed against Iran over its nuclear energy program, Draitser said the measures are intended to hurt the Iranian people and not the government, Å“so that the Iranian people become so upset and discontent that they [would] rise up against the government.”

Å“So what the United States is interested in is not democracy. It is not anything other than regime change for the purposes of extending its hegemony,” he added.

The analyst also criticized the electoral process in the US as a rigged game that is Å“designed to put puppets in power that execute the agenda of the military industrial complex and finance capital.”

The US Secretary of State John Kerry on a visit to Israel on May 24, called into question the credibility of Iran’s presidential election after US State Department spokesman, Patrick Ventrell, criticized Iranâ„¢s Guardian Council over the vetting process of presidential candidates.

Polls officially opened in Iran for presidential as well as city and rural councils elections at 8:00 am (0330 GMT) on Friday.

The president of Iran is elected for a four-year term in a national election.

PG/SS

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt has warned against the humanitarian ramifications of the US decision to provide new weapons to militants in Syria, saying the scenario will spark an Å“arms race” in the Arab country.

Å“I don’t think the way forward is to get an arms race going in Syria. There’s a risk that that would undermine the conditions for a political process,” Bildt said in a Friday TV interview.

The New York Times reported on June 13 that US President Barack Obama has decided to begin supplying the militants in Syria with small arms and ammunition. The assistance, coordinated by the CIA spy agency, could include antitank weapons, the paper said.

Bildt expressed concern that the US scenario to arm the militants in Syria would prompt Russia to boost its military support for the Syrian government.

Å“There’s no doubt that that would be very serious and have even more serious humanitarian consequences,” the Swedish foreign minister said.

On Friday, top commander of foreign-backed militants in Syria, Brigadier General Salim Idris, welcomed the US decision, expressing hope that it Å“will be implemented on the ground as soon as possible.”

The turmoil in Syria erupted in March 2011, and many people, including large numbers of Syrian soldiers and security personnel, have been killed so far.

In May, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad said militants from 29 different countries were fighting against the government in different parts of the country.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said on June 13 that at least 93,000 people have been killed since the outbreak of the foreign-sponsored militancy against the Syrian government.

ASH/KA

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Dina Spector
Business Insider
June 14, 2013

UK honeybee deaths were the worst on record, the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA) said in a statement on Thursday.

Over the 2012-2013 winter season, 34 honeybee colonies of every 100 were lost on average – more than double that of the previous year.

Widespread die-offs are being blamed largely on bad weather and a late spring, BBKA said in their report.

An exceptionally rainy season – the summer of 2012 was the wettest the UK had seen in 100 years – prevented honeybees from going out and collecting nectar and pollen from flowers, needed to nourish bees, produce honey, and to pollinate other crops. Poor nutrition, in turn, makes honeybees more susceptible to disease and other stressors. A scarcity of pollen and nectar even when honeybees were able to leave their hives served as an additional blow.

Read full article

<!–

–>

This article was posted: Friday, June 14, 2013 at 9:57 am

Tags: food, science

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

When you cut through the fog, the NSA controversy is about whether we should trust people with institutional power. Edward Snowden’s courageous exposure of massive secret surveillance separates those who say yes from those who say, “Hell no!”

The trusting attitude can be found among progressives and conservatives alike (with notable exceptions), and even some who have identified themselves as libertarians. Matt Miller, an occasional guest host on the progressive network MSNBC, left no doubt where he stands when he flippantly wrote in the Washington Post,

Do you empathize more with those who govern – and who in this case are charged with protecting us? Or has the history of abuse of power, and the special danger from such abuses in an age when privacy seems to be vanishing, leave you hailing any exposure of secret government methods as grounds for sainthood?…

Is there potential for abuse? Of course. An Internet-era J. Edgar Hoover is frightening to conjure. But what Snowden exposed was not some rogue government-inside-the-government conspiracy. It’s a program that’s legal, reviewed by Congress and subject to court oversight.

So it’s okay if the government monitors masses of innocent people as long as it’s reviewed by a clique of gagged members of Congress and a secret rubber-stamp “court.” That’s what I call trust in power. Frankly, it’s more alarming that the spying is legal rather than rogue. Michael Kinsley once said, “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the scandal is what’s legal.”

Miller’s progressive colleague Richard Cohen said much the same thing in much the same tone:

The National Security Agency has been monitoring telephone calls and e-mails – and even social media stuff of the sort you shouldn’t have been doing anyway. [!] To this, a whole lot of people have expressed shock. Oaths to the Fourth Amendment have filled the air. Unreasonable searches are simply unconstitutional, they assert – without asserting that anything has in fact been searched or seized. It has merely been noted and, if suspicious, referred to a court for the appropriate warrant.

The programs certainly can be abused. (So can local police powers.) But oddly enough, proof that this has not happened comes from the self-proclaimed martyr for our civil liberties, Edward Snowden.…

A defining trait of those who trust power is that abuse is of no concern until it occurs – if we learn about it, that is. It never occurs to them that power is inherently abusive. Donald Boudreaux informs us that Edmund Burke, the conservative Whig, had a keener insight to abuse. Burke wrote of America in 1775:

 In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and sniff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

(Cohen is true to form. After President Jimmy Carter’s energy-crisis speech in 1977, Cohen urged Carter to throw his arms around the sweaty beast of power – that’s nearly verbatim – concluding, “We are waiting for our orders, Mr. President.”)

Both Miller and Cohen, along with others others, try to diminish the disclosures by asserting that the government is only doing what Google does every day. The difference between, on the one hand, surveillance by a coercive monopoly with the legal authority to use aggressive force and, on the other, commercial offerings from one of several competing service providers seems to elude them.

The editorial board of the Post agrees with its columnists:

Just as it is important not to exaggerate the national security risks of transparency, it is also important not to give into the anti-government paranoia [!] of grandstanding politicians such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who on Sunday invoked the tyranny of King George III to criticize programs that are the result of a checked, deliberative process across three branches of government. Part of what makes this different is that if enough Americans expect more privacy after the debate Mr. Snowden incited, their representatives in Washington can act on their behalf.

That’s another mark of trust in power: a belief that those “representatives” actually represent us in any meaningful sense. The great unasked question is: How can someone literally represent anywhere from several hundred thousand to tens of millions of people?

For every ridiculous thing said by someone on the so-called Left, you can find an equivalent on the Right. Mark Thiessen, once a speech writer for President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, devoted his Washington Post column to assuring those of us who distrust power that “Big Brother is not watching you.” About the mass collection of telephone logs, Thiessen says we have no grounds for concern:

In Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy, and thus no Fourth Amendment protection, for the phone numbers people dial (as distinct from the content of the call), because the number dialed is information you voluntarily share with the phone company to complete the call and for billing purposes.

A third sign of trust in power is being impressed when one branch of government decides that you and I have no “reasonable expectation” that another branch of government will respect our privacy. After all, if you are willing to disclose a phone number to the telephone company (by calling that phone), why would you mind if the NSA stored the number (and other information) for future reference? Verizon, NSA – to quote a recent secretary of state, what difference does it make?!

“The leaks do not describe the many ‘inward-facing’ restrictions directed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to the government that describe the conditions and limitations on when and how the data can be accessed and how they can [be] used,” Thiessen writes.

In other words, trust them. The components of government will limit each other. What’s that you say? The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied before the Senate Intelligence Committee and the American people when asked if the government was collecting information on millions of Americans? He had to lie. It was for our own good. (The head of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, lied too.)

As is said in the law, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

David Brooks, the New York Times resident conservative, portrays Snowden as an alienated character, like Holden Caulfield, who “has not been a regular presence around his mother’s house for years,” who was an inadequate neighbor, and who has his priorities screwed up:

But Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.

This seems rather overwrought. Let’s remember that all Snowden did was tell us how extensive the government’s data collection is; it goes beyond what even an author of the relevant law intended. (So much for its trumpeted legality. Note well: legal and constitutional language is inherently underdeterminate and subject to biased interpretation by those with an interest in expanding power.) From what Brooks has to say, you’d think a blank check for the government is what holds society together. Did Snowden indulge an excessive individualism, or did he in fact “look after the common good”? If you trust power, you’ll choose the former.

For society to function well [Brooks continued], there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.

Well, yes, trust and cooperation are necessary for society to function well. But that does not mean one should trust inherently untrustworthy institutions – quite the contrary. Snowden has struck a blow for trust and cooperation by exposing the spies in our midst.

What these pundits won’t understand is that distrust of power, which lies at the very heart of the centuries-old liberal tradition, is responsible for so much of what is good about civilization. It is when people not only distrusted power but also grasped that they were justified in doing so that liberation began its slow progress, and zones of personal freedom began to be carved out.

Lord Acton’s dictum – “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” – is only liberalism’s the most famous statement of distrust. Before Acton, David Hume, one of the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment, noted,

Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, co-operate to public good. Without this, say they, we shall in vain boast of the advantages of any constitution, and shall find, in the end, that we have no security for our liberties or possessions, except the good-will of our rulers; that is, we shall have no security at all.

One could quote the early liberals all day on this subject, but you get the point. Those who today apologize for the NSA, the Obama administration, and their enablers in Congress betray the deepest ideals of Western civilization. They, not Edward Snowden, are the traitors.

