Terence P. Jeffrey
CNS News
June 13, 2013

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration revealed in a recently released audit report that in fiscal years 2010 and 2011 more than 1,000 Internal Revenue Service employees misused government charge cards issued by Citibank.

The report said that during the two years in question agency employees sent Citibank a total of 325 bad checks written on personal accounts that had insufficient funds to cover them, that agency officials with top-secret security clearances had their charge accounts suspended for failure to pay the balances, and that the IRS had a tendency of being “overly lenient” in disciplining those who misused the cards.

Despite the more than 1,000 IRS employees who misused the charge cards, the inspector general’s report found that the IRS did a “generally effective” job in controlling its employees use of the cards.

Despite the more than 1,000 IRS employees who misused the charge cards, the inspector general’s report found that the IRS did a “generally effective” job in controlling its employees use of the cards.

“We found that the IRS was generally effective in implementing travel card controls,” said the IG report. “However, in some instances controls were not implemented effectively, which increased the risk for misuse and resulted in some travel card misuse going undetected.”

The report, which is dated April 18, 2013, was released on May 29.

IRS employees who misused charge cards included an executive-level official, a criminal investigator, and multiple employees with security clearances.

“We found that 15 cardholders with either secret or top-secret clearances had their travel accounts suspended due to their failure to pay outstanding balances,” said the IG report. “Two other cardholders with secret and top-secret clearances presented NSF [non-sufficient funds] checks to Citibank for payment of their travel card balance.”

These were not the only IRS officials who wrote non-sufficient-fund checks after passing government background checks.

“In addition,” said the inspector general, “94 cardholders serving public trust positions requiring moderate and high-level background checks wrote one or more NSF checks, and 36 had their accounts charged off [written off as a loss by Citibank] due to their failure to pay outstanding balances.

“For example,” said the IG, “a tax compliance officer wrote seven NSF checks in FY 2011 while occupying a position that required a moderate-risk background investigation.”

The inspector general determined that the IRS had detected most, but not all, of the bad checks that IRS employees sent to Citibank. “Our analysis of the NSF check control review for FY 2011 found that the IRS identified 110 (99 percent) of 111 of the NSF checks that we identified during our review,” said the IG report. “However, during the FY 2010 NSF check control review, we found that the IRS did not identify 77 (36 percent) of 214 NSF checks due to errors in extraction. This occurred because the IRS did not select the correct NSF code in the Citibank transaction data.”

Under a law signed by President Bill Clinton in 1998, federal employees are required to use “a Government-issued travel charge card” to pay for most official government travel and travel-related expenses. The IRS uses Citibank to provide these cards, which are divided into two types: centrally billed cards and individually billed cards. Citibank bills the IRS directly for centrally billed cards, and bills the individual employees, who are then reimbursed by the IRS, for individually billed cards. IRS employees are not permitted to use their Citibank IRS travel cards for anything other than official government travel and travel-related expenses. The IG report focused on the individually billed cards used by IRS employees.

Read more

Donna Anderson
Infowars.com
June 13, 2013

While it’s true that, at some point during his colorful past, Edward Snowden took an oath of secrecy, the powers that be seem to be forgetting that Obama took an oath, too. Let’s just compare the two and see who’s really in violation, shall we?

Snowden’s Special Project Security Agreement

I acknowledge that I have been indoctrinated in the Project identified below and thus have received highly classified information relating to United States intelligence collection activities. I am aware that the unauthorized disclosure or negligent handling of such information could seriously affect the national defense and that the transmission or revelation of such information to unauthorized persons could subject me to prosecution under the Espionage Laws (Title 18, USCA, Sections 793 and 794).

I have been informed that approval for access to Project information may only be granted by Project Headquarters. I have also been informed that extraordinary security measures and controls have been established to protect Project information and that access to such information is restricted to those who “must know” based upon their present position or functional use. I agree to advise appropriate authorities of any change in my position or function and will execute a Termination Secrecy Agreement upon notification that such is required.

I realize that a briefing of this scope and depth, which identifies sponsorship, reveals codewords, and admits to the ultimate intelligence application of the Project, is given only to those individuals who have been specifically approved for the above identified Project at the highest level and that this type information may not be divulged to individuals with lesser levels of access.

I am aware that travel to certain hazardous or denied areas of the world such as the USSR, Communist China, and Sino-Soviet satellite areas may constitute an unacceptable security risk and I agree, until formally relieved of this requirement, to request authorization from Project Headquarters prior to undertaking such travel.

Having reviewed the above security requirements, I pledge that I will never publish or reveal, by any means, classified project information to unauthorized persons. Along with this pledge I recognize and accept the fact that I have a personal and individual responsibility for the protection of all such information in my possession no matter where generated nor how acquired and agree to abide by the security requirements and regulations established for the Project.

I understand that no change in my employment status or relationship with the United States Government will relieve me of my obligation under this Agreement.

I have been advised of the procedures to follow in order to determine the identity of individuals who have been approved for access to this Project, the current estimate of hazard involved in travel to a foreign area or to resolve any other question which may arise under this Agreement.

Now, let’s take a look at President Obama’s Oath of Office:

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

While some may say that Snowden committed an act of treason by revealing what might be considered “Top Secret Information,” if you take a little closer look you’ll see that it’s really Obama who’s committed treason.

Snowden’s oath states: I pledge that I will never publish or reveal, by any means, classified project information to unauthorized persons.

Obama’s oath states: I will protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

And the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States guards our right to be secure in our “persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.” In other words, according to Louis Brandeis, an Associate Justice on the US Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939, we have the right to be “left alone.”

In reality, Edward Snowden is simply defending our Constitutional rights — and he’s doing a much better job at it than Obama ever has.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 12:55 pm

Tags: big brother, constitution, domestic news, domestic spying

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

NewsMax
June 13, 2013

FBI Director Robert Mueller on Thursday defended a pair of controversial government surveillance programs, telling Congress that leaking information on them harms national security.

In his last appearance as FBI director before the House Judiciary Committee, Mueller said that terrorists track leaked information “very, very closely” and that because of leaks “we lose our ability to get their communications” and “we are exceptionally vulnerable.”

“As to the individual who has admitted making these disclosures, he is the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation,” Mueller said without naming Snowden.

Read more

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 12:54 pm

Tags: big brother, constitution, domestic news, domestic spying

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Turkey’s PM has issued a “final warning” for protesters, saying they will be removed from Istanbul’s Taksim Square. The Interior Ministry has ordered a probe into excessive use of force by police, while protesters prepare for further clashes.

“Our patience is at an end. I am making my warning for the
last time,” said Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan the day
after he promised to end protests “in 24 hours”.  

“We cannot allow troublemakers to hang around freely in this
square. We will clean the square,” he told local party
leaders.

On Wednesday night protesters were defiant to Erdogan’s deadline.
In Ankara, overnight riots ended up with police firing tear gas
and water cannons to disperse some 2,500 protesters, as they
tried to erect barricades on a road leading to government
offices.

On Thursday morning police arrested 42 people Istanbul who were
wearing masks and helmets while peacefully walking around the
park. Meanwhile, by the 14th day of bloody protests five people
have died and above 5,000 injured.

Despite the deadline, crowds of people remain in Taksim Square
and Gezi Park.

Police actions towards protesters in the past two weeks of
violence have prompted the Interior Ministry to order a probe
into what the EU Parliament has called “the disproportionate and
excessive use of force” by police.

“Our inspectors in Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir and other cities
have launched an investigation so no one should worry about
that,” Interior Minister Muammer Guler said Thursday.

The members of the European Parliament (MEPs) have expressed
their concern over the situation in Turkey with EU’s foreign
affairs chief Catherine Ashton saying police actions should be
swiftly investigated and those found guilty held accountable.

As MEPs are expected to vote on a resolution setting out their
position, Erdogan slammed the EU Parliament saying he will not
“recognize the decision.”

“I won’t recognize the decision that the European Union
Parliament is going to take about us … Who do you think you are
by taking such a decision?”

The European Union’s two most influential states, Germany and
France, have already warned that unrest and violence in Taksim
may undermine Turkey’s bid to become a member of both the EU and
the eurozone.

“We expect Prime Minister Erdogan to de-escalate the
situation, in the spirit of European values, and to seek a
constructive exchange and peaceful dialogue,” German Foreign
Minister Guido Westerwelle said, calling the images from the
square disturbing. He added that Turkish government’s reaction to
the crisis “sending the wrong signal at home and abroad.”



At the same time, French EU Affairs Minister Thierry Repentin
threatened to jeopardize plans to restart talks on Turkey’s bid
to join the single currency union.


“No democracy can be built on the repression of people who try to
express themselves in the street,” Repentin said. “The
right to protest, to oppose the government, must be
respected.”

Both states have long been skeptical about Turkey’s admission to
the EU.

In a move to end protests Justice and Development party spokesman
Huseyin Celik suggested a referendum over a development plan in
Gezi Park. But this remains unclear if such measure is possible
at all given that on May 31, on the day when violence started,
administrative court, according to Anatolia news agency, ruled
for the suspension of the replicas of Ottoman-era barracks
planned to be built on the site of Istanbul’s park. 

This article originally appeared on: RT

French rail workers have gone on strike, paralyzing 70 percent of rail services and throwing the country’s transport into turmoil, immediately following an air traffic strike which grounded over a thousand flights.

Transportation in France has been crippled by thousands of
striking workers this week, with aviation strikes leading to the
cancelation of flights, and rail workers strikes leaving swarms
of travelers stranded in stations.

The widespread strikes mean that some 70 percent of train
services will have been canceled by Friday. Parisian commuter
trains are almost at a standstill, with only around a third of
trains running in the capital.

Rail workers are protesting over the reorganization of national
train and rail companies. President Francois Hollande recently
announced plans to merge national train operator SNCF with RFF
(rail network Réseau Ferré de France). Their nationwide strike
action, which officially began on Wednesday night, also paralyzed
international travel.

Only half of the departures to Switzerland have been running and
a third of the scheduled trains to Italy have left the country’s
borders.

“I’ve been making this trip for a year, early in the morning
and late at night, and I’m sick of it. Delays, breakdowns,
strikes — there’s always something,” a 19-year-old French
girl told AFP.

Rail unions fear the merger will spark job losses: around 10,000
jobs have already been slashed in the last five years, according
to unions.

The rate of participation in the strike of 150,000 workers across
SNCF was 33.2 percent for all employees, 68.6 percent for train
drivers and 70.4 percent for controllers, according to AFP.
Strikes will draw to a close early on Friday morning.

The mass action shortly follows two days of strikes by air
traffic controllers, canceling 75 percent of French flights
across Tuesday and Wednesday.

Tourists trying to leave the capital’s airports by train or
travelling by rail to catch the soonest possible flights from
Paris on the first day of air travel are now running into further
strike action.

Controllers protested plans to reform European air space, through
a scheme intended boost air-traffic capacity. Three-quarters of
flights from the main Parisian hubs – Orly and Charles de Gaulle
airports, were canceled.

The DGAC (General Direction of Civil Aviation) stated that it was
“exceptional strike action followed by almost 100 percent of air
traffic controllers.”

Strikers intended for the act of resistance to run into Thursday,
but quelled their calls for mass action after Paris officially
asked Brussels to review its policy plans to merge EU airspace.

Workers fear that the plans are part of moves to privatize at
least part of the air transportation sector and will lead to
layoffs.

This article originally appeared on: RT

Japanese stocks nosedived on Thursday, after the yen jumped to a 10 — week high against the US dollar. The exchange rate gains that follow almost five — months of losses could now erode Japan’s export revenue.

On Thursday the Nikkei 225 index was down 22% from its five
—and-a-half —year high registered in May. The ups and downs of
the yen was the key concern for investors.

The Japanese currency lost about 30% against the US dollar
between November and May, after the country’s central bank
decided to double the money supply in an effort to boost the
country’s economy. However, this drop was replaced by a sharp
pick up, with the yen adding about 8% since May 22 on concerns
the US may scale back its stimulus programme.

“Whether the yen’s strength will persist or not is a key,”
as the BBC quote Hiroyuki Fukunaga, chief executive of
Investrust.

“If it does, companies’ earnings will be trimmed, and
investors are extremely concerned that the incentive to chase the
Japanese market higher will be erased,” Hiroyuki
Fukunaga added.

However, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga on Thursday
morning rushed to calm down traders saying it’s “important not
to swing from joy to sorrow every time stock prices rise or
fall.”

“The Japanese economy is steadily improving,” he assured.

The revised first-quarter gross domestic product figures in Japan
made public on Monday indicated that the economy grew at 4.1%
annually between January and March, which is better than the
originally estimated 3.5% growth.

Heavy losses were also seen in China and across other Southeast
Asian markets; US and European stock futures also fell. Investors
sold off stocks and transferred cash into traditional safe haven
assets such as treasuries, Japanese government bonds and the yen.

The broader market fall across Asia comes amidst the uncertainty
over the Fed’s decision on monetary policy. On May 22 Chairman
Ben Bernanke said that the US central bank might start removing
its bond-buying program as soon as June if the economy improved,
especially the labor market.

“Market volatility is expected to stay elevated until the
Fed’s policy meeting next week, at which we may see with more
clarity into the tapering issue,” Yuji Saito, director of
foreign exchange at Credit Agricole in Tokyo, told the BBC.

The next meeting of the Fed is scheduled for June 18 – 19.

This article originally appeared on: RT

The CIA’s new deputy director has an unusual resume: President Barack Obama on Wednesday nominated a woman who previously hosted “Erotica Nights” at a Baltimore bookstore, during which she would light candles and read erotic prose to her guests.

Avril Danica Haines, deputy assistant to the president and deputy
counsel for national security affairs, will soon begin her work
as the first female deputy CIA director, replacing Michael
Morell. While working in the White House, Haines approved many of
the CIA’s covert actions.

But after she was nominated to become the CIA’s new deputy
director, surprising details about her previous employment
emerged. About 20 years ago, Haines dropped out of graduate
school at Johns Hopkins University and opened an erotic
bookstore, which she called Adrian’s Book Café, The Daily Beast
reports.

The Baltimore bookstore regularly featured “Erotica Nights”,
during which Haines would light candles, serve dinner and feature
readings of erotic prose. The events cost $17 for singles and $30
for couples.

In an interview with the Baltimore Sun, Haines said she was
initially worried that only “dirty old men” would show up to the
readings and that her friends accused her of “just wanting a mass
orgy in your bookstore.” She defended her work, claiming that
erotica can improve relationships.

“Erotica has become more prevalent because people are trying
to have sex without having sex,” Haines, who was in her 20’s
during the interview, told the Sun. “Others are trying to find
new fantasies to make their monogamous relationships more
satisfying. What the erotic offers is spontaneity, twists and
turns. And it affects everyone.”

The Sun reporter attended an event at the bookstore, during which
Haines read an explicit passage from a racy book titled “The
Claiming of Sleeping Beauty”, which vividly detailed a sexual
encounter during which a character lost her virginity.

Haines’ bookstore did not exclusively sell erotic novels; she
stocked titles of many genres, but the erotic readings garnered
the most attention. 

Although a history of erotic readings may not be as sensational
as former CIA director David Petraeus’ affair with his
biographer, Haines’ past is now sparking significant media
attention. Howard Barstop, a former neighbor of Haines, was
surprised to hear about the woman’s erotic nights, but spoke
highly of her, the Daily Beast reports.

CIA Director John O. Brennan told the Washington Post that Haines
“knows more about covert action than anyone in the US
government outside of the CIA”. The 43-year-old White House
lawyer will be the first female in CIA history to serve as deputy
director. But while her missions may be covert, her past
employment has become an open book.

This article originally appeared on: RT

Human genetic sequences cannot be patented, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday in an unexpected decision that is a tremendous public interest victory.

“Myriad [Genetics] did not create anything,” the Supreme Court held, in a lawsuit that challenged the firm’s monopoly on two gene sequences used in expensive tests that reveal whether women have an inherited risk of breast and ovarian cancer. “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.”

The immediate impact gives other biotech firms the go-ahead to develop less-expensive DNA-based tests for the genetic risk of breast and ovarian cancer. Looking down the road, the ruling will force biotech companies to rethink their business models that have been based on ‘owning’ the building blocks of life.

“The Court rightfully found that patents cannot be awarded for something so fundamental to nature as DNA,” said Daniel B. Ravicher, Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation, which lead the suit challenging two patents awarded for gene sequences tied to breast and ovarian cancer. “Bottom line, diagnostic genetic testing is now free from any patent threat, forever, and the poor can now have their genes tested as freely as the rich.”

Women’s health care advocates immediately hailed the Court’s decision, saying it put patients’ health and scientific research ahead of private corporate profits.

“This ruling makes a huge and immediate difference to those with a known and suspected inherited risk of breast cancer,” said Karuna Kagger, executive director of Breast Cancer Action. “It is a tremendous victory for all people everywhere. The Supreme Court has taken a significant stand to limit the rights of companies to own human genes by striking down Myriad’s monopoly.”

“The Court struck down a major barrier to patient care and medical innovation,” said Sandra Park, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, which was a co-counsel in the lawsuit. “Myriad did not invent the BCRA [breast and ovarian cancer] genes and should not control them.”

The public interest attorneys challenged two patents issued to Myriad Genetics, saying they created a monopoly that not only prevented women from getting less-costly breast and ovarian cancer tests and second medical opinions, but also restricted scientists from doing additional research on the gene sequences. Their lawsuit was filed on behalf of researchers, genetic counselors, patients, breast cancer and women’s health groups, and medical associations representing 150,000 geneticists, pathologists, and scientific laboratory professionals.

The patents allowed Myriad Genetics, a Utah-based company, to control access to the genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, which limited others from doing tests or research. The patents also allowed Myriad to set the terms and cost of testing. The firm argued that it needed the patents to protect hundreds of millions of dollars in research that lead to its tests. That argument was also made by other biotech firms, saying that without such monopolies that it would inhibit scientific research and medical breakthroughs.

The Court’s unanimous ruling, written by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, found that the patents on human genes are invalid. That represents a major shift in law and overturns the current policy of the U.S. Trademark and Patent Office, which has issued more than 40,000 patents tied to genetic material since 1984. Delving into gene science, the Court found that patents on complementary DNA, or cDNA, however, are patent-eligible. But scientists can provide genetic testing without relying on cDNA, which lifted the patent obstacle to offering genetic diagnostic testing.

“Because of this ruling, patients will have greater access to genetic testing and scientists can engage in research on these genes without fear of being sued,” Park said.

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/obama_sweat_the_small_stuff_for_big_justice_20130613/

Posted on Jun 13, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

RT left rivals trailing in its wake when it captured the Golden Nymph for Best 24-hour News Programme at the Monte Carlo Television Festival for its coverage of the Chelyabinsk meteorite explosion earlier this year.

“It’s extremely gratifying to be recognized by your peers, and
I am very proud of all that our network has achieved at its
relatively young age,” said Margarita Simonyan, RT’s
editor-in-chief. “This award, first and foremost, is a credit
to our correspondents, whose tireless efforts made it possible
for viewers all around the world to learn the details of this
historic event.”

Founded in 1961, the festival is one of the oldest and most
prestigious in the world. The jury, staffed with editors from the
world’s leading news networks, picked RT’s entry for best live
coverage of an event as it unfolds ahead of CNN, Al Jazeera and
Sky News.

When a blinding ball of light unexpectedly appeared in the
morning sky in Chelyabinsk on February 15 only to explode seconds
later, RT was the only international channel to show almost
instant live coverage, with all other broadcasters relying on its
feed. By coincidence, a documentary crew had been filming near
the city, and was able to film the impact of the shock waves from
the blast (which injured over 7,000 people) and the reactions of
locals minutes after the event.

RT also immediately began collecting footage of the explosion,
caused by a 9,000 ton asteroid, mostly captured on dashboard cams
of passing drivers, and uploading the footage on the internet.
The video of the entry from different angles became an instant
viral hit, and has since been seen more than 38 million times on
YouTube alone.

In the studio, the team broke off from its standard schedule to
broadcast live interviews with witnesses and scientists,
discussing the unusual cosmic occurrence, which could not have
been predicted in advance.

Qatar-based network Al Jazeera had been nominated for its
coverage of protests in the Muslim world following the release of
the YouTube film Innocence of Muslims, while CNN was put forward
for the live reporting on the escape of blind Chinese civil
rights activist Chen Guangchen to the US embassy in Beijing.

RT, which recently became the first news channel to attract 1
billion views on video-sharing network YouTube, was also
nominated for a Golden Nymph last year, but this marks its first
win at the festival.

This article originally appeared on: RT

Microsoft may have misled millions of Skype users around the world by making claims last year that have since been contradicted by intelligence leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

National Security Agency documents leaked by Snowden to the
Guardian and Washington Post last week have grabbed the attention
of Americans concerned over the NSA’s blanketing surveillance of
communications involving United States citizens. The NSA is
regularly retaining the phone records for millions of Verizon
customers, the documents revealed, and a separate program called
PRISM allegedly lets federal investigators access Internet use
information for customers of the biggest online services. One of
those documents, a slideshow examining how the NSA has access to
conversations conducted over nine major Internet services, may
have caught Silicon Valley giant Microsoft in a lie.

Ryan Gallagher of Slate noted this week that one of the slides
cited by the Washington Post was labeled a “User’s Guide for
PRISM Skype Collection,” suggesting that the NSA has in place a
method for eavesdropping on conversations conducted over the
popular Web client acquired in 2011 by Microsoft.

According to the slide, NSA agents can listen in or watch Skype
chats “when one end of the call is a conventional telephone
and for any combination of ‘audio, video, chat, and file
transfers’ when Skype users connect by computer alone.”

“This piece of information is significant for a number of
reasons,” wrote Gallagher, but the most crucial perhaps is
how it compares to Microsoft’s remarks last year. As RT wrote in
2012, Microsoft was awarded a patent that summer that provides
for “legal intercept” technology that allows for agents to
“silently copy communication transmitted via the communication
session” without asking for user authorization.

At the time, Gallagher was one of the most critical reporters
examining the patent, and grilled Microsoft relentlessly to see
if this meant that a program previously considered
highly-encrypted and tough to crack could provide a backdoor to
government agents at the drop of a hat. However, Skype Corporate
VP of Product Engineering & Operations Mike Gillet also
explained to ExtremeTech.com that the company was making changes
in its infrastructure, but that they were being done to
“improve the Skype user experience.”

“Skype rejected the charge in a comment issued to the website
Extremetech, saying the restructure was an upgrade and had
nothing to do with surveillance,” Gallagher wrote at the
time, “But when I repeatedly questioned the company on
Wednesday whether it could currently facilitate wiretap requests,
a clear answer was not forthcoming. Citing ‘company policy,’
Skype PR man Chaim Haas wouldn’t confirm or deny, telling me only
that the chat service ‘co-operates with law enforcement agencies
as much as is legally and technically possible.’”

This week, Gallagher revisited the issue and explained how
Microsoft’s explanation last year is now under fire thanks to NSA
leak. Gallagher recalled that Microsoft was driven to releasing a
transparency report last year, in which a significant chunk was
set aside solely for details on settling requests for Skype data
made by law enforcement.

“The report devoted an entire section to Skype and claimed
that in 2012, it hadn’t handed any communications content over to
authorities anywhere in the world. Microsoft also said in notes
accompanying the transparency report that calls made between
Skype-Skype users were encrypted peer-to-peer, implying that they
did not pass through Microsoft’s central servers and could not be
eavesdropped on – except maybe if the government deployed a spy
Trojan on a targeted computer to bypass encryption,”
Gallagher wrote.

Now enter the “User’s Guide for PRISM Skype Collection” slide,
and the story is much different. “That the NSA claims to be
able to grab all Skype users’ communications also calls into
question the credibility of Microsoft’s transparency report –
particularly the claim that in 2012 it did not once hand over the
content of any user communications,” Gallagher wrote.
“Moreover, according to a leaked NSA slide published by the
Post, Skype first became part of the NSA’s PRISM program in
February 2011 – three months before Microsoft purchased the
service from U.S. private equity firms Silver Lake and Andreessen
Horowitz.”

In a statement emailed from Microsoft to Slate, the company said
it “went as far as it was legally able in documenting
disclosures in its Law Enforcement Requests Report” and that
“there should be greater transparency on national security
requests and Microsoft would like the government to take steps to
allow companies to do that.”

Microsoft’s statement came the same week that one of their
largest competitors, Google, pleaded with the government to let
them provide more details in their regular transparency reports
published online. In a letter sent to US Attorney General Eric
Holder and Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert
Mueller on Tuesday, Google asked the Obama administration to
allow it to share more information.

“Google’s numbers would clearly show that our compliance with
these requests falls far short of the claims being made,”
said David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer. “Google has
nothing to hide.”

During testimony made Thursday morning before Congress, Mueller
said the NSA leaks attributed to Snowden “have caused
significant harm to our nation and to our safety” and that
the FBI and Justice Department will take “all necessary steps
to hold the person responsible.” Meanwhile, US Reps. John
Conyers (D-Michigan) and Justin Amash (R-Michigan) plan to
propose legislation this week that would require that the
government provides “specific and articulable facts”
before it requests phone records of US citizens.

This article originally appeared on: RT

Infowars.com
June 13, 2013

On last night’s Infowars Nightly News, Alex spoke with a telecom industry insider who broke news of the widespread government surveillance dragnet intercepting data, phone calls, e-mails, videos and pictures a day before the NSA’s PRISM scandal went public.

Critical infrastructure consultant and transport engineer James Knox confirmed that, as an administrator, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has been completely honest with the evidence he has brought forth.

“Given what you know from your perspective, is [Snowden’s information] accurate?” Alex asked.

“Absolutely accurate,” Knox said as he proceeded to describe how certain communication technicians have the ability to literally spy on individual people at whim. “That doesn’t mean that there’s a fellow sitting there in front of a monitor watching you day to day. It only becomes important when, for whatever reason — and it could be just sheer boredom — that they run across you…”

Giving an example of how almost everything is dependent on integrated networks that can be monitored and manipulated, Knox says as a telecom worker he had the “keys to the kingdom” and if he had wanted, he could have shut down power to the capitol building in Sacramento.

When Alex mentioned that he had received phone calls in the past threatening his life from unidentifiable phone numbers, Knox said this means someone was manipulating the signaling bandwidth of the phone signal and actively stripping data so that that particular piece of information would not get transferred.

Alex also wondered how easy it is for people to install data on other peoples’ computer, via these integrated networks: “How easy is it for them to set people up?”

“…it’s simple,” Knox responded. “It’s as simple as monitoring you if they want to take that access and get you from the Internet.”

Earlier this week, Rob Dew had also interviewed Mr. Knox where he went into the history of the Telecomm Act of 1996 and CALEA, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, and how these are used to violate our rights and privacy on a daily basis.

These interviews validate what Alex has been saying for years… that the NSA doesn’t need to tap phones; the phone companies are part of the NSA. The video below is from 2011:

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 12:43 pm

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

West aims to discredit Iran poll through media psywar: Cmdr.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

As the debate in Congress intensifies over so-called “comprehensive immigration reform” amid fierce opposition from conservatives, critics are hammering the S. 744 legislation from all angles, arguing that it would provide amnesty to potentially tens of millions of illegal immigrants while costing trillions and doing nothing to secure the border. This week, meanwhile, an organization that advocates on behalf of law enforcement officers and Border Patrol agents voiced its own opposition to the plan due to numerous concerns over national security, uncontrolled immigration, agent safety, and more.

Some opponents of the immigration reform measures, meanwhile, are even arguing that the future of America’s constitutional Republic could be at stake if the controversial legislation gets through. More than a few Republicans have also argued that if the bill becomes law, aside from rewarding illegal activities, Democrats may be creating enough new voters to completely seize control of the federal government. Homeland Security boss Janet “Big Sis” Napolitano even predicted that immigrants would turn the Republican stronghold of Arizona into a Democrat-dominated state.

In a strongly worded letter to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) this week, the Law Enforcement Officers Advocates Council (LEOAC) joined the growing chorus of opposition voices, laying out multiple arguments against what the group blasted as “the U.S. Immigration Capitulation Act of 2013” and “Shamnesty.” According to LEOAC, which is asking for its criticism to be entered into the congressional record, border security is already an abject failure after being sabotaged by top officials from the Bush and Obama administrations – and the amnesty legislation would make the problems worse.

“This bill was clearly influenced and partly written by the Mexican government and their agents in America, including Janet Murguia of the National Council of La Raza,” LEOAC Founder and President Andy Ramirez told The New American, referring to a controversial pro-amnesty outfit with a name that translates to “The Race” and its president. “Murguia testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee along with a self-admitted illegal-alien female. Yet not one conservative Hispanic opposed to the U.S. Immigration Capitulation Act, as I call it, was invited to testify before the Senate.”

A third-generation American of Mexican ancestry with a long history of advocating for Border Patrol agents and other law enforcement officers, Ramirez has testified before Congress about border security and immigration-related matters on multiple occasions. This time, however, the deck appears to be stacked in favor of the legislation’s supporters. In an interview with The New American, Ramirez said his organization submitted its declaration of opposition knowing that victory for the bill in the Senate “was a done deal long decided in a backroom deal.”

While there were more than a dozen senators, including Sen. Cruz, who voted against cloture on the bill, even lawmakers say the game is rigged – at least in the Senate, if not yet completely in the House. “However, I am not letting this go without a fight,” Ramirez continued. “The Senate has talked about border security like they actually know what they’re talking about, and they’re just as guilty of misleading the American people as the Department of Homeland Security. In essence, we’re being sandbagged by the Senate yet again with fool’s gold-type promises and a farce that the master of satire, the legendary Mel Brooks, would be proud of.”

Throughout the four-page letter, LEOAC highlights the various roles played by key characters in what the organization views as the “sabotage” of border security. Ramirez, citing his previous congressional testimony and other evidence, argued that the Department of Homeland Security under former President George W. Bush deliberately implemented policies that not only prevented proper immigration enforcement but also put national security and border agents at risk. Those sabotage efforts have continued under Obama, according to LEOAC.

Among the officials at the heart of the problems: ex-Border Patrol chief David Aguilar, who eventually became Acting Commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. “He is the key player and handpicked all top U.S. Border Patrol managers personally, well documented as cronies and like-minded individuals,” Ramirez and his organization said in the letter to Sen. Cruz. “When we look to why border security has been an abject failure, which is acknowledged by top retired U.S. Border Patrol Agents including managers who have also denounced S-744, the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers (NAFBPO), it is clear as day, who shares responsibility, David V. Aguilar.” 

Still, while he may have played a crucial part, Aguilar is hardly alone – the crisis is systemic throughout the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies. In the letter, Ramirez documented what he argues is a “pattern of internal sabotage by DHS over two presidential administrations to factually demonstrate that the claims of fixing border security… is both false and filled with the same lies and propaganda DHS has stated since its inception,” he told TNA in an e-mail, referring to the so-called “Gang of Eight” senators pushing the bill as “tr8ors.”

“The Gang of Tr8ors and their cohort supporters talk about providing resources,” Ramirez said. “But for all those very resources added, they refuse to admit the fact that DHS is an abject failure serving only as a ministry of propaganda and a money pit. Its agencies are ruled by the type of cronyism and terror tactics one has come to expect from a tyrannical dictatorship instead of what America represented to so many – a cradle of liberty and freedom or, as President Reagan often referred to it, ‘a shining city on the hill.’”

Also among the myriad individuals and government agencies responsible for the current fiasco, Ramirez continued in his letter, are the Department of Justice and some U.S. attorneys. According to LEOAC and its sources, attacks on law enforcement officers near the border, including gun shots, are now occurring on a regular basis. However, when agents ask that the Justice Department prosecute criminals responsible for attacking agents, the requests are regularly denied – especially when Johnny Sutton served as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas.

“Consider the chilling message that [is] provided to agents: DOJ will protect illegal aliens but not law enforcement,” LEOAC said in the letter. “It’s no wonder when we see agents like Brian Terry are murdered, yet not one person is brought to justice for sending our agents into the field with rules that compromise their safety including the use of non-lethal loads though our agents face heavily armed drug cartels and alien smuggling organizations.” Passing the current “immigration reform” bill will only make it worse, Ramirez said – jeopardizing citizens and law enforcement alike. 

Some critics have gone even further, saying the amnesty plan actually threatens the Republic itself. “I think the master plan of the ruling class that runs Washington, D.C., is to ram this bill through before the American people know what has hit them, and before members of Congress even know what has hit them.” Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) told WND. “This is President Obama’s number one political agenda item because he knows we will never again have a Republican president, ever, if amnesty goes into effect. We will perpetually have a progressive, liberal president, probably a Democrat, and we will probably see the House of Representatives go into Democrat hands and the Senate will stay in Democrat hands.”

Other concerns expressed by critics include the estimated price tag: more than $6 trillion over the next 25 years, according to a study by the conservative-leaning Heritage Foundation. Another key problem with the bill, according to lawmakers such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), is the effort to foist an unconstitutional national ID card on Americans. If approved, the identification scheme could include all sorts of biometric data and would be required to have a job. For now, the bill’s fate remains uncertain, but even some lawmakers say a strategy to ram it through both houses of Congress is already in place. The only way to stop it, opponents argue, is a massive public outcry.

^{Photo of LEOAC Founder and President Andy Ramirez inspecting border fence near San Diego in 2005: 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:

Permanent Amnesty, Temporary Border

Rand Paul Offers Amendments to Immigration Bill

Senate Panel Rejects Border Security Amendment to Immigration Bill

The Real Cost of Amnesty

Holder Claims “Path to Citizenship” Is a Civil Right

Conservatives in Congress Slam Immigration Bill of “Gang of Eight”

Napolitano Predicts Immigrants Will Fuel Democrat Majority in Arizona

This article originally appeared on: The New American

Thousands of people gather outside the ERT Greek state television headquarters, during a 24-hour strike to support of the ERTemployees in Athens on June 13, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Only 20 of the 166 detainees held at the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison complex will be prosecuted in the war crimes tribunal, an official says.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_turkish_spring_lawyers_rounded_up_20130613/

Posted on Jun 13, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

Turkish anti-government protestors gather on Taksim Square in Istanbul. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Rep. who supported terrorists calls for jailing reporters in America

Steve Watson
Prisonplanet.com
June 13, 2013

GOP Congressman Peter King, who earlier in the week called for the extradition and prosecution of the National Security Agency whistle blower Edward Snowden, has now called for the arrest and prosecution of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the story in the London Guardian.

Greenwald has been facilitating the release of Snowden’s revelations on the NSA’s phone and internet surveillance programs, which have secretly targeted everyday Americans.

While many are dubbing Snowden and Greenwald heroes for bringing government overreach to light, Congressman King believes that the book should be thrown at them BOTH.

“No right is absolute, and even the press has certain restrictions,” King told Fox News’ Megyn Kelly yesterday. “It should be very targeted, very selective, and certainly a very rare exception.”

“But in this case, where you have someone who’s disclosed secrets like this and threatens to release more, then to me, yes – there has to be legal action. Legal action should be taken against him.” King added.

On Tuesday, after calling Snowden a “traitor”, King suggested on CNN that reporters should also be prosecuted for “willingly” publishing such classified information.

“If they willingly knew that this was classified information, I think actions should be taken, especially something of this magnitude,” King said.

“On something of this magnitude, there is an obligation both moral but also legal, I believe, against a reporter disclosing something that would so severely compromise national security.”

Glenn Greenwald responded to King’s media appearance on Tuesday with bewilderment, tweeting:

On Wednesday, however, Greenwald did not spare King his wrath, tweeting:

In an appearance on CNN, Greenwald slammed King, saying that it was “staggering” to see King call for the prosecution of journalists in America.

“It’s bad enough to call for that, it is extraordinarily menacing that he did so based on a complete falsehood, the idea that I ever threatened to [disclose CIA agents],” Greenwald said.

The reporter also pointed out that the Congressman actively supported British government sponsored terrorism in Northern Ireland for decades.

“The last thing I would try to do is read what goes on internally in the swamp of Peter King’s brain,” he asserted. “What I do know is that he has a history of all kinds of radical and extremist statements. He himself was a supporter of terrorism for several decades when it was done by the IRA.”

Greenwald, a journalist who criticised the Bush administration for its own violations of the Bill Of Rights, just as fiercely as he is now slamming the Obama administration, has described other media outlets and reporters as “Slavishly Partisan”, for not standing up on the issue.

“I’m not surprised,” Greenwald said in an email to Business Insider this week. “I’ve been amazed and disappointed for a long time at how the most slavishly partisan media Democrats who pretended to care so much about these issues when doing so helped undermine George Bush are now the loudest apologists and cheerleaders for these very same policies.”

“If they started a club called Liberal Pundits to Defend the National Security State, no auditorium in the country would be large enough to accommodate them.” Greenwald urged.

“To call them principle-free, hackish, and opportunistic is to be overly generous.” Greenwald added.

During an appearance on MSNBC earlier in the week, Greenwald, who has warned that the NSA is intent on “destroying privacy all over the world,” accused “Morning Joe” co-host Mike Brzezinski of repeating “White House talking points”, when she attempted to downplay the actions of the spy agency:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As Alex Jones breaks down in the following recent video, Congressman King is the one who should be arrested for advocating violations of the Fourth Amendment by advocating spying on Americans:

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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.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 12:14 pm

Tags: big brother, domestic spying

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

June 13, 2013
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A San Diego Catholic school fired a teacher and domestic violence survivor due to her ex-husband’s “threatening and menacing behavior,” KNSD-TV reports.

Second-grade teacher Carie Charlesworth said she received notice of her termination after an incident in which her abusive ex-husband followed her to Holy Trinity School, where she worked. Charlesworth had been teaching in the district for 14 years.

“They’ve taken away my ability to care for my kids,” she told KNSD. “It’s not like I can go out and find a teaching job anywhere.”

Charlesworth went on leave after in incident in January that forced her to call the police on her husband three separate times. As KNSD reports, she went to Holy Trinity the next day to warn the principle “to be on the lookout for her ex-husband,” who “has a trail of restraining orders and 911 calls.”

Sure enough, Charlesworth’s abuser showed up at the school’s parking lot, sending it into lockdown. The next day, she received a letter informing her that she and her children were put on “indefinite leave.” And three months later, the teacher received a letter from Holy Trinity informing her that the school “simply cannot allow” her to return to work.

It didn’t matter that Charlesworth’s ex-husband is currently behind bars for his crimes, as the school has “no way of knowing how long or short a time he will actually serve.”

Sadly, Charlesworth’s story is part of a larger pattern of employees losing their jobs after incidents of domestic violence. As KNSD reports, a 2011 study shows that “Nearly 40 percent of survivors in California reported being fired or feared termination because of domestic violence.”

Charlesworth is telling her story to raise awareness of this problem, saying: “I mean that’s why women of domestic violence don’t come forward, because they’re afraid of the way people are going to see them, view them, perceive them, treat them.”

h/t Raw Story

This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

S.A. Miller and Geoff Earle
New York Post
June 13, 2013

The State Department has hired an alarming number of law-enforcement agents with criminal or checkered backgrounds because of a flawed hiring process, a stunning memo obtained by The Post reveals.

The background problems are severe enough that many of the roughly 2,000 agents in State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security can play only limited roles in agency efforts to police bad conduct and prosecute wrongdoers.

The problems in the bureau are the latest revelation in an exploding scandal that also involves accusations that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s security detail and those of the US ambassador to Belgium solicited prostitutes overseas.

Read full article

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 12:02 pm

Tags: domestic news

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

S.A. Miller and Geoff Earle
New York Post
June 13, 2013

The State Department has hired an alarming number of law-enforcement agents with criminal or checkered backgrounds because of a flawed hiring process, a stunning memo obtained by The Post reveals.

The background problems are severe enough that many of the roughly 2,000 agents in State’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security can play only limited roles in agency efforts to police bad conduct and prosecute wrongdoers.

The problems in the bureau are the latest revelation in an exploding scandal that also involves accusations that members of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s security detail and those of the US ambassador to Belgium solicited prostitutes overseas.

Read full article

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 12:02 pm

Tags: domestic news

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Frank Fernandez
The Daytona Beach News-Journal
June 13, 2013

Florida’s prescription drug monitoring database program violates the state’s constitution, invades the privacy of residents and subjects them to unreasonable searches, according to an amended complaint filed Wednesday in circuit court in Volusia County.

The constitutional challenge is part of a growing legal battle over how the State Attorney’s Office for the 7th Judicial Circuit wound up with the prescription records for an estimated 3,300 residents and why that information was provided to five of six defense attorneys representing defendants related to a prescription fraud investigation.

The American Civil Liberties Union said this week it could file federal complaints with the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services related to the disclosure of the prescription information.

Read more

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 12:07 pm

Tags: constitution, domestic news, domestic spying, pharmaceutical

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Frank Fernandez
The Daytona Beach News-Journal
June 13, 2013

Florida’s prescription drug monitoring database program violates the state’s constitution, invades the privacy of residents and subjects them to unreasonable searches, according to an amended complaint filed Wednesday in circuit court in Volusia County.

The constitutional challenge is part of a growing legal battle over how the State Attorney’s Office for the 7th Judicial Circuit wound up with the prescription records for an estimated 3,300 residents and why that information was provided to five of six defense attorneys representing defendants related to a prescription fraud investigation.

The American Civil Liberties Union said this week it could file federal complaints with the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services related to the disclosure of the prescription information.

Read more

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 12:07 pm

Tags: constitution, domestic news, domestic spying, pharmaceutical

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

US troops walk down a pathway at the Parwan Detention Facility in Parwan province, Afghanistan. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

US troops walk down a pathway at the Parwan Detention Facility in Parwan province, Afghanistan. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranian presidential candidate Saeed Jalili has reaffirmed his resolve to mobilize all the potentials and resources of the country if elected president.

Å“If we could manage these God-given capacities in such areas as agriculture, industry, economy, mines, resources, oil and all other sectors that we have, just think what great capacities would be released and with what strong force given the high-quality manpower that we have,” said Jalili in his campaign speech in the city of Eslamshahr, south of Tehran, on Wednesday.

Å“I am telling you that if these two factors [capacities and manpower] are managed properly, a huge power will be released in comparison to which the nuclear power will look insignificant,” he added.

The principlist candidate, currently Iranâ„¢s chief nuclear negotiator in talks with the P5+1 group of world powers (five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany), also praised the resistance of the Iranian nation against the big powers since the 1979 Islamic Revolution as the main reason behind Iranâ„¢s achievements.

Å“If we have been able to achieve all those great victories through these [past] 34 years, it is because we have made up our resolve to resist against the big powers,” he said.

Jalili called on the Iranians to remain vigilant in the face of enemy efforts to create Å“skepticism” among the nation to divert them from their Islamic path.

Jalili is facing five rivals, namely, President of the Expediency Councilâ„¢s Center for Strategic Research Hassan Rohani, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, Secretary of the Expediency Council Mohsen Rezaei, former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati and former Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Gharazi.

The president of Iran is elected for a four-year term in a national election. Nearly 50.5 million Iranians are eligible to vote in the June 14th presidential poll.

ASH/MKA/SS/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Not crumpets and tea.

Protesters with the UK Tar Sands Network rallied outside of Parliament Thursday against the presence of Canadian PM Stephen Harper. (Photo: @JHAtheron/ Twitter) Greeting Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper as he arrived at the UK’s Parliament Thursday morning was a barrage of environmental activists who came to declare that “dirty tar sands fuels have no place in the UK or Europe.”

Three environmental activists scaled the roof of the House of Lords and managed to interrupt Harper’s speech to Parliament before being arrested for attempting to enter “non public rooms,” the BBC reports.

In a series of videos posted online, “Love Canada, Hate Tar Sands” protesters filmed themselves on the roof preparing for the disruption.

“We have entered Parliament to interrupt Harper’s speech. We have managed to climb onto the roof with t-shirts saying ‘oil out of politics’, ‘stop Harper’ and ‘stop the tar sands’. Two campaigners have spilled molasses on the floor outside of Parliament,” the group wrote on their site.

They continue:

From further marginalizing historically shunted Indigenous people, to muzzling world class climate scientists, Prime Minister Harper has shown time and again that nothing will stand between him and developing dirty tar sands, even though tar sands will create unprecedented global warming.

Now Harper brings his circus of oil peddlars to Europe to interfere in EU climate legislation, to push his monstrous industry onto Europeans.

Cameron’s government opens its arms to Harper and his cronies, bestowing upon them the great honour of addressing Parliament.