Sheldon Richman is vice president and editor at The Future of Freedom Foundation (www.fff.org) in Fairfax, Va. He can be reached through his blog, Free Association.

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

When you cut through the fog, the NSA controversy is about whether we should trust people with institutional power. Edward Snowden’s courageous exposure of massive secret surveillance separates those who say yes from those who say, “Hell no!”

The trusting attitude can be found among progressives and conservatives alike (with notable exceptions), and even some who have identified themselves as libertarians. Matt Miller, an occasional guest host on the progressive network MSNBC, left no doubt where he stands when he flippantly wrote in the Washington Post,

Do you empathize more with those who govern – and who in this case are charged with protecting us? Or has the history of abuse of power, and the special danger from such abuses in an age when privacy seems to be vanishing, leave you hailing any exposure of secret government methods as grounds for sainthood?…

Is there potential for abuse? Of course. An Internet-era J. Edgar Hoover is frightening to conjure. But what Snowden exposed was not some rogue government-inside-the-government conspiracy. It’s a program that’s legal, reviewed by Congress and subject to court oversight.

So it’s okay if the government monitors masses of innocent people as long as it’s reviewed by a clique of gagged members of Congress and a secret rubber-stamp “court.” That’s what I call trust in power. Frankly, it’s more alarming that the spying is legal rather than rogue. Michael Kinsley once said, “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal, the scandal is what’s legal.”

Miller’s progressive colleague Richard Cohen said much the same thing in much the same tone:

The National Security Agency has been monitoring telephone calls and e-mails – and even social media stuff of the sort you shouldn’t have been doing anyway. [!] To this, a whole lot of people have expressed shock. Oaths to the Fourth Amendment have filled the air. Unreasonable searches are simply unconstitutional, they assert – without asserting that anything has in fact been searched or seized. It has merely been noted and, if suspicious, referred to a court for the appropriate warrant.

The programs certainly can be abused. (So can local police powers.) But oddly enough, proof that this has not happened comes from the self-proclaimed martyr for our civil liberties, Edward Snowden.…

A defining trait of those who trust power is that abuse is of no concern until it occurs – if we learn about it, that is. It never occurs to them that power is inherently abusive. Donald Boudreaux informs us that Edmund Burke, the conservative Whig, had a keener insight to abuse. Burke wrote of America in 1775:

 In other countries, the people, more simple, and of a less mercurial cast, judge of an ill principle in government only by an actual grievance; here they anticipate the evil, and judge of the pressure of the grievance by the badness of the principle. They augur misgovernment at a distance; and sniff the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.

(Cohen is true to form. After President Jimmy Carter’s energy-crisis speech in 1977, Cohen urged Carter to throw his arms around the sweaty beast of power – that’s nearly verbatim – concluding, “We are waiting for our orders, Mr. President.”)

Both Miller and Cohen, along with others others, try to diminish the disclosures by asserting that the government is only doing what Google does every day. The difference between, on the one hand, surveillance by a coercive monopoly with the legal authority to use aggressive force and, on the other, commercial offerings from one of several competing service providers seems to elude them.

The editorial board of the Post agrees with its columnists:

Just as it is important not to exaggerate the national security risks of transparency, it is also important not to give into the anti-government paranoia [!] of grandstanding politicians such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who on Sunday invoked the tyranny of King George III to criticize programs that are the result of a checked, deliberative process across three branches of government. Part of what makes this different is that if enough Americans expect more privacy after the debate Mr. Snowden incited, their representatives in Washington can act on their behalf.

That’s another mark of trust in power: a belief that those “representatives” actually represent us in any meaningful sense. The great unasked question is: How can someone literally represent anywhere from several hundred thousand to tens of millions of people?

For every ridiculous thing said by someone on the so-called Left, you can find an equivalent on the Right. Mark Thiessen, once a speech writer for President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, devoted his Washington Post column to assuring those of us who distrust power that “Big Brother is not watching you.” About the mass collection of telephone logs, Thiessen says we have no grounds for concern:

In Smith v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that there’s no reasonable expectation of privacy, and thus no Fourth Amendment protection, for the phone numbers people dial (as distinct from the content of the call), because the number dialed is information you voluntarily share with the phone company to complete the call and for billing purposes.

A third sign of trust in power is being impressed when one branch of government decides that you and I have no “reasonable expectation” that another branch of government will respect our privacy. After all, if you are willing to disclose a phone number to the telephone company (by calling that phone), why would you mind if the NSA stored the number (and other information) for future reference? Verizon, NSA – to quote a recent secretary of state, what difference does it make?!

“The leaks do not describe the many ‘inward-facing’ restrictions directed by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to the government that describe the conditions and limitations on when and how the data can be accessed and how they can [be] used,” Thiessen writes.

In other words, trust them. The components of government will limit each other. What’s that you say? The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied before the Senate Intelligence Committee and the American people when asked if the government was collecting information on millions of Americans? He had to lie. It was for our own good. (The head of the NSA, Gen. Keith Alexander, lied too.)

As is said in the law, falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.

David Brooks, the New York Times resident conservative, portrays Snowden as an alienated character, like Holden Caulfield, who “has not been a regular presence around his mother’s house for years,” who was an inadequate neighbor, and who has his priorities screwed up:

But Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.

This seems rather overwrought. Let’s remember that all Snowden did was tell us how extensive the government’s data collection is; it goes beyond what even an author of the relevant law intended. (So much for its trumpeted legality. Note well: legal and constitutional language is inherently underdeterminate and subject to biased interpretation by those with an interest in expanding power.) From what Brooks has to say, you’d think a blank check for the government is what holds society together. Did Snowden indulge an excessive individualism, or did he in fact “look after the common good”? If you trust power, you’ll choose the former.

For society to function well [Brooks continued], there have to be basic levels of trust and cooperation, a respect for institutions and deference to common procedures. By deciding to unilaterally leak secret N.S.A. documents, Snowden has betrayed all of these things.

Well, yes, trust and cooperation are necessary for society to function well. But that does not mean one should trust inherently untrustworthy institutions – quite the contrary. Snowden has struck a blow for trust and cooperation by exposing the spies in our midst.

What these pundits won’t understand is that distrust of power, which lies at the very heart of the centuries-old liberal tradition, is responsible for so much of what is good about civilization. It is when people not only distrusted power but also grasped that they were justified in doing so that liberation began its slow progress, and zones of personal freedom began to be carved out.

Lord Acton’s dictum – “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” – is only liberalism’s the most famous statement of distrust. Before Acton, David Hume, one of the giants of the Scottish Enlightenment, noted,

Political writers have established it as a maxim, that, in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end, in all his actions, than private interest. By this interest we must govern him, and, by means of it, make him, notwithstanding his insatiable avarice and ambition, co-operate to public good. Without this, say they, we shall in vain boast of the advantages of any constitution, and shall find, in the end, that we have no security for our liberties or possessions, except the good-will of our rulers; that is, we shall have no security at all.

One could quote the early liberals all day on this subject, but you get the point. Those who today apologize for the NSA, the Obama administration, and their enablers in Congress betray the deepest ideals of Western civilization. They, not Edward Snowden, are the traitors.

Sheldon Richman is vice president and editor at The Future of Freedom Foundation (www.fff.org) in Fairfax, Va. He can be reached through his blog, Free Association.

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

‘;
jQuery(‘div.media-image’).each( function(index){
src = String(jQuery(this).children(‘img.media-image’).attr(‘src’));
if( src != ” && src != ‘undefined’ ){
parts = src.split(‘/’);
if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘slideshow’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/slideshow/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘AFP’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/images/AFP/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-3] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-2]+’/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else { new_src = false; }
if( new_src ){ jQuery(this).html(‘‘+jQuery(this).html()+enlarge_html+’‘); }
}
});

var slideshowdiv; var new_html; var img_obj; var sourcediv; var titlediv; var captiondiv; var title; var caption;

jQuery(‘div.slideshow-body div.slideshow div.field-item’).each( function(index){

slideshowdiv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-embedded-gallery’);
img_obj = slideshowdiv.find(‘img’);
src = img_obj.attr(‘src’);

title = slideshowdiv.children(‘div.altslideshow-title’).html();
if( title == null ){ title = ”; }

caption = slideshowdiv.children(‘div.altslideshow-caption’).html();
if( caption == null ){ caption = ”; }

if( src != ” && src != ‘undefined’ ){
// alert( ‘SRC: ‘+src );
parts = src.split(‘/’);
if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘slideshow’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/slideshow/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘AFP’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/images/AFP/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-3] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-2]+’/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else { new_src = false; }
// alert( ‘New SRC: ‘+new_src );
if( new_src ){
img_obj.parent().attr(‘href’,new_src).attr(‘rel’,’lightbox[slides]’).attr(‘title’,title+’
‘+caption).append(‘

Click to enlarge.

‘);
}
}

//sourcediv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-source’);
//titlediv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-title’);
//captiondiv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-caption’);
//sourcediv.after( titlediv ).after( captiondiv );

});

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

‘;
jQuery(‘div.media-image’).each( function(index){
src = String(jQuery(this).children(‘img.media-image’).attr(‘src’));
if( src != ” && src != ‘undefined’ ){
parts = src.split(‘/’);
if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘slideshow’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/slideshow/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘AFP’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/images/AFP/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-3] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-2]+’/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else { new_src = false; }
if( new_src ){ jQuery(this).html(‘‘+jQuery(this).html()+enlarge_html+’‘); }
}
});

var slideshowdiv; var new_html; var img_obj; var sourcediv; var titlediv; var captiondiv; var title; var caption;

jQuery(‘div.slideshow-body div.slideshow div.field-item’).each( function(index){

slideshowdiv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-embedded-gallery’);
img_obj = slideshowdiv.find(‘img’);
src = img_obj.attr(‘src’);

title = slideshowdiv.children(‘div.altslideshow-title’).html();
if( title == null ){ title = ”; }

caption = slideshowdiv.children(‘div.altslideshow-caption’).html();
if( caption == null ){ caption = ”; }

if( src != ” && src != ‘undefined’ ){
// alert( ‘SRC: ‘+src );
parts = src.split(‘/’);
if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘slideshow’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/slideshow/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘AFP’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/images/AFP/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-2] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else if( parts[parts.length-3] == ‘public’ ){ new_src = ‘/files/’+parts[parts.length-2]+’/’+parts[parts.length-1]; }
else { new_src = false; }
// alert( ‘New SRC: ‘+new_src );
if( new_src ){
img_obj.parent().attr(‘href’,new_src).attr(‘rel’,’lightbox[slides]’).attr(‘title’,title+’
‘+caption).append(‘

Click to enlarge.

‘);
}
}

//sourcediv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-source’);
//titlediv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-title’);
//captiondiv = jQuery(this).find(‘div.altslideshow-caption’);
//sourcediv.after( titlediv ).after( captiondiv );

});

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

June 14, 2013
 |

The following is a transcript originally published in Democracy Now!

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman. As the immigration reform bill makes its way through the mark-up process in the House and Senate, we turn now to the growing push to add harsher border security measures in order for the bill to pass. This week a key member of the so-called bipartisan Gang of Eight working on the bill, Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, said he himself may vote against the bill unless it includes an amendment that calls for full control of the border and 90 percent apprehension of illegal border crossings before immigrants can apply for legal status. The amendment would also require what it calls “situational awareness” of each one-mile segment of the southern border.

For more, we turn to two people working to introduce measures that protect human rights and civil liberties and to the bill, as well. Andrea Guerrero is the co-chair of Southern Border Communities Coalition and executive director of Alliance San Diego. Joining her is Shena Gutierrez, volunteer with Southern [Border Communities] Coalition. She has a very personal experience related to the border: her husband nearly killed in an encounter with Border Patrol agents. While still unconscious in the hospital, he was threatened with deportation. Andrea and Shena live in California but join us from Washington, D.C., where they’ve been meeting with members of Congress.

Let’s go to Andrea Guerrero. If you can talk for a moment about what the so-called Gang of Eight immigration reform bill is and what you are calling for?

ANDREA GUERRERO: Certainly, Amy. The Gang of Eight in the Senate introduced a comprehensive immigration reform bill that includes a Title I that is all about border enforcement. Overall, we think that the bill is, on balance, a good bill. We think that the Title I that treats–deals with border enforcement is, overall, a good title. And we have been working to improve that title. In the mark-up process, we were able to advance some significant amendments that improve the quality of life in the border region, protect the civil liberties of those living in the border region. We are concerned that the rhetoric around the border continues to dominate the conversation around immigration reform. And many who speak of the border have never been to the border or don’t know anyone from the border. So we are here in Washington, D.C., to carry a message of what the border is like. It’s not a barren wasteland. There are 15 million people living in the border region. We have lives. We have businesses. We have families. And we want to make sure that Border Patrol, which has become the largest law enforcement agency in the country concentrated in the border region, is respecting our civil liberties, our civil rights and those of those who are crossing into the country.

AMY GOODMAN: Shena Gutierrez, can you tell us what happened to your husband?

SHENA GUTIERREZ: Sure. Two years ago, March 30th–he was deported to Mexico March 21st. And, you know, he was desperate. You know, we have two young children. At the time, our son was two and a half; our daughter was only four months old. And our daughter was in the hospital. And he was deported, and he was just trying to figure out how to get back to us. March 30th, he attempted to cross back, and I lost contact with him that day. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday go by. By Saturday, I’m completely going insane, not knowing what happened, where he’s at, if he’s alive, if he’s OK. I mean, it just wasn’t like him to not call me and let me know what was going on.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

The SNAP challenge means that Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and 25 participating members must try to live off of under $4.50 per day for food and drink.

Lee detailed the tough decisions she made grocery shopping – butter and milk were outside her budget and a McDonalds value menu item will count as her midweek break – in a blog post. “What I’m thinking about most during this trip is that I’m shopping only for myself,” she wrote, comparing the difficult decisions now to when she needed public assistance as a single mother. “When I was a young, single mother, I was on public assistance. It was a bridge over troubled water, and without it, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I spent hours debating what to buy and what to skip, all the while keeping my sons in my mind.” Many Americans receiving SNAP benefits are under 18 years old and live in working households.

On Wednesday, the participating Democrats chronicled their trips to the grocery store, where they poured over coupons and attempted to buy a week’s worth of food for about $30:

Other officials have attempted to live off of food stamps for short periods of time. Newark Mayor Cory Booker took the challenge earlier this year. When Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton participated in the challenge, he found he was “tired” and it was “hard to focus” by day four. “If I were doing this with no end in sight, I probably wouldn’t be so pleasant,” he wrote. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), who recently participated in the SNAP challenge, found “I’m hungry for five days…I lost six pounds in four days.”

Compare these reactions to the arguments made by conservatives, who pan food stamps as government dependency. “Unfortunately, the rapid growth of this program has only increased dependency on government and added to our federal deficit,” 25 Republican members wrote in a letter Tuesday. Last Thanksgiving, a Fox News host joked she would look “fabulous” on a food stamp diet.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

On July 1, interest rates will double for millions of students — from 3.4% to 6.8% — unless Congress acts; and the legislative fixes on the table are largely just compromises. Only one proposal promises real relief — Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act.” This bill has been dismissed out of hand as “shameless populist demagoguery” and “a cheap political gimmick,” but is it? Or could Warren’s outside-the-box bill represent the sort of game-changing thinking sorely needed to turn the economy around?

Warren and her co-sponsor John Tierney propose that students be allowed to borrow directly from the government at the same rate that banks get from the Federal Reserve – 0.75 percent. They argue:

Some people say that we can’t afford low interest rates for students. But the federal government offers far lower rates on loans every single day – they just don’t do it for everyone. Right now, a bank can get a loan through the Federal Reserve discount window at a rate of less than one percent. The same big banks that destroyed millions of jobs and broke our economy can borrow at about 0.75 percent, while our students will be paying nine times as much as of July 1.

This is not fair. And it’s not necessary, either. The federal government makes 36 cents on every dollar it lends to students. Just last week, the Congressional Budget Office announced that the government will make $51 billion on the student loans it issued this year – more than the annual profit of any Fortune 500 company, and about five times Google’s yearly earnings. We should not be profiting from students who are drowning in debt while we are giving great deals to big banks.

The archly critical Brookings Institute says the bill “confuses market interest rates on long-term loans (such as the 10-year Treasury rate) with the Federal Reserve’s Discount Window (used to make short-term loans to banks), and does not reflect the administrative costs and default risk that increase the costs of the federal student loan program.”

Those criticisms would be valid if the provider of funds were either a private bank or the American taxpayer; but in this case, it is the U.S. Federal Reserve.  Warren and Tierney assert, “For one year, the Federal Reserve would make funds available to the Department of Education to make these loans to our students.” For the Fed, completely different banking rules apply. As “lender of last resort,” it can expand its balance sheet by buying all the assets it likes. The Fed bought over $1 trillion in “toxic” mortgage-backed securities in QE 1, and reportedly turned a profit on them.  It could just as easily buy $1 trillion in student debt and refinance it at 0.75%.

Which Is a Better Investment, Banks or Students?

Students are considered risky investments because they don’t own valuable assets against which the debt can be collected. But this argument overlooks the fact that these young trainees are assets themselves. They represent an investment in “human capital” that can pay for itself many times over, if properly supported and developed.  This was demonstrated in the 1940s with the G.I. Bill, which provided free technical training and educational support for nearly 16 million returning servicemen, along with government-subsidized loans and unemployment benefits. The outlay not only paid for itself but returned a substantial profit to the government and significant stimulus to the economy. It made higher education accessible to all and created a nation of homeowners, new technology, new products, and new companies, with the Veterans Administration guaranteeing an estimated 53,000 business loans. Economists have determined that for every 1944 dollar invested, the country received approximately $7 in return, through increased economic productivity, consumer spending, and tax revenues.

Similarly in the 1930s and 1940s, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation funded the New Deal and World War II and wound up turning a profit, without drawing on taxpayer funds. It’s an initial capitalization was only $500 million; yet the RFC eventually lent out $50 billion — the equivalent of about $500 billion today. It raised money by issuing debentures, a form of bond. It got all of this money back, made a profit for the government, and left a legacy of roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms, and much more that the country did not have before.

In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed an Economic Bill of Rights, in which higher education would be provided by the government for free; and in the progressive 1960s, tuition actually was free or nearly free at state universities. Some countries provide nearly-free higher education today. In Norway, Denmark, France and Sweden, the cost of college is less than 3% of median income, as compared to 51% in the U.S.