Instead of being honored, Harper should be shamed internationally but he is instead invited to address both Houses of Parliament. Harper has taken Canada down a dangerous climate path, destroying whole ecosystems and overriding centuries-old treaty rights. Now is now trying to stain Europe too.

We will not let this go unchallenged.

On the ground level, roughly 50 demonstrators with the UK Tar Sands Network rallied in the Commons outside of Parliament carrying signs that read “Stop Harper” and “Tar Sands Kills.”

According to a statement issued by the group, Harper has come to London “partly with the aim of lobbying against a piece of EU climate legislation (the Fuel Quality Directive) which could label the tar sands as more polluting than conventional oil and discourage its future import, closing off Europe as a desperately-needed potential market.”

The protesters have filed the Early Day Motion, to be published Friday, which “criticizes the recent barrage of lobbying from Canada and the oil industry, particularly UK oil giants Shell and BP,” and calls on the UK government to support legislation discouraging future tar sands imports. The legislation is expected to be voted on later this year.

The statement continues: 

On his trip, Harper is also hoping to seal the deal on the controversial Canada-EU free trade agreement (CETA), which could also provide a boost to the tar sands industry, giving oil and gas companies more rights than communities and making it much more difficult for the UK and EU to seriously address climate change in the future. 

“Tar sands oil is one of the dirtiest, most polluting fuels out there,” declared Caroline Lucas, the Green MP who is tabling the Early Day Motion. “David Cameron must make it clear to the Canadian Prime Minister during his visit to the UK that such dirty fuels have no place in the UK or Europe, and UK Ministers must commit to supporting proposals to label tar sands oil as more carbon intensive than other fuels through the EU Fuel Quality Directive.”

“Harper’s government has been trying to foist its dirty product on Europe by spreading misinformation and lobbying against climate legislation that would discourage tar sands imports,” said Jess Worth, from UK Tar Sands Network, who added that the UK government “should be ashamed of itself” for bestowing such an honor as is speaking before Parliament ” on a man who is scuppering climate action abroad and trampling over Indigenous rights and environmental protection at home.”

CBC news reports that, during his speech to Parliament, Harper did in fact touch upon the trade agreement calling it “a historic step – a monumental one, in fact.”

Further, he expressed his “deep appreciation” to the government of UK Prime Minister David Cameron for “robust advocacy on behalf of this agreement,” saying “It will be a great benefit to all of our citizens.”

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Not crumpets and tea.

Protesters with the UK Tar Sands Network rallied outside of Parliament Thursday against the presence of Canadian PM Stephen Harper. (Photo: @JHAtheron/ Twitter) Greeting Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper as he arrived at the UK’s Parliament Thursday morning was a barrage of environmental activists who came to declare that “dirty tar sands fuels have no place in the UK or Europe.”

Three environmental activists scaled the roof of the House of Lords and managed to interrupt Harper’s speech to Parliament before being arrested for attempting to enter “non public rooms,” the BBC reports.

In a series of videos posted online, “Love Canada, Hate Tar Sands” protesters filmed themselves on the roof preparing for the disruption.

“We have entered Parliament to interrupt Harper’s speech. We have managed to climb onto the roof with t-shirts saying ‘oil out of politics’, ‘stop Harper’ and ‘stop the tar sands’. Two campaigners have spilled molasses on the floor outside of Parliament,” the group wrote on their site.

They continue:

From further marginalizing historically shunted Indigenous people, to muzzling world class climate scientists, Prime Minister Harper has shown time and again that nothing will stand between him and developing dirty tar sands, even though tar sands will create unprecedented global warming.

Now Harper brings his circus of oil peddlars to Europe to interfere in EU climate legislation, to push his monstrous industry onto Europeans.

Cameron’s government opens its arms to Harper and his cronies, bestowing upon them the great honour of addressing Parliament.

Instead of being honored, Harper should be shamed internationally but he is instead invited to address both Houses of Parliament. Harper has taken Canada down a dangerous climate path, destroying whole ecosystems and overriding centuries-old treaty rights. Now is now trying to stain Europe too.

We will not let this go unchallenged.

On the ground level, roughly 50 demonstrators with the UK Tar Sands Network rallied in the Commons outside of Parliament carrying signs that read “Stop Harper” and “Tar Sands Kills.”

According to a statement issued by the group, Harper has come to London “partly with the aim of lobbying against a piece of EU climate legislation (the Fuel Quality Directive) which could label the tar sands as more polluting than conventional oil and discourage its future import, closing off Europe as a desperately-needed potential market.”

The protesters have filed the Early Day Motion, to be published Friday, which “criticizes the recent barrage of lobbying from Canada and the oil industry, particularly UK oil giants Shell and BP,” and calls on the UK government to support legislation discouraging future tar sands imports. The legislation is expected to be voted on later this year.

The statement continues: 

On his trip, Harper is also hoping to seal the deal on the controversial Canada-EU free trade agreement (CETA), which could also provide a boost to the tar sands industry, giving oil and gas companies more rights than communities and making it much more difficult for the UK and EU to seriously address climate change in the future. 

“Tar sands oil is one of the dirtiest, most polluting fuels out there,” declared Caroline Lucas, the Green MP who is tabling the Early Day Motion. “David Cameron must make it clear to the Canadian Prime Minister during his visit to the UK that such dirty fuels have no place in the UK or Europe, and UK Ministers must commit to supporting proposals to label tar sands oil as more carbon intensive than other fuels through the EU Fuel Quality Directive.”

“Harper’s government has been trying to foist its dirty product on Europe by spreading misinformation and lobbying against climate legislation that would discourage tar sands imports,” said Jess Worth, from UK Tar Sands Network, who added that the UK government “should be ashamed of itself” for bestowing such an honor as is speaking before Parliament ” on a man who is scuppering climate action abroad and trampling over Indigenous rights and environmental protection at home.”

CBC news reports that, during his speech to Parliament, Harper did in fact touch upon the trade agreement calling it “a historic step – a monumental one, in fact.”

Further, he expressed his “deep appreciation” to the government of UK Prime Minister David Cameron for “robust advocacy on behalf of this agreement,” saying “It will be a great benefit to all of our citizens.”

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/an_education_declaration_to_rebuild_america_20130613/

Posted on Jun 13, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/an_education_declaration_to_rebuild_america_20130613/

Posted on Jun 13, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

The UK-based energy giant, BP, has slashed its global natural gas reserves estimate for the first time in decades, sharply dropping Russia’s classified holdings and placing Iran at the top of the world’s gas-rich countries.

In its Statistical Review of World Energy released on Wednesday, the BP classed Iran as the worldâ„¢s top gas reserves holder with 33.6 trillion cubic meters.

The company downgraded Russiaâ„¢s reserves estimate to 32.9 trillion cubic meters from 44.6 trillion cubic meters in last year’s report, putting global proven gas reserves at 187.3 trillion cubic meters as of the end of 2012.

Christof Ruhl, BP’s chief economist, said in this regard that the firm decided this year to adjust its gas reserves estimates for the former Soviet Union, including Russia, where data on reserves is classified.

Å“Traditionally, countries of the former Soviet Union had different criteria than used elsewhere. So we used a conversion factor to convert that from those countries where we don’t get direct data,” Ruhl added.

The annual report also cut the estimate of gas reserves in the United States.

Meanwhile, BP also upgraded oil reserves for both Iran and Iraq by several billion barrels, estimating global proven reserves at 1,669 billion barrels at the end of last year, up slightly from 1,654 billion at the end of 2011.

Iran has been trying to boost its gas production by attracting foreign and domestic investments, especially in South Pars gas field.

South Pars is part of a wider gas field that is shared with Qatar. The larger field covers an area of 9,700 square kilometers, 3,700 square kilometers of which are in Iran’s territorial waters (South Pars) in the Persian Gulf. The remaining 6,000 square kilometers, referred to as the North Dome, are in Qatar’s territorial waters.

MKA/SS/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The UK-based energy giant, BP, has slashed its global natural gas reserves estimate for the first time in decades, sharply dropping Russia’s classified holdings and placing Iran at the top of the world’s gas-rich countries.

In its Statistical Review of World Energy released on Wednesday, the BP classed Iran as the worldâ„¢s top gas reserves holder with 33.6 trillion cubic meters.

The company downgraded Russiaâ„¢s reserves estimate to 32.9 trillion cubic meters from 44.6 trillion cubic meters in last year’s report, putting global proven gas reserves at 187.3 trillion cubic meters as of the end of 2012.

Christof Ruhl, BP’s chief economist, said in this regard that the firm decided this year to adjust its gas reserves estimates for the former Soviet Union, including Russia, where data on reserves is classified.

Å“Traditionally, countries of the former Soviet Union had different criteria than used elsewhere. So we used a conversion factor to convert that from those countries where we don’t get direct data,” Ruhl added.

The annual report also cut the estimate of gas reserves in the United States.

Meanwhile, BP also upgraded oil reserves for both Iran and Iraq by several billion barrels, estimating global proven reserves at 1,669 billion barrels at the end of last year, up slightly from 1,654 billion at the end of 2011.

Iran has been trying to boost its gas production by attracting foreign and domestic investments, especially in South Pars gas field.

South Pars is part of a wider gas field that is shared with Qatar. The larger field covers an area of 9,700 square kilometers, 3,700 square kilometers of which are in Iran’s territorial waters (South Pars) in the Persian Gulf. The remaining 6,000 square kilometers, referred to as the North Dome, are in Qatar’s territorial waters.

MKA/SS/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A disenfranchised Haiti means opportunity for the imperialist and their Left-talking right wing vultures.

Bourgeoisie Freedom or democracy is, for instance, the dissonance beating at you when Clorox Hunger, emaciated Black babies, live in the same space that $9 billion in humanitarian aid are supposed to have been poured. It’s the confusion one feels when one juxtaposes the deep, Clorox-burning hunger ravaging the population with how the United Kingdom had just opened up a new embassy in Haiti to boost UK companies “trading” in earthquake-hit Haiti.

The burning hunger, lack of relief and exploitation of the poor is easily explained by the indigenous Haitians who never saw any part of the $9 billion in his rural town. But the power of the poverty pimping NGOs, the US humanitarian occupation of Haiti is so vast, so multi-layered and interconnected with the myth of white superiority and its media forces that the rural Haiti voice is drowned-out completely. For the “schooled” stakeholders involved, both in Haiti and abroad, are mostly so vested in US imperialism, US foreign policy and white supremacy they must continue to define and defend their presence in Haiti as “development work.”

The renown Black psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, once wrote:

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.” —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Starvation is everywhere in Haiti not just in rural Haiti, evidencing the deadly and unconscionable consequences of the current US-led world pain rush in Haiti.

There are too many “schooled” Haitians either indifferent to or plain collaborating with empire abroad and in Haiti Jesus-ly suffering the racist capitalistic brutality of Papa Clinton, Paul Farmer-led NGOs, the UN and that overseer Barack Obama killing civilized, dignified co-existence in Haiti.

The children are dying, Haiti is dying. Dying from the hidden US occupation behind UN mercenary guns, dying from cholera, dying from Clorox hunger, drought, hurricanes, earthquake evictions, dying in hopelessness and despair, while in Petionville the cultural genocide has been worse than when that butcher, Franklin D. Roosevelt, violated Haiti — a man who was, ironically, so loved in America for his so-called New Deal egalitarian ideals “to make a country in which no one is left out.”

But in Haiti, Franklin D. Roosevelt was known only for his almost Rochambeau-like butchery of egalitarian ideals, his butchery of the unarmed peasants, repression of Haiti indigenous religion, rewriting Haiti’s Constitution in 1915 as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, giving a Clintonesque-Democrat face to stealing Haiti lands for the corporatocracy his ilk represented that was clear-cutting centuries-old Haiti trees for the Euro-tribes world war machine, instituting force labor chain gangs, dropping bombs on peasant farmers objecting to the US Marine occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934.

Not since then, has Haiti seen so many whites on the ground. Not since then have there been so much disease, desperation, death and hunger for the Black majority mixed in with four star hotels, token poverty programs and tourist attractions. That’s what the white tribes and repugnant Black collaborators, their imperial war machines, false benevolence, endless death, dependency, dictatorships and cold wars, bring to indigenous populations world over. Death, starvation, despair, genocide — no raising of the indigenous population’s standard of living.

It’s in the face on these starving Haiti children — who cannot eat from our grandparent’s fruit trees now polluted by Monsanto, USAID nitrate/fertilizers and the UN cholera feces. Not to mention the destruction of Haiti poultry, rice, and all local industry from the ravages of the rabid elites privatization schemes, dumping Arkansas and Miami products that destroy local Haiti food production.

Never mind that Donna Karen sells Haiti crafts at Saks or to Hollywood, Sean Penn sponsors a Haiti marathon, Paul Farmer built a new hospital from quake remains, the Clintons built new sweatshops, all so that the tourists may be steered toward lying edifices masking Western imperialism, patriarchy, domination, blatant NGO racism and capitalism. For, it’s the norm for US bourgeois democracy to tout “no one is left out.”

It’s as real today under Barack Obama as it was under the murderous FDR regime in Haiti back in 1915. Their new deals mostly leave out the Black majority populations in their sight. Indeed, bourgeois democracy’s debilitating dissonance is refined by the Obama face to imperialism.

Under this more deadly bourgeois democracy, Haiti self-determination and cultural genocide are not only acceptable collateral damages but invisible injuries.

Our pains are turned back upon us, used to enrich NGOs, mining companies, the beltway bandits and most Western adventurers. It’s not a gold rush in Haiti that’s profitable to the Euro ruling tribes, but the rush to inflict more pain and collect, collect, collect it against the myth of white superiority, white universal love for all humankind using the structures that carry this myth forth since World War II: the UN Security Council system, the NGO system, the foreign aid system, the International Monetary Fund/World Bank/World Trade Organization system. They’re all about inflicting pain on the poor and Black then capitalizing on Black pain. (See “The Evolution of Disaster Capitalism with Ezili Dantò.”) The ensuing social chaos is then capitalized upon to set up puppet neoDuvalierist US governments in Haiti, for the World Bank to draft Haiti mining laws, and for the uninterrupted Euro-US pillage and plunder of Haiti Riches — over $20 billion in gold reserves, its iridium, silver, copper, coal and the Haiti oil cache that some geologists say is a “pool to Venezuela’s cup of water.” (See Video report on Haiti Riches, Zili Dlo solar project and the works of Ezili Dantò/HLLN.)

Under the US occupation, it’s a “pain rush” in Haiti. Newspapers, foundations, “humanitarians,” think tanks write about it, elevate it, cash in on it, and keep it going, won’t tell you, ala Jared Diamond, that the Haiti struggle is cleared of cognitive dissonance only when you factor in structuralized white supremacist hatred — its genocidal germs, guns and steel. Oh, no, that’s downplayed.

Today’s mainstream media reports that chronic hunger in Haiti is rising mostly because of geography — the weather!

According to the Associated Press, much of the hunger crisis “stems from too little rain, and then too much,” corrupt Haiti politicians and because half of Haiti’s food is imported.

Although the article notes that:

“In 1997 some 1.2 million Haitians didn’t have enough food to eat. A decade later the number had more than doubled. Today, that figure is 6.7 million, or a staggering 67 percent of the population that goes without food some days…” (See “2 out of 3 people face hunger as Haiti woes mount,” AP, June 10, 2013)

It doesn’t contextualize it with US incessant destabilization, its sweatshop development and failed 40-year export led economy initiatives. But in any case, generally when a glimpse of the devastating depravity of the US occupation sneaks through the mainstream colonial narrative, it is quickly “democratized” by locating one Establishment “expert” to say that “there’s sufficient proof that at least some of the aid is reaching the population.” This journalistic trick then fully gains root to lift up (destructive) foreign aid as the only reason why the poor in Haiti are still alive. You’ll not read the truth, which is that the over $2 billion yearly in Haiti Diaspora remittances is the ONLY real direct aid to Haiti that actually reaches the population and keeps the poor alive.

Such colonial news on Haiti, will mostly remain silent about the centuries upon centuries and current US racist destabilization of Haiti while pimping out photos of our starving Black babies to sell newspapers, re-validate white supremacy, fuel humanitarian imperialism’s raison d’etre, give the NGOs a document to go raise more funds for their coffers.

The Euro colonial deforestation and their centuries of environmental harm or current open pit mining initiatives in Haiti are mostly non-existent in these colonial narratives on Haiti. For, only the peasants’ wood cutting for charcoal is highlighted. Nothing is noted about the current 10-year US occupation of Haiti behind UN guns — the totality of its devastating destructions in Haiti and failures. Nor the US support for the Duvalier dictatorships for 30 years from 1957 to 1986, the two US-sponsored coups in 1991 and then 2004 to reinstate Duvalierism over a democratically elected Haiti government, followed by the current US occupation behind UN guns. After all, the white savior industrial complex is as economically and socially benign today as it was during the Western tribes’ chattel enslavement of Ayiti, no?

“The US public won’t be taught about the nearly 10-year old US occupation of Haiti by the media. But in fact today, the US is Haiti’s mother country. And all around us the “colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.” — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Ezili Dantò is an award winning playwright, a performance poet, author and human rights attorney. She was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in the USA. She holds a BA from Boston College, a JD from the University of Connecticut School of law. She is a human rights lawyer, cultural and political activist and the founder and president of the Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN). She runs the Haitian Perspectives on-line journal and the Ezili Dantò Newsletter.

She can be contacted at http://www.ezilidanto.com/zili/contact-us/.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

A disenfranchised Haiti means opportunity for the imperialist and their Left-talking right wing vultures.

Bourgeoisie Freedom or democracy is, for instance, the dissonance beating at you when Clorox Hunger, emaciated Black babies, live in the same space that $9 billion in humanitarian aid are supposed to have been poured. It’s the confusion one feels when one juxtaposes the deep, Clorox-burning hunger ravaging the population with how the United Kingdom had just opened up a new embassy in Haiti to boost UK companies “trading” in earthquake-hit Haiti.

The burning hunger, lack of relief and exploitation of the poor is easily explained by the indigenous Haitians who never saw any part of the $9 billion in his rural town. But the power of the poverty pimping NGOs, the US humanitarian occupation of Haiti is so vast, so multi-layered and interconnected with the myth of white superiority and its media forces that the rural Haiti voice is drowned-out completely. For the “schooled” stakeholders involved, both in Haiti and abroad, are mostly so vested in US imperialism, US foreign policy and white supremacy they must continue to define and defend their presence in Haiti as “development work.”

The renown Black psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon, once wrote:

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.” —Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Starvation is everywhere in Haiti not just in rural Haiti, evidencing the deadly and unconscionable consequences of the current US-led world pain rush in Haiti.

There are too many “schooled” Haitians either indifferent to or plain collaborating with empire abroad and in Haiti Jesus-ly suffering the racist capitalistic brutality of Papa Clinton, Paul Farmer-led NGOs, the UN and that overseer Barack Obama killing civilized, dignified co-existence in Haiti.

The children are dying, Haiti is dying. Dying from the hidden US occupation behind UN mercenary guns, dying from cholera, dying from Clorox hunger, drought, hurricanes, earthquake evictions, dying in hopelessness and despair, while in Petionville the cultural genocide has been worse than when that butcher, Franklin D. Roosevelt, violated Haiti — a man who was, ironically, so loved in America for his so-called New Deal egalitarian ideals “to make a country in which no one is left out.”

But in Haiti, Franklin D. Roosevelt was known only for his almost Rochambeau-like butchery of egalitarian ideals, his butchery of the unarmed peasants, repression of Haiti indigenous religion, rewriting Haiti’s Constitution in 1915 as Assistant Secretary of the Navy, giving a Clintonesque-Democrat face to stealing Haiti lands for the corporatocracy his ilk represented that was clear-cutting centuries-old Haiti trees for the Euro-tribes world war machine, instituting force labor chain gangs, dropping bombs on peasant farmers objecting to the US Marine occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934.

Not since then, has Haiti seen so many whites on the ground. Not since then have there been so much disease, desperation, death and hunger for the Black majority mixed in with four star hotels, token poverty programs and tourist attractions. That’s what the white tribes and repugnant Black collaborators, their imperial war machines, false benevolence, endless death, dependency, dictatorships and cold wars, bring to indigenous populations world over. Death, starvation, despair, genocide — no raising of the indigenous population’s standard of living.

It’s in the face on these starving Haiti children — who cannot eat from our grandparent’s fruit trees now polluted by Monsanto, USAID nitrate/fertilizers and the UN cholera feces. Not to mention the destruction of Haiti poultry, rice, and all local industry from the ravages of the rabid elites privatization schemes, dumping Arkansas and Miami products that destroy local Haiti food production.

Never mind that Donna Karen sells Haiti crafts at Saks or to Hollywood, Sean Penn sponsors a Haiti marathon, Paul Farmer built a new hospital from quake remains, the Clintons built new sweatshops, all so that the tourists may be steered toward lying edifices masking Western imperialism, patriarchy, domination, blatant NGO racism and capitalism. For, it’s the norm for US bourgeois democracy to tout “no one is left out.”

It’s as real today under Barack Obama as it was under the murderous FDR regime in Haiti back in 1915. Their new deals mostly leave out the Black majority populations in their sight. Indeed, bourgeois democracy’s debilitating dissonance is refined by the Obama face to imperialism.

Under this more deadly bourgeois democracy, Haiti self-determination and cultural genocide are not only acceptable collateral damages but invisible injuries.

Our pains are turned back upon us, used to enrich NGOs, mining companies, the beltway bandits and most Western adventurers. It’s not a gold rush in Haiti that’s profitable to the Euro ruling tribes, but the rush to inflict more pain and collect, collect, collect it against the myth of white superiority, white universal love for all humankind using the structures that carry this myth forth since World War II: the UN Security Council system, the NGO system, the foreign aid system, the International Monetary Fund/World Bank/World Trade Organization system. They’re all about inflicting pain on the poor and Black then capitalizing on Black pain. (See “The Evolution of Disaster Capitalism with Ezili Dantò.”) The ensuing social chaos is then capitalized upon to set up puppet neoDuvalierist US governments in Haiti, for the World Bank to draft Haiti mining laws, and for the uninterrupted Euro-US pillage and plunder of Haiti Riches — over $20 billion in gold reserves, its iridium, silver, copper, coal and the Haiti oil cache that some geologists say is a “pool to Venezuela’s cup of water.” (See Video report on Haiti Riches, Zili Dlo solar project and the works of Ezili Dantò/HLLN.)

Under the US occupation, it’s a “pain rush” in Haiti. Newspapers, foundations, “humanitarians,” think tanks write about it, elevate it, cash in on it, and keep it going, won’t tell you, ala Jared Diamond, that the Haiti struggle is cleared of cognitive dissonance only when you factor in structuralized white supremacist hatred — its genocidal germs, guns and steel. Oh, no, that’s downplayed.

Today’s mainstream media reports that chronic hunger in Haiti is rising mostly because of geography — the weather!

According to the Associated Press, much of the hunger crisis “stems from too little rain, and then too much,” corrupt Haiti politicians and because half of Haiti’s food is imported.

Although the article notes that:

“In 1997 some 1.2 million Haitians didn’t have enough food to eat. A decade later the number had more than doubled. Today, that figure is 6.7 million, or a staggering 67 percent of the population that goes without food some days…” (See “2 out of 3 people face hunger as Haiti woes mount,” AP, June 10, 2013)

It doesn’t contextualize it with US incessant destabilization, its sweatshop development and failed 40-year export led economy initiatives. But in any case, generally when a glimpse of the devastating depravity of the US occupation sneaks through the mainstream colonial narrative, it is quickly “democratized” by locating one Establishment “expert” to say that “there’s sufficient proof that at least some of the aid is reaching the population.” This journalistic trick then fully gains root to lift up (destructive) foreign aid as the only reason why the poor in Haiti are still alive. You’ll not read the truth, which is that the over $2 billion yearly in Haiti Diaspora remittances is the ONLY real direct aid to Haiti that actually reaches the population and keeps the poor alive.

Such colonial news on Haiti, will mostly remain silent about the centuries upon centuries and current US racist destabilization of Haiti while pimping out photos of our starving Black babies to sell newspapers, re-validate white supremacy, fuel humanitarian imperialism’s raison d’etre, give the NGOs a document to go raise more funds for their coffers.

The Euro colonial deforestation and their centuries of environmental harm or current open pit mining initiatives in Haiti are mostly non-existent in these colonial narratives on Haiti. For, only the peasants’ wood cutting for charcoal is highlighted. Nothing is noted about the current 10-year US occupation of Haiti behind UN guns — the totality of its devastating destructions in Haiti and failures. Nor the US support for the Duvalier dictatorships for 30 years from 1957 to 1986, the two US-sponsored coups in 1991 and then 2004 to reinstate Duvalierism over a democratically elected Haiti government, followed by the current US occupation behind UN guns. After all, the white savior industrial complex is as economically and socially benign today as it was during the Western tribes’ chattel enslavement of Ayiti, no?

“The US public won’t be taught about the nearly 10-year old US occupation of Haiti by the media. But in fact today, the US is Haiti’s mother country. And all around us the “colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards.” — Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Ezili Dantò is an award winning playwright, a performance poet, author and human rights attorney. She was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in the USA. She holds a BA from Boston College, a JD from the University of Connecticut School of law. She is a human rights lawyer, cultural and political activist and the founder and president of the Ezili’s Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN). She runs the Haitian Perspectives on-line journal and the Ezili Dantò Newsletter.

She can be contacted at http://www.ezilidanto.com/zili/contact-us/.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_far_north_of_experience_20130613/

Posted on Jun 13, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

Since the Rana Plaza building collapse killed more than 1,100 people in April, retailers have faced mounting pressure to improve safety at Bangladesh garment factories and to sever ties with manufacturers that don’t measure up.

Rescue workers attempt to find survivors from the rubble of the collapsed Rana Plaza building in Savar May 2, 2013. (REUTERS/Khurshed Rinku) The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, last month released a list of more than 200 factories it said it had barred from producing its merchandise because of serious or repeated safety problems, labor violations or unauthorized subcontracting.

But at least two of the factories on the list have continued to send massive shipments of sports bras and girls’ dresses to Walmart stores in recent months, according to interviews and U.S. customs records.

In June 2011, Walmart said, it banned the Bangladeshi garment factory Mars Apparels from producing goods for the retail giant. But over the last year, Mars has repeatedly shipped tons of sports bras to Walmart, according to U.S. customs records and Mars owners. The most recent shipment was in late May, almost two years after Walmart claims it stopped doing business with the Bangladeshi firm.

A second Bangladeshi clothing maker, Simco Dresses, was blacklisted in January but continued shipping to Walmart Canada into March.

Walmart spokesman Kevin Gardner said the Mars shipments were allowed because of confusion over whether Walmart’s standards applied. Mars didn’t produce garments with a Walmart house brand but instead with a Fruit of the Loom label. So, Gardner said, it wasn’t clear if Mars needed to meet Walmart’s standards or Fruit of the Loom’s.

Fruit of the Loom could not immediately be reached for comment.

As for Simco, orders that Walmart had already placed were accepted to lessen the impact on workers, Gardner said.

The shipments raise questions about Walmart’s ability to monitor its supply chain as well as its efforts to ensure decent working conditions in factories located in low-wage countries.

Interviews with Bangladeshi factory owners spotlight another potential problem: Walmart’s approach of publishing a blacklist with no further details might unfairly tar family businesses with minor violations.

International labor groups have been pressing retailers to sign an accord to pay for fire and building safety upgrades to Bangladesh factories. So far, several large retailers including H&M, Inditex and PVH Corp., which includes Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, have signed onto the agreement.

But many of the biggest retailers in the United States, including Walmart and Gap, have not. Instead, they are working on an alternative plan that they say will improve safety faster 2014 but that is not legally binding.

“We think the safety plan that we’ve put in place already meets or exceeds the [other] proposal and is going to get results more quickly,” Gardner said. “The point of the list is to get more accountability and transparency into our supply chain.”

Soon, he said, Walmart would also publish safety audits of its current suppliers in Bangladesh.

Dan Schlademan, a United Food and Commercial Workers leader who directs the union’s Making Change at Walmart campaign, said the shipments from barred factories show that Walmart’s program is hollow.

“It’s either a question of Walmart just telling people what they want to hear,” he said, “or it’s that Walmart has created a supply chain system that they have no control over.”

Making Change at Walmart initially provided the customs data. ProPublica verified the information and found other shipments using public data compiled by research firms serving the import-export industry.

Mars Apparels is a manufacturer of lingerie and sportswear in the port city of Chittagong. In the last year, the garment maker sent at least 22 shipments, totaling 80 tons, of sports bras through the Port of Newark, according to customs records compiled by Import Genius, a data consultant for the import-export industry. In each case, the customer was listed as “Walmart Stores” and the product mark as “Ariela-Alpha International,” whose brands include L.e.i. and Fruit of the Loom. (Ariela-Alpha did not return phone calls.)

Reached on a cell phone in Bangladesh, Shaker Ahmed, deputy managing director of Mars Apparels and the son of its founder, confirmed the customs data and said that the latest shipment went out last month. (Customs data show several May shipments in which the customer was listed as “WMR.”)

But Ahmed said that until contacted by ProPublica, he had never had any problems with Walmart or heard about its list of banned factories. He described Mars as a medium-sized garment manufacturer with less than 1,000 workers.

Ahmed said Mars has supplied Walmart for more than a decade, though since 2008 it has been making clothes for private labels such as Fruit of the Loom that are owned or licensed by an importer, which then supplies the clothing to Walmart.

When Mars was manufacturing clothing for Walmart brands, its factory was regularly audited by the company, Ahmed said. Walmart rates its suppliers green, yellow, orange and red, with green being the best and red the worst, he said. “We never received a rating below yellow.”

Since 2008, Ahmed said he has passed all audits by Fruit of the Loom, which uses the Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production program to inspect factories. Walmart said Mars didn’t meet all of its criteria, which it said is more stringent than WRAP’s. Ahmed said he welcomed Walmart to look at his factory and that the company is in the process of building a state-of-the-art facility.

Walmart accounts for a “very large” percentage of Mars’ business, Ahmed said. “If Walmart were to tell us they’re stopping production, if that were to happen, we would be destroyed. Our workers would be destroyed. We haven’t had a single incident in 19 years. We never had a problem. So that would be catastrophe.”

The other banned garment maker in the recent customs records, Simco Dresses, was blacklisted in January. The Import Genius records show three shipments of girls’ dresses in February and March to the Isfel Co. destined for Walmart Canada. Isfel didn’t return a call.

Customs records provided by another trade research firm PIERS show four more March shipments of knitted dresses and rompers, also destined for Walmart Canada.

The Bangladeshi press reported in January that Walmart had refused a shipment of women’s shorts from Simco after discovering unauthorized subcontracting to Tazreen Fashion, where a fire killed 117 people last year. Simco said at the time that Walmart’s ban could drive it into bankruptcy.

Simco’s managing director Muzaffar Siddique said his firm had subcontracted an order to an authorized Walmart supplier, which then sent the work to Tazreen without its knowledge.

Asked about the February and March shipments from Simco, Walmart spokesman Gardner said, “If it isn’t an egregious matter, we will accept goods produced under existing orders as part of our efforts to mitigate impact on the workers.”

Siddique contended that Walmart’s listing of his company is unfair and is damaging his family’s business. After the list was published, he said J.C. Penney canceled a $300,000 order for 500,000 pairs of pajamas.

“We are very upset about it,” Siddique said. “When I do business with you, it is like a doctor-patient relationship; there should be confidentiality. Walmart has no business going about publishing people’s names that it thinks are bad because that jeopardizes other business we are doing with our customers.”

Walmart is the only U.S. retailer to release a list of barred factories in Bangladesh. Gap, which also has a large presence in Bangladesh, said in a May statement that it has committed up to $22 million for factory improvements and that its stepped-up inspections have already led to some vendors upgrading their plants. But the company has said it would not sign on to the accord because of a provision that could allow victims of future factory accidents to sue the companies in U.S. courts.

Walmart, Gap and other large retailers are moving forward with developing an alternative safety plan with the help of former U.S. Sens. George Mitchell, D-Maine, and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

“We are committed to Bangladesh,” Gardner said. “We understand the role that we play in improving the livelihood of factory workers in that country. And improving the safety of those workers is very important to us.”

But Walmart’s approach of naming factories as “red-failed/unauthorized” has led to criticism in the Bangladeshi garment community that Walmart is trying to shift blame rather than serve as a partner.

“What Wal-Mart is doing at the moment is nothing but saving its own skin,” Reaz Bin Mahmood of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association told Reuters. “As a responsible business partner they should stay with us and help improve working conditions for the safety and security of workers.”

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that human genes cannot be patented, a victory for “patient care and medical innovation,” that will allow greater access to genetic testing and more affordable treatment for cancer patients, the American Civil Liberties Union said today.

A DNA double helix is seen in an undated artist’s illustration released by the National Human Genome Research Institute to Reuters on May 15, 2012.
(Reuters/National Human Genome Research Institute/Handout) The court decision invalidated patents on two genes associated with hereditary breast and ovarian cancer in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) on behalf of women’s health groups and thousands of researchers, health professionals and patients.

The case concerned patents on human genes held by Myriad Genetics, a Utah based corporation, on human genes that are tied to the risk of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, an issue that received public attention in May when actress Angelina Jolie revealed she had a preventive double mastectomy. The news spawned debate over the procedure that is out of reach for most patients because of the extremely high costs related to Myriad’s monopoly over the genes.

Myriad’s patents had allowed them to set the terms and cost of testing the genes and “made it difficult for women to access alternate tests or get a comprehensive second opinion about their results,” the ACLU explains.

ACLU continues:

The patents allowed a Utah company, Myriad Genetics, to control access to the genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, thereby giving them the right to limit others from doing research or diagnostic testing of the genes, which can be crucial for individuals making important medical decisions.

“Today, the court struck down a major barrier to patient care and medical innovation,” said Sandra Park, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project. “Myriad did not invent the BRCA genes and should not control them. Because of this ruling, patients will have greater access to genetic testing and scientists can engage in research on these genes without fear of being sued.”

The decision is a major shift in patent law, pertaining to human biology, and declares that all the patents on human genes are invalid.

Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the court’s decision, stated:

“We hold that a naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated.”

“The court rightfully found that patents cannot be awarded for something so fundamental to nature as DNA,” said Daniel B. Ravicher, executive director of PUBPAT and co-counsel in the lawsuit.

“I’m relieved that no other women will have to go through what I went through,” Lisbeth Ceriani, a breast cancer survivor and plaintiff in the case, was faced with having to pay over $4,000 for Myriad’s testing. “I’m so glad that the Supreme Court agrees that women deserve full access to vital information from their own bodies.”

The court did, however, rule that “synthetically produced genetic material” could be patented as opposed to genes extracted from the human body, known as isolated DNA.

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

US female military officers stand guard. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

[unable to retrieve full-text content]At least one in six children in Britain lives in relative poverty, new figures released by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) have revealed.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The number of children being homeschooled in America has increased by 75 percent over the past 14 years in all states, according to a report in the online journal Education News. While only four percent of all school children nationwide are educated at home, “the number of primary school kids whose parents choose to forgo traditional education is growing seven times faster than the number of kids enrolling in K-12 every year,” the report noted.

A study by the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) found that as of 2011 there were an estimated 2.346 million children being homeschooled in the United States. The findings were based on data from both state and federal education agencies as well as private home-school groups. Michael Smith, president of the Home School Legal Defense Association, called the phenomenon remarkable, noting that in the early 1980s, on the leading edge of the homeschool movement, “there were only an estimated 20,000 homeschooled children.”


Although the pioneers of homeschooling in the United States were largely conservative Christian parents concerned about the negative values permeating public school curriculum, over the past several years the reasons parents choose to educate their children at home have become more diverse. A 2006 study by the Department of Education found that 31 percent of parents who taught their kids at home did so out of concern for the public school environment, citing such issues as “safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure.” Another 30 percent said that home schooling offered them the ability to “provide their children with religious or moral instruction.” An additional 16.5 percent of parents cited dissatisfaction with “the academic instruction available” in the public schools, while about 14 percent said they chose homeschooling because of special needs of their children.


As for academic achievement, numerous studies over the years have confirmed that homeschooled kids outperform students in traditional classrooms. According to Education News, present data show “that those who are independently educated typically score between the 65th and 89th percentile on [standardized achievement] exams, while those attending traditional schools average in the 50th percentile.” The reported noted that the “achievement gaps, long plaguing school systems around the country, aren’t present in [the] homeschooling environment. There’s no difference in achievement between sexes, income levels or race/ethnicity.”

A 2009 NHERI study found that homeschoolers score an average of 34 to 39 percentile points higher than the norm on standardized achievement tests, and the national average for homeschooled students range from the 84th percentile for language, math, and social studies to the 89th percentile for reading.


Education News noted “college recruiters from the best schools in the United States aren’t slow to recognize homeschoolers’ achievements. Those from non-traditional education environments matriculate in colleges and attain a four-year degree at much higher rates than their counterparts from public and even private schools.”

Research in 2010 by Dr. Michael Cogan of the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota found that homeschooled college students fare better than conventional students on a number of levels:

— They earn a higher first-year GPA (3.41) than the overall average (3.12).


— Their fourth-year GPA (3.46) bests the overall average (3.16).



— They have a higher college graduation rate (66.7 percent) compared to the overall population (57.5 percent).

NEHRI and other home education groups noted that homeschooled students are actively recruited by the top schools in the nation, including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Stanford University, and Duke.

Home education experts predict no slow-down in the number of parents opting to educate their kids at home. Such researchers as NHERI’s Dr. Brian Ray “expect to observe a notable surge in the number of children being homeschooled in the next 5 to 10 years,” reported Education News. “The rise would be in terms of both absolute numbers and percentage of the K to 12 student population.”

While parents from diverse backgrounds are recognizing the benefits of home education, Dr. Ray pointed out that a significant number of today’s homeschool parents were themselves homeschooled children who want to re-create for their own children the successful learning environment they enjoyed.

This article originally appeared on: The New American

Since the Rana Plaza building collapse killed more than 1,100 people in April, retailers have faced mounting pressure to improve safety at Bangladesh garment factories and to sever ties with manufacturers that don’t measure up.

Rescue workers attempt to find survivors from the rubble of the collapsed Rana Plaza building in Savar May 2, 2013. (REUTERS/Khurshed Rinku) The world’s largest retailer, Walmart, last month released a list of more than 200 factories it said it had barred from producing its merchandise because of serious or repeated safety problems, labor violations or unauthorized subcontracting.

But at least two of the factories on the list have continued to send massive shipments of sports bras and girls’ dresses to Walmart stores in recent months, according to interviews and U.S. customs records.

In June 2011, Walmart said, it banned the Bangladeshi garment factory Mars Apparels from producing goods for the retail giant. But over the last year, Mars has repeatedly shipped tons of sports bras to Walmart, according to U.S. customs records and Mars owners. The most recent shipment was in late May, almost two years after Walmart claims it stopped doing business with the Bangladeshi firm.

A second Bangladeshi clothing maker, Simco Dresses, was blacklisted in January but continued shipping to Walmart Canada into March.

Walmart spokesman Kevin Gardner said the Mars shipments were allowed because of confusion over whether Walmart’s standards applied. Mars didn’t produce garments with a Walmart house brand but instead with a Fruit of the Loom label. So, Gardner said, it wasn’t clear if Mars needed to meet Walmart’s standards or Fruit of the Loom’s.

Fruit of the Loom could not immediately be reached for comment.

As for Simco, orders that Walmart had already placed were accepted to lessen the impact on workers, Gardner said.

The shipments raise questions about Walmart’s ability to monitor its supply chain as well as its efforts to ensure decent working conditions in factories located in low-wage countries.

Interviews with Bangladeshi factory owners spotlight another potential problem: Walmart’s approach of publishing a blacklist with no further details might unfairly tar family businesses with minor violations.

International labor groups have been pressing retailers to sign an accord to pay for fire and building safety upgrades to Bangladesh factories. So far, several large retailers including H&M, Inditex and PVH Corp., which includes Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, have signed onto the agreement.

But many of the biggest retailers in the United States, including Walmart and Gap, have not. Instead, they are working on an alternative plan that they say will improve safety faster 2014 but that is not legally binding.

“We think the safety plan that we’ve put in place already meets or exceeds the [other] proposal and is going to get results more quickly,” Gardner said. “The point of the list is to get more accountability and transparency into our supply chain.”

Soon, he said, Walmart would also publish safety audits of its current suppliers in Bangladesh.

Dan Schlademan, a United Food and Commercial Workers leader who directs the union’s Making Change at Walmart campaign, said the shipments from barred factories show that Walmart’s program is hollow.

“It’s either a question of Walmart just telling people what they want to hear,” he said, “or it’s that Walmart has created a supply chain system that they have no control over.”

Making Change at Walmart initially provided the customs data. ProPublica verified the information and found other shipments using public data compiled by research firms serving the import-export industry.

Mars Apparels is a manufacturer of lingerie and sportswear in the port city of Chittagong. In the last year, the garment maker sent at least 22 shipments, totaling 80 tons, of sports bras through the Port of Newark, according to customs records compiled by Import Genius, a data consultant for the import-export industry. In each case, the customer was listed as “Walmart Stores” and the product mark as “Ariela-Alpha International,” whose brands include L.e.i. and Fruit of the Loom. (Ariela-Alpha did not return phone calls.)

Reached on a cell phone in Bangladesh, Shaker Ahmed, deputy managing director of Mars Apparels and the son of its founder, confirmed the customs data and said that the latest shipment went out last month. (Customs data show several May shipments in which the customer was listed as “WMR.”)

But Ahmed said that until contacted by ProPublica, he had never had any problems with Walmart or heard about its list of banned factories. He described Mars as a medium-sized garment manufacturer with less than 1,000 workers.

Ahmed said Mars has supplied Walmart for more than a decade, though since 2008 it has been making clothes for private labels such as Fruit of the Loom that are owned or licensed by an importer, which then supplies the clothing to Walmart.

When Mars was manufacturing clothing for Walmart brands, its factory was regularly audited by the company, Ahmed said. Walmart rates its suppliers green, yellow, orange and red, with green being the best and red the worst, he said. “We never received a rating below yellow.”

Since 2008, Ahmed said he has passed all audits by Fruit of the Loom, which uses the Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production program to inspect factories. Walmart said Mars didn’t meet all of its criteria, which it said is more stringent than WRAP’s. Ahmed said he welcomed Walmart to look at his factory and that the company is in the process of building a state-of-the-art facility.

Walmart accounts for a “very large” percentage of Mars’ business, Ahmed said. “If Walmart were to tell us they’re stopping production, if that were to happen, we would be destroyed. Our workers would be destroyed. We haven’t had a single incident in 19 years. We never had a problem. So that would be catastrophe.”

The other banned garment maker in the recent customs records, Simco Dresses, was blacklisted in January. The Import Genius records show three shipments of girls’ dresses in February and March to the Isfel Co. destined for Walmart Canada. Isfel didn’t return a call.

Customs records provided by another trade research firm PIERS show four more March shipments of knitted dresses and rompers, also destined for Walmart Canada.

The Bangladeshi press reported in January that Walmart had refused a shipment of women’s shorts from Simco after discovering unauthorized subcontracting to Tazreen Fashion, where a fire killed 117 people last year. Simco said at the time that Walmart’s ban could drive it into bankruptcy.

Simco’s managing director Muzaffar Siddique said his firm had subcontracted an order to an authorized Walmart supplier, which then sent the work to Tazreen without its knowledge.

Asked about the February and March shipments from Simco, Walmart spokesman Gardner said, “If it isn’t an egregious matter, we will accept goods produced under existing orders as part of our efforts to mitigate impact on the workers.”

Siddique contended that Walmart’s listing of his company is unfair and is damaging his family’s business. After the list was published, he said J.C. Penney canceled a $300,000 order for 500,000 pairs of pajamas.

“We are very upset about it,” Siddique said. “When I do business with you, it is like a doctor-patient relationship; there should be confidentiality. Walmart has no business going about publishing people’s names that it thinks are bad because that jeopardizes other business we are doing with our customers.”

Walmart is the only U.S. retailer to release a list of barred factories in Bangladesh. Gap, which also has a large presence in Bangladesh, said in a May statement that it has committed up to $22 million for factory improvements and that its stepped-up inspections have already led to some vendors upgrading their plants. But the company has said it would not sign on to the accord because of a provision that could allow victims of future factory accidents to sue the companies in U.S. courts.