Other countries make loans available to their students interest-free. For more than twenty years, the Australian government has successfully funded students by giving out what are in effect interest-free loans. They are “contingent loans,” which are repaid only if and when the borrower’s income reaches a certain level.  New Zealand also offers 0 percent interest loans to New Zealand students, with repayment to be made from their incomes after they graduate.

Banks Are Good Credit Risks Only Because They Are Backed by the Government

In a National Review article titled “Warren’s Student-loan Demagoguery,” Ian Tuttle argues that the discount window should not be available to students because the Fed defines that resource as “an instrument of monetary policy that allows eligible institutions to borrow money, usually on a short-term basis, to meet temporary shortages of liquidity caused by internal or external disruptions,” and because the discount window is “an emergency measure used to prevent runs on banks.”

It may be true that the Fed’s discount window is open only to banks, but the Federal Reserve Pact was passed by Congress and can be modified by Congress. The reasoning behind the policy needs to be re-examined.

The question is, why do banks routinely have “shortages of liquidity”?  What does that mean? It means they have lent out depositor funds that don’t properly belong to them, gambling that they will be able to replace the money before the depositors demand it back. The banks have a binding commitment to return customer money “on demand.” They can make good on that commitment because, and only because, the Fed and the FDIC back them up in a massive shell game, in which they borrow from each other or the Fed overnight — just long enough to make their books appear to balance — and then give the money back the next day. Banks are good credit risks only because they have the backstop of the Fed and the government behind them. Without those guarantees, we would be back to the cycle of endless bank runs of the 19th and early 20^th centuries.

“Our students are just as important to our recovery,” says Warren, “as our banks.” What if students, too, were backed by the government’s guarantee? What if, as in Australia and New Zealand, students were not required to repay the investment in human capital represented by their educations until the economy provided them with jobs? What if the government made it a policy to provide them with jobs? This too has been done before, quite successfully. It was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. As detailed by Prof. Randall Wray, citing N. Taylor’s The Enduring Legacy of the WPA:

The New Deal jobs programs employed 13 million people; the WPA was the biggest program, employing 8.5 million, lasting 8 years and spending about $10.5 billion. It took a broken country and in many important respects helped to not only revive it, but to bring it into the 20th century. The WPA built 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges, 125,000 civilian and military buildings, 700 miles of airport runways; it fed 900 million hot lunches to kids, operated 1500 nursery schools, gave concerts before audiences of 150 million, and created 475,000 works of art. It transformed and modernized America.

In the 1930s, the government was in a worse financial position to achieve all this than it is now; but the commitment and the will were there, and the means were found. In World War II, the means were found again. The government always seems to be able to find the means to fund a war. We can just as easily find the means to fund our economic recovery. And if the funding comes from the Federal Reserve, the government need not be propelled into a mounting debt owed at mounting interest. The funds can be provided interest-free; and because they represent an investment in productive capital, the debt itself can be repaid with the fruits of the investment — the jobs that create the salaries that generate taxes and consumer demand.

The default rate on student loans is close to 10% today because there are no jobs available to repay the loans, and because the interest rate is so high that the debt is doubled or tripled over the life of the loan. Give students loans and jobs, and the default problem will cure itself.

Investing in our young people has worked before and can work again; and if Congress orders the Fed to fund this investment in our collective futures by “quantitative easing,” it need cost the taxpayers nothing at all. The Japanese have finally seen the light and are using their QE tool as economic stimulus rather than just to keep their banks afloat. We need to do the same.

ELLEN BROWN is an attorney and president of the Public Banking Institute. In Web of Debt, her latest of eleven books, she shows how a private banking oligarchy has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Her websites are http://WebofDebt.com, http://EllenBrown.com, and http://PublicBankingInstitute.org. 

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/elizabeth_warrens_qe_for_students_20130614/

Posted on Jun 14, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

President Obama has given the green light to the shipping of weapons from the United States to opposition forces in Syria.

In a statement released by Ben Rhodes, the deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, the White House claims that “our intelligence community assesses that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons, including the nerve agent sarin.”

The Syrian government’s purported use of a chemical weapon, the president’s national security statement said, “crosses clear red lines” for the United States and the international community.

On April 26, President Obama invoked very historic words when asked about where precisely the red line was drawn.

“To use weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations crosses another line with respect to international norms and international law,” the president warned.

In a letter sent to the White House by Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.), Carl Levin (D-Mich.), and six other senators, intelligence reports were mentioned from “the French, British and Israeli governments” that corroborate claims of nerve gas deployment by Assad’s military.

The president, however, has not always been so sure.

In fact, the senators were compelled to send that letter because they felt that President Obama was waffling on his resolve to commit the United States to adding military support to the millions of dollars in financial support already sent to Syrian rebels.

A recent report by The New American reveals that there may be very good reason to doubt the “weapons of mass destruction” assertion made Thursday by the president. As The New American noted:

The “varying degrees of confidence” the Obama administration has claimed for intelligence reports of chemical weapons use by government forces in Syria may become more varied and less confident if evidence cited by a United Nations investigator is substantiated. Reuters reported from Geneva on Sunday that one member of a UN team looking into human rights violations in Syria’s two-year-old civil war said the evidence pointed to use of sarin gas by the rebel forces.

Carla Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney general and a member of the UN independent commission of inquiry on Syria, said in a Swiss-Italian television interview that the commission’s investigations produced “strong, concrete suspicions” about the origin of the nerve-gas attack.

“Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of Sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated,” Del Ponte said. “This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities,” she added.

While the United Nations has certainly not proven itself trustworthy, nor should its findings ever be accepted as persuasive by the government of the United States, the report it filed indicating possible use of sarin gas by the opposition army that the United States is now arming should be enough to give the president pause.

There, is however, an even more concrete set of facts that should cause the president to refuse to authorize sending an unidentified arsenal to the hodgepodge host of the enemies of Assad.

On August 1, 2012, Reuters reported on a secret order signed by President Obama providing support to Syrian rebel forces opposing the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Reuters wrote that “Recent news reports from the region have suggested that the influence and numbers of Islamist militants, some of them connected to al Qaeda or its affiliates, have been growing among Assad’s opponents.”

The next day, The New American covered the same story, writing that: “Western governments, brutal Sunni-Arab dictatorships, an assortment of terror groups including al-Qaeda, and other powerful interests have all been backing the uprising since long before violence even broke out last year.”

Later that same day, in a story covering the violence of the Syrian uprising, the BBC reported:

The al-Qaeda-styled group in Syria is Jabhat al-Nusra li-Ahl al-Sham (the Front for the Protection of the Syrian People). 

Like other al-Qaeda affiliated groups, al-Nusra’s statements and videos are usually issued by its own media group, al-Manara al-Baida (the White Minaret) in Syria.

Al-Nusra has claimed responsibility for several attacks against the Syrian army, security and shabiha (state-sponsored thugs) since it announced its formation early this year.

Finally, under a headline reading “Al-Qaida turns tide for rebels in battle for eastern Syria,” The Guardian (U.K.) reports:

They try to hide their presence. “Some people are worried about carrying the [black] flags,” said Abu Khuder. “They fear America will come and fight us. So we fight in secret. Why give Bashar and the west a pretext?” But their existence is common knowledge in Mohassen. Even passers-by joke with the men about car bombs and IEDs [improvised explosive devices].

According to Abu Khuder, his men are working closely with the military council that commands the Free Syrian Army brigades in the region. “We meet almost every day,” he said. “We have clear instructions from our [al-Qaida] leadership that if the FSA need our help we should give it. We help them with IEDs and car bombs. Our main talent is in the bombing operations.” Abu Khuder’s men had a lot of experience in bomb-making from Iraq and elsewhere, he added.

The foregoing accounts of the hostilities in Syria provide nearly irrefutable evidence that numerous al-Qaeda militants are found among the ranks of Syrian rebels (particularly within the Free Syrian Army), including among those filling leadership roles within those forces.

Perhaps, some may argue, President Obama is not aware of the presence of al-Qaeda militants in the Syrian opposition. Unless he doesn’t talk to members of his cabinet, such an assertion is unsupportable.

At a press conference in May 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta admitted, “We do have intelligence that indicates an al-Qaeda presence in Syria.” So much for not knowing.

In light of the overwhelming evidence of the leadership role assumed by al-Qaeda over the rebel forces he has now ordered armed with American weaponry, is President Obama guilty of supporting al-Qaeda? If so, should he be subject to indefinite detention under the terms of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)?

As The New American has chronicled since it was first proposed, the NDAA purportedly authorizes the president of the United States to deploy the armed forces to apprehend and indefinitely detain anyone suspected of providing support to terrorists. Section 1021 of the NDAA reads in relevant part:

Congress affirms that the authority of the President to use all necessary and appropriate force pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40; 50 U.S.C.1541 note) includes the authority for the Armed Forces of the United States to detain covered persons (as defined in subsection (b)) pending disposition under the law of war.

A covered person under this section is any person as follows: 

A person who was a part of or substantially supported al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces that are engaged in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners, including any person who has committed a belligerent act or has directly supported such hostilities in aid of such enemy forces.

And, finally:

Detention under the law of war without trial until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force.

A plain reading of Section 1021 reveals, then, that anyone who is found to have “substantially supported” al-Qaeda or associated forces can be detained by the military until the end of the War on Terror.