Walmart, Gap and other large retailers are moving forward with developing an alternative safety plan with the help of former U.S. Sens. George Mitchell, D-Maine, and Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

“We are committed to Bangladesh,” Gardner said. “We understand the role that we play in improving the livelihood of factory workers in that country. And improving the safety of those workers is very important to us.”

But Walmart’s approach of naming factories as “red-failed/unauthorized” has led to criticism in the Bangladeshi garment community that Walmart is trying to shift blame rather than serve as a partner.

“What Wal-Mart is doing at the moment is nothing but saving its own skin,” Reaz Bin Mahmood of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association told Reuters. “As a responsible business partner they should stay with us and help improve working conditions for the safety and security of workers.”

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

[unable to retrieve full-text content]Anti-government protesters in the Turkish city of Istanbul have rejected an ultimatum issued by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to evacuate a park next to the landmark Taksim Square.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranians have taken to the streets in the capital, Tehran, as the countryâ„¢s presidential candidates wrapped up their campaigns for the June 14 election.

Late Wednesday, the fervid atmosphere grew even stronger as election banners and rallying supporters and campaigners filled the streets.

In Tehran’s northern Tajrish Square, campaigners handed out CDs and brochures about their candidates. Many were also busily engaged in debates with passers-by to win votes for their candidate of choice.

Most of the campaigners there were supporters of principlist candidate Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf with their white scarves.

Å“Now we can completely feel the election mood and there is much hype and energy everywhere ahead of the vote,” a campaigner said.

The scene was more colorful further south and down Vali-e Asr Avenue, where the supporters of reformist candidate Hassan Rohani brandished their purple color.

Many cars looked like moving billboards for candidates, as supporters displayed posters of their favorite candidates on their cars.

Å“Everything has changed completely since last week; the city has a whole different face and everybody is in the election mood,” said a motorist behind the wheel.

Near the parliament building at Baharestan Square supporters of principlist candidate Saeed Jalili were passing out flyers, while in the central Vali-e Asr Square, fans of different candidates rallied on the sidewalks and chanted slogans.

Å“Last week there was not much happening, but in the past couple of days the election atmosphere has become really exciting,” a middle-aged citizen said.

Some stated that the three rounds of televised debates had helped build remarkable enthusiasm among the people.

Å“As far as I know people started to weigh the candidates and decide on the countryâ„¢s fate after they watched the debates on TV,” a female campaigner said.

Some campaigners had organized a rally summoning mostly their online supporters on the websites, where they have been posting their candidatesâ„¢ speeches and contacting fellow supporters across the country to call mass rallies and gatherings.

Å“As we get closer to the election, the atmosphere normally heats up and this is thanks to the activities of the candidates as well,” said a man who was participating in a rally in support of Qalibaf.

Å“The election is just around the corner and it is the peopleâ„¢s right to campaign and work for the person of their preference,” another campaigner remarked.

MRS/SS/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranians have taken to the streets in the capital, Tehran, as the countryâ„¢s presidential candidates wrapped up their campaigns for the June 14 election.

Late Wednesday, the fervid atmosphere grew even stronger as election banners and rallying supporters and campaigners filled the streets.

In Tehran’s northern Tajrish Square, campaigners handed out CDs and brochures about their candidates. Many were also busily engaged in debates with passers-by to win votes for their candidate of choice.

Most of the campaigners there were supporters of principlist candidate Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf with their white scarves.

Å“Now we can completely feel the election mood and there is much hype and energy everywhere ahead of the vote,” a campaigner said.

The scene was more colorful further south and down Vali-e Asr Avenue, where the supporters of reformist candidate Hassan Rohani brandished their purple color.

Many cars looked like moving billboards for candidates, as supporters displayed posters of their favorite candidates on their cars.

Å“Everything has changed completely since last week; the city has a whole different face and everybody is in the election mood,” said a motorist behind the wheel.

Near the parliament building at Baharestan Square supporters of principlist candidate Saeed Jalili were passing out flyers, while in the central Vali-e Asr Square, fans of different candidates rallied on the sidewalks and chanted slogans.

Å“Last week there was not much happening, but in the past couple of days the election atmosphere has become really exciting,” a middle-aged citizen said.

Some stated that the three rounds of televised debates had helped build remarkable enthusiasm among the people.

Å“As far as I know people started to weigh the candidates and decide on the countryâ„¢s fate after they watched the debates on TV,” a female campaigner said.

Some campaigners had organized a rally summoning mostly their online supporters on the websites, where they have been posting their candidatesâ„¢ speeches and contacting fellow supporters across the country to call mass rallies and gatherings.

Å“As we get closer to the election, the atmosphere normally heats up and this is thanks to the activities of the candidates as well,” said a man who was participating in a rally in support of Qalibaf.

Å“The election is just around the corner and it is the peopleâ„¢s right to campaign and work for the person of their preference,” another campaigner remarked.

MRS/SS/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Saeed Jalili, a candidate for the Iranian presidency. (Photo credit: PressTV)

Every four years when Iran holds presidential elections, U.S. journalists travel to Tehran, hang out with middle-class English speakers and — when the vote tallies are in — insist that the electoral outcome must have been rigged. But that typically reflects a lack of U.S. media objectivity about Iran.

This year’s Iranian presidential election is likely to produce a strong political figure who will have a significant impact on the Islamic Republic’s foreign and domestic policies, helping to ensure Iran’s continued internal development and bolstering its regional importance.

Yet every four years, a combustible mix of pro-Israel advocates, Iranian expatriates, Western Iran “experts,” and their fellow travelers in the media try to use Iranian presidential elections as a frame for persuading Westerners that the Islamic Republic is an illegitimate system so despised by its people as to be at imminent risk of overthrow.

Iran’s election processes, pundits tell us, will be manipulated to produce a winner chosen by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei – a “selection rather than an election” – consolidating Khamenei’s dictatorial hold over Iranian politics. Either Iranians will be sufficiently outraged to rise up against the system, commentators intone, or the world will have to deal with increasingly authoritarian – and dangerous – clerical-military rule in Tehran.

But this year’s presidential campaign, like its predecessors, challenges Westerners’ deep attachment to myths of the Islamic Republic’s illegitimacy and fragility. The eight candidates initially approved by the Guardian Council represented a broad spectrum of conservative and reformist views. While one conservative and the most clear-cut reformist – neither of whom attracted much support – have withdrawn, they did so not from intimidation but to prevent conservative and reformist votes from being dissipated across too many candidates from each camp.

Contrary to an engineered selection, Iran is in the final days of a real contest. Candidates have had broad and regular access to national media, (including the broadcasting of extended videos about each candidate prepared by their campaigns), have advertised and held campaign events, and have participated in three nationally televised (and widely watched) debates.

High-quality surveys by both Western and Iranian pollsters show that the campaign is having a powerful effect on the eventual outcome. Western pundits and journalists have regularly identified nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili as Khamenei’s “anointed” candidate and the clear “front-runner.” But high-quality polls have never identified Jalili as the clear front-runner.

As election day looms, moreover, polls conducted after the final debate show Jalili losing ground to three rivals: Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezae, and former nuclear negotiator Hassan Rohani (the only cleric on the ballot).

The data strongly suggest that no candidate will win a majority of votes cast on June 14 – meaning there will almost certainly be a second-round runoff on June 21 between the first round’s two best performers. Among the four leading candidates – Jalili, Qalibaf, Rezae, and Rohani – Qalibaf seems best positioned to make a runoff; more voters now say they will cast first-round votes for him than for anyone else.

As Jalili, Rezae and Rohani compete, effectively, for the second runoff spot, all three have substantial organizational networks. But Rezae and Rohani emerged from the debates with rising popular support; Jalili did not.

And Rohani is working to mobilize reformist and centrist voters behind him; former presidents Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (arguably the quintessential Iranian centrist) and Mohammad Khatami (the Islamic Republic’s only reformist president) have both endorsed him. Neither Jalili’s runoff spot nor his second-round victory is anywhere close to a “sure thing.”

More broadly, all four serious contenders have long records of service to the Islamic Republic. Their dedication to the Iranian Revolution and the political order it created is beyond question. Yet each advocates a distinctive presidential agenda and leadership style to advance the Islamic Republic’s domestic and international interests over the next several years.

The relevant question is not whether the Islamic Republic meets Western preferences for selecting political candidates – clearly it doesn’t – but whether most Iranians believe they have meaningful choice in this year’s election. On this point, polls suggest that first-round turnout will be around 70 percent – not as high as 2009′s extraordinary 85 percent, but respectably high compared to previous presidential elections. Whichever candidate ultimately emerges as Iran’s next president, it will be because he earned the requisite degree of electoral support, not because he was “anointed.”

And whether the next Iranian president is named Jalili, Qalibaf, Rezae or Rohani, he will almost certainly prove to be a highly consequential figure in the Islamic Republic’s political history. The Islamic Republic’s last four presidents – Seyed Ali Khamenei (now Supreme Leader), Rafsanjani, Khatami, and outgoing incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – were all accomplished figures in office, winning re-election and substantially affecting both domestic and foreign policies.

Yet all four also had to deal with – and were, at times, deeply frustrated by – other power centers in the Islamic Republic’s constitutional order, including the Supreme Leader and the popularly elected parliament.

This dynamic will continue into Iran’s next presidency. Since succeeding Imam Khomeini, the Islamic Republic’s founding father, as Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei has ascribed high priority to maintaining balance in the system – balance among ideological factions and among constitutionally defined power centers.

As Leader, Khamenei allowed Rafsanjani, Khatami, and Ahmadinejad to pursue large parts of their self-defined and very different presidential agendas; but he also restrained them when he judged that their initiatives might weaken the Islamic Republic’s identity and long-term security. Khamenei will continue playing this role after Iran’s newly elected president replaces the term-limited Ahmadinejad in August.

Parliament will also continue constraining presidential prerogative. Under speaker Ali Larijani, parliament pushed back with increasing intensity against a range of presidential initiatives and interests during Ahmadinejad’s second term. For pro-Ahmadinejad Iranians, this was unfortunate; for Ahmadinejad opponents – especially among conservatives – it was gratifying. The more important point is that this is how the Islamic Republic is designed to function – and almost certainly will function after the next president takes office.

Americans and most other Westerners have never been able to take the Islamic Republic seriously as a system – one reason successive U.S. administrations have, for three decades, bought into perennially mistaken, agenda-driven claims of the Islamic Republic’s vulnerability and impending collapse.

Westerners must tune out constant efforts to demonize Iran’s revolutionary order if they are to look soberly at the reality of Iranian politics. For only then will they be able to see the Islamic Republic as a polity with which their own governments can (and should) come to terms

Flynt Leverett served as a Middle East expert on George W. Bush’s National Security Council staff until the Iraq War and worked previously at the State Department and at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Hillary Mann Leverett was the NSC expert on Iran and — from 2001 to 2003 — was one of only a few U.S. diplomats authorized to negotiate with the Iranians over Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and Iraq. They are authors of Going to Tehran. 

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

For nearly three weeks, thousands of protestors have gathered peacefully at Occupy Gezi in Taksim Square in Istanbul. Turkish police have unleashed a brutal crackdown, resulting in three confirmed deaths and nearly 5,000 injured. According to Turkish lawyer Kerem Gulay, a Fulbright Scholar and doctoral student at Cornell Law School, police tactics include excessive beatings with police batons and rifle handles, and the use of pepper spray and other chemicals, rubber bullets, and, allegedly, real bullets.

In order to provide a pretext for police aggression against peaceful protestors, undercover police officers, acting as agents provocateurs, threw Molotov cocktails Tuesday at police, after which police launched a vicious attack on protestors.

A broad coalition of groups courageously gathered in Taksim Square is protesting neoliberal governmental policies, including economic, agricultural and environmental policies, human rights abuses, mass detentions, privatization of water resources, attacks on freedom of the press and on freedom of religion, and the treatment of Kurdish citizens of Turkey. The protestors’ politics range from moderate to center right to nationalist to left liberal to extreme leftist. “All these people have in common,” Gulay told me, “is they are critical of government policies.”

When lawyers were issuing a press statement decrying the mass detentions of their clients, some 50 lawyers were arrested and dragged on the ground by riot police. Many lawyers were injured before they were released 10 hours later. Nearly 3,000 lawyers gathered at the courthouse Tuesday to protest these detentions.

There is an ongoing and dangerous process of criminalization of lawyers in Turkey. Nine of fifteen lawyers arrested on January 18, 2013, for representing unpopular clients, remain in custody without charges or access to legal papers about their cases. On that date, police raided the Istanbul and Ankara offices of the Progressive Lawyers Association (CHD), a member organization of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL). Twelve CHD officers or members were violently detained under vague terrorism-related allegations. They were interrogated about their representation of clients. They were denied water and the use of a bathroom.

These arrests, detentions, and seizure of property–including confidential client files–violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The cases are pending in the Special Heavy Penal Courts, which have jurisdiction over “terrorism” proceedings. Their use of secret evidence and repressive procedures have been condemned by several international and regional human rights monitoring bodies and mechanisms. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, Gabriela Knaul, who recently visited Turkey, strongly criticized [PDF] the Special Heavy Penal Courts, saying their “special authority” does not comply with human rights standards on fair trial, and they should therefore be abolished.

A group of 500 lawyers who went to the courthouse to protest the lawyers’ detention in January were assaulted by police. The Istanbul Bar Associationlambasted the unlawful raids as an “explicit attack towards the legal profession and its honor, as well as the people’s right to legal remedies.”

When I visited Istanbul as a representative of IADL in April, I met with officers of the Istanbul Bar Association, and I spoke with lawyers who had been arrested and released after the January raid. Some are members of CHD. Many specialize in defending victims of torture, arbitrary detention, extrajudicial executions, police brutality and other human rights violations. They also provide free legal assistance in terrorism-related cases, and those involving freedom of expression or protection of the environment. Because of their work in defending clients who challenge government policies, CHD lawyers have been targeted by the government and the police.

Knual also reaffirmed the principle that a government should not identify lawyers with the causes of their clients. The United Nations Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers mandate that governments ensure lawyers are able to perform their professional functions without intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper interference. They also provide that lawyers shall not be identified with their clients or their clients’ causes as a result of discharging their functions.

The president of the Istanbul Bar Association has been accused of contempt of court for protesting the January detentions of lawyers. According to the 2010 US State Department country report on Turkey, there are more than 10,000 people suspected of “terrorism” in Turkey (one-third of the world’s terrorism suspects). Several hundred students, as well as army officials, journalists, lawyers, academics, Kurdish activists, nationalist activists, soldiers and members of the Turkish parliament are in prison, Gulay said.

Frequent and systematic repression against political and human rights activists in Turkey, particularly lawyers and journalists, has been well documented. This year alone, representatives of IADL witnessed evidence of the Turkish state’s enforcement of broad and oppressive laws to suppress political dissent from journalists, lawyers, trade unionists and citizens.

The Turkish government must immediately halt all police repression against Turkey’s protestors, including police beatings, the use of tear gas and other chemicals; release all detained protesters who were expressing their fundamental right to freedom of expression; and launch an immediate investigation into the human rights abuses committed against the Turkish people since the beginning of the protests, including an investigation into the unlawful use of tear gas and other chemicals.

Taksim Solidarity, the group that was organized before the recent demonstrations to stop the notorious Taksim project of the government, and which has become the voice of the resistance, has declared June 13 International Day of Solidarity with the resisting people in Turkey. Taksim Solidarity invites progressive people around the world to condemn the police violence carried out by the direct order of the government and to show their solidarity. CHD has also issued a call for international solidarity and asks lawyers organizations and human rights organizations to express their concerns to the Turkish government and state bodies. IADL calls upon people throughout the world to join us in demanding an end to the violence against Turkish protestors and accountability.

Marjorie Cohn is a Professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, past president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her next book, “Drones and Targeted Killing,” will be published in 2014 by University of California Press.

This article originally appeared in Jurist. 

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

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This article originally appeared on: AlterNet

Max Keiser
RT
June 13, 2013

Shock jock Alex Jones exploded on Andrew Neil’s “Sunday Politics” show on the BBC and Brits were aghast. This man opined the host, while make circling gestures around his head indicating mental instability, “We have an idiot on the program today.”

24-hours later a video of the appearance surpassed 1million views on YouTube and this is the point. There is a huge audience for Alex Jones and alternative media in general.

Is this just a stunt or is there something more at play here?

In two words: Nigel Farage. Nigel is one of the most radical populists in British politics in years and thanks to shock jocks like Alex Jones, he’s somewhat under a radar while he accumulates — what some now estimate — 15% of the British popular vote; and trending higher. When compared to what Alex Jones is blaring at the top of his lungs to, a huge British audience of millions who tune into his show regularly, an upstart politician like Farage — with a radical agenda — appear highly reasonable. It’s the old ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine played for votes (Ron and Rand Paul have appeared on Alex Jones’ show in the US increasing their political fortunes enormously using the same technique).

Two years ago Nigel Farage of UKIP was destined to be a fringe MEP of a fringe party but then videos of Nigel making impassioned speeches on Youtube attracted a worldwide audience of dissatisfied and disaffected voters and supports around the world. Then Nigel started appearing on major, albeit alternative media outlets like Eric King’s influential “King World News” (with a global base of very educated, very wealthy HNWI (High Net Worth Individuals). Then the Drudge Report picked up the scent, and other influential sites like Peter Schiff’s “Schiff Report.” As a result Nigel Farage is more famous globally than any other UK politician.

Nigel Farage (Reuters / Olivia Harris)

RT too started playing videos of Nigel as well as interviewing him, and RT is the first broadcaster to cross 1 billion videos on YouTube for a global TV network; with a global reach approaching 700 million viewers. It’s a reciprocal relationship. Their audience is hungry for honesty and a new wave of journalist, politicians and shock jocks are giving it to them.

Nobody in the Mainstream Media reports on these trends in Britain or in the U.S. and in the case of Alex Jones there is no chance Alex will lead a majority party in the UK but in Farage’s case there is a real possibility that he’ll supplant the Liberal Democrats as Britain’s third biggest party and could very well be on his way to becoming part of the UK’s political duopoly. And this was accomplished under the noses of the BBC and every major outlet in the UK who is playing catch up to other global broadcasters and alternative media who are pushing candidates of Alex Jones into the ‘superstar’ category and possibly the front benches.

Addendum: I sent an email to BBC producer Robbie Gibb who asked me to email him regarding the phenomenon that is Alex Jones and how the BBC might be able to tap into this huge, under served, and politically aware audience — and in typical BBC fashion — the response so far is that they’ll ‘think about it.’ Meanwhile, the media and political landscape beneath Britain’s feat is shifting and those who ignore the significance of Alex Jones’ ranting on “Sunday Politics” will have to take early retirement. But in a country of media laggards and layabouts I’m sure that’s the best possible news they could hope for.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 10:49 am

Tags: foreign affairs, mainstream media

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Max Keiser
RT
June 13, 2013

Shock jock Alex Jones exploded on Andrew Neil’s “Sunday Politics” show on the BBC and Brits were aghast. This man opined the host, while make circling gestures around his head indicating mental instability, “We have an idiot on the program today.”

24-hours later a video of the appearance surpassed 1million views on YouTube and this is the point. There is a huge audience for Alex Jones and alternative media in general.

Is this just a stunt or is there something more at play here?

In two words: Nigel Farage. Nigel is one of the most radical populists in British politics in years and thanks to shock jocks like Alex Jones, he’s somewhat under a radar while he accumulates — what some now estimate — 15% of the British popular vote; and trending higher. When compared to what Alex Jones is blaring at the top of his lungs to, a huge British audience of millions who tune into his show regularly, an upstart politician like Farage — with a radical agenda — appear highly reasonable. It’s the old ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine played for votes (Ron and Rand Paul have appeared on Alex Jones’ show in the US increasing their political fortunes enormously using the same technique).

Two years ago Nigel Farage of UKIP was destined to be a fringe MEP of a fringe party but then videos of Nigel making impassioned speeches on Youtube attracted a worldwide audience of dissatisfied and disaffected voters and supports around the world. Then Nigel started appearing on major, albeit alternative media outlets like Eric King’s influential “King World News” (with a global base of very educated, very wealthy HNWI (High Net Worth Individuals). Then the Drudge Report picked up the scent, and other influential sites like Peter Schiff’s “Schiff Report.” As a result Nigel Farage is more famous globally than any other UK politician.

Nigel Farage (Reuters / Olivia Harris)

RT too started playing videos of Nigel as well as interviewing him, and RT is the first broadcaster to cross 1 billion videos on YouTube for a global TV network; with a global reach approaching 700 million viewers. It’s a reciprocal relationship. Their audience is hungry for honesty and a new wave of journalist, politicians and shock jocks are giving it to them.

Nobody in the Mainstream Media reports on these trends in Britain or in the U.S. and in the case of Alex Jones there is no chance Alex will lead a majority party in the UK but in Farage’s case there is a real possibility that he’ll supplant the Liberal Democrats as Britain’s third biggest party and could very well be on his way to becoming part of the UK’s political duopoly. And this was accomplished under the noses of the BBC and every major outlet in the UK who is playing catch up to other global broadcasters and alternative media who are pushing candidates of Alex Jones into the ‘superstar’ category and possibly the front benches.

Addendum: I sent an email to BBC producer Robbie Gibb who asked me to email him regarding the phenomenon that is Alex Jones and how the BBC might be able to tap into this huge, under served, and politically aware audience — and in typical BBC fashion — the response so far is that they’ll ‘think about it.’ Meanwhile, the media and political landscape beneath Britain’s feat is shifting and those who ignore the significance of Alex Jones’ ranting on “Sunday Politics” will have to take early retirement. But in a country of media laggards and layabouts I’m sure that’s the best possible news they could hope for.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 10:49 am

Tags: foreign affairs, mainstream media

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Daniel Strauss
The Hill
June 13, 2013

The federal surveillance programs revealed in media reports are just “the tip of the iceberg,” a House Democrat said Wednesday.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) said lawmakers learned “significantly more” about the spy programs at the National Security Agency during a briefing on Tuesday with counter-terrorism officials.

“What we learned in there,” Sanchez said, “is significantly more than what is out in the media today.”

Read more

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 10:59 am

Tags: big brother, constitution, domestic news, domestic spying, government corruption

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Daniel Strauss
The Hill
June 13, 2013

The federal surveillance programs revealed in media reports are just “the tip of the iceberg,” a House Democrat said Wednesday.

Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.) said lawmakers learned “significantly more” about the spy programs at the National Security Agency during a briefing on Tuesday with counter-terrorism officials.

“What we learned in there,” Sanchez said, “is significantly more than what is out in the media today.”

Read more

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 10:59 am

Tags: big brother, constitution, domestic news, domestic spying, government corruption

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Syrian Army soldiers have killed dozens of foreign-sponsored militants during mop-up operations on the outskirts of the capital Damascus.

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

Two mortar launchers and a heavy machinegun used by a militant group were also destroyed in the operation.

Syrian troops also stormed a terrorist hideout in the city of Douma, located about 10 kilometers (six miles) northeast of Damascus, and shot dead scores of militants.

Additionally, Syrian troops clashed with militants affiliated to the terrorist group Jabhat al-Nusra in the district of Adraa. Dozens of gunmen were killed in the heavy exchange of fire.

A terrorist hideout was also raided by the Syrian forces in the district, and several anti-government gunmen were killed. A large amount of weapons and munitions was also destroyed after the fierce gun battle.

Separately, a unit of government 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 town of Halboun, situated some 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Damascus, Syrian soldiers raided a terrorist hideout and shot dead scores of militants. A large amount of munitions was also destroyed after heavy clashes.

Syrian troops engaged Jabhat al-Nusra militants in al-Nabk city, located 81 kilometers (50 miles) north of Damascus. Dozens of gunmen were killed and wounded during the heavy clashes.

Syrian forces also raided a terrorist hideout in the town of al-Husseiniya, and shot dead scores of armed men. A heavy machinegun used by militants was also destroyed.

In addition, Syrian troops fully purged the Abo Hbeilat village in the western province of Hama of foreign-backed militants on Thursday.

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/KA

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Syrian Army soldiers have killed dozens of foreign-sponsored militants during mop-up operations on the outskirts of the capital Damascus.

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

Two mortar launchers and a heavy machinegun used by a militant group were also destroyed in the operation.

Syrian troops also stormed a terrorist hideout in the city of Douma, located about 10 kilometers (six miles) northeast of Damascus, and shot dead scores of militants.

Additionally, Syrian troops clashed with militants affiliated to the terrorist group Jabhat al-Nusra in the district of Adraa. Dozens of gunmen were killed in the heavy exchange of fire.

A terrorist hideout was also raided by the Syrian forces in the district, and several anti-government gunmen were killed. A large amount of weapons and munitions was also destroyed after the fierce gun battle.

Separately, a unit of government 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 town of Halboun, situated some 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Damascus, Syrian soldiers raided a terrorist hideout and shot dead scores of militants. A large amount of munitions was also destroyed after heavy clashes.

Syrian troops engaged Jabhat al-Nusra militants in al-Nabk city, located 81 kilometers (50 miles) north of Damascus. Dozens of gunmen were killed and wounded during the heavy clashes.

Syrian forces also raided a terrorist hideout in the town of al-Husseiniya, and shot dead scores of armed men. A heavy machinegun used by militants was also destroyed.

In addition, Syrian troops fully purged the Abo Hbeilat village in the western province of Hama of foreign-backed militants on Thursday.

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/KA

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/once_in_a_century_floods_due_every_ten_years_20130613/

Posted on Jun 13, 2013

This article originally appeared on: TruthDig

Iranian presidential candidate Ali Akbar Velayati has pledged to solve Iranâ„¢s economic problems by adopting production-oriented policies and rebuilding Tehranâ„¢s ties with the international community.

Å“In the macroeconomic arena, we should do two things: firstly, reconstruction of the countryâ„¢s economy around the pivot of production and support for producers; and secondly, rebuilding of foreign relations. Our relations with other countries need to be rebuilt,” said Velayati in his campaign speech in the southern Iranian city of Bandar Abbas.

The principlist candidate pointed to his plans to form a Å“Complementary Administration” if elected president, adding, Å“In that ËœComplementary Administrationâ„¢, we will fight against financial corruption, bureaucratic corruption, and other kinds of corruption.”

Å“Those who will be part of our administration should be pious and faithful to religion, so that we would not witness corruption anymore,” he said.

Velayati pointed to the high unemployment rate among the Iranian youth and said, Å“One of our most basic programs is to create jobs.”

Å“The experienced people [in the future administration] should transfer their expertise to the youth. Moreover, these people must be experts, favor expertise, and support the experts,” he added.

Velayati underscored his resolve to take advantage of moderate figures in his future administration, noting, Å“They should be centrists and not extremists. They should not go to the extremes. Islam is the religion of moderation and balance. Extremism will be fought against.”

Velayati is facing five rivals – President of the Expediency Council’s Center for Strategic Research Hassan Rohani, Expediency Council Secretary Mohsen Rezaei, Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, Supreme National Security Council Secretary Saeed Jalili, and former Telecommunications Minister Mohammad Gharazi – in Iran’s 11th presidential election.

Former Majlis Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel and former First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref withdrew their candidacy bids earlier this week.

The president of Iran is elected for a four-year term in a national election. Nearly 50.5 million Iranians are eligible to vote in the upcoming presidential poll which is to be held on Friday.

ASH/SS/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

For nearly three weeks, thousands of protestors have gathered peacefully at Occupy Gezi in Taksim Square in Istanbul. Turkish police have unleashed a brutal crackdown, resulting in three confirmed deaths and nearly 5,000 injured. According to Turkish lawyer Kerem Gulay, a Fulbright Scholar and doctoral student at Cornell Law School, police tactics include excessive beatings with police batons and rifle handles, and the use of pepper spray and other chemicals, rubber bullets, and, allegedly, real bullets.

In order to provide a pretext for police aggression against peaceful protestors, undercover police officers, acting as agents provocateurs, threw Molotov cocktails Tuesday at police, after which police launched a vicious attack on protestors.

A broad coalition of groups courageously gathered in Taksim Square is protesting neoliberal governmental policies, including economic, agricultural and environmental policies, human rights abuses, mass detentions, privatization of water resources, attacks on freedom of the press and on freedom of religion, and the treatment of Kurdish citizens of Turkey. The protestors’ politics range from moderate to center right to nationalist to left liberal to extreme leftist. “All these people have in common,” Gulay told me, “is they are critical of government policies.”

When lawyers were issuing a press statement decrying the mass detentions of their clients, some 50 lawyers were arrested and dragged on the ground by riot police. Many lawyers were injured before they were released 10 hours later. Nearly 3,000 lawyers gathered at the courthouse Tuesday to protest these detentions.

There is an ongoing and dangerous process of criminalization of lawyers in Turkey. Nine of fifteen lawyers arrested on January 18, 2013, for representing unpopular clients, remain in custody without charges or access to legal papers about their cases. On that date, police raided the Istanbul and Ankara offices of the Progressive Lawyers Association (CHD), a member organization of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL). Twelve CHD officers or members were violently detained under vague terrorism-related allegations. They were interrogated about their representation of clients. They were denied water and the use of a bathroom.

These arrests, detentions, and seizure of property–including confidential client files–violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The cases are pending in the Special Heavy Penal Courts, which have jurisdiction over “terrorism” proceedings. Their use of secret evidence and repressive procedures have been condemned by several international and regional human rights monitoring bodies and mechanisms. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Independence of Judges and Lawyers, Gabriela Knaul, who recently visited Turkey, strongly criticized [PDF] the Special Heavy Penal Courts, saying their “special authority” does not comply with human rights standards on fair trial, and they should therefore be abolished.

A group of 500 lawyers who went to the courthouse to protest the lawyers’ detention in January were assaulted by police. The Istanbul Bar Associationlambasted the unlawful raids as an “explicit attack towards the legal profession and its honor, as well as the people’s right to legal remedies.”

When I visited Istanbul as a representative of IADL in April, I met with officers of the Istanbul Bar Association, and I spoke with lawyers who had been arrested and released after the January raid. Some are members of CHD. Many specialize in defending victims of torture, arbitrary detention, extrajudicial executions, police brutality and other human rights violations. They also provide free legal assistance in terrorism-related cases, and those involving freedom of expression or protection of the environment. Because of their work in defending clients who challenge government policies, CHD lawyers have been targeted by the government and the police.

Knual also reaffirmed the principle that a government should not identify lawyers with the causes of their clients. The United Nations Basic Principles on the Role of Lawyers mandate that governments ensure lawyers are able to perform their professional functions without intimidation, hindrance, harassment or improper interference. They also provide that lawyers shall not be identified with their clients or their clients’ causes as a result of discharging their functions.

The president of the Istanbul Bar Association has been accused of contempt of court for protesting the January detentions of lawyers. According to the 2010 US State Department country report on Turkey, there are more than 10,000 people suspected of “terrorism” in Turkey (one-third of the world’s terrorism suspects). Several hundred students, as well as army officials, journalists, lawyers, academics, Kurdish activists, nationalist activists, soldiers and members of the Turkish parliament are in prison, Gulay said.

Frequent and systematic repression against political and human rights activists in Turkey, particularly lawyers and journalists, has been well documented. This year alone, representatives of IADL witnessed evidence of the Turkish state’s enforcement of broad and oppressive laws to suppress political dissent from journalists, lawyers, trade unionists and citizens.

The Turkish government must immediately halt all police repression against Turkey’s protestors, including police beatings, the use of tear gas and other chemicals; release all detained protesters who were expressing their fundamental right to freedom of expression; and launch an immediate investigation into the human rights abuses committed against the Turkish people since the beginning of the protests, including an investigation into the unlawful use of tear gas and other chemicals.

Taksim Solidarity, the group that was organized before the recent demonstrations to stop the notorious Taksim project of the government, and which has become the voice of the resistance, has declared June 13 International Day of Solidarity with the resisting people in Turkey. Taksim Solidarity invites progressive people around the world to condemn the police violence carried out by the direct order of the government and to show their solidarity. CHD has also issued a call for international solidarity and asks lawyers organizations and human rights organizations to express their concerns to the Turkish government and state bodies. IADL calls upon people throughout the world to join us in demanding an end to the violence against Turkish protestors and accountability.

Marjorie Cohn is a Professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, past president of the National Lawyers Guild, and deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers. Her next book, “Drones and Targeted Killing,” will be published in 2014 by University of California Press.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Taxpayers likely to foot half the bill for secret meeting

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
June 13, 2013

The security operation surrounding the secret Bilderberg meeting in Watford, England, last week cost a whopping £1 million according to police, and British taxpayers are set to foot at least half the bill.

The Watford Observer reports that Hertfordshire Constabulary revealed the figures today, noting that the Bilderberg Group made a “donation” of £500,000 following media scrutiny and complaints from activists and local residents.

Police said that the £1 million figure was an estimate, and that they were still totalling up the actual costs of the exercise to facilitate the elite delegates, including the Prime Minister David Cameron, Chancellor George Osborne and shadow chancellor Ed Balls, as well as catering for the protesters at the Fringe festival event.

Officers from 12 forces had to be drafted in to enforce road closures under anti-terror laws, help erect a huge ring of steel perimeter, and oversee the enforcement of a no-fly zone.

Police are still negotiating with the Home Office over how much they will have to pay toward the costs of the meeting, having applied for an emergency grant solely for the purposes of hosting the Bilderberg Group in Hertfordshire.

The Mayor of Watford issued a statement this week, revealing that she was forced to sign the official secrets act before she could be briefed on any of the events surrounding the Bilderberg meeting, hammering home the importance of the gathering.

During a town hall meeting prior to the beginning of the conference, police told reporters and local residents that they were sure the event would be “cost neutral” for Hertfordshire taxpayers. Now, however, it seems that those assurances were completely inaccurate.

Before the confab started, police had also underestimated the amount of protesters that would attend, believing that only around 100 would show up.

When 2000 people had entered the designated protest area inside the grounds of The Grove Hotel on Saturday, police instigated a “one in, one out” policy and began turning away hundreds more people.

Furthermore, local residents were forced to endure protesters parking on and occupying their roads, as thousands descended on the area. When all was said and done, parking spaces were virtually non-existant, and police actively dissuaded protesters from leaving their vehicles anywhere near the scene.

Despite the huge turnout, only two arrests were made during the protests, with all events proceeding peacefully.

–––––––––––––––––––––-

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.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 10:40 am

Tags: bilderberg

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Taxpayers likely to foot half the bill for secret meeting

Steve Watson
Infowars.com
June 13, 2013

The security operation surrounding the secret Bilderberg meeting in Watford, England, last week cost a whopping £1 million according to police, and British taxpayers are set to foot at least half the bill.

The Watford Observer reports that Hertfordshire Constabulary revealed the figures today, noting that the Bilderberg Group made a “donation” of £500,000 following media scrutiny and complaints from activists and local residents.

Police said that the £1 million figure was an estimate, and that they were still totalling up the actual costs of the exercise to facilitate the elite delegates, including the Prime Minister David Cameron, Chancellor George Osborne and shadow chancellor Ed Balls, as well as catering for the protesters at the Fringe festival event.

Officers from 12 forces had to be drafted in to enforce road closures under anti-terror laws, help erect a huge ring of steel perimeter, and oversee the enforcement of a no-fly zone.

Police are still negotiating with the Home Office over how much they will have to pay toward the costs of the meeting, having applied for an emergency grant solely for the purposes of hosting the Bilderberg Group in Hertfordshire.

The Mayor of Watford issued a statement this week, revealing that she was forced to sign the official secrets act before she could be briefed on any of the events surrounding the Bilderberg meeting, hammering home the importance of the gathering.

During a town hall meeting prior to the beginning of the conference, police told reporters and local residents that they were sure the event would be “cost neutral” for Hertfordshire taxpayers. Now, however, it seems that those assurances were completely inaccurate.

Before the confab started, police had also underestimated the amount of protesters that would attend, believing that only around 100 would show up.

When 2000 people had entered the designated protest area inside the grounds of The Grove Hotel on Saturday, police instigated a “one in, one out” policy and began turning away hundreds more people.

Furthermore, local residents were forced to endure protesters parking on and occupying their roads, as thousands descended on the area. When all was said and done, parking spaces were virtually non-existant, and police actively dissuaded protesters from leaving their vehicles anywhere near the scene.

Despite the huge turnout, only two arrests were made during the protests, with all events proceeding peacefully.

–––––––––––––––––––––-

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.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 10:40 am

Tags: bilderberg

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

News outlets are reporting a “major blast” and “hydrocarbon fire” at a chemical plant in Geismar, Louisiana with reports of injuries and possible fatalities.

(Photo via WAFB Baton Rouge) The William Olefins plant produces approximately 1.3 billion pounds of ethylene and 90 million pounds of polymer grade propylene, according to the Williams website. These chemicals are the basic building blocks in the petrochemical process used to make plastics.

The blast was reported at approximately 8:30am local time. According to reports, a hazardous materials team is on the scene preparing to to decontaminate the area.

A neighboring plant warned local news outlet WAFB in Baton Rouge that the major exposure following the explosion is “Butadiene spheres,” which could potentially trigger another explosion. They say that Williams Olefine has a hydrocarbon fire and the concern is that another explosion could occur and the fire is not under control.

WAFB 9 News Baton Rouge, Louisiana News, Weather, Sports

The blast comes two months after a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas devastated the surrounding area and, because of lax zoning laws and regulatory enforcement, caused plums of toxic clouds to spread throughout the community.

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

News outlets are reporting a “major blast” and “hydrocarbon fire” at a chemical plant in Geismar, Louisiana with reports of injuries and possible fatalities.

(Photo via WAFB Baton Rouge) The William Olefins plant produces approximately 1.3 billion pounds of ethylene and 90 million pounds of polymer grade propylene, according to the Williams website. These chemicals are the basic building blocks in the petrochemical process used to make plastics.

The blast was reported at approximately 8:30am local time. According to reports, a hazardous materials team is on the scene preparing to to decontaminate the area.

A neighboring plant warned local news outlet WAFB in Baton Rouge that the major exposure following the explosion is “Butadiene spheres,” which could potentially trigger another explosion. They say that Williams Olefine has a hydrocarbon fire and the concern is that another explosion could occur and the fire is not under control.

WAFB 9 News Baton Rouge, Louisiana News, Weather, Sports

The blast comes two months after a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas devastated the surrounding area and, because of lax zoning laws and regulatory enforcement, caused plums of toxic clouds to spread throughout the community.

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Rescue workers are seen at the site of a commuter train crash in Castelar, some 30 kms west of Buenos Aires, on June 13, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Bill Leukhardt
Courant
June 13, 2013

More than 1,300 vehicles were inspected in the latest checkpoint the town police often run to find intoxicated drivers and get them off the road.

A report by police of the May 10 checkpoint on the Berlin Turnpike south of Deming Road said officers stopped and briefly checked 1,338 vehicles that passed through the site. Officers flagged 21 drivers for further interviews because they either were suspected of being intoxicated or had some other issue, such as an expired registration.

Read more

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 10:24 am

Tags: foreign affairs, police state

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

CP writers Sperber and Kampmark, among others, superbly discuss legal-moral-political implications, respectively, of the revelations of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden in their exposure of US government war crimes (Manning) and domestic spying on a comprehensive scale (Snowden) and, especially, where this leaves us a nation presumably under the rule of law. Let me add: No other country in the world presently stands out so nakedly–the Manning-Snowden symbolism–in clamping down hard on internal dissent, on erecting secrecy into a principle of the state (now capitalized in practice as the State, the National Security State), on developing the legal arguments and provisions which legitimate the suspension of the Constitution in the name of the law. Supplementary baggage doesn’t help: the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, targeted assassinations, illegal, unwarranted intervention, all of these, now under Obama, as the continuance and intensification of the work of his predecessors, for which he must therefore take full responsibility (even more so, since the previous contours of policy were well-known, and he willingly followed suit), places the US in the unenviable position of representing a society almost alone, by its action, in combining domestic repression and foreign aggression, becoming the more integrated the further each is pursued, in order to cover up the other.

Manning-Snowden should be viewed as a unitary political-structural phenomenon, inseparable from the direction America is taking (a) as an historical process of the militarization and financialization of American capitalism, (b) necessitating that in this mature stage (of impending decline) drastic steps be taken to maintain what before had been unilateral dominance in economic and political affairs, and (c) among these is suffocating internal dissent for a course of permanent war and the violation of international law.

Manning and Snowden obviously speak truth to power, and less obviously, rip away the façade of liberal democracy to reveal the hard core of punitive authoritarianism in the service of a concentrated system of economic power, a corporatist ethos of respect for hierarchical arrangements of class and wealth, and deference to a political authority itself beholden to exactly the structure of wealth (capitalism) and its military sources of support.

Correctly, US authority perceives the dangers raised by Manning and Snowden, that of awakening the people to a real understanding of the privileged total sham, which passes for public policy, under which we all live. Hence, secrecy, surveillance, intimidation, at home, atrocities abroad, whatever it takes to keep the show on the road, except that with Manning and Snowden the world can see America’s gnawing fear about being found out, the lengths to which it will go to remain on top, rather than live among others peacefully and modestly, two words absent from the national vocabulary.

Obama plots hegemony, hegemony by every available means, starting from the modernization of the nuclear arsenal through the pursuit of paramilitary operations on a grand scale and global in scope. Manning and Snowden, each obstructs the path of the juggernaut, each identifies humanity as a transcendent ideal, each has a conception of patriotism in which the president’s much-vaunted trade-offs between national security and privacy are seen as phony and odious in the extreme, for there are no trade-offs where freedom is concerned, and the best national security lies in not doing harm to others.

Aggression meets retaliation. And privacy is the last thing wanted, when it is the burden of government (here Obama-Holder-Brennan-NSA-DOJ-FBI-CIA-JSOC, etc. etc.) to instill a false sense of pride, the official brand of patriotism, into the consciousness of its people (subjects?) of military glory and the triumph of American business in the markets of the world. The assault on privacy, precisely like the wanton killing of civilians through drone strikes, a one-two punch of domination that is intended to put the world on notice of America’s capacity for acting unrestrained and with impunity, puts the raw component of power on display for others to see, appreciate, and submit to. Surveillance at home, under the spurious cover of counterterrorism, naturally a good idea, indeed brilliant in that using the hostility built up over decades (anticommunism) to tap into the latest manufactured scare, is an idea any self-respecting despot and his national-security advisers would approve.

For in this way, the populace internalizes its own false consciousness and thereby affords the leadership free grace to pursue its military adventures. Surveillance and the commission of war crimes, these become the Patriotic Duo of US culture, ideology, and politics. With that becoming set in stone, can fascism be far behind?

Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University.

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

CP writers Sperber and Kampmark, among others, superbly discuss legal-moral-political implications, respectively, of the revelations of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden in their exposure of US government war crimes (Manning) and domestic spying on a comprehensive scale (Snowden) and, especially, where this leaves us a nation presumably under the rule of law. Let me add: No other country in the world presently stands out so nakedly–the Manning-Snowden symbolism–in clamping down hard on internal dissent, on erecting secrecy into a principle of the state (now capitalized in practice as the State, the National Security State), on developing the legal arguments and provisions which legitimate the suspension of the Constitution in the name of the law. Supplementary baggage doesn’t help: the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, targeted assassinations, illegal, unwarranted intervention, all of these, now under Obama, as the continuance and intensification of the work of his predecessors, for which he must therefore take full responsibility (even more so, since the previous contours of policy were well-known, and he willingly followed suit), places the US in the unenviable position of representing a society almost alone, by its action, in combining domestic repression and foreign aggression, becoming the more integrated the further each is pursued, in order to cover up the other.

Manning-Snowden should be viewed as a unitary political-structural phenomenon, inseparable from the direction America is taking (a) as an historical process of the militarization and financialization of American capitalism, (b) necessitating that in this mature stage (of impending decline) drastic steps be taken to maintain what before had been unilateral dominance in economic and political affairs, and (c) among these is suffocating internal dissent for a course of permanent war and the violation of international law.

Manning and Snowden obviously speak truth to power, and less obviously, rip away the façade of liberal democracy to reveal the hard core of punitive authoritarianism in the service of a concentrated system of economic power, a corporatist ethos of respect for hierarchical arrangements of class and wealth, and deference to a political authority itself beholden to exactly the structure of wealth (capitalism) and its military sources of support.

Correctly, US authority perceives the dangers raised by Manning and Snowden, that of awakening the people to a real understanding of the privileged total sham, which passes for public policy, under which we all live. Hence, secrecy, surveillance, intimidation, at home, atrocities abroad, whatever it takes to keep the show on the road, except that with Manning and Snowden the world can see America’s gnawing fear about being found out, the lengths to which it will go to remain on top, rather than live among others peacefully and modestly, two words absent from the national vocabulary.

Obama plots hegemony, hegemony by every available means, starting from the modernization of the nuclear arsenal through the pursuit of paramilitary operations on a grand scale and global in scope. Manning and Snowden, each obstructs the path of the juggernaut, each identifies humanity as a transcendent ideal, each has a conception of patriotism in which the president’s much-vaunted trade-offs between national security and privacy are seen as phony and odious in the extreme, for there are no trade-offs where freedom is concerned, and the best national security lies in not doing harm to others.

Aggression meets retaliation. And privacy is the last thing wanted, when it is the burden of government (here Obama-Holder-Brennan-NSA-DOJ-FBI-CIA-JSOC, etc. etc.) to instill a false sense of pride, the official brand of patriotism, into the consciousness of its people (subjects?) of military glory and the triumph of American business in the markets of the world. The assault on privacy, precisely like the wanton killing of civilians through drone strikes, a one-two punch of domination that is intended to put the world on notice of America’s capacity for acting unrestrained and with impunity, puts the raw component of power on display for others to see, appreciate, and submit to. Surveillance at home, under the spurious cover of counterterrorism, naturally a good idea, indeed brilliant in that using the hostility built up over decades (anticommunism) to tap into the latest manufactured scare, is an idea any self-respecting despot and his national-security advisers would approve.

For in this way, the populace internalizes its own false consciousness and thereby affords the leadership free grace to pursue its military adventures. Surveillance and the commission of war crimes, these become the Patriotic Duo of US culture, ideology, and politics. With that becoming set in stone, can fascism be far behind?

Norman Pollack is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University.

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee took the opportunity Wednesday during a previously scheduled hearing to challenge the director of the National Security Agency about the extent of the agency’s domestic surveillance, during which it was made clear that what has been revealed thus far is just the “tip of the iceberg.”

During Wednesday’s hearing, NSA Chief Keith Alexander was reluctant to divulge further details in public about the agency’s dragnet surveillance practices. (Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP) Responding specifically to questions regarding whether “e-mail contacts” are being “vacuumed” by the Obama administration’s clandestine interpretation of the Patriot Act’s surveillance powers, NSA Chief Keith Alexander responded, “I don’t want to make a mistake” and reveal too much. He added that disclosing such details may cause “our country to lose some sort of protection.”

Alexander followed up by saying the topic of e-mail and other metadata surveillance is best discussed in a “classified session” which senators are scheduled to attend Thursday.

The two programs in question, which were revealed last week in a series of breaking stories by the Guardian–which had obtained the information by Edward Snowden, an employee of the contracted security firm Booz Allen–are supposedly distinct and are theoretically justified by different laws.

The first, justified under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, collects the phone records of millions of Americans, but reportedly does not examine at their content. The other, known as PRISM, is justified under Section 702 of the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act and is meant to surveil the online communications of people believed not to be inside the United States.

However, as Alexander explained during yesterday’s hearing, it is difficult, in practice, to separate them. “The reality is, they work together,” Alexander said.

Senators yesterday were specifically concerned about a top secret court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, disclosed last week by the Guardian, which allows the NSA to obtain daily records of all domestic calls made by Verizon customers and could, under certain interpretations, justify a similar collection of email and IP data.

CNET’s Declan McCullagh explains:

The Justice Department obtained that order by claiming it was permitted by Section 215 of the Patriot Act, 50 USC 1861, better known as the “business records” portion. Section 215 allows FBI agents to obtain any “tangible thing,” including “books, records, papers, documents, and other items,” which some of the Patriot Act’s supporters have said was never intended to cover every American’s phone call logs. (Section 215 orders are far less privacy-protective, and therefore more legally problematic, than traditional search warrants backed by probable cause and signed by a judge.)

In an unusual move, however, the Justice Department has refused to disclose its secret interpretation of Section 215–despite complaints from multiple senators–that would reveal just how far Patriot Act surveillance has extended.

“What I worry is how far you believe this authority extends,” Sen. Johanns said to the NSA director during yesterday’s hearing. Alexander replied that Section 215 only covered metadata: “If you want to get the content, you’d have to get a court order.”

Under the Justice Department’s reasoning, Web browsing logs and e-mail logs “would seem to be a record, and thus potentially subject to a 215 order,” says Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Alan Butler, appellate advocacy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., agreed by adding that, considering the Justice Department’s use of Section 215, they could make the argument that IP address records fall under the same “tangible” classification as phone numbers:

I think that IP address records would likely be treated the same as call records unless they contain “content” (detailed URIs for specific pages might be considered content). So the FBI could theoretically put forth the same broad relevance argument used to justify this Verizon order.

Adding further weight to the suspicion that there is much yet to be revealed about the NSA’s dragnet surveillance operation, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), appearing on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” Wednesday, said that lawmakers learned “significantly more” about the NSA’s spy programs during a Tuesday briefing with counter terrorism officials.

“What we learned in there,” Sanchez said, “is significantly more than what is out in the media today.” Adding that the information already revealed is just “the tip of the iceberg.”

“I think it’s just broader than most people even realize,” she said, “and I think that’s, in one way, what astounded most of us, too.”

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee took the opportunity Wednesday during a previously scheduled hearing to challenge the director of the National Security Agency about the extent of the agency’s domestic surveillance, during which it was made clear that what has been revealed thus far is just the “tip of the iceberg.”

During Wednesday’s hearing, NSA Chief Keith Alexander was reluctant to divulge further details in public about the agency’s dragnet surveillance practices. (Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP) Responding specifically to questions regarding whether “e-mail contacts” are being “vacuumed” by the Obama administration’s clandestine interpretation of the Patriot Act’s surveillance powers, NSA Chief Keith Alexander responded, “I don’t want to make a mistake” and reveal too much. He added that disclosing such details may cause “our country to lose some sort of protection.”

Alexander followed up by saying the topic of e-mail and other metadata surveillance is best discussed in a “classified session” which senators are scheduled to attend Thursday.

The two programs in question, which were revealed last week in a series of breaking stories by the Guardian–which had obtained the information by Edward Snowden, an employee of the contracted security firm Booz Allen–are supposedly distinct and are theoretically justified by different laws.

The first, justified under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, collects the phone records of millions of Americans, but reportedly does not examine at their content. The other, known as PRISM, is justified under Section 702 of the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act and is meant to surveil the online communications of people believed not to be inside the United States.

However, as Alexander explained during yesterday’s hearing, it is difficult, in practice, to separate them. “The reality is, they work together,” Alexander said.

Senators yesterday were specifically concerned about a top secret court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, disclosed last week by the Guardian, which allows the NSA to obtain daily records of all domestic calls made by Verizon customers and could, under certain interpretations, justify a similar collection of email and IP data.

CNET’s Declan McCullagh explains:

The Justice Department obtained that order by claiming it was permitted by Section 215 of the Patriot Act, 50 USC 1861, better known as the “business records” portion. Section 215 allows FBI agents to obtain any “tangible thing,” including “books, records, papers, documents, and other items,” which some of the Patriot Act’s supporters have said was never intended to cover every American’s phone call logs. (Section 215 orders are far less privacy-protective, and therefore more legally problematic, than traditional search warrants backed by probable cause and signed by a judge.)

In an unusual move, however, the Justice Department has refused to disclose its secret interpretation of Section 215–despite complaints from multiple senators–that would reveal just how far Patriot Act surveillance has extended.

“What I worry is how far you believe this authority extends,” Sen. Johanns said to the NSA director during yesterday’s hearing. Alexander replied that Section 215 only covered metadata: “If you want to get the content, you’d have to get a court order.”

Under the Justice Department’s reasoning, Web browsing logs and e-mail logs “would seem to be a record, and thus potentially subject to a 215 order,” says Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Alan Butler, appellate advocacy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., agreed by adding that, considering the Justice Department’s use of Section 215, they could make the argument that IP address records fall under the same “tangible” classification as phone numbers:

I think that IP address records would likely be treated the same as call records unless they contain “content” (detailed URIs for specific pages might be considered content). So the FBI could theoretically put forth the same broad relevance argument used to justify this Verizon order.

Adding further weight to the suspicion that there is much yet to be revealed about the NSA’s dragnet surveillance operation, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), appearing on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” Wednesday, said that lawmakers learned “significantly more” about the NSA’s spy programs during a Tuesday briefing with counter terrorism officials.

“What we learned in there,” Sanchez said, “is significantly more than what is out in the media today.” Adding that the information already revealed is just “the tip of the iceberg.”

“I think it’s just broader than most people even realize,” she said, “and I think that’s, in one way, what astounded most of us, too.”

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

News outlets are reporting a “major blast” and “hydrocarbon fire” at a chemical plant in Geismar, Louisiana with reports of injuries and possible fatalities.

(Photo via WAFB Baton Rouge) The William Olefins plant produces approximately 1.3 billion pounds of ethylene and 90 million pounds of polymer grade propylene, according to the Williams website. These chemicals are the basic building blocks in the petrochemical process used to make plastics.

The blast was reported at approximately 8:30am local time. According to reports, a hazardous materials team is on the scene preparing to to decontaminate the area.

A neighboring plant warned local news outlet WAFB in Baton Rouge that the major exposure following the explosion is “Butadiene spheres,” which could potentially trigger another explosion. They say that Williams Olefine has a hydrocarbon fire and the concern is that another explosion could occur and the fire is not under control.

WAFB 9 News Baton Rouge, Louisiana News, Weather, Sports

The blast comes two months after a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas devastated the surrounding area and, because of lax zoning laws and regulatory enforcement, caused plums of toxic clouds to spread throughout the community.

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

News outlets are reporting a “major blast” and “hydrocarbon fire” at a chemical plant in Geismar, Louisiana with reports of injuries and possible fatalities.

(Photo via WAFB Baton Rouge) The William Olefins plant produces approximately 1.3 billion pounds of ethylene and 90 million pounds of polymer grade propylene, according to the Williams website. These chemicals are the basic building blocks in the petrochemical process used to make plastics.

The blast was reported at approximately 8:30am local time. According to reports, a hazardous materials team is on the scene preparing to to decontaminate the area.

A neighboring plant warned local news outlet WAFB in Baton Rouge that the major exposure following the explosion is “Butadiene spheres,” which could potentially trigger another explosion. They say that Williams Olefine has a hydrocarbon fire and the concern is that another explosion could occur and the fire is not under control.

WAFB 9 News Baton Rouge, Louisiana News, Weather, Sports

The blast comes two months after a massive explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas devastated the surrounding area and, because of lax zoning laws and regulatory enforcement, caused plums of toxic clouds to spread throughout the community.

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

A US trooper and an Afghanistan National Army soldier patrol in Kalinoum village, west of Garmsir, Helmand Province. (file photo) –

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A US trooper and an Afghanistan National Army soldier patrol in Kalinoum village, west of Garmsir, Helmand Province. (file photo) –

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Erin McClam
NBC News
June 13, 2013

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Thursday that natural human genes cannot be patented by companies, but it said that synthetically produced genetic material can – a mixed ruling for the biotechnology industry.

A naturally occurring piece of DNA is “a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” the court said.

The case centered on a Salt Lake City company called Myriad Genetics that was granted patents for isolating two genes, known as BRCA1 and BRCA2, that indicate a higher risk of breast and ovarian cancer. The company now markets tests for those genes.

Read more

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 10:15 am

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

“Revolutions happen in the flesh.” What a perceptive observation! Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for the rest of Michael Kimmelman’s article (“In Istanbul’s Heart, Leader’s Obsession, Perhaps Achilles’ Heel,” The New York Times, June 8, 2013).

Describing Taksim Square, and Prime Minister ErdoÄŸan’s intentions, as “Taksim Square is a mess of buses and crowds, a tangle of plazas, streets, shops and taxi horns… Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is determined to clean it up and make it into a pedestrian zone, with a new mall, mosque and tunnels for traffic to move underground” makes the public reaction seem quite irrational. Yet, even the person interviewed by Kimmelman objected to the subtle charge of irrationality, noting that “the government wants to sanitize this place without consulting the people.” And indeed, that lies at the heart of the matter: this is a reaction to the current government’s notion of democracy which calls for no public participation and no consultation with the people.

Though the article briefly touches upon the comprehensive nature of Istanbul’s urban transformation above and beyond what is happening at Taksim, it misses the broader economic context. In so doing, it creates the impression that the recent developments are due almost exclusively to ErdoÄŸan’s vision and incorrect political choices (or perhaps design). Stated differently, it suggests that the recent problems were caused by errors in leadership, as suggested by Kimmelman’s description of ErdoÄŸan’s goal as “a scripted public realm” formulated after presenting various urban projects similar to the one at Taksim. Yet, as several interviewees cited by Kimmelman pointed out, the issue is not whether or not public space is scripted. Rather, it is the very attempt at grabbing what was public –in today’s parlance, the commons– and handing it over to the private sector, one more act of privatization. The latter, as is well known, has been canonical of neoliberal economic policies throughout the last 40 years.

In short, the Ä°stanbul revolt can only be fully understood by linking Prime Minister ErdoÄŸan’s very limited (almost outdated) notion of democracy with the political economy of urban transformation.

E. Ahmet Tonak, Ph.D., is a Professor of Economics at Ä°stanbul Bilgi University.

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

A large explosion shook a petrochemical plant in the industrial district of Geismar in Louisiana on Thursday morning. Firefighter and police Hazmat units are still attempting to contain the fire, while the number of injuries has not been confirmed.

The Williams Olefins plant, opened in 1999, produced two
widely-used explosive compounds, propylene and ethylene.

15:25 GMT:

15:17 GMT: Local CBS affiliate reports.

15:12 GMT: The area, 60 miles north of New Orleans, is
home to a whole cluster of petrochemical plants, owned by giants
Shell, BASF and others.

15:10 GMT:  Update from a local news reporter.

15:07 GMT:

15:00 GMT: Here is an amateur video of the fire, which
appears to still be raging.

14:58 GMT: Numerous eyewitnesses on Twitter say police are
telling locals to stay inside and shut windows.

This article originally appeared on: RT

File photo of United States Secretary of State John Kerry.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Further my speculation that Edward Snowden, as a CIA guy, may have chosen Hong Kong because the PRC would be less eager than most jurisdictions to assist the CIA in whatever derring-do it might try to practice on Snowden in Hong Kong, Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch seemed to call that idea into question by invoking the case of Sami al-Saadi, a leader of the anti-Gaddafi Libyan Islamic Fighting Group:

“There’s little doubt [reason] to believe that the Hong Kong authorities would not co-operate with the CIA in this case,” said Peter Bouckaert, who after the fall of Muammar Gaddafi found faxes in Tripoli indicating that the Hong Kong authorities had co-operated with the CIA in rendering an anti-Gaddafi Islamist to Libya.

The details are quite interesting, especially since the UK recently agreed to duck Saadi’s lawsuit and give him an EP 2.3 million out of court settlement, presumably so that additional interesting and embarrassing details would not be raised in court (in recent UK news coverage, Saadi, who is a big wheel in the new Libya, received the courtesy of being referred to as a “dissent” rather than the perhaps more accurate “militant” or, for that matter, “terrorist”, which is what the Qaddafi government called him).

As the Guardian reported in 2011, the UK administered a good old-fashioned ratfucking to Saadi–who had lived in the UK under asylum for three years–when it came time to offer him up as a sacrifice to rapprochement with Muammar Qaddafi in 2004.

Saadi says he was tricked by the British authorities into travelling to Hong Kong. While in exile in China in March 2004 he approached British intelligence officers via an intermediary in the UK, he says, and was told that he would be permitted to return to London, where he had lived for three years after seeking asylum in 1993. First, however, he would have to be interviewed at the British consulate in Hong Kong, and would be met by British diplomats on his arrival.

Saadi flew to Hong Kong with his wife, two sons aged 12 and nine, and two daughters aged 14 and six. They were not met by any British officials but were detained by Chinese border guards over alleged passport irregularities, held for a week and then despatched to Tripoli.

Saadi says he always assumed the British were behind his rendition, “working behind the curtain”. Confirmation came when Human Rights Watch, the New York-based NGO, discovered a cache of papers in Moussa Koussa’s abandoned office.

Seven years later, the UK helped administer a similar ratfucking to Qaddafi, leading the “humanitarian intervention” pack baying for his blood.  It is interesting to remember that Qaddafi had dismantled his WMD programs and paid out billions of dollars to the West to normalize relations; indeed, Qaddafi’s actions were touted as “the Libyan Model” for voluntary denuclearization.

I hope Kim Jung-un was taking notes (don’t worry; he was).

In the context of the Edward Snowden case, the most interesting question is: why was Saadi renditioned?

This was not a case of the US secretly snatching some friendless nobody from a cooperative jurisdiction for some extralegal prison and pummeling beyond the reach of habeas corpus.

The Saadi case was packaged as an Interpol “Red Notice” request from the relevant Libyan authorities to detain Saadi, who was allegedly travelling under a forged passport under an alias, for return to Libya for legal proceedings.

The Hong Kong authorities duly detained Saadi–which is what they are supposed to do, as members of Interpol (Interpol Red Notices are only challenged by Interpol HQ if they are deemed blatantly political; certainly that wasn’t going to happen in this case, since Interpol is very much a US show), and the logical next step would have been a legal proceeding either to deport him, or arrange his extradition to the jurisdiction in which his crime was allegedly committed.

So why rendition?  Was it because the Libyan government did not have an extradition treaty with Hong Kong? (haven’t been able to confirm this, by the way).

Or was it because time was of the essence?

Saadi was delivered back to Libya (where he was not put on trial and was treated very badly in detention for over five years) at the time of Tony Blair’s trip to Libya a.k.a. the notorious “Deal in the Desert” that welcomed Libya back into the family of civilized nations.

Maybe Qaddafi had demanded the return of Saadi as a precondition for Blair’s trip.

A pretty safe assumption, as the Guardian reported in 2011:

The operation coincided exactly with Tony Blair’s first visit to Libya. Two days after the fax [from the CIA re mechanics of the rendition] was sent, Blair arrived to shake hands with Gaddafi, and said the two nations wanted to make “common cause” in counter-terrorism operations. It was also announced that Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell had signed a £550m gas exploration deal. Three days later Saadi and his family were put aboard a private Egyptian-registered jet and flown to Tripoli.

Associates of Saadi cannot understand why his capture and interrogation would hold any great intelligence value for the British authorities, and are speculating that he may have been a “gift” from the British to the Gaddafi regime.

Incidentally another anti-Qaddafi Libyan–and another heavyweight in the post-Qaddafi regime, Abdul Hakim Belhaj–was renditioned to Libya at the same time.

Maybe the Brits, instead of waiting for the wheels of Hong Kong justice to grind (and maybe worried that a spirited legal defense of Saadi in open court—a guy who had actually received asylum and resided in England for three years as a respected guest–might fatally delay or even prevent his extradition), arranged for Saadi to be released from HK custody and bundled on a plane with his wife and children.

Since the Libyan security organs liaised with Hong Kong’s principle secretary for security (per the introduction of the CIA) on the matter of Saadi’s rendition, I assume the Chinese government knew about this, and acquiesced as a brother in arms in the War on Terror (and as an eager beneficiary of the lucrative business deals Qaddafi was showering on his foreign friends).

As for Edward Snowden …

I think “judicial rendition”, as the British courts politely characterized Saadi’s treatment, might work in the case of the unreported detention of an anonymous Libyan detainee for the sake of a big geopolitical win; but I don’t think that the PRC would choose to taint Hong Kong’s legal reputation before the entire world in order to short circuit deportation or extradition due process in order to satisfy an Obama administration request for the early return of Edward Snowden unless the payoff was enormous.

As to whether the PRC’s Ministry of Public Security would offer the CIA counterintelligence operations in Hong Kong the courtesy of the trade with respect to Snowden–assistance in locating him, tracking his movements, intercepting his communications, identifying his contacts, hassling them ad infinitum, covertly entering his residence to search it, install a bug or a dead girl or a live boy, drop a eight ton safe on his head a la Wiley Coyote etc.–getting Chinese cooperation is going to be more difficult and costly than just picking up the phone and yanking MI5’s chain,especially since the US has spent the last year on an anti-Chinese espionage jihad.

But with ratfucking, you never know.

The nitty-gritty of Saadi’s case is quite interesting, especially the part where he is able to get a Chinese visa and hang out there for a few weeks.  Have to think the Malaysians told the Chinese when they pitched him over the transom.  But, if Saadi’s account is accurate, the PRC did not shop him to England; the wheels came off when his family in the UK told him to go Hong Kong.

First, Saadi’s recollections, as recorded in the HRW report:

They went to Malaysia, where he hoped to get asylum. He visited a UN office and was given an appointment for a month later. Before then, he was arrested by the Malaysian authorities, who detained him and his family for about 10 days. Saadi asked to be released to go to his UN appointment. The Malaysian authorities said they would, but if he went back to the UN, he would find US officials waiting for him. So he asked to be sent to China, where he had already obtained a visa. “The Chinese visa was so easy for us,” he said. “The Chinese were receiving people from everywhere at the time.” The Malaysians then sent him to China.

From China he attempted to get back to the United Kingdom. Saadi’s friends and family in the UK told him that if he went to the UK embassy in Hong Kong, someone there would be able to help him.[331] When he arrived in Hong Kong, a man he assumed was a UK diplomat was waiting for him when he got off the plane. Instead, he was arrested for purported passport or immigration violations and detained, most of the time with his family. The room was monitored with cameras. During this period he said he overheard two police women arguing: “They were talking in their own language and I didn’t understand everything, but I did hear ‘CIA’ about four or five times, so I expected that something not good was about to happen.” After 13 days of detention, the Hong Kong authorities told him he would be sent back to China.

On or about March 28, 2004, Saadi said he was handcuffed, his legs zip-tied, and he was taken along with his wife and four children onto an empty plane with an Egyptian crew [and renditioned to Libya].

Second, the tale of the documents discovered in an abandoned government building after the fall of Qaddafi:

Saadi’s return appears to have been initiated by the MI6, but once the CIA discovered it was underway, they stepped in to do everything they could to assist. A March 23, 2004 fax from the CIA to Libyan intelligence, found in the folder marked “USA,” states that the CIA has “become aware” that Saadi and his family were being held in detention in Hong Kong and that the Libyans have been working with the British to “effect [his] removal to Tripoli” on a Libyan plane that was in the Maldives.[334]

In the fax, the CIA said that it was aware that the Hong Kong special wing had denied permission for the Libyan airplane to land. It went on to explain, “However, we believe that the reason for the refusal was based on international concerns over having a Libyan-registered aircraft land in Hong Kong. Accordingly, if your government were to charter a foreign aircraft from a third country, the Hong Kong government may be able to coordinate with you to render Abu Munthir [Saadi] and his family into your custody.”[335] The CIA even offered to pay for the non-Libyan-registered charter aircraft. “If payment of a charter aircraft is an issue, our service would be willing to assist financially to help underwrite those costs.”[336]

The CIA requested perfunctory diplomatic assurances that Saadi and his family would not be harmed if they provided assistance: “Please be advised if we pursue that option [providing assistance], we must have assurances from your government that Abu Munthir [Saadi] and his family will be treated humanely and that his human rights will be respected.” [337]

In the same fax, the CIA also provided suggestions as to how the Libyans might expedite the process and convince the Hong Kong authorities to cooperate.[338] “[W]e believe that you will need to provide significant detail on Abu Munthir (e.g. his terrorist/criminal acts, why he is wanted, perhaps proof of citizenship)…. Specifically, the Hong Kong government must have a stipulation … that he will not be subject to the death penalty.”[339]

The next day, on March 24, 2004, the Libyan authorities sent a 32-page fax to Hong Kong authorities containing, among other things, a birth certificate, information on why Saadi was wanted, and details on the “crimes and the terrorist activities that [Saadi] committed.” They also promised that the “maximum penalty” for what he had done was “life imprisonment.”[340] (Though later, after being in Libyan custody for five years without charge, Saadi was sentenced to death). The United States also provided the name and telephone numbers for Hong Kong’s principal secretary for security.[341]

After the Hong Kong authorities received this information, it appears they agreed to allow the non-Libyan registered charter aircraft to land. Also in the Tripoli Documents, in the folder marked “USA,” a fax sent just two days before Saadi arrived in Libya contains a cover page marked “Hong Kong Landing Requirements” and two pages stamped “confidential.” It states that in order for the “Non-Scheduled Flight to land in Hong Kong,” the Libyan government has to comply with “certain regulations” so that a “Permission to Land” can be issued.[342] It also confirms, “[i]t is agreed that the subject person will be moved together with his whole family (a total of six persons) on board of the same flight” and recommends a “local Aircraft Handling Agent” for the transaction who needs to be paid in “cash (in US dollars).”[343] Saadi was transferred around March 28, 2004, just a few days after Tony Blair’s historic first visit to Libya on March 25. [344]

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

Whitehall spending watchdogs warn British Chancellor George Osborne over short-term emergency cuts.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
June 13, 2013

On Wednesday, Attorney General Eric Holder filed a Justice Department brief in a class-action lawsuit challenging the New York Police Department’s policy of violating the Fourth Amendment with its controversial stop-and-frisk program.

Instead of taking a stand on the illegality of the procedure, Holder’s Justice Department said a monitor should be put in place to oversee changes to the police department’s practices following remarks made by Judge Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan in May questioning the clearly unconstitutional police tactic. Scheindlin criticized the “high error rate” of the procedure. “You reasonably suspect something and you’re wrong 90 percent of the time,” she said.

The lawsuit was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights and other civil rights lawyers. Floyd v. City of New York argues that police target black and Hispanic New Yorkers without probable cause and the procedure amounts to racial profiling.

In 1968 the Supreme Court undercut the Fourth Amendment by ruling in Terry v. Ohio that cops only require “reasonable suspicion” and not “probable cause” to search a person. In the case of New York police, this “reasonable suspicion” standard fails 88 percent of the time.

The Justice Department brief reveals an effort by the federal government to trample states’ rights by advocating the use of injunctive relief that “may include the appointment of an independent monitor” designated by the feds instead of arguing that the stop-and-frisk procedure is unconstitutional.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 9:42 am

Tags: big brother, constitution, domestic news, police state

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Blanket surveillance is about covering up government corruption and chilling free speech, not catching terrorists

Alex Jones & Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
June 13, 2013

The NSA’s vast wiretapping and surveillance operation, in addition to the agency’s attempt to intimidate the media and whistleblowers from releasing information about programs such as PRISM, has has virtually nothing to do with catching terrorists and everything to do with creating a chilling effect that dissuades the free press from exposing government corruption while making Americans fearful of engaging in political free speech.

National Security Agency

The myth that blanket NSA spying is primarily concerned with catching terrorists, or that terrorists will be aided by people like Edward Snowden blowing the whistle on the PRISM program, has been debunked by numerous experts.

Firstly, the threat posed to Americans by terrorism is grossly exaggerated and overhyped. Americans are more likely to be killed by toddlers than terrorists. Intestinal illnesses, allergic reactions to peanuts, bee stings, drowning in the bath, or accident-causing deer all individually pose a greater threat to Americans than terrorists. So the whole debate about sacrificing privacy for security is a total fraud to begin with.

As the former head of the National Security Agency’s global digital data gathering program — William Binney — confirmed, the witch hunt targeting Edward Snowden is not about preventing terrorists from discovering how they are being tracked by the NSA, it is about preventing the American people from finding out about the unconstitutional actions of the NSA.

“The terrorists have already known that we’ve been doing this for years, so there’s no surprise there. They’re not going to change the way they operate just because it comes out in the U.S. press. I mean, the point is, they already knew it, and they were operating the way they would operate anyway. So, the point is that they’re–we’re not–the government here is not trying to protect it from the terrorists; it’s trying to protect it, that knowledge of that program, from the citizens of the United States,” said Binney.

This sentiment was echoed by top counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, who remarked, “The argument that this sweeping search must be kept secret from the terrorists is laughable. Terrorists already assume this sort of thing is being done. Only law-abiding American citizens were blissfully ignorant of what their government was doing.”

Innumerable lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who have called for Ed Snowden to be arrested for revealing the existence of PRISM have done do under the justification that Snowden is aiding terrorists by tipping them off to the fact that the NSA is spying on them and therefore harming national security. Yet as Clarke and Binney highlight, this is a moot point — it was already known by everyone — therefore there must be a different reason for the persecution of Snowden and his ilk.

The reason for the persecution of whistleblowers and media outlets who leak evidence of government wrongdoing is to intimidate the free press and make them less likely to publish information about government corruption for fear of legal reprisals.

This is an easily understood consequence of the persecution of Edward Snowden and yet it has barely been touched upon in the aftermath of the PRISM scandal.

As William Binney explains, government officials are only mad at Snowden because his revelations expose their wrongdoing. This has nothing to do with genuine concerns about national security or terrorism.

Data is being obtained by the NSA unencrypted so that no probable cause is needed for the agency to access that data — meaning the system has been set up for political and not practical purposes.

As Thomas Drake, former senior NSA executive and a decorated Air Force and Navy veteran remarks, the government is incensed at Snowden and the media outlets who carried his story because Snowden exposed how the NSA is acting in “direct violation of the fourth amendment of the US constitution,” and how the NSA is “subverting the constitution.”

Despite the fact that whistleblowers are helping to expose wrongdoing in government — and the polls show they are supported by the majority of the American people — the Obama administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined.

As all the experts agree, this isn’t being done to protect America from terrorists, it is being done to intimidate insiders from coming forward and speaking out against government corruption in the fear that they will end up like Bradley Manning — locked away in solitary confinement for years.

Telephones belonging to AP reporters are also being tapped to discourage other news organizations from reporting on government misdeeds. Individual reporters like James Rosen are also being targeted by the Obama administration, making potential sources who have information on government wrongdoing less likely to approach journalists.

The NSA’s huge illegal dragnet also has an additional consequence — implanting a seed of doubt in the minds of average Americans seeking to exercise their first amendment right to criticize the government. Could they become a target of blanket surveillance and wiretapping? Could their private life be exposed by a resentful NSA official if they dare to become a nuisance to the feds? Could they be accidentally mistaken for a terrorist if they send an email to another person who is under suspicion?

The Obama administration’s war on whistleblowers and the NSA and other federal agency’s role in spying on reporters and average Americans has nothing to do with stopping terrorists and everything to do with intimidating the media, creating a chilling effect that makes insiders who have clear evidence of government corruption far less likely to go public, and making Americans think twice before they criticize the government or exercise their constitutional rights.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 9:56 am

Tags: big brother, domestic spying

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Josh Peterson
Daily Caller
June 13, 2013

National Security Agency chief Gen. Keith Alexander will answer senators’ questions about the agency’s domestic surveillance program behind closed doors on Thursday.

He was expected to face senators on Wednesday but, because his answers require the disclosure of sensitive details about NSA operations, the meeting will no longer be public.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 9:58 am

Tags: big brother, constitution, domestic news, domestic spying, government corruption

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Iranâ„¢s highest electoral supervisory body, the Guardian Council, has warned presidential candidates against claiming victory before the official election results are announced by the Interior Ministry.

The Councilâ„¢s spokesman, Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei, said on Thursday that under the election law, only the Interior Ministry is authorized to announce the final results of Fridayâ„¢s presidential race.

“Such [premature] statements are absolutely invalid and candidates should avoid them,” he told reporters.

Kadkhodaei also warned the candidates against organizing victory parades on the streets, saying this is also illegal. He also urged media outlets not to speculate about the election results.

The six candidates in Iranâ„¢s presidential election are the President of the Expediency Councilâ„¢s Center for Strategic Research Hassan Rohani, 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.

Former Majlis Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel and former First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref withdrew their candidacy bids earlier this week.

Iranians will go to the polls on Friday to elect their 11th president, who will succeed the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a four-year term.

Over 66,000 polling stations will be set up across the country, while expatriates will be also able to cast ballots at 285 polling stations that will be set up overseas.

Nearly 50.5 million Iranians are eligible to vote in Friday’s presidential poll. The fourth city and rural council elections are also scheduled to be held on the same day.

MRS/SS/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Edward Snowden is not a traitor. Nor is he a hero, at least not yet. But he probably will be martyred by an establishment that cannot abide critics.

Both House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Cal.) have called him a traitor, which only shows how ignorant they are. Under our Constitution (and the Espionage Act of 1917), it is not enough for a leaker to do something that might arguable “aid or comfort” an enemy; the leaker must also have the intent, by his disclosures, to betray the United States. No proof exists the Mr. Snowden had either motive.

Quite the contrary. Had he wanted to aid an enemy and hurt the United States, he would not have gone public. He would have secretly disclosed very different information to the agents of a foreign power.

Which raises the question: Why can’t these politicians respect Mr. Snowden for what he is: an ordinary young man who does not claim to be a hero, but is willing to go to jail, if necessary, to start a debate over what our bloated intelligence community and do-nothing Congress are doing to our liberties?

Part of the answer is that the politicians don’t want to admit that Congress (and the courts) have failed to exercise adequate oversight over a giant network of secret agencies and corporations that is wasting billions of dollars on worthless surveillance and, in the process, invading the privacy of millions of Americans and endangering the capacity of reporters, leakers, and crusading members of Congress to check the secret abuses of secret government.

This scandal is not just about Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency, and Snowden’s profiteering bosses at Booz Allen Hamilton. It is about secret government in general, the militarization of intelligence, the privatization of governmental functions, and the role of secret campaign contributions to prevent adequate oversight of the executive branch and its pet companies.

Senator Feinstein and her colleagues don’t want to admit it, but the secrecy system does not permit her and her colleagues to restrain secret government. Once they get a secret briefing, they are pledged not to discuss what they have learned, even with their staffs. Feinstein is such a weak overseer that she could not even persuade the secret FISA court to declassify its sweeping surveillance orders or the legal rationale behind them. But Mr. Snowden could do that with his leaks. He, not the senator, revealed that the secret court had, with its rubber stamp, rendered the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonably broad seizures meaningless.

This is not Senator Feinstein’s fault alone. It’s not even the president’s fault. The secrecy system is out of control. There are supposed to be three levels of security classifications: Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. Bradley Manning’s massive leaks proved that most documents marked Confidential or Secret do not deserve to be classified at all. Much that is labeled Top Secret only needs be kept secret for short periods of time. The truly important secrets are classified, if that is the right word, well above Top Secret, in that access to them is restricted to people with special authorizations and special needs to know.

This security system, which keeps Congress and the public largely in the dark about matters they ought to know in a timely fashion, is profoundly corrupt. Contrary to what the politicians say, its chief function is not to keep enemies ignorant; most secret information has nothing to do with the kind of details that might help an enemy. Its chief function is to protect bureaucrats and politicians from being held accountable for their failings, including their wasteful distribution of government contracts to companies like Booz Allen.

So, if Congress wants to make the intelligence budget go further, it ought to ask why Booz Allen is paying people of Snowden’s limited education more than $125,000 a year, and taking still more money off the top of the contract for itself. (The company routinely steals valuable employees from the government by paying them more, and then rents them back to their former agencies at an inflated price.) But Congress probably won’t investigate, because Booz Allen has hired Mike McConnell, the former NSA (and National Intelligence) director, as its vice chairman.

Since 9/11 private corporations have greatly expanded the intelligence community. Seventy percent of the community’s budget now goes to private contractors. So members of Congress, reporters, and suspected leakers are not just vulnerable to government surveillance; they are vulnerable to corporate reprisals, should their investigations or disclosures pose a threat to companies in the intelligence business. These surveillance powers can be used not only to protect secret agencies from criticism; they can be used, as General Motors once used them, to try to discredit critics like Ralph Nader.

Many people believe that they have nothing to fear from government/corporate surveillance because they have nothing to hide. But every bureaucracy is a solution in search of a problem, and if it can’t find a problem to fit its solution, they will redefine the problem. In the 1960s, the surveillance bureaucracies redefined anti-war and civil rights protests as communist enterprises; today the same bureaucracies redefine anti-war Quakers, environmentalists, and animal rights activists as “terrorists.” So political activists, no matter how benign, have good reasons to fear these bureaucracies.

Again, most Americans do not worry, because they are not political activists, reporters, investigating legislators, or crusading attorneys general like Eliot Spitzer. Most Americans are like the Germans who did not fear the secret police because they were not Jews. But all Americans depend on reporters, leakers, and crusading legislators to keep government agencies and private corporations under control. So they should worry about government secrecy, the militarization of surveillance, the privatization of intelligence, and the role of corporate money in elections.

Snowden has revealed just enough to show how pervasive this spying is. Will we pay attention, or will we be distracted by irrelevant attacks upon his character? Given all he has sacrificed to let us know what is happening inside our secret government, don’t we owe it to him to pay attention?

Christopher H. Pyle teaches constitutional law and civil liberties at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of Military Surveillance of Civilian Politics and Getting Away with Torture. In 1970, he disclosed the U.S. military’s surveillance of civilian politics and worked as a consultant to three Congressional committees, including the Church Committee. 

This article originally appeared on: Counterpunch

Logo of February 14 Revolution Youth Coalition on a wall in Bahrainâ„¢s northern village of Barbar (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Millions of Iranian will head into polling stations in less than a day to determine the president of the Islamic Republic for the next four years, Press TV reports.

Around 51 million eligible voters in Iran are getting ready to cast their votes in the Friday presidential election as the six candidates wrapped up their final day of campaigning across the country on Wednesday.

The fourth city and rural council elections are also scheduled to be held on Friday.

Ahead of the vote, the national opinion polls indicate that more than 60 percent of the eligible voters will take part in the country’s 11th presidential election. The Iranian voters will have to choose among six candidates who have stayed in the race.

Recent polls also suggest that presidential election might go for a run-off, setting the stage for a fierce race between the two top candidates.

Under the election law, a presidential candidate must obtain more than 50 percent of the votes in the initial round to win outright. Otherwise, the two top candidates will face each other in a second round of voting on June 21.

The six candidates in Iranâ„¢s presidential election are the President of the Expediency Councilâ„¢s Center for Strategic Research Hassan Rohani, 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.

Former Majlis Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel and former First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref withdrew their candidacies earlier this week.

MKA/SS/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

According to writers Thomas Heath and Marjorie Censer at the Washington Post, The Carlyle Group and its errant child, Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH), have a public relations problem, thanks to NSA leaker and former BAH employee Edward Snowden. By the time top management at BAH learned that one of their top level agents had gone rogue, and terminated his employment, it was too late.

For years Carlyle had, according to the Post, “nurtured a reputation as a financially sophisticated asset manager that buys and sells everything from railroads to oil refineries”; but now the light from the Snowden revelations has revealed nothing more than two companies, parent and child, “bound by the thread of turning government secrets into profits.”

And have they ever. When The Carlyle Group bought BAH back in 2008, it was totally dependent upon government contracts in the fields of information technology (IT) and systems engineering for its bread and butter. But there wasn’t much butter: After two years the company’s gross revenues were $5.1 billion but net profits were a minuscule $25 million, close to a rounding error on the company’s financial statement. In 2012, however, BAH grossed $5.8 billion and showed earnings of $219 million, nearly a nine-fold increase in net revenues and a nice gain in value for Carlyle.

Unwittingly, the Post authors exposed the real reason for the jump in profitability: close ties and interconnected relationships between top people at Carlyle and BAH, and the agencies with which they are working. The authors quoted George Price, an equity analyst at BB&T Capital: “[Booz Allen has] got a great brand, they’ve focused over time on hiring top people, including bringing on people who have a lot of senior government experience.” (Emphasis added.)

For instance, James Clapper had a stint at BAH before becoming the current Director of National Intelligence; George Little consulted with BAH before taking a position at the Central Intelligence Agency; John McConnell, now vice chairman at BAH, was director of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the ‘90s before moving up to director of national intelligence in 2007; Todd Park began his career with BAH and now serves as the country’s chief technology officer; James Woolsey, currently a senior vice president at BAH, served in the past as director of the Central Intelligence Agency; and so on.

BAH has had more than a little problem with self-dealing and conflicts of interest over the years. For instance in 2006 the European Commission asked the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Privacy International (PI) to investigate BAH’s involvement with President George Bush’s SWIFT surveillance program, which was viewed by that administration as “just another tool” in its so-called “War on Terror.” The only problem is that it was illegal, as it violated U.S., Belgian, and European privacy laws. BAH was right in the middle of it. According to the ACLU/PI report,

Though Booz Allen’s role is to verify that the access to the SWIFT data is not abused, its relationship with the U.S. Government calls its objectivity significantly into question. [Emphasis added.]

Among Booz Allen’s senior consulting staff are several former members of the intelligence community, including a former Director of the CIA and a former director of the NSA.

As noted by Barry Steinhardt, an ACLU director, “It’s bad enough that the [Bush] administration is trying to hold out a private company as a substitute for genuine checks and balances on its surveillance activities. But of all companies to perform audits on a secret surveillance program, it would be difficult to find one less objective and more intertwined with the U.S. government security establishment.” (Emphasis added.)

And then there’s BAH’s role as subcontractor in the Trailblazer Project and in Pioneer Groundbreaker, both projects designed to analyze data flowing on the Internet to find potential terrorists. Both ran hugely over budget while exceeding security protocols to protect Americans’ privacy in the process.

So much for the errant child who is profiting enormously at taxpayer expense while invading their privacy. The parent, The Carlyle Group, the third largest private equity firm in the world with assets approaching $200 billion, is also run and managed by individuals with feet in both camps – to wit:

James Baker, currently a Carlyle senior counselor, was President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of state;

George W. Bush, the former president of the United States, serves as senior adviser to the Carlyle Asia Advisory Board;

Frank Carlucci, former secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, also served Carlyle as its chairman from 1989 to 2005;

Richard Darman, director of the Office of Management and Budget under President George H. W. Bush, also served Carlyle as its managing director and then as a senior adviser

And so on.

The light of day now causing public relations problems for Booz Allen Hamilton and its parent, The Carlyle Group, began with the decision by Booz Allen Hamilton employee Edward Snowden to warn Americans of the dangers to their privacy. As his revelations continue to flow out from the pen of Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian (U.K.), the stature, prestige, and credibility of these two intertwined companies will continue to suffer.

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

Just days after being sworn in as prime minister of Pakistan, and declaring that he did not want to sever ties with the United States over the drone strikes that plague parts of his country, Nawaz Sharif (shown) said Monday that two recent U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan have convinced him that his own military is in collusion with the CIA to kill his countrymen.

“The policy of protesting against drone strikes for public consumption, while working behind the scenes to make them happen, is not on,” Sharif said, according to the record of statements made at the inaugural meeting of his cabinet.

By taking on the military, Sharif may be outkicking his coverage. In the past, the Pakistani army – described by the Washington Post as one of “the strongest institutions in the country” – has welcomed the presence of the U.S. military, including the drones.

For a bit of context, it’s been just over two weeks since President Obama proclaimed in a major policy address that drones would be used to kill only those “terrorists” whose threat to the security of the homeland was deemed “continuing and imminent.”

Sharif was elected on May 11, and since that day he has decried the drone strikes that have become a central operation in the so-called War on Terror first prosecuted by the George W. Bush administration and perpetuated by President Obama.

In his first comments after his election, Sharif insisted that he did not want to sever ties with the United States over the drone strikes that have killed so many of his countrymen, but he did call out President Obama for violating the sovereignty of Pakistan by ordering the deadly drone missions without the approval of Islamabad.

The Washington Post suggested in a report that Sharif’s stance might evince a forthcoming rescinding of Pakistan’s “grudging compliance” in the prosecution of the death-by-drone program that is such a favorite weapon in President Obama’s demonstrable war on due process hidden behind the Potemkin village of the War on Terror.

“I think we have good relations with the United States of America. We certainly have to listen to each other,” said Sharif immediately after his election. “If there are any concerns on any side, I think we should address those concerns.”

“Drones indeed are challenging our sovereignty,” said Sharif. “I think this is a very serious issue, and our concern must be understood properly.”

Sharif is not the alone in his disdain for the drones.

In an interview with The New American in March, a senior official in Pakistan’s mission to the United Nations said that “everyone in the government” of Pakistan believes the drone missions are assaults not only on the citizens of Pakistan, but on its sovereignty, as well.