If the laws passed by Congress apply only to the American people and not to the president or members of Congress themselves (15 senators recently voted to arm Syrian rebels), then the United States has become an aristocracy, whose ruling class is not governed by the laws they pass.

^{Photo of President Barack Obama: 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

Michael Riley
Bloomberg
June 14, 2013

Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said.

These programs, whose participants are known as trusted partners, extend far beyond what was revealed by Edward Snowden, a computer technician who did work for the National Security Agency. The role of private companies has come under intense scrutiny since his disclosure this month that the NSA is collecting millions of U.S. residents’ telephone records and the computer communications of foreigners from Google Inc (GOOG). and other Internet companies under court order.

Many of these same Internet and telecommunications companies voluntarily provide U.S. intelligence organizations with additional data, such as equipment specifications, that don’t involve private communications of their customers, the four people said.

Read full article

<!–

–>

This article was posted: Friday, June 14, 2013 at 9:38 am

Tags: big brother, domestic news, domestic spying

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Infowars.com
June 14, 2013

The idea that someone is listening every time you pick up your cell phone is scary enough, but a recent report by David Knight makes it alarmingly clear that someone, somewhere, is watching every single move you make. Short of removing yourself from the grid and buying yourself an invisibility cloak there’s literally no way to escape the prying eyes of the feds.

After learning last week that the National Security Agency (NSA) had been using data-mining techniques to monitor cell phone and email communications between millions of American citizens, you might have been outraged for a moment, or maybe even a day or two. But then, if you’re like most Americans, you thought, “Well, I don’t spend much time on my phone or my computer anyway, so they’re not talking about me.”

Rest assured — they most certainly are talking about you. And they’re monitoring your activities in ways you probably don’t even realize.

In a June 14 report, David Knight discusses the Florida Prescription Drug Monitoring Program, a program which tracks purchases of drugs such as oxycodone and hydrocodone as well as other drugs ranging from anti-anxiety medications to sleeping pills. All purchases are sent to a database and the information is used to help shut down pill mills and to prevent patients from “doctor shopping.”

Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Well, I don’t live in Florida, and even if I did, I only purchase drugs for legitimate purposes and only under the supervision of my physician, so again, this doesn’t apply to me.”

First, the names and personal information of everyone who purchases these types of drugs in Florida — even if it’s with a legitimate prescription — are entered into this database.

But what’s most important to understand is that it isn’t just your cell phone or email or prescription purchases that you need to be concerned about. It’s everything you do that’s connected with a database or a network, and that covers just about everything we do these days.

Currently sitting on President Obama’s desk is a proposal that would require companies to build into their network structures the capability for the federal government to automatically tap into the system and collect information.

This is a crucial piece of legislation. Currently, companies are asked to comply when the feds want access to a database but if the company isn’t technologically able to comply then the feds can’t force them to. However, with this new legislation, all companies will be required to build the necessary systems into their networks. If not, they face fines of up to $25,000 per day.

Still think these “privacy issues” don’t affect you? Then consider all of the databases and networks that currently hold your own name and personal information — your bank, your physician and your pharmacy are just the tip of the iceberg.

If you have a library card, you’re in a database. If you have a savings card from your local grocery store, you’re in a database. If you have credit or debit cards, you’re in a database. If you have a security system in your home, if you have OnStar in your car, if you belong to Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or any other online social network, if you use a workout monitor that’s connected with the Internet to track your weight loss goals, if you belong to a gym, Weight Watchers, or Jenny Craig, if your child attends a school, if you’re a member of a church … the list is endless.

Now, think of all of the reasons these various companies and services have your name in their database. At the very least, they’re recording your personal contact information. But most are tracking other personal user statistics, like what time you’re home, where you went over the weekend, and what you bought at the hardware store.

If your name is on a list somewhere and that list is eventually loaded into an electronic database or onto the Internet, then someone, somewhere, is constantly watching you and when Obama signs this new legislation the feds will automatically have access to that information.

<!–

–>

This article was posted: Friday, June 14, 2013 at 9:32 am

Tags: big brother, domestic spying, police state

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

President has violated section 1021 of act he signed into law

Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
June 14, 2013

Under the terms of the National Defense Authorization Act that he personally signed into law, President Barack Obama should immediately be arrested and indefinitely detained for providing support to Al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria.

President Barack Obama

Section 1021(b)(2) of the NDAA law allows for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens on “suspicion of providing substantial support” to groups engaged in hostilities against the U.S. such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

The indefinite detention provision also applies to Americans who have given “substantial support” to terrorists or other “associated groups”.

Although the administration has attempted to differentiate between FSA militants and Al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria, the two groups have become one and the same. Even if you make a distinction between the FSA and Jabhat al-Nusra terrorists in Syria, the FSA is still clearly an “associated group” under the terms of the NDAA.

By announcing that his administration will arm the Syrian rebels in anticipation of a no fly zone being imposed over areas of the country, President Barack Obama is giving direct support, aid and comfort to terrorists. Obama and his top administration officials clearly represent a national security threat to the interests of the United States and should immediately be arrested and detained under the NDAA.

The evidence that FSA militants in Syria are being led by Al-Qaeda terrorists and are carrying out terrorist atrocities is overwhelming.

– Jabhat al-Nusra is now the leading front line fighting force in Syria and is commanding the other rebel groups.

– In April, the head of Jabhat al-Nusra pledged allegiance to al-Qaeda chief Ayman al-Zawahiri.

– FSA rebels are defecting to Jabhat al-Nusra in droves.

– Jabhat al-Nusra killed U.S. troops in Iraq.

– Immediately after the State Department declared Jabhat al-Nusra a terrorist organization, 29 different FSA rebel outfits pledged allegiance to the Al-Qaeda group.

– FSA rebels have vowed to “fight the U.S.” once they finish with Bashar Al-Assad.

– FSA rebels have been filmed burning US and Israeli flags on more than one occasion.

– FSA rebels have been filmed singing songs that glorify Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks.

– One FSA group even calls its fighting unit the “Osama Bin Laden” brigade.

– Another video shows FSA rebels chanting, “We are all with Osama bin Laden!”

– FSA rebels have voiced their desire to see the Al-Qaeda flag fly over the White House once the rebels are victorious across the region.

– FSA rebels have been filmed cutting out people’s hearts on camera and eating them while chanting “Allahu Akbar”.

– FSA rebels have been responsible for innumerable beheadings over the course of the conflict, chanting “Allahu Akbar” as they decapitate their victims.

– FSA rebels have committed innumerable sectarian murders, including beheading a man for being a Christian and feeding him to the dogs.

– FSA rebels have also forced children to behead people and carry out other atrocities.

– FSA rebels have ransacked Christian churches.

– FSA rebels have massacred entire villages of Christians.

– Earlier this week, FSA rebels slaughtered a 14-year-old boy for supposedly insulting Mohammed.

– FSA rebels have murdered numerous journalists in targeted killings, including Maya Nasser and most recently Yara Abbas.

– FSA rebels have been pictured numerous times flying the black flag of Al-Qaeda and wearing uniforms with Al-Qaeda insignia.

– FSA rebels have been caught on camera preparing chemical weapons attacks.

– In March, UN human rights investigator Carla del Ponte said FSA rebels had used chemical weapons.

– FSA rebels have forced prisoners to become suicide bombers.

– According to eyewitnesses on the ground, at least half of the so-called “Syrian rebels” aren’t even Syrian and are foreign jihadists sent by the likes of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

In announcing that his administration will provide arms to Al-Qaeda terrorists and associated groups like the FSA, Obama has violated his oath to protect and defend America against its enemies and should at the very least be subject to immediate impeachment proceedings, if not detained under the NDAA which clearly outlines the illegality of providing support to terrorist organizations.

*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.

<!–

–>

This article was posted: Friday, June 14, 2013 at 9:27 am

Tags: foreign affairs, war

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Anyone who buys a house in today’s market should be aware of the risks. They should know that current prices are not supported by fundamentals, but by unprecedented manipulation by the Fed, the Obama administration, Wall Street Private Equity investors, and the nation’s biggest banks. If any of these main-players withdraws or even reduces their support for the market (in other words, if the banks release more of their distressed inventory, if rates rise, if PE firms buy fewer homes, or if the Congress curtails current mortgage modification programs), housing prices will fall. Given the increasing volatility in global stock and bond markets in recent weeks—which is likely to intensify as the Fed implements its exit strategy from QE— interest rates will continue to fluctuate putting downward pressure on housing sales and prices. The impact the Fed’s policy will have on markets and the economy is unknown. The Central Bank is in uncharted water. That makes it a particularly bad time to buy a home. Caveat emptor.