Despite such reported unanimity of animosity, there are a couple of obstacles standing between Sharif and the ridding of Pakistani skies of the ubiquitous buzz of U.S. drones.

First, as reported by the Washington Post, Pakistan stands in the very busy queue of countries cashing checks from the U.S. Treasury. In 2012, for example, Pakistan received nearly $3 billion in American humanitarian and military aid.

In the case of Pakistan’s dependence on U.S. largesse, it seems that money talks and sovereignty walks.

Since he was elected, Sharif has witnessed two major drone strikes in his country.

On May 30, the Movement of the Taliban (the Pakistani arm of the Taliban) issued a statement confirming that Waliur Rehman, their deputy leader and an emir, was killed in a U.S. drone strike. According to LongWarJournal.com, “The Taliban vowed to avenge his death and also withdrew the prospects of peace talks with the newly elected Pakistani government.”

Rehman, his deputy Fakhar-ul-Islam, and two Uzbekis were among seven people killed by Hellfire missiles launched at a compound in the village of Chashma in North Waziristan.

The Movement of the Taliban’s statement, as reported in Dawn, declared their decision to reject peace and embrace revenge.

“We are suspending all kinds of contacts and revoke the peace talks offer with the government, soon we shall be responding with full force,” said Ihsanullah Ihsan, the Movement’s lead spokesman in Pakistan.

“On one hand the Pakistani government is advocating the mantra of peace talks, and on the other it is colluding with the United States and killing the Taliban leadership,” Ihsan continued.

The second attack of the Sharif regime came just days ago.

On June 7, at least six “militants” were summarily executed by the government of the United States when two Hellfire missiles destroyed a compound in the village of Mangroati in the Shawal area of North Waziristan.

The designation of six of these victims as “militants” raises the question: What is a militant?

For President Obama and those pulling the triggers on the joysticks guiding the missiles toward their human targets, “suspected militant” means (presumably) “all military-age males in a strike zone.”

For those of us more concerned with the Constitution and with the rule of law than the president, “suspected militant” in this case appears to mean nothing other than a person not charged with any crime, not afforded even the most perfunctory due process protections, but summarily executed upon order of the president anyway. In this way, we are no better than those we kill in the name of safety.

Beyond the unconscionable murder of thousands, the drone war is doing perhaps irreparable damage to the sovereignty of Pakistan (and Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.), the sanctity of the Constitution and the fundamental principles of liberty it protects, and to the likelihood that the ranks of the Taliban and al-Qaeda will shrink in fear of the fire from the sky.

Since 2006, drone strikes have resulted in the death of at least 2,673 Pakistanis, not all of whom qualified as “militants” who are purportedly the target of the drones’ deadly payload.

From “double-tap” strikes (that kill not only the target, but also anyone trying to retrieve the body) to the “signature strikes” (that target groups displaying “militant behavior” rather than individual suspects believed to be planning attacks on the United States), this indiscriminate assassination of those not charged with any crime or suspected of any ill will is creating more enemies than it is eliminating.

Facts reveal that the prosecution of the drone war throughout the region is ironically increasing al-Qaeda’s success in the region. Al-Qaeda couldn’t cook up a more effective recruitment program than the U.S. drone war that is allegedly aimed at eliminating the “terrorist” organization.

In an interview with the Times of India, Akbar Ahmed – diplomat and author of The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam – Ahmed warned about the rise in recruitment among those targeted by Obama’s drone war.

“Apart from the dubious arguments justifying drones, this is a highly ineffective method of checking violence. With every three bad guys killed, there are some 30 innocent women and children who die. And every strike feeds into anti-Americanism – after over a decade of using drones, neither have suicide bombers stopped, nor have those following them dwindled,” he said.

Despite Prime Minister Sharif’s criticism of the U.S. government and his own military, on Wednesday he announced that “Pakistan’s cash-strapped new government” somehow found the funds to increase the country’s defense budget by 15 percent. And, according to Indian Express, “the powerful army [gets] the lion’s share of the outlay.”

^{Photo of Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif: 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

Marc Jones
Reuters
June 13, 2013

World shares fell and the dollar slumped on Thursday as a sell-off on global financial markets accelerated on concerns over whether central banks will continue the stimulus they have come to rely on.

Stocks, bonds, commodities and the dollar were all caught in the selling. There were tentative signs markets were leveling off ahead of U.S. trading, although Wall Street was also expected to open in the red.

The slide has been triggered by comments from policymakers at the U.S. Federal Reserve, which meets next Tuesday and Wednesday, about when to start scaling back its huge bond-buying program.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 9:33 am

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

The long awaited Syrian peace talks – instigated by power brokers Russia and the United States – had already passed their initial due date, and are now officially stillborn.  

The peace talks are dead because the U.S.-backed rebels are boycotting the negotiations, ruining any hope for peace, while threatening to turn an already-tragic disaster into a Yugoslavia-style catastrophe…or worse.

The U.S. backed rebels are not participating in the talks because they have nothing to gain from them, and everything to lose.

In war, the purpose of peace negotiations is to copy the situation on the battlefield and paste it to a treaty: the army winning the war enters negotiations from a dominant position, since its position is enforceable on the ground.

The U.S.-backed rebels would be entering peace talks broken and beaten, having been debilitated on the battlefield. The Syrian army has had a string of victories, pushing the rebels back to the border areas where they are protected by U.S. allies Turkey, Jordan, and northern Lebanon. Peace talks would merely expose this reality and end the war on terms dictated by the Syrian government.

A rebel leader was quoted in The New York Times revealing this motive for the rebel’s abandonment of peace talks:

“What can we [rebels] ask for when we go very weak to Geneva [for peace talks]?… The Russians and the Iranians and the representatives of the [Syrian] regime will say: ‘You don’t have any power. We are controlling everything. What you are coming to ask for?’”

This is the reality as it exists in Syria, and realistic peace talks would recognize the situation in Syria and end the conflict immediately.

But first the rebel’s supporters – the United States and its lackeys Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar – must acknowledge this reality and demand that the rebels forge ahead with peace talks, on threat of being cut off politically, financially, and militarily.

If this happens, war is over.

But if the war ended tomorrow, Syrian President Bashar Assad, would still be in power, and President Obama has said repeatedly, “Assad must go.”  Obama would be further humiliated by his Syria policy if he had to again recognize Assad as president after spending a year recognizing a group of rich Syrian exiles as “the legitimate government of Syria” and after his administration repeatedly announced that the Assad regime had ended over a year ago.

More importantly, if Assad stayed in power, U.S. foreign policy would appear weak internationally, which is one main reason that the U.S. political establishment wants to go “all in” for regime change in Syria: super powers must back up their threats, since otherwise other nations might choose to challenge the United States.

This is the real reason peace talks will not be held. The U.S. and its European allies want regime change in Syria, and they are prepared to allow many more people to die to make it so. This was made clear by the Obama administration. The New York Times reports:

“[Syrian] President Bashar al-Assad’s gains on the battlefield have called the United States’ strategy on Syria into question, prompting the Obama administration to again consider military options, including arming the rebels and conducting airstrikes to protect civilians and the Syrian opposition, administration officials said on Monday.”

The above quote mentions “conducting airstrikes to protect civilians.” This is the infamous language of the UN resolution that allowed U.S.-NATO to intervene in Libya; but Obama immediately overstepped “protecting civilians” and quickly jumped into “regime change,” a gross violation of international law and a Bush-like war crime.

The UN – though especially China and Russia – have learned from the Libya example and will doubtfully ever again approve of a “protect civilian” UN resolution. If the U.S. intervenes in Syria, it will do so with a Bush-style “coalition of the willing,” i.e. U.S. allies.

Obama’s dream of having a post-Assad Syria is further complicated by the fact that Assad is apparently more popular than he has ever been.

Many Syrians that didn’t previously support Assad now do, having concluded that Assad in power is better than their country being obliterated in an Iraq-style invasion, or being dominated by Islamic extremists, as the majority of the Syrian rebel groups are.

Further helping Assad’s popularity is that Israel has bombed Syria recently on multiple occasions, while Syrians watch the unpopular United States funnels massive amounts of weapons to the rebels. As a result, Assad can now successfully portray himself as a defender of Syria’s sovereignty against foreign aggression.

But, Obama will not be deterred. After it became clear that the rebels were losing the war, the U.S. and its European allies removed the remaining legal barriers to further arming the rebels, while the religious leaders of Saudi Arabia and Qatar – both U.S. allies – assisted in the war effort by calling for Jihad against the Syrian government (the same week the leader of al-Qaeda did).

Behind this frenzy of rebel support lies the sick logic that, in order for successful peace negotiations to take place, the rebels need to be in a stronger battlefield position. Arm the rebels to the teeth for peace!

In response to this twisted logic, Oxfam International – a disaster relief coalition – responded by saying:

“Sending arms to the Syrian opposition won’t create a level playing field. Instead, it risks further fueling an arms free-for-all where the victims are the civilians of Syria. Our experience from other conflict zones tells us that this crisis will only drag on for far longer if more and more arms are poured into the country.”

Ultimately, the Syrian rebels would have already been defeated – and thousands of lives spared – if they had not been receiving support from the U.S. and other countries. The U.S.-backed rebels have said that a pre-condition for peace is “Assad must go;” but this demand does not coincide with the reality on the ground: the rebels are in no position to demand this, and the U.S. is using this unrealistic demand to artificially lengthen an already-bloody war.

Obama can either use his immense influence to end this bloody conflict now by withdrawing support to the rebels, or he can extend the conflict and further tear to shreds the social fabric of the Middle East, while risking a multi-nation war that history will denounce as an easily preventable holocaust.

Shamus Cooke is a social service worker, trade unionist, and writer for Workers Action (www.workerscompass.org). He can be reached at shamuscooke@gmail.com

Notes

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Research from Germany’s Deutsche Bank shows emerging markets are in better positions now than they were in 2008 to withstand external shocks.

Back in 2008, emerging markets coped with the effects of the
global financial crisis without “structural damage,” although a
small number of countries received liquidity support from the
International Monetary Fund, Deutsche Bank’s emerging markets
analyst Markus Jaeger says in the survey.

They adjusted to shocks to their capital and current accounts by
currency depreciation, liquidity support from central banks and
by the contraction of their economies.

The banks’ economists analysed countries’ external financing
requirements (EFR) to study their exposure to a sharp slowdown in
capital flows. EFR shows the ratio of short-term debt, medium-and
long-term debt amortizations and the current account in relation
to foreign exchange reserves. Generally, EFR below 100 percent
mean the country is able to withstand external shocks while those
above show vulnerability.

Judging by EFR, South Korea, Poland and South Africa have
much stronger positions now compared to 2008, while India and
Indonesia have “slightly weaker, but still solid, positions,”
according to Deutsche Bank.

China and Russia showed the best results with EFR ratio below 50
percent. In addition, the two countries have a surplus in their
current accounts and short-term debt of the two countries is less
than half of the state reserves, according to the survey

The only developing country that is not prepared for the crisis
is Turkey — its need for foreign financing has grown since 2008
and is now more than 100 percent of FX.

Overall, emerging markets are more solid than they were five
years ago, as many have put in place regulations that limit the
extent to which banks can run foreign currency risks, according
to Markus Jaeger.

The study supports the Russian authorities when they say Russia
is ready for the crisis. Russian President Vladimir Putin said
that the “safety margin” of the Russian economy is formed by high
oil prices and large state reserves. Russia’s foreign exchange
reserves are the fourth largest in the world topping $515bn,
Reuters reports.

This article originally appeared on: RT

Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee took the opportunity Wednesday during a previously scheduled hearing to challenge the director of the National Security Agency about the extent of the agency’s domestic surveillance, during which it was made clear that what has been revealed thus far is just the “tip of the iceberg.”

During Wednesday’s hearing, NSA Chief Keith Alexander was reluctant to divulge further details in public about the agency’s dragnet surveillance practices. (Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP) Responding specifically to questions regarding whether “e-mail contacts” are being “vacuumed” by the Obama administration’s clandestine interpretation of the Patriot Act’s surveillance powers, NSA Chief Keith Alexander responded, “I don’t want to make a mistake” and reveal too much. He added that disclosing such details may cause “our country to lose some sort of protection.”

Alexander followed up by saying the topic of e-mail and other metadata surveillance is best discussed in a “classified session” which senators are scheduled to attend Thursday.

The two programs in question, which were revealed last week in a series of breaking stories by the Guardian–which had obtained the information by Edward Snowden, an employee of the contracted security firm Booz Allen–are supposedly distinct and are theoretically justified by different laws.

The first, justified under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, collects the phone records of millions of Americans, but reportedly does not examine at their content. The other, known as PRISM, is justified under Section 702 of the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act and is meant to surveil the online communications of people believed not to be inside the United States.

However, as Alexander explained during yesterday’s hearing, it is difficult, in practice, to separate them. “The reality is, they work together,” Alexander said.

Senators yesterday were specifically concerned about a top secret court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, disclosed last week by the Guardian, which allows the NSA to obtain daily records of all domestic calls made by Verizon customers and could, under certain interpretations, justify a similar collection of email and IP data.

CNET’s Declan McCullagh explains:

The Justice Department obtained that order by claiming it was permitted by Section 215 of the Patriot Act, 50 USC 1861, better known as the “business records” portion. Section 215 allows FBI agents to obtain any “tangible thing,” including “books, records, papers, documents, and other items,” which some of the Patriot Act’s supporters have said was never intended to cover every American’s phone call logs. (Section 215 orders are far less privacy-protective, and therefore more legally problematic, than traditional search warrants backed by probable cause and signed by a judge.)

In an unusual move, however, the Justice Department has refused to disclose its secret interpretation of Section 215–despite complaints from multiple senators–that would reveal just how far Patriot Act surveillance has extended.

“What I worry is how far you believe this authority extends,” Sen. Johanns said to the NSA director during yesterday’s hearing. Alexander replied that Section 215 only covered metadata: “If you want to get the content, you’d have to get a court order.”

Under the Justice Department’s reasoning, Web browsing logs and e-mail logs “would seem to be a record, and thus potentially subject to a 215 order,” says Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Alan Butler, appellate advocacy counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., agreed by adding that, considering the Justice Department’s use of Section 215, they could make the argument that IP address records fall under the same “tangible” classification as phone numbers:

I think that IP address records would likely be treated the same as call records unless they contain “content” (detailed URIs for specific pages might be considered content). So the FBI could theoretically put forth the same broad relevance argument used to justify this Verizon order.

Adding further weight to the suspicion that there is much yet to be revealed about the NSA’s dragnet surveillance operation, Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Calif.), appearing on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” Wednesday, said that lawmakers learned “significantly more” about the NSA’s spy programs during a Tuesday briefing with counter terrorism officials.

“What we learned in there,” Sanchez said, “is significantly more than what is out in the media today.” Adding that the information already revealed is just “the tip of the iceberg.”

“I think it’s just broader than most people even realize,” she said, “and I think that’s, in one way, what astounded most of us, too.”

_____________________

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

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

On Tuesday night at 11:11 p.m. Greek police forces stopped the transmission of the public broadcasting service ERT, cutting the power supply to its antennas. Workers responded by occupying the station’s main building in Athens suburb of Agia and broadcasting a protest program via satellite and internet. Thousands of sympathizers gathered in front of the building.

The police action was ordered by conservative premier Antonis Samaras (ND) to shut down Greece’s three public television and 26 public radio stations, which altogether constitutes the ERT. Just four hours earlier the government spokesman Simos Kedikoglou had announced the plan to close down the state-owned company and dismiss all the 2,656 workers with immediate effect. This decree ended the public broadcast service after 75 years of existence.

In the coming months, the government intends to rebuild a smaller TV and radio channel with some 1,000 workers, that is directly regulated by the state. ERT workers have to apply for jobs in the new company just as any other applicant. “We are abolishing a front of opacity and waste,” Samaras said.

“What happened here was just done by dictators,” ERT journalist Yannis Darras told the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, “Or have you ever heard about a democracy, that shuts down all the public stations in a surprise-coup manner?”

Indeed, scenes like this were last seen in Greece under the rule of the colonel dictatorship from 1967 to 1974.

A statement by the human rights organization Reporters Without Borders condemned the decision to close the ERT as an attack on democratic rights. “Greece has fallen almost 50 places in the past three years in the Reporters Without Borders press freedom index, a record fall in such a short period for a European Union member state,” a statement said.

The shutdown of ERT–considered a more serious source of information than Greece’s private broadcasters–is the latest example of the brutalization of Greek politics. In the last five months, the Greek government used martial law three times to crush strikes with police. Demonstrations and protests are regularly attacked by riot police, and journalists are blocked from reporting on them.

These reactionary policies are the direct result of the brutal social attacks dictated by the European Union (EU) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and implemented by the Greek government. These policies have slashed wage levels and public services, sending Greek living standards back decades.

Such social destruction is no longer compatible with democratic rights or media freedom. Ruling elites in Greece and throughout Europe are deeply concerned about social unrest–like the recent protests that have erupted against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. They are responding by attacking the media and moving to suppress any opposition of the working class.

The attack on the ERT can be traced back directly to the EU and IMF. The IMF already demanded massive job cuts at the ERT in 2011. On Wednesday European Commissioner for Economic Issues Olli Rehn said that the commission does not “question the Greek government’s mandate to manage the public sector in Greece”. Rehn added that it hadn’t been the decision of the commission to shut down the ERT. This statement is not credible, however.

The IMF and EU have placed observers in every Greek ministry and are involved in every single decision taken. They just ordered Athens to sack 2,000 public workers by the end of the month in order to receive the next tranche of aid credits. Some 13,500 more are to be dismissed by the end of 2014.

That is part of the plan to destroy 150,000 jobs in the public sector. The closure of the ERT is obviously part of the austerity measures dictated by the EU.

The junior coalition partners of the conservative New Democracy (ND), the social democratic PASOK and the Democratic Left (DIMAR) made limited objections to the closure. They made clear that they agree on layoffs, but that they want the ERT to stay open while restructuring is carried out. Both parties repeatedly raised objections to similar measures but never moved to break the coalition with ND.

Should PASOK and DIMAR withdraw their support for ND’s attack on the ERT, ND can count on the fascistic Golden Dawn party. Its deputy, Ilias Panagiotaros, Tweeted: “ERT, that Socialist-Communist shack, is finally closing.”

Workers have made clear their opposition to this attack on democratic and social rights. Workers in Athens refused to leave the building, after ERT CEO Emilios Latsios issued instructions for employees to leave all of the broadcaster’s buildings or face arrest as illegal occupiers. Most of them are still in the building, broadcasting the protest program.

After this message was broadcast on Tuesday night, thousands of protesters gathered within hours around the ERT’s main Athens building to protest this decision. Many of them stayed the whole night and all of Wednesday.

These included celebrities like the singer Eleftheria Arvanitaki, who sang for the protesters. The broadcaster’s orchestra performed for some time in the building, and their music was relayed over loudspeakers outside. A large crowd has gathered also outside the ERT3 building in Thessaloniki.

Anastasia Zigou, an active ERT worker, told British daily the Guardian: “Many of us haven’t slept for 48 hours, but we won’t give in. We are sustained by the huge response we’ve had from citizens, not only here but at local radio stations all over the country.”

On Wednesday, Greek newspaper journalists stopped work in solidarity with the ERT workers. Workers at private broadcasters blocked all news programs until noon and reported exclusively on the ERT protests in later news programs. Some journalists declared that they will strike until the ERT reopens.

Amid rising popular opposition to the government’s austerity policies, pseudo-left parties like the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) and the trade union bureaucracies are doing everything to block the development of opposition. The SYRIZA chairman Alexis Tsipras met on Wednesday with Greek President Karolos Papoulias to discuss the ERT crisis. He asked the president to intervene and initiate a debate in parliament in order to stabilize the situation.

Greece’s two main trade union federations, GSEE and ADEDY, called for a 24-hour strike for today. Such strikes are well-known in Greece. The unions are closely aligned with PASOK, back the government, and organize strikes so as to avoid disrupting its austerity policies. If they are now organizing a strike, it is in an attempt to keep working class struggles from turning into a direct political challenge to the government and to capitalist rule in Greece, which they defend.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

A group of British MPs have urged HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to fully investigate the search giant Google on tax avoidance as information from ex-employees undermined the companyâ„¢s defence on its tax arrangement.

The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) rejected Googleâ„¢s earlier claims of selling no advertising from London, saying that it has been told that the vast majority of sales activity still takes place in the country.

The chairman of the committee Margaret Hodge said the British Prime Minister David Cameron should demand the company to pay its fare share of tax on its UK profits and added he should tackle the issue first at home and then internationally.

Å“I want him to toughen up HMRC, I want him to simplify the code, I want him to have greater transparency about what happens,” Hodge said.

According to reports, Google generated £11.5 billion in revenue from the UK between 2006 and 2011 and it only paid £10 million in UK corporate taxes in the same period.

Earlier last year, Business giants Starbucks, Google and Amazon were found guilty of dodging millions of pounds in tax in Britain.

It is estimated that the corporate tax evasion is costing the UK economy something between 45 to 90 billion pounds a year, meaning that it is practically undoing all austerity measures as well as widening the gap between the rich and the poor in the British society.

MOS/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

This article originally appeared on: RT

Statoil of Norway, and Russian state-owned oil company Rosneft are partnering in a venture after being awarded a 20 percent stake in Norway’s continental shelf in the Barents Sea.

Norway has estimated the blocks, which span 1,213 square
kilometers, contain a potential 400 to 600 million barrels of
recoverable oil.

RN Nordic Oil AS, an indirect subsidiary of Rosneft, will work
with Norway’s Statoil, who will act as an operator, to
develop four ‘promising and prolific’ blocks near recently
discovered Skrugard and Havis areas in the Casberg fields.

“This license award marks for Rosneft a promising firm entry
into the Norwegian continental shelf in the Barents Sea. It also
marks a major step in developing the long-term cooperation with
Statoil,” Rosneft said in a statement.

Rosneft’s partnership with Statoil is key in the company’s
development and influence in the region.

 “We are pleased to have been awarded the license and
look forward to making active contributions to the License work
program. We are convinced that application of the latest
technology jointly with our strategic partner Statoil will enable
us to develop these acreages in the most efficient way,”
Rosneft Vice President for Offshore Projects Zeljko Runje said.

Lukoil, which didn’t receive any Arctic drilling permits from Russia, also received a
license through Statoil to jointly develop hydrocarbons.

Norway’s oil magnate publicized the licensing results on
Wednesday, and a total of 24 blocks were awarded to 29 different
companies. Twenty of the licenses are for the Barents Sea and
four are for the Norwegian Sea.

The bidding companies submitted their applications by December
2012, and development will begin no earlier than ten years time.

Rosneft has also partnered with Statoil to explore shale oil
deposits in the Khadum Formation in Russia’s Stavropol Region,
and fields beneath the Arctic Sea.

Norway and Russia are in close competition for Germany’s energy market.
Norway boasted record high exports in 2012, while Russia’s
largest European exporter, Gazprom, suffered its worst numbers in
10 years.

Norway increased its exports 16% in 2012 to reach 107.6bn cubic
meters, according to Europe’s key statistics office Eurostat

After taking over TNK-BP in March, Rosneft has been
picking up joint venture projects worldwide. 

Sechin aims to chip away at the Gazprom monopoly, and to double
Rosneft’s domestic gas market by 2020, from 9% to at last 19%, in
plans made clear at an investor meeting in London on Tuesday.

In May, Rosneft signed a cooperation agreement with INPEX, Japan’s largest
energy explorer, to jointly explore for oil and gas in the Sea of
Okhotsk, in which it will hold a two-thirds stake.

In May, Rosneft teamed up with Venezuelan national oil
company PDVSA to explore the Orinico river delta, a 342 square
kilometer heavy oil belt. Rosneft’s share will be 40 percent.

In March, Rosneft subsidiary Neftegaz America Shelf LP acquired a
30 percent interest in 20 deep water exploration blocks in the
Gulf of Mexico held by Exxon Mobil. The
blocks have a total area of 450 square kilometers

Rosneft is considering an intial public offering, but hasn’t made
any final public announcements on the matter.

If Rosneft is privatized, it stands to gain market capitalization
and higher profits. The public offering, similar to VTB’s, would
likely be made on the Moscow Stock Exchange, and the Kremlin
would keep a majority share of the company, at least 60%.

This article originally appeared on: RT

National Security Agency internal memorandums made public over a decade ago refute the Obama administration’s claims that its vast domestic surveillance program are being carried out as part of a “war on terror.”

Plans to carry out the abrogation of basic democratic rights were well underway at least ten months before the “global war on terror” was launched in the aftermath of the still unexplained events of September 11th, 2001.

The “Transition 2001” memo, published internally by the NSA at the end of 2000 in preparation for the inauguration of President George W. Bush, discloses a decade-old plan to undermine the foundations of the Fourth Amendment. The heavily-redacted document was made public by a Freedom of Information Act request filed by a George Washington University professor.

The Fourth Amendment states that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”

The 2000 NSA memo expresses the view that this basic democratic right is not compatible with the repressive needs of the state:

“The Fourth Amendment is as applicable to eSIGNINT [electronic signal intelligence] as it is to the SIGINT of yesterday and today. The Information Age will however cause us to rethink and reapply the procedures, policies and authorities born in an earlier electronic surveillance environment.” [emphasis added.]

“Make no mistake,” the memo continues, “NSA can and will perform its missions consistent with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws. But senior leadership must understand that today’s and tomorrow’s mission will demand a powerful, permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host the ‘protected’ communications of Americans as well as the targeted communications of adversaries.” [emphasis added.]

The Fourth Amendment contains no “however” or “but” clauses, as the authors of the memo attempt to imply. The language “shall not be violated” clearly indicates that the constitution’s authors intended no such exceptions.

Moreover, the fact that the NSA employed quotation marks when referencing “protected” constitutional rights signifies the level of contempt with which large sections of the ruling class view the basic democratic rights of the American people.

The authors also express consternation about the slow pace in the growth of the NSA’s surveillance plan, stating less than a year before the events of September 11th that “the process of transformation” is “likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

This is an extraordinary statement, echoing remarks made in 1997 by former national security adviser under Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who noted that the “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.”

Despite the authors’ formal statements of support for the Fourth Amendment, the insinuation that there exists a legalistic state of exception to protected constitutional rights has historical implications: such exceptions serve as pseudo-legal justification for the actual establishment of a police state.

References to the fact that the proposed “rethinking” is the result of changes in “today’s and tomorrow’s mission” demonstrate that Constitutional democratic rights are to be subordinated to the needs of US imperialism in the post-Soviet era.

Faced with the need “to exploit in an unprecedented way the explosion in global communications,” the memo demands that the NSA undertake a “fresh approach to the way [it] has traditionally done business.”

A related NSA document provides further insight into the social forces behind this “fresh approach.” Titled “The National Security Agency: Issues for Congress” and published in January 2001, the document explained that “a major renewal effort is underway” to expand the domestic surveillance powers of the agency, which in the last quarter of the 20th century had been limited by popular anger over agency abuses made public through the Church Committee hearings of 1976.

“This represents an Agency very different from the one we inherited from the Cold War,” the memo acknowledges. “It also demands a policy recognition that NSA will be a legal but also a powerful and permanent presence on a global telecommunications infrastructure…”

Reading the Church Committee’s finding that the NSA was “vital to American security” as encouragement to expand its anti-democratic practices, the 2001 memo commends Congress for watering-down the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to permit limited domestic surveillance operations for “law enforcement purposes.”

The degree to which the NSA colluded with Congress at the turn of the millennium was stated explicitly in the Transition 2001 memo. The NSA authors wrote that “[t]he Agency recognizes that Congressional buy-in is a necessary first step toward transforming the Agency, and has been keen to keep Congress fully and currently informed.”

Noting that NSA proposals for heightened domestic surveillance “led to hearings” in Congress, the Transition 2001 document points out that “[a]t the close of the 106th Congress, no legislation that would harm NSA’s collection was enacted.”

The 2001 Congressional report also mentions that “[m]embers and staff [of the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence] have regularly reviewed NSA programs and adjusted budgetary priorities with almost all hearings being conducted in closed sessions.”

Those members sitting on either the House or Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the two years immediately prior include such high-ranking Democrats and friends of the Obama administration as former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Secretary of State John Kerry, and Democratic Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance Max Baucus.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

National Security Agency internal memorandums made public over a decade ago refute the Obama administration’s claims that its vast domestic surveillance program are being carried out as part of a “war on terror.”

Plans to carry out the abrogation of basic democratic rights were well underway at least ten months before the “global war on terror” was launched in the aftermath of the still unexplained events of September 11th, 2001.

The “Transition 2001” memo, published internally by the NSA at the end of 2000 in preparation for the inauguration of President George W. Bush, discloses a decade-old plan to undermine the foundations of the Fourth Amendment. The heavily-redacted document was made public by a Freedom of Information Act request filed by a George Washington University professor.

The Fourth Amendment states that “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…”

The 2000 NSA memo expresses the view that this basic democratic right is not compatible with the repressive needs of the state:

“The Fourth Amendment is as applicable to eSIGNINT [electronic signal intelligence] as it is to the SIGINT of yesterday and today. The Information Age will however cause us to rethink and reapply the procedures, policies and authorities born in an earlier electronic surveillance environment.” [emphasis added.]

“Make no mistake,” the memo continues, “NSA can and will perform its missions consistent with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws. But senior leadership must understand that today’s and tomorrow’s mission will demand a powerful, permanent presence on a global telecommunications network that will host the ‘protected’ communications of Americans as well as the targeted communications of adversaries.” [emphasis added.]

The Fourth Amendment contains no “however” or “but” clauses, as the authors of the memo attempt to imply. The language “shall not be violated” clearly indicates that the constitution’s authors intended no such exceptions.

Moreover, the fact that the NSA employed quotation marks when referencing “protected” constitutional rights signifies the level of contempt with which large sections of the ruling class view the basic democratic rights of the American people.

The authors also express consternation about the slow pace in the growth of the NSA’s surveillance plan, stating less than a year before the events of September 11th that “the process of transformation” is “likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

This is an extraordinary statement, echoing remarks made in 1997 by former national security adviser under Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who noted that the “the pursuit of power is not a goal that commands popular passion, except in conditions of a sudden threat or challenge to the public’s sense of domestic well-being.”

Despite the authors’ formal statements of support for the Fourth Amendment, the insinuation that there exists a legalistic state of exception to protected constitutional rights has historical implications: such exceptions serve as pseudo-legal justification for the actual establishment of a police state.

References to the fact that the proposed “rethinking” is the result of changes in “today’s and tomorrow’s mission” demonstrate that Constitutional democratic rights are to be subordinated to the needs of US imperialism in the post-Soviet era.

Faced with the need “to exploit in an unprecedented way the explosion in global communications,” the memo demands that the NSA undertake a “fresh approach to the way [it] has traditionally done business.”

A related NSA document provides further insight into the social forces behind this “fresh approach.” Titled “The National Security Agency: Issues for Congress” and published in January 2001, the document explained that “a major renewal effort is underway” to expand the domestic surveillance powers of the agency, which in the last quarter of the 20th century had been limited by popular anger over agency abuses made public through the Church Committee hearings of 1976.

“This represents an Agency very different from the one we inherited from the Cold War,” the memo acknowledges. “It also demands a policy recognition that NSA will be a legal but also a powerful and permanent presence on a global telecommunications infrastructure…”

Reading the Church Committee’s finding that the NSA was “vital to American security” as encouragement to expand its anti-democratic practices, the 2001 memo commends Congress for watering-down the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to permit limited domestic surveillance operations for “law enforcement purposes.”

The degree to which the NSA colluded with Congress at the turn of the millennium was stated explicitly in the Transition 2001 memo. The NSA authors wrote that “[t]he Agency recognizes that Congressional buy-in is a necessary first step toward transforming the Agency, and has been keen to keep Congress fully and currently informed.”

Noting that NSA proposals for heightened domestic surveillance “led to hearings” in Congress, the Transition 2001 document points out that “[a]t the close of the 106th Congress, no legislation that would harm NSA’s collection was enacted.”

The 2001 Congressional report also mentions that “[m]embers and staff [of the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence] have regularly reviewed NSA programs and adjusted budgetary priorities with almost all hearings being conducted in closed sessions.”

Those members sitting on either the House or Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the two years immediately prior include such high-ranking Democrats and friends of the Obama administration as former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Secretary of State John Kerry, and Democratic Chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance Max Baucus.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

The vast majority of garments sold in US retail stores are made overseas. US and European fashion designers establish relations with suppliers based on profit, regardless of where the product is made or the working conditions.

The world’s little-regulated free trade agreements, competition between fashion designers and the craving of Western consumers for low-cost products traditionally drive the fast-growing outsourcing of textile manufacturing to countries that lack protection for workers and where unions do not exist.

The collapse of the Rana Plaza building in the Savar district of Bangladesh’s capital last April, killing more than 1,100 workers, highlighted the plight of exploited garment labourers in Asia.

According to official investigation, the upper four floors of the building were erected without proper permits. Just one day earlier, inspectors ordered the evacuation of the building after uncovering serious structural cracks. However, the victims — half of whom were women and their nursing children — were threatened with having one month’s salary (about $50) deducted if they didn’t report to work the next day.

About six months earlier, 112 workers were killed in another garment factory in Bangladesh. Two weeks after April’s garment factory tragedy, another eight people lost their lives when fire swept through a large clothing factory in Dhaka.

Following the latest incident, human rights organisations initiated a campaign urging Western fashion designers and outlet stores to sign the Fire and Building Safety Accord in Bangladesh. The accord calls for an end to abysmal, unsafe factory conditions and requires a commitment from major Western retailers to invest in renovations and repairs necessary to make buildings safe.

The accord’s preamble calls for establishing a fire and building safety programme where “no worker needs to fear fires, building collapses, or other accidents that could be prevented with reasonable health and safety measures”.

The pact’s five-year commitment requires participating retailers to carry out independent safety inspections of factories and contribute up to $500,000 per year towards safety improvements.

Wistfully, some 14 major American and eight UK fashion retailers refused to endorse the Bangladesh readymade garment agreement. This included three of the largest buyers: Wal-Mart and GAP of the US and Asda of the UK.

It is disgraceful that major American and UK fashion retailers refuse — albeit under superficial pretexts — to sign the 25-point plan ensuring a safe work environment, especially when the cost to these large retailers comes to less than 0.1 per cent of their annual profits.

Labour organisations, trade unions and human rights groups in the EU and North America should bring the fight home and lobby unscrupulous retailers not just to sign the safety plan, but take it a step further and force these sweatshops to abide by internationally accepted labour standards with an eight-hour day — putting an end to modern slavery.

A growing body of evidence has established a clear correlation between long working hours and the risk of occupational injuries.

A US study of over 100,000 job records and over 5,000 workplace injuries for the period 1987 to 2000, carried out by the Centre for Health Policy and Research at the University of Massachusetts, concluded that long working hours “precipitate workplace accidents”.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Europeâ„¢s leading satellite operator Eutelsat has stepped up its illegal campaign against Iranian media outlets.

The French-based company has warned several international satellite providers against cooperating with Iranian channels, most notably the 24-hour English-language news channel Press TV.

Eutelsatâ„¢s Israeli-French CEO, Michel De Rosen, has written letters to satellite companies, reminding them of anti-Iran sanctions by the US and the European Union.

Press TV has obtained some of those letters in which Eutelsat has warned satellite companies that Å“broadcasting Iranian channels is a breach of American law.”

The company has also tried to tie the EUâ„¢s anti-Iran embargo to media sanctions. This is while the EU foreign policy chiefâ„¢s spokesperson, Michael Mann, has told Press TV that sanctions do not apply to Iranian media.

The West claims to be the main defender of free speech in the world, but has tried its best to silence Press TV’s alternative voice by shutting down its broadcasting in several countries.

SS/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

What Edward Snowden has done is an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil disobedience.

Like me, he became discomforted by [the NSA’s] direct violation of the fourth amendment of the US constitution.

The NSAprograms that Snowden has revealed are nothing new: they date back to the days and weeks after 9/11. I had direct exposure to similar programs, such as Stellar Wind, in 2001. In the first week of October, I had an extraordinary conversation with NSA’s lead attorney. When I pressed hard about the unconstitutionality of Stellar Wind, he said:

“The White House has approved the program; it’s all legal. NSA is the executive agent.”

It was made clear to me that the original intent of government was to gain access to all the information it could without regard for constitutional safeguards. “You don’t understand,” I was told. “We just need the data.”

In the first week of October 2001, President Bush had signed an extraordinary order authorizing blanket dragnet electronic surveillance: Stellar Wind was a highly secret program that, without warrant or any approval from the Fisa court, gave the NSA access to all phone records from the major telephone companies, including US-to-US calls. It correlates precisely with the Verizon order revealed by Snowden; and based on what we know, you have to assume that there are standing orders for the other major telephone companies.

***

The supposed oversight, combined with enabling legislation — the Fisa court, the congressional committees — is all a kabuki dance, predicated on the national security claim that we need to find a threat. The reality is, they just want it all, period.

So I was there at the very nascent stages, when the government — wilfully and in deepest secrecy — subverted the constitution. All you need to know about so-called oversight is that the NSA was already in violation of the Patriot Act by the time it was signed into law.

***

To the US government today, however, we are all foreigners.

I became an expert on East Germany, which was then the ultimate surveillance state. Their secret police were monstrously efficient: they had a huge paper-based system that held information on virtually everyone in the country — a population of about 16-17 million. The Stasi’s motto was “to know everything”.

***

So none of this is new to me. The difference between what the Bush administration was doing in 2001, right after 9/11, and what the Obama administration is doing today is that the system is now under the cover and color of law. Yet, what Snowden has revealed is still the tip of the iceberg. [Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez – a member of the Committee on Homeland Security and the Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities confirms this]

General Michael Hayden, who was head of the NSA when I worked there, and then director of the CIA, said, “We need to own the net.” [Background] And that is what they’re implementing here. They have this extraordinary system: in effect, a 24/7 panopticon on a vast scale that it is gazing at you with an all-seeing eye.

***

My concern [while working for the NSA] was that we were more than an accessory; this was a crime and we were subverting the constitution.

I differed as a whistleblower to Snowden only in this respect: in accordance with the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act, I took my concerns up within the chain of command, to the very highest levels at the NSA, and then to Congress and the Department of Defense. I understand why Snowden has taken his course of action, because he’s been following this for years: he’s seen what’s happened to other whistleblowers like me.

By following protocol, you get flagged — just for raising issues. You’re identified as someone they don’t like, someone not to be trusted. [Indeed, Obama has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other presidents combined. And the government threw in jail the one telecom executive to refuse government orders to hand over mass surveillance records on its customers.] I was exposed early on because I was a material witness for two 9/11 congressional investigations. In closed testimony, I told them everything I knew ….

But as I found out later, none of the material evidence I disclosed went into the official record. It became a state secret even to give information of this kind to the 9/11 investigation.

I reached a point in early 2006 when I decided I would contact a reporter. I had the same level of security clearance as Snowden. If you look at the indictment from 2010, you can see that I was accused of causing “exceptionally grave damage to US national security“. Despite allegations that I had tippy-top-secret documents, In fact, I had no classified information in my possession, and I disclosed none to the Baltimore Sun journalist during 2006 and 2007. But I got hammered: in November 2007, I was raided by a dozen armed FBI agents, when I was served with a search warrant. The nightmare had only just begun, including extensive physical and electronic surveillance.

In April 2008, in a secret meeting with the FBI, the chief prosecutor from the Department of Justice assigned to lead the prosecution said, “How would you like to spend the rest of your life in jail, Mr Drake?” — unless I co-operated with their multi-year, multimillion-dollar criminal leak investigation, launched in 2005 after the explosive New York Times article revealing for the first time the warrantless wiretapping operation. Two years later, they finally charged me with a ten felony count indictment, including five counts under the Espionage Act. I faced upwards of 35 years in prison.

In July 2011, after the government’s case had collapsed under the weight of truth, I plead to a minor misdemeanor for “exceeding authorized use of a computer” under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act — in exchange for the DOJ dropping all ten felony counts. I received as a sentence one year’s probation and 240 hours of community service: I interviewed almost 50 veterans for the Library of Congress veterans history project. This was a rare, almost unprecedented, case of a government prosecution of a whistleblower ending in total defeat and failure.

So, the stakes for whistleblowers are incredibly high. The government has got its knives out: there’s a massive manhunt for Snowden. They will use all their resources to hunt him down and every detail of his life will be turned inside out. They’ll do everything they can to “bring him to justice” — already there are calls for the “traitor” to be “put away for life”.

***

Since the government unchained itself from the constitution after 9/11, it has been eating our democracy alive from the inside out. There’s no room in a democracy for this kind of secrecy: it’s anathema to our form of a constitutional republic, which was born out of the struggle to free ourselves from the abuse of such powers, which led to the American revolution.

That is what’s at stake here: to an NSA with these unwarranted powers, we’re all potentially guilty; we’re all potential suspects until we prove otherwise. That is what happens when the government has all the data.

***

We are seeing an unprecedented campaign against whistleblowers and truth-tellers: it’s now criminal to expose the crimes of the state.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Protesters gather at the entrance of the Greek public broadcaster ERT headquarters in Athens on June 13, 2013, during a 24-hour strike over the sudden ERT shutdown.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Civil liberties advocates have encouraged the American public to protect themselves against the US governmentâ„¢s clandestine surveillance programs, Press TV reports.

According to a new Pew Research Poll, only 27 percent of Americans admit they are following the recent news concerning the largest US spy organization, the National Security Agency (NSA), which is conducting massive surveillance of electronic communications on tens of millions of US citizens and foreigners.

Å“The NSA scandal I think affects people in my generation a lot in terms of how we see it just because it gives us all an awareness of just how much data weâ„¢re actually putting online, you know, pictures and information about ourselves in Facebook or other social networks and the idea that that might somehow be relevant to the government I think is scary to a lot of people my age,” said a civil liberties activist.

The poll further revealed that 62 percent of Americans accept the federal governmentâ„¢s intrusion of their personal privacy in order to investigate possible terrorist threats, while only 34 percent said the government may not intrude on their personal privacy under any circumstance including the investigation of possible terrorist threats.

Civil liberties groups have urged the American public to further educate themselves about the governmentâ„¢s spy scheme in a bid to safeguard their rights to privacy.

This is while the American Civil Liberties Union and others have filed lawsuits against the administration of President Barack Obama as well as the NSA for violating the Constitution notably the fourth amendment, over the governmentâ„¢s surveillance scheme.

Å“The FISA court is overseeing this information and ensuring that itâ„¢s carried out in a just way, except for thereâ„¢s no real precedent in a constitutional law for a court thatâ„¢s outside of normal jurisdiction and normal, basically, visibility – you know, the ability for the public to keep that court in check and to see its proceedings,” an activist said.

Under a program code named PRISM, the NSA and the FBI are monitoring the central servers of nine leading US Internet companies, extracting audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs.

GMA/KA

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

A new exhibit spotlighting rare books from the disputed Schneerson Library collection, featuring 12,000 books and 50,000 rare documents, has opened at the Jewish Museum and Center of Tolerance in Moscow.

The Schneerson Library, which boasts a selection of rare Hasidic
religious books and documents, was started in the early 20th
Century by Rabbi Joseph I. Schneerson in the Russian city of
Lyubavichi (present-day Belarus). Part of the collection later
came to be nationalized by Soviet Russia as there were no legal
heirs in the Schneerson family.

Earlier this year, a US court issued a ruling according to which
Russia would be required to pay US$50,000 a day to Chabad
Lubavitch, an Orthodox Jewish movement headquartered in New York
City, until it releases the historic Schneerson Library of which
the Jewish group claims rightful ownership.

The roots of the conflict go back to 1994, when the Library of
Congress obtained seven of the rare Schneerson Library books from
the Russian State Library through an inter-library exchange
program.

The books were handed on to Chabad-Lubavitch. But since then the
US library helped to prolong the use of the books twice, in 1995
and 1996, before the Jewish organization finally refused to
return the books back to Russia in 2000.

Chabad-Lubavitch used diplomatic channels to propose another
‘exchange’, sending a list of the books they were ready to
give back in return for getting the seven abovementioned books
into indefinite possession. In 2004 the movement filed a lawsuit
against Russia, claiming the Russian part of the Schneerson
Library in full. In 2010 an American court actually granted their
claim, which Russia ignored as invalid.

Moscow is currently working on a lawsuit against the US Library
of Congress over the rare collection. In January, Russian Foreign
Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the recent decision of the US
court, ruling to fine Russia US$50,000 daily until it surrenders
the texts, “has nothing in common with justice.” The
collection is the “heritage of the Russian nation,”
according to Lavrov.

President Vladimir Putin came up with the idea to house the
unique collection at the Jewish Museum and the Center of
Tolerance in February. The president stated that the Schneerson
Library belongs to the Russian state.

“Sadly, I can only state that the discussion on the issue has
become confrontational, after what I regard as unlawful decisions
taken in the other country’s courts,” he said.

Four thousand five hundred books from the collection, which is
currently stored at the Russian State Library, are set to be
taken to the Jewish Museum and the Center of Tolerance by the end
of the year. The Center’s new library area will function as the
branch of the Russian State Library.

Chabad-Lubavitch is one of the largest Hasidic movements of
Orthodox Judaism in the world with cells in over 1,000 cities
across the world. Founded in the late 18th century by Rabbi
Shneur Zalman, the movement was based in the Russian town of
Lyubavichi until the early 20th century. In 1940, the sixth
leader of the organization, Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, escaped
from WWII, raging in Europe, to New York, USA, where he founded a
synagogue. The movement’s current official HQ is in the Crown
Heights section of Brooklyn, NYC.

Moscow’s Jewish Museum and Center of Tolerance features permanent
and temporary exhibitions, conference halls, a library, a
research center, a 4D cinema, a children’s center, a museum shop,
and a kosher cafe. Among the first guests of the museum, which
opened in November, were Israeli President Shimon Peres and FM
Lavrov.

This article originally appeared on: RT

There are six candidates to choose from for Iran’s first new president in eight years. While critics say the ballot won’t be free and fair, the very manner in which Iranian people vote differs significantly from what Westerners are used to.

Speaking on the last day of a subdued campaign, Iran’s supreme
leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has called on voters to turn out in
big numbers on Friday, pointing out that the “strong presence
of the Iranian nation will disappoint the enemy.”

“It is possible that some people, for whatever reason, do not
want to support the Islamic Republic’s establishment, but they do
want to support their country. They should also come to the
polls. Everyone should come to the polls,” Khamenei said in a
speech on Wednesday, reported on his website.

The winner in the 11th presidential election since Iran’s 1979
Islamic Revolution will replace the current president Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad, who is not eligible to run for a third term. Among
the problems to tackle will be high unemployment and inflation,
as well as international sanctions imposed over Iran’s disputed
nuclear program.

“We started presidential elections three decades ago, we had a
monarchy in Iran. So it’s all new. We are learning and trying to
make everything better and better every year,” Mohammad Reza
Nematzadeh, campaign director of one of the presidential hopefuls
Hasan Rouhani, told RT. 

A number of people on the streets of Tehran told RT they are
proud of the upcoming elections, regardless of their
outcome. 

“No Islamic State, not Saudi Arabia nor Kuwait would ever have
elections like we have. In those countries it’s more like someone
has appointed them to a post,” said one local.

Some Iranians complain they are simply tired of ‘conventional
politics’, however.

“Politicians become more and more distanced from the people.
The gap is wider and wider. And whole elections look more and
more like an appointment. This is why I will not vote,”
another Iranian remarked.

Others may fear going to vote because of possible violence. Mass
protests that followed the 2009 disputed elections are still
fresh in the memories of people when between 30 and 70 people
were killed, hundreds others injured, and thousands arrested
during the unrest in what became the worst domestic unrest since
the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iranians staged rallies calling into
question Ahmadinejad’s ‘sweeping victory’ with a majority of 60
percent.

Six hundred and seventy-eight people registered as candidates
have been barred from standing in the election on June 14, giving
rise to criticism from the West. 

The Iranian presidential vote itself may seem somewhat different
to the Western eye, in terms of election campaigns and tactics,
as RT’s Maria Finoshina reports from the Iranian capital. 

“If people see a campaign poster, they’ll start thinking ‘they
spend lots of money on that! Where does it all come from?’ And
they will draw the conclusion that someone – a bank or an
organization – funds the candidate. This means that when a
candidate takes power, he will have to give back the money, he
will owe them.  And with such strings attached, he’ll never
be free. People will never vote for a politician like that,”
Reza Moghadasi, from news agency MEHR, told RT.

Therefore, you won’t see
numerous banners or posters scatted across Iran ahead of the
country’s 11th presidential vote, but not because they have been
banned. Candidates prefer to run low-cost grass-roots campaigns,
with their supporters handing out fliers on the streets,
advertising different political programs.  

Candidates these days also seek alternative support among Iranian
internet users.

“Twelve million people are now using the internet. It is much
easier to communicate with them. But the people in more rural
areas, we need more trying to get to them, this is our weak
point,” Mohammad Reza Nematzadeh said. 

The golden rule is not to go against the norms and traditions
deep-rooted in the Iranian society. The fact remains that key
Iranian policies, such as its controversial uranium enrichment
program and Iran’s support for Syrian President Bashar Assad, are
still decided by one person, Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei.

“A candidate cannot go against our religious or cultural
traditions; you cannot change the way women wear hijabs. And as
for taboos on foreign policy issues – you cannot come out and
say, ‘Iran will become a friend of the US or Israel’,”
director of newspaper Mohamed Pirali explained.

Pirali says these restrictions are aimed at protecting the
national character of the elections. 

“You cannot go against values, even democratic countries can’t
do that… but perhaps if we weren’t under so much pressure from
foreign countries that only want to change the government of Iran
our campaign could be different,” he added. 

The president of Iran is elected for a four-year term. If no
candidate rakes in 50 per cent of the ballots cast in the first
round, a runoff vote will be held in two weeks, on June 21. In
the second round, the candidate with the most votes will become
the winner and will take office after approval by the Guardian
Council.

This article originally appeared on: RT

He may be a four-star Army general, but Alexander more closely resembles a head librarian than George Patton. His face is anemic, his lips a neutral horizontal line. Bald halfway back, he has hair the color of strong tea that turns gray on the sides, where it is cut close to the skin, more schoolboy than boot camp. For a time he wore large rimless glasses that seemed to swallow his eyes. Some combat types had a derisive nickname for him: Alexander the Geek.

Born in 1951, the third of five children, Alexander was raised in the small upstate New York hamlet of Onondaga Hill, a suburb of Syracuse. He tossed papers for the Syracuse Post-Standard and ran track at Westhill High School while his father, a former Marine private, was involved in local Republican politics. It was 1970, Richard Nixon was president, and most of the country had by then begun to see the war in Vietnam as a disaster. But Alexander had been accepted at West Point, joining a class that included two other future four-star generals, David Petraeus and Martin Dempsey. Alexander would never get the chance to serve in Vietnam. Just as he stepped off the bus at West Point, the ground war finally began winding down.

In April 1974, just before graduation, he married his high school classmate Deborah Lynn Douglas, who grew up two doors away in Onondaga Hill. The fighting in Vietnam was over, but the Cold War was still bubbling, and Alexander focused his career on the solitary, rarefied world of signals intelligence, bouncing from secret NSA base to secret NSA base, mostly in the US and Germany. He proved a competent administrator, carrying out assignments and adapting to the rapidly changing high tech environment. Along the way he picked up masters degrees in electronic warfare, physics, national security strategy, and business administration. As a result, he quickly rose up the military intelligence ranks, where expertise in advanced technology was at a premium.

In 2001, Alexander was a one-star general in charge of the Army Intelligence and Security Command, the military’s worldwide network of 10,700 spies and eavesdroppers. In March of that year he told his hometown Syracuse newspaper that his job was to discover threats to the country. “We have to stay out in front of our adversary,” Alexander said. “It’s a chess game, and you don’t want to lose this one.” But just six months later, Alexander and the rest of the American intelligence community suffered a devastating defeat when they were surprised by the attacks on 9/11. Following the assault, he ordered his Army intercept operators to begin illegally monitoring the phone calls and email of American citizens who had nothing to do with terrorism, including intimate calls between journalists and their spouses. Congress later gave retroactive immunity to the telecoms that assisted the government.

In 2003 Alexander, a favorite of defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, was named the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence, the service’s most senior intelligence position. Among the units under his command were the military intelligence teams involved in the human rights abuses at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison. Two years later, Rumsfeld appointed Alexander–now a three-star general–director of the NSA, where he oversaw the illegal, warrantless wiretapping program while deceiving members of the House Intelligence Committee. In a publicly released letter to Alexander shortly after The New York Times exposed the program, US representative Rush Holt, a member of the committee, angrily took him to task for not being forthcoming about the wiretapping: “Your responses make a mockery of congressional oversight.”

Alexander also proved to be militant about secrecy. In 2005 a senior agency employee named Thomas Drake allegedly gave information to The Baltimore Sun showing that a publicly discussed program known as Trailblazer was millions of dollars overbudget, behind schedule, possibly illegal, and a serious threat to privacy. In response, federal prosecutors charged Drake with 10 felony counts, including retaining classified documents and making false statements. He faced up to 35 years in prison–despite the fact that all of the information Drake was alleged to have leaked was not only unclassified and already in the public domain but in fact had been placed there by NSA and Pentagon officials themselves. (As a longtime chronicler of the NSA, I served as a consultant for Drake’s defense team. The investigation went on for four years, after which Drake received no jail time or fine. The judge, Richard D. Bennett, excoriated the prosecutor and NSA officials for dragging their feet. “I find that unconscionable. Unconscionable,” he said during a hearing in 2011. “That’s four years of hell that a citizen goes through. It was not proper. It doesn’t pass the smell test.”)

But while the powers that be were pressing for Drake’s imprisonment, a much more serious challenge was emerging. Stuxnet, the cyberweapon used to attack the Iranian facility in Natanz, was supposed to be untraceable, leaving no return address should the Iranians discover it. Citing anonymous Obama administration officials, The New York Times reported that the malware began replicating itself and migrating to computers in other countries. Cyber­security detectives were thus able to detect and analyze it. By the summer of 2010 some were pointing fingers at the US.

Natanz is a small, dusty town in central Iran known for its plump pears and the burial vault of the 13th-century Sufi sheikh Abd al-Samad. The Natanz nuclear enrichment plant is a vault of a different kind. Tucked in the shadows of the Karkas Mountains, most of it lies deep underground and surrounded by concrete walls 8 feet thick, with another layer of concrete for added security. Its bulbous concrete roof rests beneath more than 70 feet of packed earth. Contained within the bombproof structure are halls the size of soccer pitches, designed to hold thousands of tall, narrow centrifuges. The machines are linked in long cascades that look like tacky decorations from a ’70s discotheque.

To work properly, the centrifuges need strong, lightweight, well-balanced rotors and high-speed bearings. Spin these rotors too slowly and the critical U-235 molecules inside fail to separate; spin them too quickly and the machines self-destruct and may even explode. The operation is so delicate that the computers controlling the rotors’ movement are isolated from the Internet by a so-called air gap that prevents exposure to viruses and other malware.

In 2006, the Department of Defense gave the go-ahead to the NSA to begin work on targeting these centrifuges, according to The New York Times. One of the first steps was to build a map of the Iranian nuclear facility’s computer networks. A group of hackers known as Tailored Access Operations–a highly secret organization within the NSA–took up the challenge.

They set about remotely penetrating communications systems and networks, stealing passwords and data by the terabyte. Teams of “vulnerability analysts” searched hundreds of computers and servers for security holes, according to a former senior CIA official involved in the Stuxnet program. Armed with that intelligence, so-called network exploitation specialists then developed software implants known as beacons, which worked like surveillance drones, mapping out a blueprint of the network and then secretly communicating the data back to the NSA. (Flame, the complex piece of surveillance malware discovered by Russian cybersecurity experts last year, was likely one such beacon.) The surveillance drones worked brilliantly. The NSA was able to extract data about the Iranian networks, listen to and record conversations through computer microphones, even reach into the mobile phones of anyone within Bluetooth range of a compromised machine.

The next step was to create a digital warhead, a task that fell to the CIA Clandestine Service’s Counter-Proliferation Division. According to the senior CIA official, much of this work was outsourced to national labs, notably Sandia in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So by the mid-2000s, the government had developed all the fundamental technology it needed for an attack. But there was still a major problem: The secretive agencies had to find a way to access Iran’s most sensitive and secure computers, the ones protected by the air gap. For that, Alexander and his fellow spies would need outside help.

This is where things get murky. One possible bread crumb trail leads to an Iranian electronics and computer wholesaler named Ali Ashtari, who later confessed that he was recruited as a spy by the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. (Israel denied the claim.) Ashtari’s principal customers were the procurement officers for some of Iran’s most sensitive organizations, including the intelligence service and the nuclear enrichment plants. If new computers were needed or routers or switches had to be replaced, Ashtari was the man to see, according to reports from semi-official Iranian news agencies and an account of Ashtari’s trial published by the nonprofit Iran Human Rights Voice.

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

A Florida county has agreed to allow an atheist organization to erect a monument to its godless religion. In a major concession to a Ten Commandments monument that graces the courthouse lawn at Bradford County, Florida’s, county seat in the community of Starke, county officials will allow the group American Atheists to erect a 1,500-pound granite bench engraved with quotations from the group’s founder, Madalyn Murray O’Hair, along with pithy secular-flavored sayings from Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. The bench, which is scheduled to be dropped at the courthouse June 29, will share prominence with the Judeo-Christian monument, which was placed at the courthouse in May 2012 through the efforts of the local Community Men’s Fellowship.

After the $22,000 Ten Commandments display, paid for by a local businessman, was erected on the courthouse property, the atheist group promptly sued to have it removed. But when the men’s Christian group decided, after “prayerful” consideration, not to move the monument and filed its own suit to prevent the display from being forcibly displaced, the county decided, rather than press the issue, to simply allow the atheists to put up their own display.

The American Atheists grudgingly agreed to the compromise, with the group’s president, David Silverman, commenting: “We have maintained from the beginning that the Ten Commandments doesn’t belong on government property. There is no secular purpose for the monument whatsoever and it makes atheists feel like second-class citizens. But if keeping it there means we have the right to install our own monument, then installing our own is exactly what we’ll do.”

Will Sexton, an attorney for the county, explained that neither the religious monument nor the atheist display implies that the county is either establishing a religion or denying one. In fact, he noted, the atheists had the opportunity all along to erect their own display. “In October 2011, the county adopted a set of monument placement guidelines that created what we saw as a free speech forum in the courtyard,” he recalled. “What the atheists agreed to is something they could have originally been approved for without a year of money and litigation.”

Among the quotes etched on the odd-shaped atheist bench (which roughly resembles a backwards, lower-case letter “h”), are the following:

An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An atheist believes that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty banished, war eliminated. – Madalyn Murray O’Hair

Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear. – Thomas Jefferson

It will never be pretended that any person employed in that service [writing the Constitution], had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of Heaven. — John Adams

Where a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not support itself, and God does not take care to support it so that its professors are obliged to call for help of the civil power, ’tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one. – Benjamin Franklin

Silverman insisted that his godless group’s copycat display “is not an attack on religion, but rather religion’s monopoly. The words on our monument do not deride or mock, but rather they clarify and correct assertions that Christianity has some kind of special place in America over other religious positions.”

Religion News Service (RNS) reported that the opposing monuments in Bradford County “illustrate an ongoing battle over public displays of religion across the country that have gone beyond the annual December dust-ups over creche displays on civic property. Just this year, there have been legal wranglings over Ten Commandment displays in Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, and in another Florida county.”

First Amendment scholar Charles Haynes noted that the atheist display represents a strategy that is likely to pop up in other communities that have allowed religious displays on public property. “This is a tactic that is becoming more common,” Haynes told RNS. “If we can’t get religious symbols out of public spaces, then we will put ours up to counter them. If the government allows one group to put up a display, then it must allow others.”

The American Atheists’ Silverman confirmed the strategy, promising that “everywhere a religious monument is displayed, we will attempt to place an equalizer.” He added, “I would like to encourage all religious groups, sects, or cults to follow suit. Everyone has the same rights in America, and those rights are lost if not defended.”

For its part, the Bradford County Community Men’s Fellowship said it had no beef with the atheist monument that will soon take its place near the Ten Commandments display. The group explained on its Facebook page that “this issue was won on the basis of this being a free speech issue, so don’t be alarmed when the American Atheists want to erect their own sign or monument. It’s their right. As for us, we will continue to honor the Lord, and that’s what matters.”

This article originally appeared on: The New American

For over two weeks, daily anti-government protests rocked Turkey. Police attacked peaceful demonstrators intermittently. They’ve done so brutally. Turkey’s notorious for police state viciousness.

It’s a democracy in name only. Prime Minister Erdogan is authoritarian and hardline

Turkey’s one of 28 NATO countries. Erdogan partners with Washington’s imperial wars. He’s unapologetic about neoliberal harshness. More on that below.

He’s been prime minister for over 10 years. Why Turks put up with him they’ll have to explain. Growing opposition demands he resign. New elections are wanted. Erdogan refuses to call them. If protests continue and grow, parliament may overrule him.

On June 11, Russia Today headlined “Turkish police oust Taksim protesters with tear gas as Erdogan cheers removal of ‘rags,’ ” saying:

“Hundreds of Turkish police clashed with protesters in Istanbul.” Doing so followed removal of barricades and banners. Erdogan’s tactics are polarizing. He called peaceful demonstrators thugs, looters, revolutionaries, marauders and extremists.

RT correspondent Ashraf El Sabbagh said “(t)here are serious clashes in the small streets surrounding (Taksim). They are running after each other tossing stones, bottles and smoke grenades. It’s a meat grinder in there.”

On June 12, RT headlined “Istanbul warzone: Thousands of protesters try to reclaim Taksim Square,” saying:

Riot police attacked protesters viciously. Clashes were fierce. “Thick smoke blankets the square. Turkish police are driving thousands into narrow side streets.”

Bystanders are attacked. Tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray, and water cannons target indiscriminately. A man in a wheelchair was struck. British journalist Neil Clark said “(i)f you’re in NATO, you can get away with murder.”

America, Britain, France, and most other NATO countries operate like Turkey. Dissent is verboten. Democracy exists in name only. Some NATO members are worse than others. America’s by far the worst.

Turkish protests appear to have legs. The more brutality Erdogan orders, the larger crowds grow. Growing popular sentiment opposes him. On June 11, dozens of Turkish lawyers joined protesters. They came to defend those arrested.

Police attacked them viciously. They did so in front of Caglayan Courthouse. Witnesses called what happened brutal. Lawyer Fatma Elif Koru explained, saying:

“We were just gathering to make a press statement about Gezi Park and then the police attacked. It was very brutal. Now 49 lawyer friends are in custody and many are injured.”

“They even kicked their heads. The lawyers were on the ground. They were hitting us they were pushing. They built a circle around us and then they attacked.”

On June 11, hundreds of police encircled Taksim Square. They fired rubber bullets and tear gas. They ripped down banners calling for Erdogan’s resignation.

Later on Tuesday, dozens more lawyers were arrested. Since protests began, thousands were arrested. Thousands more were injured.

On June 12, brutal attacks continued. More arrests followed. Erdogan’s uncompromising. He announced an “end to tolerance.” None existed before his pronouncement.

He dismissively ignores criticism. He governs by what he says goes. “If you call this roughness,” he said, “I’m sorry, but this Tayyip Erdogan will not change.”

His comment replicated Margaret Thatcher once saying “The lady’s not for turning.” Saying it defined her ideological harshness.

She was unapologetic. She was unforgiving. She was unprincipled. She was despised for good reason. Millions of Brits suffered from the neoliberal flimflam she endorsed.

Erdogan matches her and more. He’s way over-the-top. He reflects power politics’ dark side. He doesn’t know when to quit. He called peaceful demonstrators “a handful of plunderers.”

They’re “manipulated” to protest, he claims. He won’t let them dictate policy, he said. They’re the “greatest threat to the society.”

“For those who want to continue with the incidents,” he said, (i)t’s over. As of now, we have no tolerance for them. Not only will we end the actions, we will be at the necks of the provocateurs and terrorists and no one will get away with it. I am sorry, but Gezi Park is for taking promenades, not for occupation.”

A previous article called Turkey more police state than democracy. Press freedom is compromised. Censorship is standard practice. Dissent is verboten. Challenging government authority is called terrorism.

No country imprisons more journalists than Turkey. Television channels largely ignored protests. A bureau chief was arrested for airing what authorities wanted suppressed.

On June 11, TV channels broadcast a staged incident. Viewers saw half a dozen “demonstrators” throw molotov cocktails at police. They advanced on police lines provocatively.

They held a flag of a fringe left-wing party. It was a thinly veiled stunt. It’s commonly used during protests.  America and other Western countries feature them. Doing so lets authorities claim peaceful demonstrators are violent.

So-called protesters were undercover cops. Their mock attack was staged. Expect more like it if protests continue. Expect greater violence ahead. It’s already brutal and increasing.

Instead of engaging protesters responsibly, Erdogan wants them crushed. Thousands have been arrested and/or injured. Despots operate this way.

Can Oz is an Istanbul publisher. His London Guardian op-ed headlined “I can never trust the Turkish police and government again.” Why before he’ll have to explain.

Longstanding Turkish policy is brutal. Now it’s more public, widespread and visible.

“For years I did not speak up enough, but no more,” said Oz. “I could lose everything, but I cannot live a dishonorable life any longer.”

“I am scared. With every speech that prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan gives, I feel the hatred and disgust against me and young people of my generation increase.”

“All we are after is a bit of freedom, a bit of space to live and a few trees.”

“(O)ver the past few days, I have witnessed so many lies from the police and government that I don’t think I can ever trust them again. I have spent days with the protesters — withstanding another gas attack, cheering, singing chants and sharing food in the park — and I haven’t encountered any signs of weapons or violence on their behalf.”

Oz said he received hate mail and death threats. Participating in “passive resistance” leaves him vulnerable.

For years he feared expressing his views publicly. He failed to criticize political wrongdoing he witnessed.

He’ll no longer stay silent, he said. He listed five demands he and other protesters want:

(1) They want Gezi Park left unchanged.

(2) They want arrested protesters released.

(3) They want police brutality ended. They want responsible officials prosecuted.

(4) They want the right to protest publicly.

(5) They want Erdogan-ordered violence stopped. They want him held accountable for his actions.

Oz is a large Turkish publisher. He’s unaffected by neoliberal harshness. Most Turks want relief. Erdogan spurns popular interests. He’s beholden solely to wealth, power and privilege.

Turkish workers and youths demand social justice. Young ones are especially outraged. Their living standards significantly eroded.

They’ve tasted neoliberal harshness far too long. They know nothing else. Their ability to make ends meet troubles them. Their futures are seriously compromised. They want something better. They deserve it. Perhaps now’s their chance for change.

Turkey’s economic model features capitalism’s dark side. It includes economic freedom as a be-all-and-end-all, unrestrained profit-making, privatizations, cheap labor, deregulation, corporate-friendly tax cuts, marginalized worker rights, and speculative capital inflows.

Economic conditions are inherently unstable. Turkey suffers rolling recessions, crisis conditions, and fragile largely jobless recoveries. It’s increasingly dependent on imports of resources and capital goods.

Youth unemployment tops 22%. It’s rising. It’s socially and economically unstable. It’s untenable. It’s fuel for public rage.

When well-connected private debtors are troubled or go bankrupt, their losses are socialized. Turkey’s next crisis is certain. It’s only a matter of when.

Ordinary people are hardest hit. Youths most of all. Growing numbers have no viable futures. Profits matter more than public needs. Insecurity haunts an entire generation.

Turkish neoliberalism replicates what’s ongoing throughout Europe, America, Israel and elsewhere. Anger swells up and explodes.

The common thread is democracy in name only, inequality, political corruption, unemployment, growing poverty, insecurity, and corporate priorities over social justice.

Turkey has a long history of rebellion. Turks know what’s going on in troubled EU countries. They’ve seen it throughout the Middle East.

People only take so much before reacting. Protesting is fashionable to do. It’s unifying and energizing. It remains to be seen where things go.

Ban Ki-moon reacted as expected. He urged “calm” and “dialogue.” He ignored police brutality. It didn’t surprise. He fronts for power. He’s mindless of public needs.

He turns a blind eye to horrendous imperial crimes. He’s secretary-general because Washington installed him. White House spokesman Jay Carney also urged both sides to show restraint.

Washington supports its ally. Police brutality is commonplace in America. Thuggish cops attack peaceful protesters violently. It’s common practice. It replicates what’s ongoing in Turkey.

America’s a democracy in name only. Imperial and corporate priorities alone matter. It’s true throughout Europe, Israel and Turkey.

Unchallenged power matters most. Erdogan matches the worst of a bad lot. Turks see him for what he is. Tinpot despots can’t hide.

Turkey’s military remains a wild card. Maybe it’ll intervene. It’s done it before. It may again. If not generals, perhaps party leaders or political opposition.

Erdogan remains defiant. He looks like damaged goods. He’s vulnerable if internal interests react. He heads Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP). It may decide to cut its losses and replace him.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book is titled “Banker Occupation: Waging Financial War on Humanity.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs Fridays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour

http://www.dailycensored.com/turkey-epicenter-of-police-state-violence/

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Gabriela Baczynska and Alexei Anishchuk
Reuters
June 13, 2013

Thousands of Russians marched through Moscow demanding Vladimir Putin resign on Wednesday, as the president took the helm of a loyalist movement designed to broaden his power base.

With helmeted riot police looking on, some 10,000 protesters chanted “Russia without Putin!” and called for the release of activists who face long jail terms over violence at a protest against his inauguration to a third presidential term last year.

Critics accuse Putin, in power since 2000, of clamping down on dissent after he weathered the biggest protests of his rule and returned to the Kremlin following a stint as prime minister.

Read full article

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 4:10 am

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Paul Bonneau
strike-the-root.com
June 13, 2013

I was just reading “Liberty in the Tenticular State” by Charles Cooke and had a few comments about how confusing issues get, to people with a rights-based (not to mention Constitutionalist) view of reality. There is a better way.

First interesting item in the article was this: “So complete has been the destruction of liberty’s cradle that, a few years back, the ruling Labour party felt comfortable suggesting that all British automobiles be mandated to carry state-owned GPS equipment that would track each car’s movements and automatically calculate one’s road taxes.”

One needn’t go to England to find this. Even (so-called) libertarians in the U.S. have been promoting essentially the same thing: “The Portland region should implement congestion pricing on all regional highways, and make those facilitieis [sic] totally self-supported by tolls.” There are of course detail differences, but tracking of drivers’ movements does not seem to concern them much. This pseudo-free market (that is, fascist) solution has been a staple of “Policy Institutes” for a long time.

Getting to the meat of my comments however, take a look at this statement from the article: “On his cable-news show, which is conveniently protected by the First Amendment, Bill Maher took this to its logical conclusion last week, arguing that the Founding Fathers could never have imagined these threats, and asking pugnaciously whether the Fourth Amendment was now as obsolete as he considers the Second to be. Suffice it to say that to take this position is to accept that the American ideal of a limited government that exercises its powers judiciously and only with explicit permission is no longer viable . . . . I will not stand for that.”

Uh, yes, Charles, you will stand for it. Unless you consider voting for an alternative scoundrel an example of not standing for that.

I always think it is a good idea to have reality firmly in mind when one puts pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) . . . .

He writes, “If I ceased to be a “sensible, law-abiding Englishman” and elected to commit a crime – or, for that matter, if the authorities had reasonable cause to suspect that I had done so – I would be happy to concede that my privacy, after the relevant permissions were sought, would be abrogated.”

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Big of him. Also entirely irrelevant, as if the ruling class and its minions give a damn what he thinks. But it is somewhat revealing that he is perfectly OK with the trashing of his liberty as long as the proper forms are followed! This kinda tempers his righteous outrage, doesn’t it?

“At what point did it become assumed in free countries that relationships between free citizens and free businesses were not sacrosanct?

At what point were they ever sacrosanct? This is clearly a clue (“sacrosanct”) we are talking about a religious notion. The fun thing about religion is that it doesn’t need to show any connection with reality.

“That Constitution, I might remind naysayers, is still in force . . . .”

News to me . . . .

“The Fourth Amendment exists now for precisely the same reason that it existed in 1791: to ensure that, in the absence of extremely compelling situations, Americans are not subject to casual government scrutiny.”

But . . . they are subject to casual government scrutiny. If you want to claim otherwise, you have to show some mechanism that reliably, time after time, prevents it. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, nothing prevents it. That’s reality.

“It is precisely this confluence that Americans must resist.”

Ah, now we get down to the nitty gritty. Unfortunately, Cooke leaves out the details of what constitutes resistance. I suspect his recipe is voting for someone with an R behind his name.

A while back I wrote an article examining another way of looking at “private property“. I suspect this business about privacy is much the same.

First, there is no such thing as a right to privacy, because there is no such thing as rights at all. Rights are just memes floating around in our heads, interpreted differently according to the individual (I’ll bet an NSA employee has an interesting take on privacy). Further, privacy is relatively recent; the human race got along without it for eons. Nice to have, but hardly crucial. If there was some way for individuals to actually enforce it (and there is in some spheres, such as encryption), it would actually be helpful in the relation between the individual and the state. But we needn’t throw up our hands—and keep in mind that the ruling class is itself living in a fishbowl, along with the rest of us.

Second, just as your property is that stuff you can prevent others from taking, privacy is that information you can keep others from learning—and nothing more than that. For that reason it is well worth getting up on encryption technology and tools like bitmessage. It’s not that life will end if they can record and scan your emails or something; it’s that it’s good and proper to poke the snoops in the eye by finding information you can prevent them learning. The more mundane that stuff is, the better. Let’s face it, most things people do, that they reflexively want to keep private, are not all that important or remarkable.

Third, privacy can be a crutch. Are gays better off now, or before they came out of the closet? Anyway sometimes the urge to privacy is a hint it is about something we shouldn’t be doing in the first place. Banging the neighbor’s wife sure wants to be kept private, but if you are worried some government goon is going to blackmail you with that information, you’d probably be better off not banging her any more.

Finally, I have a suggestion for an alternative view of all this surveillance. Let’s imagine all the lurid details about that Utah disk farm and vacuuming up emails are true. Why would the government bother—especially since life is generally so unremarkable? Why track a housewife to the supermarket? I’d like to propose that the information-gathering is not actually very useful to the ruling class, and that it’s not really what they are after. Instead, all the fear mongering such as that stirred up by Cooke’s article, is what they are really aiming at. It takes self-enforcement to keep a huge population in line, and fear is the premier tool that enables that to happen. They don’t want our privacy trashed or our information compromised; they want us scared shitless.

If you are getting depressed about stuff you can’t control, such as government snooping, the proper response is to do something you can control. Encrypt your hard drive just for fun. Buy a case of ammo and get some “recoil therapy” at the range. Pull your kid out of the government indoctrination center. Carry a handgun. Find something that the ruling class hates, and do that.

They want you scared. Don’t do that.

This article appeared as an exclusive for Strike the Root.

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 8:24 am

Tags: constitution, domestic news, domestic spying

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Three U.S. youths reunited with their deported mothers Tuesday at the stretch of Arizona-Mexico border that slices the town of Nogales in two. The mothers made the journey from Columbia, Mexico, and Brazil to see their children in person for the first time after years of separation forced by U.S. immigration laws.

Yet, the towering fence that walls off the U.S.-Mexico border stood between the U.S.-based youth, whose legal status prohibits them from re-entering the United States if they leave, and their parents, who are not legally permitted to enter the United States because they were deported.

In a highly emotional reunion, the family members clasped each other’s hands through the bars of the border fence as they laughed, cried, and exchanged family photographs and gifts.

The reunion, termed Operation Butterfly, was organized by the youth-led immigrant justice group United We Dream to raise awareness about the inhumanity of forced separation that many immigrants face at the hands of U.S. immigration laws. The youth in the video are part of the growing movement of Dreamers–undocumented youth demanding justice and dignity for people living in the U.S. without papers.

Renata Teodora explained in a United We Dream video that it had been six years since she had seen her mother who was deported to Brazil.

“I am a little angry that this is the only way I can see [my mother], through a fence,” declared Evelyn Rivera, who also reunited with her mother.

United We Dream explained that the action took place in conjunction with efforts to press Washington for immigration policies that do not tear loved ones apart:

After years of separation, Evelyn Rivera, Renata Teodoro, & Carlos Padilla finally saw their parents face-to-face today by traveling to the US/Mexico Border. Evelyn Rivera, a DREAMer from the Orlando area, reunited with her mom, who was deported to Colombia 6 years ago after a traffic stop. Renata Teodora, whose mom turned herself in after her brother was unfairly detained, saw her mom after 6 years. And Carlos Padilla, a DREAMer from Seattle, finally saw his mother, who’d returned to Mexico to care for aging relatives several years ago and hasn’t been able to come back to the U.S. since.

Meanwhile, the immigration debate in Washington DC is heating up & DREAMers continue to put the pressure on Congress. They are maintaining a strong presence at the cloture vote in the Senate Gallery & are reminding politicians that DREAMers are watching and we expect them to stand with our families, create a real path to citizenship, and reunite those who’ve been separated!

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Green groups have mounted an aggressive attack against TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline by filing a lawsuit in federal court Monday accusing the State Department and their latest Keystone XL Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) of being “plagued by conflicts of interest.”

(Photo: 350.org/ Flickr) “Imagine if the surgeon general was replaced with a tobacco executive,” Robin Mann, former Sierra Club club president, said during a press call on Tuesday. “At the State Department, we’re seeing something just as outrageous.”

Led by the Sierra Club who filed the suit, the groups are asserting that the State Department is “withholding key documents” related to the Keystone XL impact statement including evidence related to a “potential conflict of interest” with Environmental Resources Management, the third-party contractor hired to conduct the analysis. They are demanding the documents under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Lynne Peeples of the Huffington Post reports:

During the press call on Tuesday, advocates pushed for a State Department investigator general analysis of the impact statement. Mann added that ERM is a “dues-paying member” of the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S trade association for the oil and natural gas industry.

“The State Department should be an honest broker on Keystone XL, not a cheerleader for TransCanada,” said Friends of the Earth President Erich Pica. “Secretary Kerry needs to halt the review process and find out how a paid member of the American Petroleum Institute was allowed to write such a critical report and why State Department employees have tried to cover up this company’s ties with the oil industry.”

The groups are calling on Secretary of State John Kerry to suspend the review until State Department Investigator General investigation has looked into the process. Nearly 73,000 people have signed petitions through groups such as Friends of the Earth, Bold Nebraska, and Oil Change International, echoing this request.

“The only way the State Department could produce even a remotely favorable review of this dirty and flawed pipeline is by getting Big Oil’s friends to write it for them,” said Oil Change International executive director, Steve Kretzmann. “The tens of thousands of people who have joined this campaign are making it clear that we won’t stand for this. Secretary Kerry has a key opportunity to reject bad process, to reject Big Oil influence and to reject this dirty pipeline.”

Peeples continues:

Devorah Ancel, the Sierra Club attorney working on the lawsuit, noted that in March the group formally requested evidence that the State Department had screened for conflict of interest when selecting ERM for the project. They also asked for documents supporting the report’s conclusions that Keystone XL would have no significant impact on the environment and that the expansion of tar sands development would occur with or without the project.

Ancel said that the department has “refused to hand over documents” and was “not able to provide a timeline or even a promise that the information would be disclosed before they make a final decision,” a milestone she said she and other experts now anticipate by the end of the year.

“We felt that the Sierra Club had tried every means possible to get that information,” Ancel told HuffPost. “This lawsuit was the next step we had to take to get these documents, as they are critically important in the public’s evaluation and the overall review of Keystone XL.”

The lawsuit also asks for the State Department to reopen the public comment period and hold off on finalizing the environmental review until the documents are made available.

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Lawyers and intelligence experts with direct knowledge of two intercepted terrorist plots that the Obama administration says confirm the value of the NSA’s vast data-mining activities have questioned whether the surveillance sweeps played a significant role, if any, in foiling the attacks.

(Image via eff.org) The defence of the controversial data collection operations, highlighted in a series of Guardian disclosures over the past week, has been led by Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, and her equivalent in the House, Mike Rogers. The two politicians have attempted to justify the NSA‘s use of vast data sweeps such as Prism and Boundless Informant by pointing to the arrests and convictions of would-be New York subway bomber Najibullah Zazi in 2009 and David Headley, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence for his role in the 2008 Mumbai attacks.

Rogers told ABC’s This Week that the NSA’s bulk monitoring of phone calls and internet contacts was central to intercepting the plotters. “I can tell you, in the Zazi case in New York, it’s exactly the programme that was used,” he said.

A similar point was made in anonymous briefings by administration officials to the New York Times and Reuters.

But court documents lodged in the US and UK, as well as interviews with involved parties, suggest that data-mining through Prism and other NSA programmes played a relatively minor role in the interception of the two plots. Conventional surveillance techniques, in both cases including old-fashioned tip-offs from intelligence services in Britain, appear to have initiated the investigations.

In the case of Zazi, an Afghan American who planned to attack the New York subway, the breakthrough appears to have come from Operation Pathway, a British investigation into a suspected terrorism cell in the north-west of England in 2009. That investigation discovered that one of the members of the cell had been in contact with an al-Qaida associate in Pakistan via the email address sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com.

British newspaper reports at the time of Zazi’s arrest said that UK intelligence passed on the email address to the US. The same email address, as Buzzfeed has pointed out, was cited in Zazi’s 2011 trial as a crucial piece of evidence. Zazi, the court heard, wrote to sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com asking in coded language for the precise quantities to use to make up a bomb.

Eric Jurgenson, an FBI agent involved in investigating Zazi once the link to the Pakistani email address was made, told the court: “My office was in receipt — I was notified, I should say. My office was in receipt of several email messages, email communications. Those email communications, several of them resolved to an individual living in Colorado.”

Michael Dowling, a Denver-based attorney who acted as Zazi’s defence counsel, said the full picture remained unclear as Zazi pleaded guilty before all details of the investigation were made public. But the lawyer said he was sceptical that mass data sweeps could explain what led law enforcement to Zazi.

“The government says that it does not monitor content of these communications in its data collection. So I find it hard to believe that this would have uncovered Zazi’s contacts with a known terrorist in Pakistan,” Dowling said.

Further scepticism has been expressed by David Davis, a former British foreign office minister who described the citing of the Zazi case as an example of the merits of data-mining as “misleading” and “an illusion”. Davis pointed out that Operation Pathway was prematurely aborted in April 2009 after Bob Quick, then the UK’s most senior counter-terrorism police officer, was pictured walking into Downing Street with top secret documents containing details of the operation in full view of cameras.

The collapse of the operation, and arrests of suspects that hurriedly followed, came five months before Zazi was arrested in September 2009. “That was the operation that led to the initial data links to Zazi — they put the clues in the database which gave them the connections,” Davis said.

Davis said that the discovery of the sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com email — and in turn the link to Zazi — had been made by traditional investigative work in the UK. He said the clue-driven nature of the inquiry was significant, as it was propelled by detectives operating on the basis of court-issued warrants.

“You can’t make this grand sweeping [data collection] stuff subject to warrants. What judge would give you a warrant if you say you want to comb through vast quantities of data?”

Legal documents lodged with a federal court in New York’s eastern district shortly after Zazi’s arrest show that US counter-intelligence officials had been keeping watch over him under targeted surveillance with the warranted approval of the special intelligence court. During the course of the prosecution, the US served notice that it would be offering evidence “obtained and derived from electronic surveillance and physical search conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (Fisa).”

Feinstein and Rogers have also pointed to the case of David Headley, who in January was sentenced to 35 years in jail for having made multiple scouting missions to Mumbai ahead of the 2008 terrorist attacks that killed 168 people. Yet the evidence in his case also points towards a British tip-off as the inspiration behind the US interception of him.

In July 2009, British intelligence began tracking Headley, a Pakistani American from Chicago, who was then plotting to attack Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in retaliation for its publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed. Information was passed to the FBI and he was thereafter, until his arrest that October, kept under targeted US surveillance.

An intelligence expert and former CIA operative, who asked to remain anonymous because he had been directly involved in the Headley case, was derisive about the claim that data-mining sweeps by the NSA were key to the investigation. “That’s nonsense. It played no role at all in the Headley case. That’s not the way it happened at all,” he said.

The intelligence expert said that it was a far more ordinary lead that ensnared Headley. British investigators spotted him when he contacted an informant.

The Headley case is a peculiar choice for the administration to highlight as an example of the virtues of data-mining. The fact that the Mumbai attacks occurred, with such devastating effect, in itself suggests that the NSA’s secret programmes were limited in their value as he was captured only after the event.

Headley was also subject to a plethora of more conventionally obtained intelligence that questions the central role claimed for the NSA’s data sweeps behind his arrest. In a long profile of Headley, the investigative website ProPublica pointed out that he had been an informant working for the Drug Enforcement Administration perhaps as recently as 2005. There are suggestions that he might have then worked in some capacity for the FBI or CIA.

Headley was also, ProPublica found, the subject of several inquiries by agents of the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Force. A year before the Mumbai attacks his then wife, Faiza Outalha, reported on him to the US embassy Islamabad, saying he was on a secret mission in India and was a “drug dealer, terrorist and spy”.

© 2013 The Guardian

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

(Image via Institute for Policy Studies)Members of Fix the Debt, the coalition of CEOs who promote fear-mongering over the national debt as a guise for cutting social support programs, are “brazenly” pursuing new legislation to widen tax haven loopholes which, according to a new report, will earn them billions.

Published Wednesday, the report–Corporate Pirates of the Caribbean (pdf)–by the Institute for Policy Studies reveals that group member corporations could gain as much as $173 billion in “windfalls” should Congress adopt the group’s proposal for a “territorial” tax system.

This reform–a centerpiece of “Fix the Debt” co-founders Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson’s recent deficit reduction proposal–would increase incentives to exploit tax havens by permanently exempting US corporations’ foreign earnings from US federal income taxes.

“These Fix the Debt corporations are like modern day pirates,” says report co-author Scott Klinger. “Their crews are not sword-wielding ruffians, but high-priced lobbyists and accountants who fight for, win, and then exploit loopholes in the tax code that allow them to avoid paying their fair share of the tax burden.”

Under the current tax code, the report explains, US-headquartered corporations are required to pay a tax rate of 35 percent on their profits, regardless of where in the world those profits are earned. However, those corporations are given “full credit” for any taxes paid to foreign governments and “any profits deemed permanently reinvested offshore” are exempt from US taxes until and unless they are returned to the US.

Thus, if a corporation is able to shift their overseas profits to a country where corporate profits are lightly taxed and the taxes paid there are “permanently exempted”–as would be the case under the territorial tax system–the change would be “enormously profitable” for those companies raking in offshore profits.

Some of the major findings of the report include:

• The 59 Fix the Debt member corporations that reported their offshore profits had a combined total of more than $544 billion at the end of 2012, up from $473 billion in 2011. The average offshore stash per company rose 15 percent last year to $9.4 billion.
• Currently, these profits are not subject to U.S. corporate income taxes unless they are brought back to the United States (also known as “repatriation”). If Congress adopts Fix the Debt’s proposed territorial tax system, these 59 companies would stand to win as much as $173 billion in immediate tax windfalls.
• The biggest potential winner is General Electric, which could reap a tax windfall of as much as $38 billion on its overseas earnings stash of $108 billion.
• The Fix the Debt member with the largest increase in offshore untaxed profits in 2012 among firms with more than $1 billion in offshore profits was Honeywell, with a 43 percent increase to $11.6 billion in 2012.
• Twenty-two firms reported increases of more than 20 percent in their untaxed offshore profits last year.

“If these corporate CEOs were serious about strengthening the American economy, they wouldn’t be seeking more tax breaks that will only add to the national deficit,” adds report co-author Sarah Anderson.

IPS released the report one day ahead of House Ways and Means Committee hearing scheduled Thursday to examine multinational corporations’ use of low- or no-tax countries to shift profits offshore to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan today vowed to escalate violence after yesterday’s crackdown on Istanbul protesters left hundreds injured. He insists Turkey’s massive protests, now entering their third week, will be “over in 24 hours.”

Taksim Square June 11, AP/Thanassis Stavrakis Yet, thousands defied his warning and flocked to Gezi Park Wednesday night, accompanied by a heavy presence of riot police.