When we say that fundamentals are weak, it means that the factors that typically drive the market are not strong enough to boost sales or push up prices. In a normal market, “first-time homebuyers” and “move up” buyers would represent the vast majority of sales. In today’s market, these two “demand cohorts” are actually quite weak, which is to say that current prices are not sustainable. Consider this: According to Lender Processing Services (LPS) Mortgage Monitor for April, there are “4,699,000, or 9.76% of home loans delinquent or in foreclosure as of April 30th”…” (“Mortgage Delinquencies Down….But a Record 843 Days to Foreclose“, Naked Capitalism)

So, nearly 5 million homes are either seriously delinquent or in some stage of foreclosure. This unseen backlog of distressed homes makes up the so called “shadow inventory” which is still big enough to send prices plunging if even a small portion was released onto the market.  In other words, supply vastly exceeds demand in real terms. Now check this out from Zillow:

“13 million homeowners with a mortgage remain underwater. Moreover, the effective negative equity rate nationally –where the loan-to-value ratio is more than 80%, making it difficult for a homeowner to afford the down payment on another home – is 43.6% of homeowners with a mortgage.” (Zillow)

This might sound a bit confusing, but it’s crucial to understanding what’s really going on. While many people know that 13 million homeowners are underwater on their mortgages, they probably don’t know that nearly half (43.6%) of the potential “move up” buyers (who represent the bulk of organic sales) don’t have enough equity in their homes to buy another house. Think about that. Like we said, housing sales depend almost entirely on two groups of buyers; firsttime homebuyers and move up buyers. Unfortunately, the number of potential move up buyers has been effectively cut in half. It’s simply impossible for prices to keep rising with so many move up buyers on the ropes.

So, if “repeat” buyers cannot support current prices, then what about the other “demand cohort”, that is, firsttime home buyers?

It looks like demand is weak there, too. According to housing analyst Mark Hanson: “First-timer home volume hit a fresh 4-year lows last month and distressed sales 6-year lows”.

So, no help there either. Firsttime homebuyers are vanishing due to a number of factors, the biggest of which is the $1 trillion in student loans which is preventing debt-hobbled young people from filling the ranks of the firsttime homebuyers. Given the onerous nature of these loans, which cannot be discharged through bankruptcy, many of these people will never own a home which, of course, means that demand will continue to weaken, sales will drop and prices will fall.

The banks have countered this weakness in demand by withholding distressed inventory. According to Realty Trac, foreclosures are down 33 percent in May year-over-year. There’s no reason for this reduction in foreclosures because there are nearly 5 million homes that are either seriously delinquent or in some stage of foreclosure. The banks are simply manipulating distressed supply to push up prices and avoid losses. To better understand what the banks are up to, check out this article on Marketwatch666:

“As of April, the average seriously delinquent homeowner has not paid on their mortgage for 503 days, and that the typical home in foreclosure has been delinquent for 843 days; in general, those who are seriously delinquent (more than 90 days past due) are not being foreclosed on, and those who are in the foreclosure process are not having their homes seized. Since this metric seems to be increasing an average of ten days a month, and new foreclosure starts are being added each month which should be bringing the average days down, we can only conclude that the foreclosure process is damn near frozen.” (“Mortgage Delinquencies Down….But a Record 843 Days to Foreclose“, Naked Capitalism)

“843 days”! That’s a new record, which means that the banks are actually dragging the process out longer today then ever before. This has had profound effect on prices which have soared by more than 10 percent in the last 12 months creating the illusion of a sustainable recovery. Keep in mind, that the banks have little choice in the matter. They are still sitting on more-than one trillion dollars worth of non performing loans leftover from the recession. If they simply dumped their backlog of distressed homes onto the market all at once, the deluge would push prices below their 2009-lows leaving bank balance sheets in tatters. That’s the scenario they want to avoid at all costs.  Now get a load of this article in last week’s Reuters:

“Well over a million U.S. homeowners are months behind on payments on government-backed mortgages, raising the risk federal housing agencies will end up facing the cost of managing a fresh flood of foreclosed homes, two government watchdogs said on Thursday.

Some 1.7 million borrowers have missed several payments on mortgages backed by the U.S. government, the inspectors general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and Department of Housing and Urban Development said in a joint report.

These loan delinquencies represent a “shadow inventory” of homes that could hit the market if foreclosed on, which would need be managed by government-run Fannie Mae (FNMA.OB) or Freddie Mac (FMCC.OB), or some other federal housing agency.” (“Shadow’ homes could burden U.S. housing agencies”, Reuters)

Actually, the numbers are much larger that Reuters indicates, but it’s good to see someone in the MSM finally acknowledging the magnitude of the problem.

It would be interesting to know how many of these 1.7 million non-performing loans were shunted off to Fannie and Freddie in 2009 and 2010 by cagey banksters who knew that they were essentially worthless. We’ll probably never know for sure. The fact is, the vast majority of toxic mortgages weren’t created by the GSE’s but by crooked bankers who pooled the dreck into private label securities and sold them to gullible investors around the world. Now, much of that securitized sewage is festering on the Fed’s bloated balance sheet. The Fed has replaced the shadow banking system as the place where bad loans go to die.  Here’s more from Reuters:

“Once seized, these so-called real estate owned properties, or REOs, present significant financial challenges to these government agencies, the report said.

“Not only are current REO inventory levels elevated … they may rise over the next several years depending on the number of shadow inventory properties that are ultimately foreclosed on,” the report stated….

The report said the shadow inventory, which is made up of loans that have been delinquent for at least 90 days, is more than seven times the inventory of REOs that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and HUD currently own.” (Reuters)

So, the number of seriously delinquent mortgages IS MORE THAN SEVEN TIMES the inventory of REOs that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and HUD currently own?!? What the hell kind of shell-game are these guys playing? Do you get the impression, dear reader, that the government is pulling the wool over your eyes? 7X is a bit more than a rounding error, I’d say.

Okay, so the government has been fudging the numbers to make things look better than they really are. (What a surprise) But why would the GSE’s try to hide what’s going on, after all, Fannie and Freddie have implicit government guarantees, so they don’t really have to worry about falling prices. And, as far as the red ink, well, Uncle Sugar will take care of that, right?

Not exactly. It looks to me like Fannie and Freddie are tailoring their policies to meet the needs of the banks. As Reuters reluctantly admits, “Even a fraction of the shadow inventory falling into foreclosure could considerably swell … inventories of REO properties.”

It’s simple, really; more foreclosures mean lower prices. Lower prices, in turn, mean heavier losses for the banks. That’s why Fannie and Freddie are playing hide-n-seek; it’s another giveaway to the banks.

Reuters again: “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac owned about 158,000 REO properties at the end of September 2012, while HUD had about 37,000.” (Reuters)

Huh? The author has already admitted that the real number is at least 7 times that amount (“Well over a million.”), so why the sudden reversal? Is he trying to downplay the bad news to slip it past his editor?

Many of the experts still anticipate between 3 to 6 million foreclosures in the next few years, so it is doubtful that the current strategy will work. Eventually, the floodgates will open, distressed supply will be released, and prices will drop.

And distressed inventory is just one of many headwinds facing the housing industry today. There’s also this: “Rising Prices Lead to Fewer Investor Purchases, Longer Holding Times“, DS News:

“Close to half–48 percent–of the investors surveyed in May said they will purchase fewer properties in the next 12 months than they did in the past year.” (DS News)

And this from CNN Money:

“Say goodbye to ultra-low mortgage rates.

In the past month, rates have been on the rise and they are expected to continue to climb. This week, the average rate on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage jumped another 10 percentage points to 4.07% and are up from 3.3% in early May, according to mortgage giant Freddie Mac.

“It’s unlikely that rates will ever be that low again,” said Doug Duncan, Fannie Mae’s chief economist. “Those who didn’t take advantage of record-low rates have missed the boat – at least for now.” (“Why 3% Mortgage Rates Are a Thing of the Past”, CNN Money)

And this:

Application Volume Stumbles, Sales to Suffer, OC Housing News

“Mortgage application data for May lends credence to analysts’ predictions of a slowdown in the year’s second half, Capital Economics says in its latest US Housing Data Response. According to Capital Economics’ data–compiled from statistics offered by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA)–total mortgage application volume fell 2.0 percent from April to May, the first monthly drop since February and the biggest decline since January.” (“Application Volume Stumbles, Sales to Suffer“, OC Housing News)

And, finally, this from BusinessWeek:

“Hedge fund manager Bruce Rose was among the first investors to coax institutional money into the mom and pop business of single-family home rentals, raising $450 million last year from Oaktree Capital Group LLC.

Now, with house prices climbing at the fastest pace in seven years and investors swamping the rental market, Rose says it no longer makes sense to be a buyer.

“We just don’t see the returns there that are adequate to incentivize us to continue to invest….There’s a lot of – bluntly – stupid money that jumped into the trade without any infrastructure, without any real capabilities and a kind of build-it-as-you-go mentality that we think is somewhat irresponsible.” (“Carrington Stops Buying U.S. Rentals as Blackstone Adding“, BusinessWeek)

I could go on, but why bother? You get the point. The fact is, is that this is a uniquely bad time to buy a house. There’s too much uncertainty about rates, inventory, demand and investors. The risks far outweigh the rewards. Anxious buyers should hold-their-horses and wait for the market to normalize instead of chaining themselves to sinking asset that will cost them a bundle. Remember, patience is a virtue. It can also save you a lot of dough.

MIKE WHITNEY lives in Washington state. He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press). Hopeless is also available in a Kindle edition. Whitney’s story on how the banks targeted blacks for toxic subprime mortgages appears in the May issue of CounterPunch magazine. He can be reached at fergiewhitney@msn.com.

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

Jon Chang
ABC News
June 14, 2013

Fish swimming in water with a trace of the anti-depressant Prozac did not adopt a cheery disposition. Instead, they became edgy, aggressive and some even killed their mates.

The fish were subjected to traces of the drug by a research group at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee that examined how environmental exposure to the medication altered the behavior of fathead minnows, a common fish found throughout the Midwest.

Lead researcher Rebecca Klapper says that this experimental setup could actually be a reflection of the fishes’ reality.

Read more

<!–

–>

This article was posted: Friday, June 14, 2013 at 9:19 am

Tags: domestic news, health

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Documents recently obtained by Bold Nebraska show that TransCanada – owner of the hotly-contested Keystone XL (KXL) tar sands pipeline – has colluded with an FBI/DHS Fusion Center in Nebraska, labeling non-violent activists as possible candidates for “terrorism” charges and other serious criminal charges.

Further, the language in some of the documents is so vague that it could also ensnare journalists, researchers and academics, as well. 

TransCanada also built a roster of names and photos of specific individuals involved in organizing against the pipeline, including 350.org‘s Rae Breaux, Rainforest Action Network‘s Scott Parkin and Tar Sands Blockade‘s Ron Seifert. Further, every activist ever arrested protesting the pipeline’s southern half is listed by name with their respective photo shown, along with the date of arrest.

It’s PSYOPs-gate and “fracktivists” as “an insurgency” all over again, but this time it’s another central battleground that’s in play: the northern half of KXL, a proposed border-crossing pipeline whose final fate lies in the hands of President Barack Obama.

The southern half of the pipeline was approved by the Obama Admin. via a March 2013 Executive Order. Together, the two pipeline halves would pump diluted bitumen (“dilbit”) south from the Alberta tar sands toward Port Arthur, TX, where it will be refined and shipped to the global export market.

Activists across North America have put up a formidable fight against both halves of the pipeline, ranging from the summer 2011 Tar Sands Action to the ongoing Tar Sands Blockade. Apparently, TransCanada has followed the action closely, given the level of detail in the documents.

Another Piece of the Puzzle

“The Hot Springs School District practiced a lockdown procedure after pretending to receive a letter from a group that wrote ‘things dear to everyone will be destroyed unless continuation of the Keystone pipeline and uranium mining is stopped immediately,” explained the Rapid City Journal. “As part of the drill, the district’s 800 students locked classroom doors, pulled down window shades and remained quiet.”

This latest revelation, then, is a continuation of the troubling trend profiled in investigative journalist Will Potter’s book “Green Is the New Red.” That is, eco-activists are increasingly being treated as domestic eco-terrorists both by corporations and by law enforcement. 

TransCanada Docs: “Attacking Critical Infrastructure” = “Terrorism”

The documents demonstrate a clear fishing expedition by TransCanada. For example, TransCanada’s PowerPoint presentation from Dec. 2012 on corporate security allege that Bold Nebraska had “suspicious vehicles/photography” outside of its Omaha office.

That same presentation also says TransCanada has received “aggressive/abusive email and voicemail,” vaguely citing an incident in which someone said the words “blow up,” with no additional context offered. It also states the Tar Sands Blockade is “well-funded,” an ironic statement about a shoe-string operation coming from one of the richest and most powerful industries in human history.

Another portion of TransCanada’s PowerPoint presentation discusses the various criminal and anti-terrorism statutes that could be deployed to deter grassroots efforts to stop KXL. The charge options TransCanada presented included criminal trespass, criminal conspiracy, and most prominently and alarmingly: federal and state anti-terrorism statutes.

Journalism Could be Terrorism/Criminal According to FBI/DHS Fusion Center Presentation

An April 2013 presentation given by John McDermott – a Crime Analyst at the Nebraska Information Analysis Center (NIAC), the name of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) funded Nebraska-based Fusion Center – details all of the various “suspicious activities” that could allegedly prove a “domestic terrorism” plot in-the-make. 

NAIC says its mission is to “[c]ollect, evaluate, analyze, and disseminate information and intelligence data regarding criminal and terrorist activity to federal, state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies, other Fusion Centers and to the public and private entities as appropriate.”

Among the “observed behaviors and incidents reasonably indicative of preoperations planning related to terrorism or other criminal activity” is “photography, observation, or surveillance of facilities, buildings, or critical infrastructure and key resources.” A slippery slope, to say the least, which could ensnare journalists and photo-journalists out in the field doing their First Amendment-protected work.

Another so-called “suspicious activity” that could easily ensnare journalists, researchers and academics: “Eliciting information beyond curiosity about a facility’s or building’s purpose, operations, or security.”

Melissa Troutman and Joshua Pribanic – producers of the documentary film “Triple Divide” and co-editors of the investigative journalism website Public Herald – are an important case in point. While in the Tioga State Forest (public land) filming a Seneca Resources fracking site in Troy, Pennsylvania, they were detained by a Seneca contractor and later labeled possible “eco-terrorists.”

“In discussions between the Seneca Resources and Chief Caldwell, we were made out to be considered ‘eco-terrorists’ who attempted to trespass and potentially vandalize Seneca’s drill sites, even though the audio recording of this incident is clear that we identified ourselves as investigative journalists in conversation with the second truck driver,” they explained in a post about the encounter, which can also be heard in their film.

“We were exercising a constitutional right as members of the free press to document and record events of interest to the public on public property when stripped of that right by contractors of Seneca.”

Activists protesting against the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) during its April 2013 meeting in Arizona were also labeled as possible “domestic terrorists” by the Arizona FBI/DHS Fusion Center, as detailed in a recent investigation by the Center for Media and Democracy.  

“Not Just Empty Rhetoric”

It’d be easy to write off TransCanada and law enforcement’s antics as absurd. Will Potter, in an article about the documents, warned against such a mentality. 

“This isn’t empty rhetoric,” he wrote. “In Texas, a terrorism investigation entrapped activists for using similar civil disobedience tactics. And as I reported recently for VICE, Oregon considered legislation to criminalize tree sits. TransCanada has been using similar tactics in [Canada] as well.”

And this latest incident is merely the icing on the cake of the recent explosive findings by Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian about the National Security Agency’s (NSA) spying on the communcations records of every U.S. citizen.

“Many terrorism investigations (and a great many convictions) are politically contrived to suit the ends of corporations, offering a stark reminder of how the expansion of executive power — whether in the context of dragnet NSA surveillance, or the FBI treating civil disobedience as terrorism — poses a threat to democracy,” Shahid Buttar, Executive Director of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee told DeSmogBlog.

© 2013 DeSmogBlog.com

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Attorney General Eric Holder (shown) offered to answer in closed session when asked in a Senate hearing if the executive branch had been monitoring the phone calls of members of Congress. The question was put to Holder by Senator Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) at a June 6 hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee. The hearing was overshadowed by news the previous evening of the government’s daily collection of Verizon’s telephone records and the revelation that same day of the National Security Agency’s PRISM program for tracking the communications made through several of the nation’s largest telephone companies. The following exchange between Kirk and Holder received little more than passing mention in news coverage: 

Sen. Kirk: Mr. Attorney General, I want to take you to, uh, the Verizon scandal, and which I understand takes us to possibly monitoring up to 120 million calls. You know, when government bureaucrats are sloppy, they’re usually really sloppy. So I want to just ask: Can you assure to us that uh, that no phones inside the capital were monitored, members of Congress, that would give a future executive branch, if they start pulling this kind of thing up, would give them unique leverage over the legislature?

AG Holder: Uh, with all due respect, Senator, I don’t think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss, um, that issue. I’d be more than glad to come back, uh, in a – in an appropriate setting to discuss, uh, the issue that, that you have raised. But in this open forum, I don’t, I do not have a way to…

At that point, Kirk cut short Holder’s response. 

Sen. Kirk: I would, uh, interrupt you to say, the correct answer would be [to] say, ‘No, we stayed within our lane, and I’m assuring we did not spy on members of Congress.

AG Holder: There has been no intention to spy on members of Congress and members of the Supreme Court.

It may or may not be revealing, but surely it is interesting that Holder mentioned the Supreme Court in that context. Clearly the attorney general wanted to discuss the matter, if at all, only behind closed doors, with the press and public shut out. And his carefully guarded statement that there has been “no intention” to spy on members of Congress leaves open the possibility that members may have come under surveillance by accident, which could happen easily enough. Given the number of calls involved, it’s quite likely phone numbers of members of Congress are included. And if members have spoken on the phone with a person or persons targeted in an investigation of a news leak about a foreign terrorist plot, then it’s quite possible those conversations have been captured by a wiretap authorized by the FISA Court, which almost never refuses a government request for a warrant. As long as no representative’s or senator’s own phone was targeted, Holder’s answer could be technically correct.  

But the Justice Department last month seized the records of all the phone calls for a two-month period last year to and from the phone lines of 20 Associated Press reporters and three AP offices, along with the main line for the AP in the House press gallery. Surely some of those reporters had calls to and from members of Congress. And calls made to members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, who are briefed on classified information, would likely have caught the attention of the investigators. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Col.) are on the Intelligence Committee and have repeatedly sounded alarms about the secrecy surrounding FISA Court interpretations of government surveillance powers under the PATRIOT Act, saying the public would be “stunned” to learn the extent of those powers. But would anyone be surprised if we were to learn the FBI had taken a special interest in the home and office phone numbers of those two senators and the numbers of those to whom and from who they make and receive calls?