Erdogan’s latest threat flies in the face of his earlier tones of reconciliation.

In a bid to quell massive uprisings now entering their third week, Erdogan met earlier today with a small group of people he alleges represent protesters.

Yet, organizers in Turkey cried foul, insisting that the 11 academics, students, and artists meeting with the government do not represent the country’s uprisings that have spread to dozens of cities.

Lawyers in Turkey are launching an investigation into excessive police violence against protesters in Istanbul’s Taksim Square who were forcibly removed by police weilding tear gas, rubber bullet, and water cannon weapons. The clearing of the square led to more than 600 injuries, including the injury of a one year old baby, according to Turkey’s Human Rights Foundation, the Huffington Post reports.

Lawyers throughout Ankara and Istanbul held boisterous courthouse protests today against police mistreatment of lawyers at yesterday’s protests.

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This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Much of the U.S. media coverage of last week’s NSA revelations has concentrated on its impact on the constitutional rights of U.S.-based Internet users. But what about the billions of Internet users around the world whose private information is stored on U.S. servers, or whose data travels across U.S. networks or is otherwise accessible through them?

A screenshot of “Boundless Informant,” a government software program revealed to The Guardian by Edward Snowden that tracks and maps by country the “voluminous amount of information” sapped from their massive surveillance apparatus. (Image via The Guardian) While the details are still emerging, what is clear is that many of the newly exposed surveillance activities have been shaped by U.S. foreign intelligence surveillance laws. The secret court that rubberstamped the collection of phone records from Verizon came from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), a secret court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); the PRISM requests, the U.S. government has said, were FISA orders intended to target non-American persons outside of the United States.

As U.S. officials have repeated, FISA is designed to protect the rights of “U.S. persons” (citizens, permanent residents, and others on U.S. soil) in the face of operations targeting foreigners. But regardless of their effectiveness (or lack thereof) in achieving this objective, these slim protections offer nothing to the vast majority of Internet users around the world. One privacy expert, Caspar Bowden, has gone so far as to say that U.S. foreign intelligence powers “offer zero protection to foreigners’ data in U.S. Clouds.”

In this article, we will look into how the NSA leaks may affect the rest of the world, and how they highlight one part of an international system of surveillance that dissolves what national privacy protections any of us have, where ever we live.

Global Communications Networks & Trans-border Surveillance

Before looking at the specifics of the NSA’s surveillance program, it is worth noting that these programs are part of a broader trend: as greater use of cloud computing and other web-based services entails more global data routing and storage, many states gain the practical ability to capture, access and in many cases spy on data passing through their territory or accessible remotely through terminals based in their territory. While not an entirely new problem, states have met this increase in practical capacity to conduct sweeping extra-territorial surveillance has not been matched with an increase in extra-territorial protections. This is especially true with foreign intelligence activities, where agencies have historically been granted close to carte blanche legal capacity to surveill foreigners, while incentives to adopt a “capture everything” approach to information gathering have been high. Now, even as it becomes feasible for foreign intelligence agencies to capture all data on all individuals everywhere, states are moving to impose this troubling carte blanche foreign intelligence paradigm to digital networks. The United States government’s FISA powers represent just such a move.

There are many indications of states’ increasing capacity to conduct sweeping and invasive extra-territorial surveillance from domestic soil. In 2009, security researchers uncovered a broad network of infiltrated computer systems, which included a significant proportion of high value targets including foreign ministries, news media, NGOs and political dissidents around the world. Infiltration was likely used to extract sensitive documents and even to surreptitiously hijack audio and video-recording capabilities on many affected computers and transmit it to IP addresses found to be based in China. While there is no direct evidence that this was a state-sponsored attack, it demonstrates the potential for vast and targeted malware-based extra-territorial surveillance. When the lid was finally blown off Gadhafi’s surveillance regime, dissidents in the United Kingdom, foreign activists, casual callers and foreign political adversaries discovered they were caught in its expansive web. Bahreini activists abroad have found malware on their machines, presumably from state-connected actors. An Angolan journalist working from Oslo discovered his Skype conversations being recorded, almost certainly to be relayed back to his government watchers at home. The German government has leveraged the ability to remotely compromise computer systems in order to spy on them by its acquisition of commercial malware and is reportedly in the process of developing its own custom state-owned malware. While there has been no confirmation that Germany is deploying these investigative techniques against persons outside German territories, infection occurs by email and information transmission is over the Internet, so extra-territorial use is certainly feasible.

Far from reigning in this growing technical capacity, domestic laws are increasingly removing all remaining barriers to extra-territorial spying. Surveying a long and growing list of legal frameworks designed to take advantage of this new-found global reach, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue, recently concluded in a report that:

These developments suggest an alarming trend towards the extension of surveillance powers beyond territorial borders, increasing the risk of cooperative agreements between State law enforcement and security agencies to enable the evasion of domestic legal restrictions.

Exacerbating this problem is an aura of secrecy that pervades trans-border electronic surveillance. The secrecy provisions inherent in U.S. foreign intelligence legislation have, for example, prevented companies like Google and Microsoft from revealing any raw statistics regarding these activities in the Transparency reports these companies publish in their efforts to ensure the public is aware of the true scope and nature of government surveillance activities on their services, although many have now called on the U.S. government to let them do so.

The NSA Leaks: Rare Glimpses into a Vast & Unfettered International Monitoring Program

In the past week or so, new details on the scope of NSA and FBI surveillance were revealed in a series of leaks released primarily by The Guardian (one co-leaked by the Washington Post). In response to these leaks, the Director of National Intelligence has released some additional information on the parameters of the program. Collectively, these releases paint a picture of two specific aspects of surveillance programs that seem designed to leverage the trans-global nature of modern communications in order to empower U.S. foreign intelligence.

The first component targets a huge amount of metadata from telephone calls originating and/or terminating within the United States. The leaked documents reveal that at least one company — Verizon — was ordered to hand over all metadata associated with all telephone communications originating or terminating within the United States (as well as calls wholly within the United States). It has been reported that this program has been operating for about 7 years, meaning the U.S. Government could potentially have a historical database of all calls since 2008.

Metadata is defined quite broadly, to include all ‘routing’ information, as well as unique mobile phone identifiers such as International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) numbers. The enhanced capacity to generate, store and analyze metadata has transformed what may once have been innocuous data points — who spoke to who, when, for how long, from where — into a highly valuable intelligence capable of revealing people’s most intimate and private affairs. Metadata, for example, played an instrumental role in the forced former CIA Director David Petraeus to resign. Even in its most basic form — who did you call — metadata can be extremely revealing. This invasive capacity is greatly exacerbated by the pervasiveness and scope of the NSA’s collection program.

A second revealed component of these surveillance programs is called PRISM. The full parameters and capacities of PRISM remain unclear. Initially suspected to provide back-door access to the networks of a number of Internet companies, giving the NSA direct access to search service providers networks unilaterally, more recent reports paint a picture of a more narrowly curtailed, but still potentially troubling interface. At its most innocuous, PRISM appears to be a database capable of interacting directly with the networks of participating Internet companies through a series of portals whose specific features and capacities are negotiated and developed with each participating company. Acquisition orders are issued under FISA and sent to the respective companies, who then review them and make use of the portal to respond to the orders electronically. This provides responses in a quicker and more efficient manner than could be otherwise achieved. Portals of this nature have reportedly been set up in other jurisdictions, albeit for law enforcement purposes. It is possible, but not confirmed, that some of the portals in question also facilitate qualitatively different levels of data acquisition. For example, citing a lawyer representing one of the companies in question, the New York Times reports that Internet companies do have the technical capacity to digitally transmit data in real-time to the NSA where a valid FISA order requires this. It is not clear whether this real-time transmission capacity is mediated through the PRISM interface directly. While a U.S. law requires carriers and managed VoIP providers (potentially including Skype) to build real-time interception capabilities into their services, these obligations have not yet been applied to Internet services such as Gmail and Facebook, so real-time access capacity would signal a meaningful qualitative shift in access capability.

Even without the addition of real-time acquisition capacities, however, the PRISM leaks still reveal a program that leverages the domestic presence of remote computing services in order to collect significant amounts of personal data that many individuals around the world would consider highly sensitive. Various reports describe PRISM as providing access to emails, online chats (video and voice), photos, file transfers, search queries, online social networking details and more. The leaks point to this social media, email and cloud data as growing not only in scope, but also in frequency of use. Reports suggest that PRISM information collection interfaces are designed to limit exposure of U.S.-based targets on a balance of probabilities: “designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s foreigness.”

An additional leak provided further insight into the staggering size of the NSA’s overall communications surveillance activities. While there have always been hints of the breadth of these activities — earlier this year it was reported the NSA was building a data centre the size of a small village just to store (and analyze) all the data it was collecting — this leak provided specific details on the immense amount of data sets collected by the NSA on a monthly basis. For example, in March 2013 alone, it seems the NSA collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide, bringing new meaning to the term ‘big data’. As explained below, given the questionable legality of NSA domestic surveillance, a lot of the attention from this final revelation will be focused on the close to 3 billion data points marked as ‘United States’. However, the rest of the world should be more concerned with the remaining 94 billion data points particularly in light of the highly dim prospects of a domestic legal remedy to this collection given that such collection occurs under powers intended to facilitate broad surveillance of foreigners outside the U.S.

One more element of the PRISM system is worth examining in light of its implications for non-U.S. persons. According to the Guardian, the United Kingdom’s NSA counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, apparently has had access to the PRISM database, generating 197 intelligence reports in 2012 — far less than the 2,000 reports per month issued by the NSA, but still not an insubstantial amount. This raises concerns as the PRISM database is populated through extra-ordinary NSA foreign intelligence powers that far exceed what most democratic governments would be allowed to accomplish under their own laws. It is not clear, for example, that GCHQ would have the legal ability to set up its own PRISM system. If the United States is allowing its security services to collect vast amounts of data on the citizens of its allies, then freely hands that data over to their security services, what protections they might have under domestic surveillance law is completely undermined. And we still don’t know what information the U.S. government might receive in return.

_____________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

Stephen Hester, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), has been forced out of his job as the British government prepares the ground to privatize the bank next year.

Hester would step down at the end of this year with a payoff of at least £1.6 million – and possibly up to £5.6 million – as British Chancellor George Osborne announced plans to sell the bailed-out bankâ„¢s 82 percent stake in the lender.

Å“Having brought RBS back from the brink, now is the time to move on from the rescue phase,” the Chancellor said.

Osborne is expected to announce further details of the bankâ„¢s privatisation in a speech next week, media reports say.

Last month, The International Monetary Fund (IMF) urged the British government to sell taxpayer-held shares in RBS and Lloyds following their bail-out in the financial crisis.

The suggestion is reportedly meant to trigger growth in a bid to deal with the British economic woes.

RBS was handed a £390 million fine for “widespread misconduct” in rigging the London Interbank Offered Rate (Libor) earlier in February.

MOS/HE

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Some US Congressmen say getting straight answers from the intelligence community on issues it does not wish to discuss — such as surveillance of Americans — is extremely difficult without knowledge of the community’s internal workings.

Intelligence officials have scheduled several closed briefings
with lawmakers this week amid heightened media interest in data
collection by the NSA and FBI. Former NSA contractor Edward
Snowden has leaked details of alleged widespread domestic
surveillance to the press.

Officials from the DoJ, FBI, NSA, and office of the Director of
National Intelligence discussed the leak with members of the house
on Tuesday, though many lawmakers were unsatisfied with the
discussions. A confidential briefing to the Senate is scheduled
for Thursday.

Some officials have been on the defensive amid the public furor
over the allegations, citing the security benefits of
surveillance. NSA Director and US Cyber Command head General
Keith Alexander said during a hearing on cyber security in the
Senate that it has “helped thwart dozens of terrorist events.

“When I say dozens, what I’m talking about here is that these
authorities complement each other in helping us identify
different terrorist actions and help disrupt them,” he added.

As officials offer clarity on the scope of PRISM and other
surveillance programs, and deal with public outrage over its
revelations, they insist that the public had oversight on the
controversial practice via legislators.

The Obama administration has said that members of Congress were
filled in on the programs 22 times in the 14 months to December
last year. Those sessions included hearings, meetings with
individual members, and meetings of the judiciary and
intelligence committees.

However, some of representatives are saying that the intelligence
community is complicating their task. “One of the most
important responsibilities a senator has is oversight of the
intelligence community. This job cannot be done responsibly if
senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct
questions,” said Senator Ron Wyden as cited by Reuters.

Wyden was among the senators who questioned National Intelligence
Director James Clapper during a hearing in March. When asked
whether the government had collected data on millions of US
citizens, he answered “not wittingly.”

After the exposure of PRISM, Clapper referred to the question as
a “when are you going to start – stop beating your wife”
kind of question, adding that his negative answer was the
“least untruthful” he could give at the time.

Evasive tactics, of which this episode could be said to be an
example, are frowned upon by some legislators.

“Sometimes these briefings are a game of 20 questions. If you
don’t ask exactly the right question, you don’t get the
answer,” former Representative Jane Harman said when
describing the situation.

Things are complicated by the secretive nature of such meetings,
which exclude experts advising lawmakers from participating.
Without the help of tech-savvy staffers, many lawmakers are
simply not capable of asking the right questions.

Intelligence officials appear to have had second thoughts before
disclosing details of their work to Congress. 

“In the aftermath of 9/11, I got the impression that they were
telling us as little as they could without perjuring
themselves,” said former senator Bob Graham, who chaired the
Senate intelligence committee from 2001-03.

Edward Snowden, the whistleblower behind the scandal, remains in
Hong Kong. In his latest interview with the local newspaper The
South China Morning Post, he reiterated that he plans to expose
more US intelligence secrets.

In the interview, Snowden accused the US of using its cyber
capabilities to hack targets in China, and particularly Hong
Kong, as well as using “bullying” to force his extradition back
to the US. He added that he trusts the autonomous city’s
authorities to “do the right thing.”

This article originally appeared on: RT

Turkey’s TV watchdog fined four TV channels over their live coverage of the Gezi Park protests in Istanbul, citing that the broadcasts were “harming the physical, moral and mental development of children and young people.”

The Radio and Television Supreme Council fined private channels
including Halk TV, Ulusal TV, Cem TV and EM TV.

Halk TV has gained local popularity because of their 24-hour live
coverage of protests in Turkey, as most of the mainstream media
have been slammed for their lack of reporting on the protests in
the country.

As the unrest unfolded almost two weeks ago, mainstream Turkish
media did not cover the violent police clashes, but instead
broadcast nature and history documentaries, and cooking shows.

Many of the other local networks briefly mentioned the protests,
but failed to cover the violent clashes in which scores were
injured.

Angered protesters had to turn to the internet, especially
Twitter, to get the information out.

In response, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan condemned
social media’s role in the riots, singling out what he called the
“scourge” of Twitter.

“There is now a menace which is called Twitter,” Erdogan
said in the beginning of June.

Most recently two Canadian journalists were arrested by police on
Wednesday while covering the ongoing protests in Istanbul’s
Taksim Square. The two had been held all day and later released.

Turkey is known for its
suppression of journalists. In 2012 it was dubbed as the world’s
leading jailer of reporters by a New York—based Committee to
Protect Journalists (CPJ). The investigation revealed that 76
journalists were detained in Turkey as of August 1, 2012, 80
percent of which were imprisoned as a direct result of their
work.

In response to the Radio and
Television Supreme Council’s fines, Hackers from the Anonymous
collective hacked the website of the Turkish TV watchdog, calling
the operation “Tango Down RTÃœK” via the Twitter account of the
collective’s Turkish members.

This article originally appeared on: RT

People in 18 countries across Europe have been found to have traces of the weed killer glyphosate in their urine, show the results of tests commissioned by Friends of the Earth Europe and released today [1].

The findings raise concerns about increasing levels of exposure to glyphosate-based weed killers, commonly used by farmers, public authorities and gardeners across Europe. The use of glyphosate is predicted to rise further if more genetically modified (GM) crops are grown in Europe [2].

Despite its widespread use, there is currently little monitoring of glyphosate in food, water or the wider environment. This is the first time monitoring has been carried out across Europe for the presence of the weed killer in human bodies.

Friends of the Earth Europe’s spokesperson Adrian Bebb said:

“Most people will be worried to discover they may have weed killer in their bodies. We tested people living in cities in 18 countries and found traces in every country. These results suggest we are being exposed to glyphosate in our everyday lives, yet we don’t know where it is coming from, how widespread it is in the environment, or what it is doing to our health.

“Our testing highlights a serious lack of action by public authorities across Europe and indicates that this weed killer is being widely overused. Governments need to step-up their monitoring and bring in urgent measures to reduce its use. This includes rejecting any genetically modified crops that would increase the use of glyphosate.”

Friends of the Earth Europe is calling on the European Union to urgently investigate how glyphosate is finding its way into people’s bodies; to increase the levels of monitoring in the environment and in food and water; and to introduce immediate restrictions on the use of glyphosate.

Friends of the Earth Europe commissioned laboratory tests on urine samples from volunteers in 18 countries across Europe and found that on average 44% of samples contained glyphosate. The proportion of positive samples varied between countries, with Malta, Germany, the UK and Poland having the most positive tests, and lower levels detected in Macedonia and Switzerland.

All the volunteers who provided samples live in cities, and none had handled or used glyphosate products in the run-up to the tests which were carried out between March and May 2013.

Glyphosate is used on many genetically modified crops. 14 new GM crops designed to be cultivated with glyphosate are currently waiting for approval to be grown in Europe. Approval of these crops would inevitably lead to a further increase of glyphosate spraying in the EU.

The biggest producer of glyphosate is Monsanto which sells it under the brand name ‘Roundup’. Two weeks ago the US Department of Agriculture announced that it had found GM wheat developed by Monsanto that has not been approved anywhere in the world growing in a field in Oregon, leading to some countries restricting or testing US wheat imports and farmers in the US starting legal cases against the company.

Notes:

[1] Urine samples were collected from volunteers in Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, France, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Latvia, Macedonia, Malta, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, The Netherlands, and the UK. A total of 80/182 samples tested were found to contain glyphosate. Volunteers were all city-dwellers and included vegetarian and non-vegetarian diets. No two samples were tested from the same household. The samples were analysed by Dr Hoppe at Medical Laboratory Bremen in Germany.

The full results of ‘Determination of Glyphosate residues in human urine samples from 18 European countries’ by Medical Laboratory Bremen are available online.  

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Liz Peek
The Fiscal Times
June 13, 2013

While Americans anxiously scan their gizmos for signs of e-surveillance, thousands of illegals continue to jump the fence at our borders undetected.

Increasingly, it looks like the bipartisan push for immigration reform may founder if the Obama administration cannot convince Congress — and especially Republicans — that our borders are secure. Are GOP hold-outs being obstructionist, or are they right to question the White House’s reassurances about ongoing illegal immigration?

Republicans are demanding that in return for providing a path to citizenship for the eleven million immigrants in the country illegally — what skeptics call “amnesty” — the Obama administration must guarantee a certain level of security along our borders.

Read full article

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 8:10 am

Tags: domestic news

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Liz Peek
The Fiscal Times
June 13, 2013

While Americans anxiously scan their gizmos for signs of e-surveillance, thousands of illegals continue to jump the fence at our borders undetected.

Increasingly, it looks like the bipartisan push for immigration reform may founder if the Obama administration cannot convince Congress — and especially Republicans — that our borders are secure. Are GOP hold-outs being obstructionist, or are they right to question the White House’s reassurances about ongoing illegal immigration?

Republicans are demanding that in return for providing a path to citizenship for the eleven million immigrants in the country illegally — what skeptics call “amnesty” — the Obama administration must guarantee a certain level of security along our borders.

Read full article

<!–

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 8:10 am

Tags: domestic news

–>

This article originally appeared on: Infowars

Iranian lawmakers have called on the nation to take part in Fridayâ„¢s presidential and city council elections in massive numbers, saying a huge turnout will safeguard national security and promote democracy.

Lawmakers said Iranâ„¢s enemies seek to foment despair and discourage participation in elections through their media propaganda campaigns.

They added that the best way to fight back is for everyone from all walks of life and political background to take part in the vote.

Lawmakers said participation is a duty because it will show that all Iranians care about their country and its future.

Opinion polls show that the presidential election in Iran is headed for a runoff.

Opinion polls also show that more than 60 percent of the nearly 50.5 million eligible voters will be taking part in the election.

The six candidates in Iranâ„¢s presidential election are President of the Expediency Councilâ„¢s Center for Strategic Research Hassan Rohani, 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.

Former Majlis Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel and former First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref withdrew their candidacy bids earlier this week.

Iranians will go to the polls in the nationâ„¢s 11th presidential election on June 14. Over 66,000 polling stations will be set up across the country, while expatriates will be also able to cast their ballots at 285 polling stations that will be set up overseas.

The fourth city and rural council elections are also scheduled to be held on the same day.

MRS/SS/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranian lawmakers have called on the nation to take part in Fridayâ„¢s presidential and city council elections in massive numbers, saying a huge turnout will safeguard national security and promote democracy.

Lawmakers said Iranâ„¢s enemies seek to foment despair and discourage participation in elections through their media propaganda campaigns.

They added that the best way to fight back is for everyone from all walks of life and political background to take part in the vote.

Lawmakers said participation is a duty because it will show that all Iranians care about their country and its future.

Opinion polls show that the presidential election in Iran is headed for a runoff.

Opinion polls also show that more than 60 percent of the nearly 50.5 million eligible voters will be taking part in the election.

The six candidates in Iranâ„¢s presidential election are President of the Expediency Councilâ„¢s Center for Strategic Research Hassan Rohani, 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.

Former Majlis Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel and former First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref withdrew their candidacy bids earlier this week.

Iranians will go to the polls in the nationâ„¢s 11th presidential election on June 14. Over 66,000 polling stations will be set up across the country, while expatriates will be also able to cast their ballots at 285 polling stations that will be set up overseas.

The fourth city and rural council elections are also scheduled to be held on the same day.

MRS/SS/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Iranian lawmakers have called on the nation to take part in Fridayâ„¢s presidential and city council elections in massive numbers, saying a huge turnout will safeguard national security and promote democracy.

Lawmakers said Iranâ„¢s enemies seek to foment despair and discourage participation in elections through their media propaganda campaigns.

They added that the best way to fight back is for everyone from all walks of life and political background to take part in the vote.

Lawmakers said participation is a duty because it will show that all Iranians care about their country and its future.

Opinion polls show that the presidential election in Iran is headed for a runoff.

Opinion polls also show that more than 60 percent of the nearly 50.5 million eligible voters will be taking part in the election.

The six candidates in Iranâ„¢s presidential election are President of the Expediency Councilâ„¢s Center for Strategic Research Hassan Rohani, 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.

Former Majlis Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel and former First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref withdrew their candidacy bids earlier this week.

Iranians will go to the polls in the nationâ„¢s 11th presidential election on June 14. Over 66,000 polling stations will be set up across the country, while expatriates will be also able to cast their ballots at 285 polling stations that will be set up overseas.

The fourth city and rural council elections are also scheduled to be held on the same day.

MRS/SS/HMV

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

The Western press was mute on the Syrian war on June 12^th  as reports came of another massacre  carried out by the so called ‘rebels’, who are in fact members of al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Among those massacred in the village of Hatlah in the region of Deir e Zohr were dozens of women and children. Reports of the massacre vary from 30 to 100.

The French press did seem too interested in dwelling on the massacre, which is surprising given their deep concern for the ‘protection of the civilian population’ and indefatigable advocacy of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the Syrian conflict.

Le Monde, who published two sensational reports recently which purported to ‘prove’ that the Syrian ‘regime’ had used chemical weapons ‘on its own people’-without presenting a shred of credible evidence to back up their claims-  attempted to play down the crime against humanity committed by the ‘rebels’ they support.

The French daily reported that 60 shiite residents of the village of Hatlah were killed on Tuesday. There was no mention of the word ‘massacre’, no mention of the word ‘crime’, no condemnation of the barbaric acts. Instead, the report spoke of government ‘militias’ controlling local areas.

There was no condemnation of the massacre of Hatlah from the Quai D’Orsay either. Thousands of massacres have been committed by the western-backed terrorists since the outbreak of the conflict in Syria in 2011, most of not all have been ignored by the French government.[1]

The mainstream press agencies usually use massacres committed by terrorists in Syria as war propaganda by blaming the crimes on the Syrian army. But the coordination between the terrorists and Nato’s media agencies would appear to have been lacking in Tuesdays’ Syrian war theatre.

The killers posted a video on the internet where they boasted about their slaughter of civilians in the village, chanting ‘Allah akbar’ as they showed the remains of their ‘raafidis’(derogatory term for Shiite) victims. This is not the script Nato’s media agencies find useful. In fact, it is counter productive and only helps the ‘regime’. They should have filmed their slaughtered victims and posted the video online with the caption ‘innocent civilians slaughtered by Assad’s forces, international community must intervene’ It seems these terrorists were badly trained.

Syrian and Kuwaiti killers entered the village of Hatlah on Tuesday, June 11^th, marked out Shiite houses for destruction and proceeded to burn them down. Ibrahim Said, a local cleric, his wife and two girls of 4 and 2 were taken out and butchered to death. The leader of the gang also called on Sunnis in Kuwait to kill their Shiite neighbours. The video, visible on June 12^th, has been censored by U Tube but can be viewed on Liveleak.[2]

According to reports, hundreds of the remaining inhabitants of the town were abducted by the terrorists, who call themselves the Al Mut’aa Brigade. The location of the abductees is currently unknown.

In another video posted on the Syria News website, a small crowd of protestors in the town of Al Mayadeen celebrate the mass murder of the Shiite citizens of Hatlah.

Since the beginning of the unrest in Syria in 2011, the Western press has incited religious and sectarian hatred by demonizing the alawite community just as they did against the Serbs during the destruction of Yugoslavia.The result is now ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. The demonization of the alawites consists in claiming that they constitute a ruling caste over a majority Sunni population. This is not true. The majority of the Syrian Arab Army is Sunni. Sunnis and Christians have always held top positions in government. Syria is a secular, multicultural state which has always prided itself on its diversity.

But Le Monde did publish an important report concerning Syria on the day men, women and children were slaughtered in Hatlah by their beloved ‘rebels’. The report headlined ‘ Syrie : Fabius appelle à arrêter la progression des forces d’Assad. Syria : Fabius calls for stopping the advance of Assad’s forces’[3]

Perhaps Le Monde’s editors decided to ignore the Hatlah massacre because they were loath to risk further loss of credibility as a newspaper. It would been too embarrassing for Fabius, who has little if  support among the French population for his war mongering against Syria.

One only has to read the commentaries on Le Monde’s website to realize the contempt which intelligent and well-read readers have for the French daily. The same can be said for the rest of the mainstream press in France. In fact, many newspapers have decided not to allow further comments on Syria due to the plethora of internet users denouncing and exposing their criminal lies and war propaganda.

It is possible that the leader of the death squad who murdered and abducted the citizens of Hatlah may some day meet his biggest French supporter, Laurent Fabius. Like his American colleague Senator John McCain, Fabius apparently met with  Syrian terrorist Mohammad Noor recently. Noor is the leader of a terrorist group who kidnapped Christians in Lebanon last year. Their whereabouts remain unknown.[4]

As this author pointed out earlier, should the death squads fail to destroy the Syrian state, Nato could use their existence to justify intervention under the guise of the ‘War on Terror’.  But first they would have to weaken the state sufficiently to justify such as strategy.

After the triumph of the Syrian Arab Army over the foreign-backed terrorists in the city of Al-Qusayr, the prospect of a victory over Nato is increasing. A writer in the Syria News website notes that it is significant that the MI6 propaganda organ called the Syrian Observatory For Human Rights-which has hitherto been the source of the mainstream media disinformation- has also reported on the massacre in Hatlah.

An attempt is being made to distinguish the Free Syrian Army from the Al Qaeda terrorists. Given the efficacy of the media’s lies on a brain washed population, it would be easy to claim that Assad was secretly cooperating with Al-Qaeda and intervention was necessary in order to rid the country of the terrorists. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights may start publishing more massacres by the terrorists in order to provide propaganda to that effect were Nato to change its war strategy against Syria.

A similar strategy was adopted by France against Mali, where terrorists were allowed pass into the country for months in order to serve as a pretext later for a military invasion and occupation of the country by France. The War on Terror fiction series is flexible and can be rewritten on demand to suit Nato’s geopolitical exigencies.[5] But for now, the French war narrative remains focused on Assad.

The response by the US government to the massacre in Hatlah shows the divergence between the neo-conservative psychopaths in Paris and London, who want all out war in Syria and the Obama regime which appears to be attempting to disengage from the Middle East. The US state department official condemned the massacre. This shows that France and the UK are now even more belligerent than their US counterparts.

The French military-industrial-media complex is raging for the re-colonization of Syria, and its loyal public relations newsletter Le Monde is doing everything in its power to serve its war mongering masters. The butchered citizens of Hatlah failed to make headlines yesterday because there was good news for those Syrians who have not yet been killed by car bombs or massacred in their homes: the French government wants to give the terrorists more arms.

Notes

[1] http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2013/06/12/60-chiites-tues-dans-des-combats-avec-des-rebelles-en-syrie_3428359_3218.html

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aDKhsTnZs0c

[3] http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2013/06/12/syrie-fabius-appelle-a-arreter-la-progression-des-forces-d-assad_3428444_3218.html

[4] http://syriareport.net/mccain-visited-kidnappers-in-syria/

[5] http://www.syrianews.cc/alert-nato-false-flags-increase-syria-massacres/

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

The Western press was mute on the Syrian war on June 12^th  as reports came of another massacre  carried out by the so called ‘rebels’, who are in fact members of al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Among those massacred in the village of Hatlah in the region of Deir e Zohr were dozens of women and children. Reports of the massacre vary from 30 to 100.

The French press did seem too interested in dwelling on the massacre, which is surprising given their deep concern for the ‘protection of the civilian population’ and indefatigable advocacy of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the Syrian conflict.

Le Monde, who published two sensational reports recently which purported to ‘prove’ that the Syrian ‘regime’ had used chemical weapons ‘on its own people’-without presenting a shred of credible evidence to back up their claims-  attempted to play down the crime against humanity committed by the ‘rebels’ they support.

The French daily reported that 60 shiite residents of the village of Hatlah were killed on Tuesday. There was no mention of the word ‘massacre’, no mention of the word ‘crime’, no condemnation of the barbaric acts. Instead, the report spoke of government ‘militias’ controlling local areas.

There was no condemnation of the massacre of Hatlah from the Quai D’Orsay either. Thousands of massacres have been committed by the western-backed terrorists since the outbreak of the conflict in Syria in 2011, most of not all have been ignored by the French government.[1]

The mainstream press agencies usually use massacres committed by terrorists in Syria as war propaganda by blaming the crimes on the Syrian army. But the coordination between the terrorists and Nato’s media agencies would appear to have been lacking in Tuesdays’ Syrian war theatre.

The killers posted a video on the internet where they boasted about their slaughter of civilians in the village, chanting ‘Allah akbar’ as they showed the remains of their ‘raafidis’(derogatory term for Shiite) victims. This is not the script Nato’s media agencies find useful. In fact, it is counter productive and only helps the ‘regime’. They should have filmed their slaughtered victims and posted the video online with the caption ‘innocent civilians slaughtered by Assad’s forces, international community must intervene’ It seems these terrorists were badly trained.

Syrian and Kuwaiti killers entered the village of Hatlah on Tuesday, June 11^th, marked out Shiite houses for destruction and proceeded to burn them down. Ibrahim Said, a local cleric, his wife and two girls of 4 and 2 were taken out and butchered to death. The leader of the gang also called on Sunnis in Kuwait to kill their Shiite neighbours. The video, visible on June 12^th, has been censored by U Tube but can be viewed on Liveleak.[2]

According to reports, hundreds of the remaining inhabitants of the town were abducted by the terrorists, who call themselves the Al Mut’aa Brigade. The location of the abductees is currently unknown.

In another video posted on the Syria News website, a small crowd of protestors in the town of Al Mayadeen celebrate the mass murder of the Shiite citizens of Hatlah.

Since the beginning of the unrest in Syria in 2011, the Western press has incited religious and sectarian hatred by demonizing the alawite community just as they did against the Serbs during the destruction of Yugoslavia.The result is now ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. The demonization of the alawites consists in claiming that they constitute a ruling caste over a majority Sunni population. This is not true. The majority of the Syrian Arab Army is Sunni. Sunnis and Christians have always held top positions in government. Syria is a secular, multicultural state which has always prided itself on its diversity.

But Le Monde did publish an important report concerning Syria on the day men, women and children were slaughtered in Hatlah by their beloved ‘rebels’. The report headlined ‘ Syrie : Fabius appelle à arrêter la progression des forces d’Assad. Syria : Fabius calls for stopping the advance of Assad’s forces’[3]

Perhaps Le Monde’s editors decided to ignore the Hatlah massacre because they were loath to risk further loss of credibility as a newspaper. It would been too embarrassing for Fabius, who has little if  support among the French population for his war mongering against Syria.

One only has to read the commentaries on Le Monde’s website to realize the contempt which intelligent and well-read readers have for the French daily. The same can be said for the rest of the mainstream press in France. In fact, many newspapers have decided not to allow further comments on Syria due to the plethora of internet users denouncing and exposing their criminal lies and war propaganda.

It is possible that the leader of the death squad who murdered and abducted the citizens of Hatlah may some day meet his biggest French supporter, Laurent Fabius. Like his American colleague Senator John McCain, Fabius apparently met with  Syrian terrorist Mohammad Noor recently. Noor is the leader of a terrorist group who kidnapped Christians in Lebanon last year. Their whereabouts remain unknown.[4]

As this author pointed out earlier, should the death squads fail to destroy the Syrian state, Nato could use their existence to justify intervention under the guise of the ‘War on Terror’.  But first they would have to weaken the state sufficiently to justify such as strategy.

After the triumph of the Syrian Arab Army over the foreign-backed terrorists in the city of Al-Qusayr, the prospect of a victory over Nato is increasing. A writer in the Syria News website notes that it is significant that the MI6 propaganda organ called the Syrian Observatory For Human Rights-which has hitherto been the source of the mainstream media disinformation- has also reported on the massacre in Hatlah.

An attempt is being made to distinguish the Free Syrian Army from the Al Qaeda terrorists. Given the efficacy of the media’s lies on a brain washed population, it would be easy to claim that Assad was secretly cooperating with Al-Qaeda and intervention was necessary in order to rid the country of the terrorists. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights may start publishing more massacres by the terrorists in order to provide propaganda to that effect were Nato to change its war strategy against Syria.

A similar strategy was adopted by France against Mali, where terrorists were allowed pass into the country for months in order to serve as a pretext later for a military invasion and occupation of the country by France. The War on Terror fiction series is flexible and can be rewritten on demand to suit Nato’s geopolitical exigencies.[5] But for now, the French war narrative remains focused on Assad.

The response by the US government to the massacre in Hatlah shows the divergence between the neo-conservative psychopaths in Paris and London, who want all out war in Syria and the Obama regime which appears to be attempting to disengage from the Middle East. The US state department official condemned the massacre. This shows that France and the UK are now even more belligerent than their US counterparts.

The French military-industrial-media complex is raging for the re-colonization of Syria, and its loyal public relations newsletter Le Monde is doing everything in its power to serve its war mongering masters. The butchered citizens of Hatlah failed to make headlines yesterday because there was good news for those Syrians who have not yet been killed by car bombs or massacred in their homes: the French government wants to give the terrorists more arms.

Notes

[1] http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2013/06/12/60-chiites-tues-dans-des-combats-avec-des-rebelles-en-syrie_3428359_3218.html

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aDKhsTnZs0c

[3] http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2013/06/12/syrie-fabius-appelle-a-arreter-la-progression-des-forces-d-assad_3428444_3218.html

[4] http://syriareport.net/mccain-visited-kidnappers-in-syria/

[5] http://www.syrianews.cc/alert-nato-false-flags-increase-syria-massacres/

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

The Western press was mute on the Syrian war on June 12^th  as reports came of another massacre  carried out by the so called ‘rebels’, who are in fact members of al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda affiliated groups. Among those massacred in the village of Hatlah in the region of Deir e Zohr were dozens of women and children. Reports of the massacre vary from 30 to 100.

The French press did seem too interested in dwelling on the massacre, which is surprising given their deep concern for the ‘protection of the civilian population’ and indefatigable advocacy of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in the Syrian conflict.

Le Monde, who published two sensational reports recently which purported to ‘prove’ that the Syrian ‘regime’ had used chemical weapons ‘on its own people’-without presenting a shred of credible evidence to back up their claims-  attempted to play down the crime against humanity committed by the ‘rebels’ they support.

The French daily reported that 60 shiite residents of the village of Hatlah were killed on Tuesday. There was no mention of the word ‘massacre’, no mention of the word ‘crime’, no condemnation of the barbaric acts. Instead, the report spoke of government ‘militias’ controlling local areas.

There was no condemnation of the massacre of Hatlah from the Quai D’Orsay either. Thousands of massacres have been committed by the western-backed terrorists since the outbreak of the conflict in Syria in 2011, most of not all have been ignored by the French government.[1]

The mainstream press agencies usually use massacres committed by terrorists in Syria as war propaganda by blaming the crimes on the Syrian army. But the coordination between the terrorists and Nato’s media agencies would appear to have been lacking in Tuesdays’ Syrian war theatre.

The killers posted a video on the internet where they boasted about their slaughter of civilians in the village, chanting ‘Allah akbar’ as they showed the remains of their ‘raafidis’(derogatory term for Shiite) victims. This is not the script Nato’s media agencies find useful. In fact, it is counter productive and only helps the ‘regime’. They should have filmed their slaughtered victims and posted the video online with the caption ‘innocent civilians slaughtered by Assad’s forces, international community must intervene’ It seems these terrorists were badly trained.

Syrian and Kuwaiti killers entered the village of Hatlah on Tuesday, June 11^th, marked out Shiite houses for destruction and proceeded to burn them down. Ibrahim Said, a local cleric, his wife and two girls of 4 and 2 were taken out and butchered to death. The leader of the gang also called on Sunnis in Kuwait to kill their Shiite neighbours. The video, visible on June 12^th, has been censored by U Tube but can be viewed on Liveleak.[2]

According to reports, hundreds of the remaining inhabitants of the town were abducted by the terrorists, who call themselves the Al Mut’aa Brigade. The location of the abductees is currently unknown.

In another video posted on the Syria News website, a small crowd of protestors in the town of Al Mayadeen celebrate the mass murder of the Shiite citizens of Hatlah.

Since the beginning of the unrest in Syria in 2011, the Western press has incited religious and sectarian hatred by demonizing the alawite community just as they did against the Serbs during the destruction of Yugoslavia.The result is now ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. The demonization of the alawites consists in claiming that they constitute a ruling caste over a majority Sunni population. This is not true. The majority of the Syrian Arab Army is Sunni. Sunnis and Christians have always held top positions in government. Syria is a secular, multicultural state which has always prided itself on its diversity.

But Le Monde did publish an important report concerning Syria on the day men, women and children were slaughtered in Hatlah by their beloved ‘rebels’. The report headlined ‘ Syrie : Fabius appelle à arrêter la progression des forces d’Assad. Syria : Fabius calls for stopping the advance of Assad’s forces’[3]

Perhaps Le Monde’s editors decided to ignore the Hatlah massacre because they were loath to risk further loss of credibility as a newspaper. It would been too embarrassing for Fabius, who has little if  support among the French population for his war mongering against Syria.

One only has to read the commentaries on Le Monde’s website to realize the contempt which intelligent and well-read readers have for the French daily. The same can be said for the rest of the mainstream press in France. In fact, many newspapers have decided not to allow further comments on Syria due to the plethora of internet users denouncing and exposing their criminal lies and war propaganda.

It is possible that the leader of the death squad who murdered and abducted the citizens of Hatlah may some day meet his biggest French supporter, Laurent Fabius. Like his American colleague Senator John McCain, Fabius apparently met with  Syrian terrorist Mohammad Noor recently. Noor is the leader of a terrorist group who kidnapped Christians in Lebanon last year. Their whereabouts remain unknown.[4]

As this author pointed out earlier, should the death squads fail to destroy the Syrian state, Nato could use their existence to justify intervention under the guise of the ‘War on Terror’.  But first they would have to weaken the state sufficiently to justify such as strategy.

After the triumph of the Syrian Arab Army over the foreign-backed terrorists in the city of Al-Qusayr, the prospect of a victory over Nato is increasing. A writer in the Syria News website notes that it is significant that the MI6 propaganda organ called the Syrian Observatory For Human Rights-which has hitherto been the source of the mainstream media disinformation- has also reported on the massacre in Hatlah.

An attempt is being made to distinguish the Free Syrian Army from the Al Qaeda terrorists. Given the efficacy of the media’s lies on a brain washed population, it would be easy to claim that Assad was secretly cooperating with Al-Qaeda and intervention was necessary in order to rid the country of the terrorists. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights may start publishing more massacres by the terrorists in order to provide propaganda to that effect were Nato to change its war strategy against Syria.

A similar strategy was adopted by France against Mali, where terrorists were allowed pass into the country for months in order to serve as a pretext later for a military invasion and occupation of the country by France. The War on Terror fiction series is flexible and can be rewritten on demand to suit Nato’s geopolitical exigencies.[5] But for now, the French war narrative remains focused on Assad.

The response by the US government to the massacre in Hatlah shows the divergence between the neo-conservative psychopaths in Paris and London, who want all out war in Syria and the Obama regime which appears to be attempting to disengage from the Middle East. The US state department official condemned the massacre. This shows that France and the UK are now even more belligerent than their US counterparts.

The French military-industrial-media complex is raging for the re-colonization of Syria, and its loyal public relations newsletter Le Monde is doing everything in its power to serve its war mongering masters. The butchered citizens of Hatlah failed to make headlines yesterday because there was good news for those Syrians who have not yet been killed by car bombs or massacred in their homes: the French government wants to give the terrorists more arms.

Notes

[1] http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2013/06/12/60-chiites-tues-dans-des-combats-avec-des-rebelles-en-syrie_3428359_3218.html

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aDKhsTnZs0c

[3] http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2013/06/12/syrie-fabius-appelle-a-arreter-la-progression-des-forces-d-assad_3428444_3218.html

[4] http://syriareport.net/mccain-visited-kidnappers-in-syria/

[5] http://www.syrianews.cc/alert-nato-false-flags-increase-syria-massacres/

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

Pakistani forces cordon off the site of a blast in the southern port city of Karachi.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Pakistani forces cordon off the site of a blast in the southern port city of Karachi.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

”The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Dov Weissglass, advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister in 2006

In 2005 Israel withdrew its settlers from Gaza. Following this there were democratic elections which Hamas won. Since voting the ”wrong way” the Palestinian people of Gaza have been subjected to a siege by Israel. The Palestinian people of Gaza are blockaded by land, sea and air by the Israeli Defence Force.

The EU and America have failed to do anything to stop Israel’s war against the Palestinians of Gaza. Most notable were the massive military attacks of December-January 2008-9 which killed 1,500 Palestinians and the most recent attack of November 2012 which resulted in nearly 200 deaths.

The International Red Cross and the United Nations have found the Israeli government’s siege of Gaza to be illegal under international law.

In September 2011 five independent UN rights experts made a report to the UN Human Rights Council which said that Israel’s siege of Gaza amounted to collective punishment of the Palestinian people and was a “flagrant contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law” under the Fourth Geneva Convention. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out the Gaza Strip is the world’s largest open air prison. In October 2012 Professor Chomsky said:

”The siege is a criminal act that has no justification. It should be broken and it should be strongly opposed by the outside world. It’s simply an effort to intimidate the Gazans into self-destruction, to try to get rid of them and destroy the society. There is absolutely no justification for it – military justifications are claimed but they have no credibility.”

 Israel’s blockade of Gaza is denying the Palestinian people access to medical supplies and food. Hospitals face critical shortages, with 40% of all essential medicines at zero stock level. Out of the 1.7 million Palestinians living in Gaza 54% are food insecure including 428,000 children.

 Israel’s illegal blockade has led to a massive shortage of building materials to repair the homes, hospitals, schools and water/sanitation infrastructure that have been destroyed/damaged by the IDF in the last 5 years. Most of Gaza’s water supplies are polluted and unsafe to drink. Meanwhile there are power cuts every day.

I spoke to documentary film maker and journalist Harry Fear who is based in Gaza and has reported extensively on the siege of Gaza over the last few years.

 Chomsky has called the Gaza Strip the ”world’s largest prison”. Would you agree with this description?

I would largely agree with Chomsky’s description. I’ve found, though, that quite a few of those sympathetic with Palestinians don’t actually know that the Gaza Strip has a border with Egypt, and that Egypt is also largely responsible for the imprisonment (‘security besiegement’) policy. Civilian traffic out of Gaza into Israel is basically a no-no, while leaving into Egypt is diplomatically difficult and unaffordable for most Palestinians. I think the most important aspect of the siege, though, is the economic blockade. The Egyptian border with Gaza is closed to almost all economic traffic –only recently have the Egyptians allowed construction materials to be imported into Gaza. Palestinians want and need economic independence (not aid dependency), and I haven’t met any Palestinians who want to leave Gaza for any reason other than the poor economic opportunities there (prolonged by the deliberately-punishing siege). My on-the-ground experience in Gaza has made me realise that there is a real psychological sense of imprisonment and worldly isolation as a result of the siege, which affects widespread depression and eats away at people’s hope and the future prospects for prosperity. ‘Free Gaza!’ should remain the mantra, so long as this illegal solitary confinement policy continues. Incidentally, the besiegement policy proves that Israel (and Egypt) are the dominating external powers, and that the Palestinians are not in a symmetrical conflict or battle with Israel, but are the persecuted party. The government in Gaza can’t do anything to lift the siege, only help alleviate it by facilitating the underground smuggling tunnels into Egypt.

Since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 the IDF has launched two massive military assaults upon Gaza. What effect/impact have these had upon Gazan society?

Although I wasn’t present during the winter ‘08-’09 assault, I believe the affects of these military operations on Gaza have of course been grave and multidimensional. At a psychological and spiritual level the resolve and will of the Palestinian people has been tested by most cruel and barbaric aggressions, launched by one of the most powerful militaries in the world, resulting in the ‘collateral damage’ massacring of hundreds. With around one in a thousand Palestinians in Gaza wiped of the map during that 22-day assault, every family and street has been touched by terror and tragedy. Similarly, during this winter (11/2012), the 8-day operation hit every area of Gaza and once again no civilian was really safe during those bloody days. Without meaning to deliberately romanticise or objectify Palestinians, it’s absolutely important to note the unimaginable resilience (including moral resilience) of Palestinians in the face of such barbarity. Some of my closest friends in Gaza volunteered at hospitals during Operation Cast Lead and had to carry dying and dead children through bombed streets, but you wouldn’t know it or guess it from their political stances. I ask myself: would the British people react in a relatively restrained manner to aggressions of these sorts? I can’t imagine so. Interviewing Hamas spokespeople you notice that they often mention their policy desire to perpetuate the steadfastness of their people. That’s a striking policy goal and one that shows that the Palestinian steadfastness is something tangible, remarkable, and fundamental in the conflict with Israel. That steadfastness has been tested. At a physical and political level, massive civilian infrastructural damage and damage to civilian administrative capacity was done during both recent operations. Neither operations have of course been able to stop militant groups from producing home-made rockets, including rockets that can reach 75km away from the Strip. Israel’s operations have tried to prove a terror deterrence to the subjugated Palestinians, but Palestinians resolve hasn’t been broken.

What impact has the Israeli siege of Gaza had upon the living standards of ordinary Palestinians?

The siege has explicitly destroyed serious economic prospects for Palestinians. Most Palestinians are living in relative poverty, relying on food aid for support. While unemployment is over 50%, most Palestinians are living in refugee camps, awaiting economic freedom to improve their living conditions. Population centres in Gaza constitute some of the most over-crowed and densely-populated residential areas in the world. At the same time there is quite pronounced inequality in the Strip, as the main city (historic Gaza City) is strikingly developed in comparison to other areas of the Strip. What’s clear is that Palestinians have used all means at their disposal to attempt development, by relying mostly on smuggling tunnels with Egypt for imports, proving determination and resourcefulness, as well as Gaza’s economic capacity if it were free.

Medical Aid for Palestinians has criticised the siege of Gaza for the terrible impact upon its health service. How is the siege affecting the medical services available to people in Gaza?

Of course the health services do their best under the circumstances. Limitations include lack of medicines, basic medical equipments and advanced technology that we take for granted in developed countries. Aid efforts and convoys have delivered some alleviation, but there is too far left to go.

How has the siege affected the education of children in Gaza?

The worsened economic situation seems to have driven Palestinians to a stronger determination for academic excellence, rather than having had a demoralising effect. Although there are thousands too few school places, a lack of basic texts and (some way) poor teaching altogether, there are several universities in Gaza of excellent standards whose students’ determination and skill is incredible.

 Following the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 the people of Gaza voted the ”wrong way” by electing Hamas to office. Why do you think Western governments have such a hostile attitude towards Palestinian resistance to Israeli repression?

Since the media strips away the historical and practical context in which this desperate and weak Palestinian armed resistance is borne, then of course one sees only ‘terrorist crazies’ in Gaza, perpetuating the dangerous common stereotypes. For powerful and dominant Western governments it’s far easier to simply go along with the Israeli terms of reference than confront them in a just and reasoned way. So the Western position is almost identical to the Israeli position. Hamas’ armed resistance (in response to Israeli state terrorism) is of course considered as (private) terrorism by American and British governments, who are themselves used to dealing with and labelling resistance efforts in such a way (think of their own adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan). Meanwhile, as ‘we’ are unused to being occupied and resisting occupation, there is automatically an ideological dissimilarity and natural sympathy deficit with the Palestinian position.

 Thousands of Palestinians have been killed and injured by the IDF since 2005. Do you think that ordinary Palestinians have the right to defend themselves against military attack?

Palestinians have a legal, moral and abrahamic religious rights to self-defence, including explicit and direct armed resistance. However Palestinians do not have the legal right to target Israeli civilians, any more than the Israeli military had the right to kill 61 Palestinian children last winter. Unguided rocket fire from Gaza is legally and morally problematic. The military thinking is that Palestinian retaliatory rocket fire that terrorises Israeli civilians could be successful in scaring off and preventing Israeli state terrorism, and it has indeed been somewhat successful in ‘rebalancing the terror threat’. However, one has to take a macro perspective: Palestinians in Gaza are contained behind walls, fences and no-go zones, with little opportunities to attack Israeli military units or installations. Meanwhile in the West Bank, the opposite is the case, but Palestinians don’t have weapons (only stones) to resist with. If we were (hypothetically) to see widespread Intifada-style mass popular resistance to Israeli occupation, I think that would be monumental in knocking into place the last nail of the coffin of Israeli occupation. The international community is moved by occupation, suffering, and organised resistance, and needs to see it to forcefully externally intervene, use its power and enforce the law.

Whenever rockets are fired from Gaza into Israel the UK government is quick to condemn such acts as terrorism. The historian Illan Pappe has noted that the far more important issue is Israeli violence against the Gaza Strip. How would you characterize Israeli acts of violence against the Gaza Strip?

Living through the recent 8-day aggression confirmed my previous analysis that Israel’s violent adventures in Gaza constitute illegal, disproportionate and reckless military engagements, resulting in blatant state terrorism and inevitable massacring. In the last couple of years it’s been the case that Israel’s attacks have largely been targeted (although sometimes the targeting is erroneous). The key to understanding the state violence is to see that Israel is willing to use incredible and ridiculous force, inevitably invoking massive civilian ‘collateral damage’, in order to kill a suspected militant or two. Palestinian blood is cheap. Who cares? The mainstream media certainly doesn’t.

More and more activists from around the world are taking solidarity action such as the Aid to Gaza convoys or visiting the West Bank to help with the olive harvest. Can you tell us more about your initiative to take media activists to Gaza this summer?

I’m taking a few dozen media workers and media students to Gaza in July for a solidarity and media-making mission to stimulate improved journalistic coverage on, understanding of and compassion towards Gaza. From 18 countries around the world, the media convoy members will congregate in Cairo and then complete an intense two-week programme of immersion and media work in Gaza. The participants were carefully chosen by a team in Gaza, based on their education, skills and experience, as well as their willingness to follow-up the trip with awareness-building work when they return home. I have tried to reinvent the convoy model, moving away from a model of pit-stop visiting of war sites, institutes and then plush hotels, to a model that’s more intense, embedded, realistic and hopefully more socially constructive.

You can help beat the blockade and get food to malnourished children in Gaza by making a donation to Medical Aid for Palestinians special appeal at:

http://www.justgiving.com/MAP-Feed-the-children-of-Gaza-appeal

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

”The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.” Dov Weissglass, advisor to the Israeli Prime Minister in 2006

In 2005 Israel withdrew its settlers from Gaza. Following this there were democratic elections which Hamas won. Since voting the ”wrong way” the Palestinian people of Gaza have been subjected to a siege by Israel. The Palestinian people of Gaza are blockaded by land, sea and air by the Israeli Defence Force.

The EU and America have failed to do anything to stop Israel’s war against the Palestinians of Gaza. Most notable were the massive military attacks of December-January 2008-9 which killed 1,500 Palestinians and the most recent attack of November 2012 which resulted in nearly 200 deaths.

The International Red Cross and the United Nations have found the Israeli government’s siege of Gaza to be illegal under international law.

In September 2011 five independent UN rights experts made a report to the UN Human Rights Council which said that Israel’s siege of Gaza amounted to collective punishment of the Palestinian people and was a “flagrant contravention of international human rights and humanitarian law” under the Fourth Geneva Convention. As Noam Chomsky has pointed out the Gaza Strip is the world’s largest open air prison. In October 2012 Professor Chomsky said:

”The siege is a criminal act that has no justification. It should be broken and it should be strongly opposed by the outside world. It’s simply an effort to intimidate the Gazans into self-destruction, to try to get rid of them and destroy the society. There is absolutely no justification for it – military justifications are claimed but they have no credibility.”

 Israel’s blockade of Gaza is denying the Palestinian people access to medical supplies and food. Hospitals face critical shortages, with 40% of all essential medicines at zero stock level. Out of the 1.7 million Palestinians living in Gaza 54% are food insecure including 428,000 children.

 Israel’s illegal blockade has led to a massive shortage of building materials to repair the homes, hospitals, schools and water/sanitation infrastructure that have been destroyed/damaged by the IDF in the last 5 years. Most of Gaza’s water supplies are polluted and unsafe to drink. Meanwhile there are power cuts every day.

I spoke to documentary film maker and journalist Harry Fear who is based in Gaza and has reported extensively on the siege of Gaza over the last few years.

 Chomsky has called the Gaza Strip the ”world’s largest prison”. Would you agree with this description?

I would largely agree with Chomsky’s description. I’ve found, though, that quite a few of those sympathetic with Palestinians don’t actually know that the Gaza Strip has a border with Egypt, and that Egypt is also largely responsible for the imprisonment (‘security besiegement’) policy. Civilian traffic out of Gaza into Israel is basically a no-no, while leaving into Egypt is diplomatically difficult and unaffordable for most Palestinians. I think the most important aspect of the siege, though, is the economic blockade. The Egyptian border with Gaza is closed to almost all economic traffic –only recently have the Egyptians allowed construction materials to be imported into Gaza. Palestinians want and need economic independence (not aid dependency), and I haven’t met any Palestinians who want to leave Gaza for any reason other than the poor economic opportunities there (prolonged by the deliberately-punishing siege). My on-the-ground experience in Gaza has made me realise that there is a real psychological sense of imprisonment and worldly isolation as a result of the siege, which affects widespread depression and eats away at people’s hope and the future prospects for prosperity. ‘Free Gaza!’ should remain the mantra, so long as this illegal solitary confinement policy continues. Incidentally, the besiegement policy proves that Israel (and Egypt) are the dominating external powers, and that the Palestinians are not in a symmetrical conflict or battle with Israel, but are the persecuted party. The government in Gaza can’t do anything to lift the siege, only help alleviate it by facilitating the underground smuggling tunnels into Egypt.

Since the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 the IDF has launched two massive military assaults upon Gaza. What effect/impact have these had upon Gazan society?

Although I wasn’t present during the winter ‘08-’09 assault, I believe the affects of these military operations on Gaza have of course been grave and multidimensional. At a psychological and spiritual level the resolve and will of the Palestinian people has been tested by most cruel and barbaric aggressions, launched by one of the most powerful militaries in the world, resulting in the ‘collateral damage’ massacring of hundreds. With around one in a thousand Palestinians in Gaza wiped of the map during that 22-day assault, every family and street has been touched by terror and tragedy. Similarly, during this winter (11/2012), the 8-day operation hit every area of Gaza and once again no civilian was really safe during those bloody days. Without meaning to deliberately romanticise or objectify Palestinians, it’s absolutely important to note the unimaginable resilience (including moral resilience) of Palestinians in the face of such barbarity. Some of my closest friends in Gaza volunteered at hospitals during Operation Cast Lead and had to carry dying and dead children through bombed streets, but you wouldn’t know it or guess it from their political stances. I ask myself: would the British people react in a relatively restrained manner to aggressions of these sorts? I can’t imagine so. Interviewing Hamas spokespeople you notice that they often mention their policy desire to perpetuate the steadfastness of their people. That’s a striking policy goal and one that shows that the Palestinian steadfastness is something tangible, remarkable, and fundamental in the conflict with Israel. That steadfastness has been tested. At a physical and political level, massive civilian infrastructural damage and damage to civilian administrative capacity was done during both recent operations. Neither operations have of course been able to stop militant groups from producing home-made rockets, including rockets that can reach 75km away from the Strip. Israel’s operations have tried to prove a terror deterrence to the subjugated Palestinians, but Palestinians resolve hasn’t been broken.

What impact has the Israeli siege of Gaza had upon the living standards of ordinary Palestinians?

The siege has explicitly destroyed serious economic prospects for Palestinians. Most Palestinians are living in relative poverty, relying on food aid for support. While unemployment is over 50%, most Palestinians are living in refugee camps, awaiting economic freedom to improve their living conditions. Population centres in Gaza constitute some of the most over-crowed and densely-populated residential areas in the world. At the same time there is quite pronounced inequality in the Strip, as the main city (historic Gaza City) is strikingly developed in comparison to other areas of the Strip. What’s clear is that Palestinians have used all means at their disposal to attempt development, by relying mostly on smuggling tunnels with Egypt for imports, proving determination and resourcefulness, as well as Gaza’s economic capacity if it were free.

Medical Aid for Palestinians has criticised the siege of Gaza for the terrible impact upon its health service. How is the siege affecting the medical services available to people in Gaza?

Of course the health services do their best under the circumstances. Limitations include lack of medicines, basic medical equipments and advanced technology that we take for granted in developed countries. Aid efforts and convoys have delivered some alleviation, but there is too far left to go.

How has the siege affected the education of children in Gaza?

The worsened economic situation seems to have driven Palestinians to a stronger determination for academic excellence, rather than having had a demoralising effect. Although there are thousands too few school places, a lack of basic texts and (some way) poor teaching altogether, there are several universities in Gaza of excellent standards whose students’ determination and skill is incredible.

 Following the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in 2005 the people of Gaza voted the ”wrong way” by electing Hamas to office. Why do you think Western governments have such a hostile attitude towards Palestinian resistance to Israeli repression?

Since the media strips away the historical and practical context in which this desperate and weak Palestinian armed resistance is borne, then of course one sees only ‘terrorist crazies’ in Gaza, perpetuating the dangerous common stereotypes. For powerful and dominant Western governments it’s far easier to simply go along with the Israeli terms of reference than confront them in a just and reasoned way. So the Western position is almost identical to the Israeli position. Hamas’ armed resistance (in response to Israeli state terrorism) is of course considered as (private) terrorism by American and British governments, who are themselves used to dealing with and labelling resistance efforts in such a way (think of their own adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan). Meanwhile, as ‘we’ are unused to being occupied and resisting occupation, there is automatically an ideological dissimilarity and natural sympathy deficit with the Palestinian position.

 Thousands of Palestinians have been killed and injured by the IDF since 2005. Do you think that ordinary Palestinians have the right to defend themselves against military attack?

Palestinians have a legal, moral and abrahamic religious rights to self-defence, including explicit and direct armed resistance. However Palestinians do not have the legal right to target Israeli civilians, any more than the Israeli military had the right to kill 61 Palestinian children last winter. Unguided rocket fire from Gaza is legally and morally problematic. The military thinking is that Palestinian retaliatory rocket fire that terrorises Israeli civilians could be successful in scaring off and preventing Israeli state terrorism, and it has indeed been somewhat successful in ‘rebalancing the terror threat’. However, one has to take a macro perspective: Palestinians in Gaza are contained behind walls, fences and no-go zones, with little opportunities to attack Israeli military units or installations. Meanwhile in the West Bank, the opposite is the case, but Palestinians don’t have weapons (only stones) to resist with. If we were (hypothetically) to see widespread Intifada-style mass popular resistance to Israeli occupation, I think that would be monumental in knocking into place the last nail of the coffin of Israeli occupation. The international community is moved by occupation, suffering, and organised resistance, and needs to see it to forcefully externally intervene, use its power and enforce the law.

Whenever rockets are fired from Gaza into Israel the UK government is quick to condemn such acts as terrorism. The historian Illan Pappe has noted that the far more important issue is Israeli violence against the Gaza Strip. How would you characterize Israeli acts of violence against the Gaza Strip?

Living through the recent 8-day aggression confirmed my previous analysis that Israel’s violent adventures in Gaza constitute illegal, disproportionate and reckless military engagements, resulting in blatant state terrorism and inevitable massacring. In the last couple of years it’s been the case that Israel’s attacks have largely been targeted (although sometimes the targeting is erroneous). The key to understanding the state violence is to see that Israel is willing to use incredible and ridiculous force, inevitably invoking massive civilian ‘collateral damage’, in order to kill a suspected militant or two. Palestinian blood is cheap. Who cares? The mainstream media certainly doesn’t.

More and more activists from around the world are taking solidarity action such as the Aid to Gaza convoys or visiting the West Bank to help with the olive harvest. Can you tell us more about your initiative to take media activists to Gaza this summer?

I’m taking a few dozen media workers and media students to Gaza in July for a solidarity and media-making mission to stimulate improved journalistic coverage on, understanding of and compassion towards Gaza. From 18 countries around the world, the media convoy members will congregate in Cairo and then complete an intense two-week programme of immersion and media work in Gaza. The participants were carefully chosen by a team in Gaza, based on their education, skills and experience, as well as their willingness to follow-up the trip with awareness-building work when they return home. I have tried to reinvent the convoy model, moving away from a model of pit-stop visiting of war sites, institutes and then plush hotels, to a model that’s more intense, embedded, realistic and hopefully more socially constructive.

You can help beat the blockade and get food to malnourished children in Gaza by making a donation to Medical Aid for Palestinians special appeal at:

http://www.justgiving.com/MAP-Feed-the-children-of-Gaza-appeal

This article originally appeared on: Global Research

The UK prison system’s steps towards privatization may only usher it into further decline as the need for profit overtakes already insufficient attempts to rehabilitate offenders. Critics say the UK is putting cost cutting ahead of public safety.

The Ministry of Justice
announced plans to privatize up to 70 percent of probation’s core
work in early May. Competition for contracts in 21 areas over
England and Wales is expected to begin in August. 

According to a June report entitled ‘Justice in Meltdown,’ 15,000 justice sector
jobs are expected to be axed by 2015 as a result, alongside a 23
percent cut to the department’s budget, equating to some 2
billion pounds (US$3.1 billion). 

Large private companies such as Serco and G4S will be able to bid
for ‘payments by results’ contracts. 

“It’s a disaster waiting to happen,” Ian Lawrence of the
Probation Officers’ Trade Union told RT. 

“We’re extremely concerned about [Justice Secretary]
Grayling’s proposals to privatize two thirds of the workforce,
two thirds of the workload, and put it in the hands of untrained
private sector providers,” he said. 

Thirty-five probation trusts in England and Wales are to be told
to merge into 21 contract package areas. The public sector
probation service will retain work with high-risk offenders,
while contracts to supervise low- to medium-level offenders
across England and Wales will be up for grabs, according to the
report.

“Well, it’s one sentence — public bad, private good. At the
end of the day I still abhor the idea that anybody makes any
profit out of the suffering of other people in the criminal
justice system. But that, I’m afraid, is where we are at the
moment,” Elfyn Llwyd, chair of the Justice Unions’
Parliamentary Group told RT.

The successful contract tenders are still to be announced.
However, two of the potential candidates – G4S and Serco – have
each been the subject of controversy. Both are being investigated
for overcharging the government over contracts they secured in
2005 for the electronic tagging of prisoners.

Across 2012 and 2013 alone, the contracts cost the UK’s Ministry
of Justice 107 million pounds.

“At the end of the day those private companies are going to be
accountable to shareholders, and not to the public. Their
loyalties will be split. In fact there will be no loyalty to the
public. It will be primarily — if not only — to their
shareholders,” said Kevin Greenway of the Public and
Commercial Services Union.

This lack of public accountability could still be of harm to the
public, especially given the likelihood of low- and medium-risk
prisoners reoffending. 

Re-offenders within just a year among adults sentenced to less
than 12 months’ “immediate custody” and set free in the
year ending December 2010 numbered 57 percent, according to an Offender
Rehabilitation Bill currently awaiting its third reading in the
House of Lords.

“They were trying to find me employment, I was trying to get
on a training scheme, but they were waiting for funding from the
government — Prince Charles Trust and so forth,” Andrei
Cunningham, one reoffender explained to RT. 

“ Now, that took time to
liaise between the trust, and then they had to analyze, do
whatever they had to do, and all that took three months — by then
I wasn’t living anywhere at the time, I was all over the place,
and I just got caught back up in it, trying to
survive.”

On May 14, the director of campaigns at Howard League for Penal
Reform said that Serco-run private prison Thamesside was already
“out of control.” 

“Conditions at Thameside are truly alarming. Violence was so
common that the Serco management put the prison in a state of
lockdown,” he said in a statement. 

“This extreme measure has done little to bring down the number
of attacks. Staff are inexperienced and often resort to physical
force,” he added.  

A ‘Prisons are Not for Profit’ campaign
recently launched by POA, the Professional Trades Union for
Prison, Correctional and Secure Psychiatric Workers, stated that
“The privatization of prisons as a concept was exported by the
United States of America and successive British Governments have
increased the use of the private sector, which now make up over
10 percent of the England and Wales prison estate.”

Horror stories from private US prisons fail to provide much hope
for advocates of the new system.  

A Pennsylvania judge was found guilty of incarcerating kids in a
prison facility owned by a developer who was fronting him money.
He was sentenced to 28 years himself at the beginning of May amid
criticism that “the more time an inmate spends in a facility,
the more of a profit is reaped.”

Two US civil liberties groups entered legal action against a
Mississippi prison for the mentally ill, the East Mississippi
Correctional Facility, at the end of May. 

A complaint lodged declared that the privately-run prison was a
“dangerous facility operating in a perpetual state of crisis,
where prisoners live in barbaric conditions,” and residents
were denied requests for medical help. 

“This bid to cut costs could come at a very high price,”
concluded RT’s Sara Firth from London.

This article originally appeared on: RT

The director of Israelâ„¢s Mossad intelligence agency has met secretly with the Turkish intelligence agencyâ„¢s undersecretary and discussed the latest regional developments.

Turkish Hurriyet newspaper reported on Wednesday that the secret meeting between Tamir Pardo and Hakan Fidan took place in Ankara on June 10.

During the meeting, the pair discussed the situation in Syria, Iranâ„¢s nuclear energy program as well as anti-government demonstrations and protests across Turkey.

The two men also discussed intelligence sharing between Ankara and Tel Aviv.

In addition, Pardo asked for an appointment to meet with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but he did not receive a reply.

Israel has not confirmed the Turkish news report.

The anti-government unrest began after police broke up a sit-in staged in Taksim Square on May 31 to protest against the demolition of Gezi Park.

The protesters say the park, which is a traditional gathering point for rallies and demonstrations as well as a popular tourist destination, is the city’s last green public space.

The death toll from clashes between anti-government protesters and police in Turkey has reportedly reached five.

Amnesty International has censured the Turkish police for the tactics they have used to control the protests.

On Thursday, Erdogan issued a “last warning” for thousands of protesters to evacuate Gezi Park in the city of Istanbul.

MP/KA

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Russian NGOs that receive funding from abroad are already using several methods that allow them to bypass the obligatory registration as ‘foreign agents’.

One possible option is to register an ordinary commercial company
that would receive funds from abroad and employ NGO staff as
workers to pay their salaries, Kommersant daily wrote quoting the
head of a Russian NGO who spoke on the condition of total
anonymity.

The source noted that about 15 Russian groups had already
switched to this method.

Another possible way, suggested by the daily itself, is to set up
an endowment that would properly register as a foreign agent and
receive foreign funding which would then be transferred to one or
several Russian groups, allowing them to skip the registration as
they are formally sponsored by a Russian company.

The third way has been outlined in a recent report by the Civil
Initiatives Committee, an influential expert group chaired by
former finance minister Aleksey Kudrin, which said that under
growing pressure Russian NGOs could re-register in neighboring
states.

Some Russian officials already called for changes in the recently
approved law, saying that the flaws of the original bill are
being exposed as it is applied. Mikhail Fedotov, chairman of the
Presidential Council on Human Rights, said that the practice was
only showing one thing — that the law had been poorly written and
that it was in need of corrections.

Fedotov added that the council had already prepared several
suggestions on corrections, but he did not go into detail.

Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich has said that the law
needs changes and called for activists to draft their amendments.
But Dvorkovich added that the law is in force and must be
observed by all members of the community until it is altered in
the desired way.

Russia introduced the so-called Foreign Agents Law in
November last year. It requires all NGOs engaged in political
activities and receiving funding from abroad to register as
“foreign agents”. Failure to do so is punishable by a fine and
may bring about an extensive inspection by prosecutors and the
Justice Ministry.

These two departments launched a major nationwide program in March this
year in order to check how the fresh law is being applied.
The inspections caused protests from NGOs, rights activists and
the international community, which claimed they were a form of
government pressure on independent critics.

Russian officials, including the president, have repeatedly
stated that the law is not banning any NGOs and simply requires
disclosure of the sources of their income. Such transparency
would give Russian citizens and voters some clues about possible
motives of the groups’ political actions, the officials added.

Currently no organization is registered as a foreign agent in
Russia.

This article originally appeared on: RT

Much of the U.S. media coverage of last week’s NSA revelations has concentrated on its impact on the constitutional rights of U.S.-based Internet users. But what about the billions of Internet users around the world whose private information is stored on U.S. servers, or whose data travels across U.S. networks or is otherwise accessible through them?

A screenshot of “Boundless Informant,” a government software program revealed to The Guardian by Edward Snowden that tracks and maps by country the “voluminous amount of information” sapped from their massive surveillance apparatus. (Image via The Guardian) While the details are still emerging, what is clear is that many of the newly exposed surveillance activities have been shaped by U.S. foreign intelligence surveillance laws. The secret court that rubberstamped the collection of phone records from Verizon came from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), a secret court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); the PRISM requests, the U.S. government has said, were FISA orders intended to target non-American persons outside of the United States.

As U.S. officials have repeated, FISA is designed to protect the rights of “U.S. persons” (citizens, permanent residents, and others on U.S. soil) in the face of operations targeting foreigners. But regardless of their effectiveness (or lack thereof) in achieving this objective, these slim protections offer nothing to the vast majority of Internet users around the world. One privacy expert, Caspar Bowden, has gone so far as to say that U.S. foreign intelligence powers “offer zero protection to foreigners’ data in U.S. Clouds.”

In this article, we will look into how the NSA leaks may affect the rest of the world, and how they highlight one part of an international system of surveillance that dissolves what national privacy protections any of us have, where ever we live.

Global Communications Networks & Trans-border Surveillance

Before looking at the specifics of the NSA’s surveillance program, it is worth noting that these programs are part of a broader trend: as greater use of cloud computing and other web-based services entails more global data routing and storage, many states gain the practical ability to capture, access and in many cases spy on data passing through their territory or accessible remotely through terminals based in their territory. While not an entirely new problem, states have met this increase in practical capacity to conduct sweeping extra-territorial surveillance has not been matched with an increase in extra-territorial protections. This is especially true with foreign intelligence activities, where agencies have historically been granted close to carte blanche legal capacity to surveill foreigners, while incentives to adopt a “capture everything” approach to information gathering have been high. Now, even as it becomes feasible for foreign intelligence agencies to capture all data on all individuals everywhere, states are moving to impose this troubling carte blanche foreign intelligence paradigm to digital networks. The United States government’s FISA powers represent just such a move.

There are many indications of states’ increasing capacity to conduct sweeping and invasive extra-territorial surveillance from domestic soil. In 2009, security researchers uncovered a broad network of infiltrated computer systems, which included a significant proportion of high value targets including foreign ministries, news media, NGOs and political dissidents around the world. Infiltration was likely used to extract sensitive documents and even to surreptitiously hijack audio and video-recording capabilities on many affected computers and transmit it to IP addresses found to be based in China. While there is no direct evidence that this was a state-sponsored attack, it demonstrates the potential for vast and targeted malware-based extra-territorial surveillance. When the lid was finally blown off Gadhafi’s surveillance regime, dissidents in the United Kingdom, foreign activists, casual callers and foreign political adversaries discovered they were caught in its expansive web. Bahreini activists abroad have found malware on their machines, presumably from state-connected actors. An Angolan journalist working from Oslo discovered his Skype conversations being recorded, almost certainly to be relayed back to his government watchers at home. The German government has leveraged the ability to remotely compromise computer systems in order to spy on them by its acquisition of commercial malware and is reportedly in the process of developing its own custom state-owned malware. While there has been no confirmation that Germany is deploying these investigative techniques against persons outside German territories, infection occurs by email and information transmission is over the Internet, so extra-territorial use is certainly feasible.

Far from reigning in this growing technical capacity, domestic laws are increasingly removing all remaining barriers to extra-territorial spying. Surveying a long and growing list of legal frameworks designed to take advantage of this new-found global reach, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Frank La Rue, recently concluded in a report that:

These developments suggest an alarming trend towards the extension of surveillance powers beyond territorial borders, increasing the risk of cooperative agreements between State law enforcement and security agencies to enable the evasion of domestic legal restrictions.

Exacerbating this problem is an aura of secrecy that pervades trans-border electronic surveillance. The secrecy provisions inherent in U.S. foreign intelligence legislation have, for example, prevented companies like Google and Microsoft from revealing any raw statistics regarding these activities in the Transparency reports these companies publish in their efforts to ensure the public is aware of the true scope and nature of government surveillance activities on their services, although many have now called on the U.S. government to let them do so.

The NSA Leaks: Rare Glimpses into a Vast & Unfettered International Monitoring Program

In the past week or so, new details on the scope of NSA and FBI surveillance were revealed in a series of leaks released primarily by The Guardian (one co-leaked by the Washington Post). In response to these leaks, the Director of National Intelligence has released some additional information on the parameters of the program. Collectively, these releases paint a picture of two specific aspects of surveillance programs that seem designed to leverage the trans-global nature of modern communications in order to empower U.S. foreign intelligence.

The first component targets a huge amount of metadata from telephone calls originating and/or terminating within the United States. The leaked documents reveal that at least one company — Verizon — was ordered to hand over all metadata associated with all telephone communications originating or terminating within the United States (as well as calls wholly within the United States). It has been reported that this program has been operating for about 7 years, meaning the U.S. Government could potentially have a historical database of all calls since 2008.

Metadata is defined quite broadly, to include all ‘routing’ information, as well as unique mobile phone identifiers such as International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) numbers. The enhanced capacity to generate, store and analyze metadata has transformed what may once have been innocuous data points — who spoke to who, when, for how long, from where — into a highly valuable intelligence capable of revealing people’s most intimate and private affairs. Metadata, for example, played an instrumental role in the forced former CIA Director David Petraeus to resign. Even in its most basic form — who did you call — metadata can be extremely revealing. This invasive capacity is greatly exacerbated by the pervasiveness and scope of the NSA’s collection program.

A second revealed component of these surveillance programs is called PRISM. The full parameters and capacities of PRISM remain unclear. Initially suspected to provide back-door access to the networks of a number of Internet companies, giving the NSA direct access to search service providers networks unilaterally, more recent reports paint a picture of a more narrowly curtailed, but still potentially troubling interface. At its most innocuous, PRISM appears to be a database capable of interacting directly with the networks of participating Internet companies through a series of portals whose specific features and capacities are negotiated and developed with each participating company. Acquisition orders are issued under FISA and sent to the respective companies, who then review them and make use of the portal to respond to the orders electronically. This provides responses in a quicker and more efficient manner than could be otherwise achieved. Portals of this nature have reportedly been set up in other jurisdictions, albeit for law enforcement purposes. It is possible, but not confirmed, that some of the portals in question also facilitate qualitatively different levels of data acquisition. For example, citing a lawyer representing one of the companies in question, the New York Times reports that Internet companies do have the technical capacity to digitally transmit data in real-time to the NSA where a valid FISA order requires this. It is not clear whether this real-time transmission capacity is mediated through the PRISM interface directly. While a U.S. law requires carriers and managed VoIP providers (potentially including Skype) to build real-time interception capabilities into their services, these obligations have not yet been applied to Internet services such as Gmail and Facebook, so real-time access capacity would signal a meaningful qualitative shift in access capability.

Even without the addition of real-time acquisition capacities, however, the PRISM leaks still reveal a program that leverages the domestic presence of remote computing services in order to collect significant amounts of personal data that many individuals around the world would consider highly sensitive. Various reports describe PRISM as providing access to emails, online chats (video and voice), photos, file transfers, search queries, online social networking details and more. The leaks point to this social media, email and cloud data as growing not only in scope, but also in frequency of use. Reports suggest that PRISM information collection interfaces are designed to limit exposure of U.S.-based targets on a balance of probabilities: “designed to produce at least 51 percent confidence in a target’s foreigness.”

An additional leak provided further insight into the staggering size of the NSA’s overall communications surveillance activities. While there have always been hints of the breadth of these activities — earlier this year it was reported the NSA was building a data centre the size of a small village just to store (and analyze) all the data it was collecting — this leak provided specific details on the immense amount of data sets collected by the NSA on a monthly basis. For example, in March 2013 alone, it seems the NSA collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide, bringing new meaning to the term ‘big data’. As explained below, given the questionable legality of NSA domestic surveillance, a lot of the attention from this final revelation will be focused on the close to 3 billion data points marked as ‘United States’. However, the rest of the world should be more concerned with the remaining 94 billion data points particularly in light of the highly dim prospects of a domestic legal remedy to this collection given that such collection occurs under powers intended to facilitate broad surveillance of foreigners outside the U.S.

One more element of the PRISM system is worth examining in light of its implications for non-U.S. persons. According to the Guardian, the United Kingdom’s NSA counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters, apparently has had access to the PRISM database, generating 197 intelligence reports in 2012 — far less than the 2,000 reports per month issued by the NSA, but still not an insubstantial amount. This raises concerns as the PRISM database is populated through extra-ordinary NSA foreign intelligence powers that far exceed what most democratic governments would be allowed to accomplish under their own laws. It is not clear, for example, that GCHQ would have the legal ability to set up its own PRISM system. If the United States is allowing its security services to collect vast amounts of data on the citizens of its allies, then freely hands that data over to their security services, what protections they might have under domestic surveillance law is completely undermined. And we still don’t know what information the U.S. government might receive in return.

_____________________

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

This article originally appeared on: Common Dreams

People protest against the rise in public bus and subway fares in the Brazilian city of Sao Paulo on June 11, 2013.

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Aleksandr Lebedev, an outspoken Kremlin critic and media mogul with assets in Russia and Britain, plans to unload his remaining 4.5 percent stake in Russia’s national airline, Aeroflot, a Russian news source quoted the billionaire as saying.

After a brush with the law and an increase in his UK media
holdings, it may appear Lebedev is jettisoning his Russian
assets, but the former KGB-man-turned-oligarch may be putting his
eggs in another basket, according to Isvestia news, who
Thursday reported Lebedev plans to acquire a 2.1 percent stake in
Pushkino Bank, for a nominal fee.

“By the end of June, I can become a shareholder of the
bank,” Lebedev is quoted by Izvestia.

Lebedev is picking up a minority share in order to gain influence
in the bank’s affairs, which would grant him the ability to
challenge shareholder decisions.

“As a minority shareholder I will be able to file complaints
to the regulatory authorities, and be able to request inspections
for any illegal asset withdrawals,” said Lebedev.

A large portion of the bank is owned by Aleksandr
Dobrovinsky, who said he is willing to sell the entire credit
institution to Lebedev for nearly $99 million (3.2 billion
roubles).

According to the National Rating Agency (NRA), on May 1, 2013,
Pushkino ranks 158th out of Russia’s top 200 banks.

“I would gladly sell it to him tomorrow for assets,” said
Dobrovinsky, who is also the lawyer representing developer Sergey
Polonsky with whom Lebedev got involved in a fist fight on
live television in 2011.

Lebedev is currently on trial for the on-air brawl, and faces up
to five years in prison if he is convicted on the charges of
hooliganism and battery. He views the charges as ‘motivated by
political hatred’ in an attempt to smear his name and sink his
billions in assets. 

Polonsky, was arrested in Cambodia while on vacation for
holding six sailors hostage and physical violence last January.

Lebedev fell from Forbes billionaire list this year, after
he graced the chart with a $1.1 billion fortune in 2012.

Unfinished business

It doesn’t seem like Lebedev is quite finished with his
Russian business.

On 5 November 2012, he announced he would close all the regional
offices of the National Reserve Bank and sell off the real estate
as well as 75 percent of the bank’s loan portfolio, worth 16.8bn
roubles ($542m).

The main source of his wealth, Lebedev has owned the bank since
1995, which was one of few to survive the 1998 financial crisis.

Shedding his Aeroflot stakes may appear to be the 53-year-old
oligarch’s final severance with Russia after getting rid of the
National Reserve Bank and other Russian assets.

Lebedev’s current share of Aeroflot is worth $78 million (2.5
billion roubles). He once owned 25.8 percent in Aeroflot, and
over the years has decreased his stake, selling shares back to
the state. In February 2012 he was nominated to the board of
Aeroflot by his bank. The bank also nominated anti-corruption
blogger Alexey Nalvalny, who was elected to the board
in June 2012.

In February 2013, Lebedev ironically tweeted his grandson, then 15-months old,
should be appointed to Aeroflot’s advisory board, drawing
comparisons between the decision making ability of his grandson
and the board.

In 2009 he began to purchase UK media outlets, and on January 21,
his company Evening Press Corporation acquired a 75.1
percent share of the Evening Standard newspaper for £1.00. A year
later, Lebedev bought The Independent and Independent
on Sunday for the same nominal price.

“I just want to work as a journalist,” he told The
Guardian earlier this month after appearing in Moscow court
on hooliganism charges.

Lebedev, the journalist

A Moscow native and son of Russian intelligentsia, Lebedev’s
business empire is vast and includes parts of Gazprom, spas in
Crimea, Europe’s largest potato farm, hotels in Italy, and
previously mentioned British news outlets.

His son, Evgeny, lives in London and runs the family’s British
newspaper titles. Lebedev generously gives to charities dedicated
to restoring and commemorating Soviet monuments and heroes
abroad.

In tandem with former USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev, Lebedev owns 49 percent of
Russian opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta which often
runs ‘exposes’ on political and financial corruption. Newspaper
staff controls the remaining 51 percent of the shares.

Lebedev had an unsuccessful mayoral bid for Moscow in 2003, only
garnering 13 percent of the vote. He was a member of the State
Duma until 2007.

The Russian government may sell Aeroflot shares this year as part
of a plan to raise 427 billion roubles ($13.5 billion) through
state asset sales to help balance the budget and reduce its role
in the economy. The government is also selling off VTB and Rosneft shares.

This article originally appeared on: RT

Afghan police officers stand guard at the entrance to police headquarters in Kabul. (file photo)

This article originally appeared on: Press TV

Elizabeth Harrington
Politico
June 13, 2013

Rep. Jeff Duncan wants to know why IRS law enforcement agents are training with AR-15 rifles.

As chairman of the House Homeland Security oversight subcommittee, Duncan (R-S.C.) toured a federal law enforcement facility in late May and noticed agents training with the semi-automatic weapons at a firing range. They identified themselves as IRS, he said.

“When I left there, it’s been bugging me for weeks now, why IRS agents are training with a semi-automatic rifle AR-15, which has stand-off capability,” Duncan told POLITICO. “Are Americans that much of a target that you need that kind of capability?”

While Duncan acknowledges that the IRS has an enforcement division, he questions if that level of firepower is appropriate when they could coordinate operations with other agencies, like the FBI, especially in a time of austerity.

Full article here

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This article was posted: Thursday, June 13, 2013 at 5:16 am

Tags: police state

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This article originally appeared on: Infowars

<!–Max Keiser–>

Max Keiser, the host of RT’s ‘Keiser Report,’ is a former stockbroker, the inventor of the virtual specialist technology, virtual currencies, and prediction markets.

Shock jock Alex Jones exploded on Andrew Neil’s “Sunday Politics” show on the BBC and Brits were aghast. This man opined the host, while make circling gestures around his head indicating mental instability, “We have an idiot on the program today.”

24-hours later a video of the appearance surpassed 1million views
on YouTube and this is the point. There is a huge audience for
Alex Jones and alternative media in general.

Is this just a stunt or is there something more at play here?

In two words: Nigel Farage. Nigel is one of the most radical
populists in British politics in years and thanks to shock jocks
like Alex Jones, he’s somewhat under a radar while he accumulates
– what some now estimate – 15% of the British popular vote; and
trending higher. When compared to what Alex Jones is blaring at
the top of his lungs to, a huge British audience of millions who
tune into his show regularly, an upstart politician like Farage –
with a radical agenda – appear highly reasonable. It’s the old
‘good cop, bad cop’ routine played for votes (Ron and Rand Paul
have appeared on Alex Jones’ show in the US increasing their
political fortunes enormously using the same technique).

Two years ago Nigel Farage of UKIP was destined to be a fringe
MEP of a fringe party but then videos of Nigel making impassioned
speeches on Youtube attracted a worldwide audience of
dissatisfied and disaffected voters and supports around the
world. Then Nigel started appearing on major, albeit alternative
media outlets like Eric King’s influential “King World News”
(with a global base of very educated, very wealthy HNWI (High Net
Worth Individuals). Then the Drudge Report picked up the scent,
and other influential sites like Peter Schiff’s “Schiff
Report.” As a result Nigel Farage is more famous globally
than any other UK politician.

RT too started playing videos of Nigel as well as interviewing
him, and RT is the first broadcaster to cross 1 billion videos on
YouTube for a global TV network; with a global reach approaching
700 million viewers. It’s a reciprocal relationship. Their
audience is hungry for honesty and a new wave of journalist,
politicians and shock jocks are giving it to them.

Nobody in the Mainstream Media reports on these trends in Britain
or in the U.S. and in the case of Alex Jones there is no chance
Alex will lead a majority party in the UK but in Farage’s case
there is a real possibility that he’ll supplant the Liberal
Democrats as Britain’s third biggest party and could very well be
on his way to becoming part of the UK’s political duopoly. And
this was accomplished under the noses of the BBC and every major
outlet in the UK who is playing catch up to other global
broadcasters and alternative media who are pushing candidates of
Alex Jones into the ‘superstar’ category and possibly the front
benches.

Addendum: I sent an email to BBC producer Robbie Gibb who asked
me to email him regarding the phenomenon that is Alex Jones and
how the BBC might be able to tap into this huge, under served,
and politically aware audience – and in typical BBC fashion – the
response so far is that they’ll ‘think about it.’ Meanwhile, the
media and political landscape beneath Britain’s feat is shifting
and those who ignore the significance of Alex Jones’ ranting on
“Sunday Politics” will have to take early retirement. But in a
country of media laggards and layabouts I’m sure that’s the best
possible news they could hope for.

The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.

This article originally appeared on: RT

The spot price of oil jumped by a fifth in Russia between May and June, as Rosneft reportedly redirected part of domestic sales to Asia — Pacific markets after the TNK-BP acquisition.

Russia’ s oil market has seen reduced volumes which
has driven prices in the country’s spot market to 12,650 roubles
($408) per tonne, says research by the International
Information service Argus Media.