Sen. Kirk spoke of “unique leverage” the executive branch might have over the Congress if the legislators’ phone calls were under surveillance. Such leverage is called, in common parlance, blackmail, and it could be useful whenever the administration sees a need to gain the support or silence the opposition of a member or members of Congress. And it might not be anything the actual member did that could cause legal problems or embarrassment if it were passed on to prosecutors or exposed to the public. In a Washington Examiner column this week, Gene Healy offered just one example of how that sort of thing worked in the heyday of the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover:

In his book The Secrets of the FBI, Ronald Kessler quotes one of the FBI director’s former top lieutenants: “The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator,” he’d send an emissary to the Hill to “advise the senator that ‘we’re in the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter.’… From that time on, the senator’s right in his pocket.”

Hoover was legendary not only for his anti-communism and crime-fighting, but also for using the vast amount of information collected by his agency as, in Kirk’s phrase, “unique leverage” in rewarding political friends and punishing enemies, right up until his death in 1972. He has been gone for more than 40 years, but that doesn’t mean all the techniques he developed and put into practice at the agency he ruled for half a century are buried with him. They may be alive and well in a more technologically advanced FBI in the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C.

^{Photo of Attorney General Eric Holder: AP Images}

This article originally appeared on: The New American

Attorney General Eric Holder (shown) offered to answer in closed session when asked in a Senate hearing if the executive branch had been monitoring the phone calls of members of Congress. The question was put to Holder by Senator Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) at a June 6 hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee. The hearing was overshadowed by news the previous evening of the government’s daily collection of Verizon’s telephone records and the revelation that same day of the National Security Agency’s PRISM program for tracking the communications made through several of the nation’s largest telephone companies. The following exchange between Kirk and Holder received little more than passing mention in news coverage: 

Sen. Kirk: Mr. Attorney General, I want to take you to, uh, the Verizon scandal, and which I understand takes us to possibly monitoring up to 120 million calls. You know, when government bureaucrats are sloppy, they’re usually really sloppy. So I want to just ask: Can you assure to us that uh, that no phones inside the capital were monitored, members of Congress, that would give a future executive branch, if they start pulling this kind of thing up, would give them unique leverage over the legislature?

AG Holder: Uh, with all due respect, Senator, I don’t think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss, um, that issue. I’d be more than glad to come back, uh, in a – in an appropriate setting to discuss, uh, the issue that, that you have raised. But in this open forum, I don’t, I do not have a way to…

At that point, Kirk cut short Holder’s response. 

Sen. Kirk: I would, uh, interrupt you to say, the correct answer would be [to] say, ‘No, we stayed within our lane, and I’m assuring we did not spy on members of Congress.

AG Holder: There has been no intention to spy on members of Congress and members of the Supreme Court.

It may or may not be revealing, but surely it is interesting that Holder mentioned the Supreme Court in that context. Clearly the attorney general wanted to discuss the matter, if at all, only behind closed doors, with the press and public shut out. And his carefully guarded statement that there has been “no intention” to spy on members of Congress leaves open the possibility that members may have come under surveillance by accident, which could happen easily enough. Given the number of calls involved, it’s quite likely phone numbers of members of Congress are included. And if members have spoken on the phone with a person or persons targeted in an investigation of a news leak about a foreign terrorist plot, then it’s quite possible those conversations have been captured by a wiretap authorized by the FISA Court, which almost never refuses a government request for a warrant. As long as no representative’s or senator’s own phone was targeted, Holder’s answer could be technically correct.  

But the Justice Department last month seized the records of all the phone calls for a two-month period last year to and from the phone lines of 20 Associated Press reporters and three AP offices, along with the main line for the AP in the House press gallery. Surely some of those reporters had calls to and from members of Congress. And calls made to members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, who are briefed on classified information, would likely have caught the attention of the investigators. Senators Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Col.) are on the Intelligence Committee and have repeatedly sounded alarms about the secrecy surrounding FISA Court interpretations of government surveillance powers under the PATRIOT Act, saying the public would be “stunned” to learn the extent of those powers. But would anyone be surprised if we were to learn the FBI had taken a special interest in the home and office phone numbers of those two senators and the numbers of those to whom and from who they make and receive calls?

Sen. Kirk spoke of “unique leverage” the executive branch might have over the Congress if the legislators’ phone calls were under surveillance. Such leverage is called, in common parlance, blackmail, and it could be useful whenever the administration sees a need to gain the support or silence the opposition of a member or members of Congress. And it might not be anything the actual member did that could cause legal problems or embarrassment if it were passed on to prosecutors or exposed to the public. In a Washington Examiner column this week, Gene Healy offered just one example of how that sort of thing worked in the heyday of the late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover:

In his book The Secrets of the FBI, Ronald Kessler quotes one of the FBI director’s former top lieutenants: “The moment [Hoover] would get something on a senator,” he’d send an emissary to the Hill to “advise the senator that ‘we’re in the course of an investigation, and we by chance happened to come up with this data on your daughter.’… From that time on, the senator’s right in his pocket.”

Hoover was legendary not only for his anti-communism and crime-fighting, but also for using the vast amount of information collected by his agency as, in Kirk’s phrase, “unique leverage” in rewarding political friends and punishing enemies, right up until his death in 1972. He has been gone for more than 40 years, but that doesn’t mean all the techniques he developed and put into practice at the agency he ruled for half a century are buried with him. They may be alive and well in a more technologically advanced FBI in the J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C.

^{Photo of Attorney General Eric Holder: AP Images}

This article originally appeared on: The New American

This text is excerpted from Big Lies: How Our Corporate Overlords, Politicians and Media Establishment Warp Reality and Undermine Democracy

Pre-9/11 Flashback

When NATO’s US and British troops in Macedonia began evacuating Albanian rebels in June 2001, officials claimed that they were merely trying to help Europe avert a devastating civil war. Most media dutifully repeated this spin as fact. But the explanation only made sense if you ignored a troublesome contradiction; namely, US support for both the Macedonian Armed Forces and the Albanians fighting them. Beyond that, there was a decade of confused and manipulative Western policies, climaxing with NATO bombing and the imposition of “peace” through aggression in Kosovo. Together, these moves effectively destabilized the region.

In Macedonia, the main “cut out” — spook-speak for “intermediary” —was Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), then a major private military company (PMC) whose Macedonian field commander was a former US general with strong ties to Kosovo Liberation Army Commander Agim Ceku and Macedonian General Jovan Andrejevski.

MPRI and other PMCs that have succeeded it receive much of their funding from the US State Department, Pentagon, and CIA. For example, MPRI trained and equipped the Bosnian Croat Muslim Federation Army with a large State Department contract. Over the years, the company claimed to have “helped” Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Macedonia — in effect, arming and training all parties. In 2000, it pulled in at least $70 million from its global operations.

Working closely with the Pentagon, MPRI also arranged for the Kosovo Liberation Army’s (KLA) training and weapons in the run up to the war on Yugoslavia. Later, the same firm channeled token military aid to the Macedonian army, new US weapons to the rebels, and military intelligence to both sides.

Actually, it was a standard procedure, applied with great success in the Middle East for decades: Keep warring parties from overwhelming one other and you strengthen the bargaining power of the puppeteer behind the scenes. Better yet, combine this with disinformation; that is, tell the public one thing while doing the opposite.

It’s not a question of allies and enemies. Those designations can change for any number of reasons. In 1999, ethnic Albanians were victims and freedom fighters. In 2001, they were “officially” a threat. Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden were just three of the friends-turned-pariahs who learned that lesson.

And what was the real objective in Macedonia? The country was in a financial straight jacket, its budget basically controlled by the IMF and the World Bank on behalf of international creditors. Since the IMF had placed a ceiling on military expenditures, the only funding option left was privatization. According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, the process started with the sale of the government’s stake in Macedonian Telekom.

Even more was at stake — things like strategic pipeline routes and transport corridors through the country. But that wouldn’t become obvious for years, if ever. This is another traditional tactic: Keep the true agenda under wraps for as long as possible.

Pretexts for War

Despite 24-hour news and talk about transparency, there’s much we don’t know about our past, much less current events. What’s worse, some of what we think we know isn’t true.

The point is that it’s no accident. Consider, for example, the proximate circumstances that led to open war in Vietnam. According to official history, two US destroyers patrolling in the Gulf of Tonkin off North Vietnam were victims of unprovoked attacks in August 1964, leading to a congressional resolution that gave President Johnson the power “to take all necessary measures.”

In fact, the destroyers were spy ships, part of a National Security Agency (NSA) eavesdropping program operating near the coast as a way to provoke the North Vietnamese into turning on their radar and other communications channels. The more provocative the maneuvers, the more signals that could be captured. Meanwhile, US raiding parties were shelling mainland targets. Documents revealed later indicated that the August 4 attack on the USS Maddox — the pretext for passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution — may not even have taken place.

But even if it did, the incident was still stage managed to build up congressional and public support for the war. Evidence suggests that the plan was based on Operation Northwoods, a scheme developed in 1962 to justify an invasion of Cuba. Among the tactics the Joint Chiefs of Staff considered then were blowing up a ship in Guantanamo Bay, a phony “communist Cuba terror campaign” in Florida and Washington, DC, and an elaborate plan to convince people that Cuba had shot down a civilian airliner filled with students. That operation wasn’t implemented, but two years later, desperate for a war, the administration’s military brass found a way to create the necessary conditions in Vietnam.

NSA and Echelon