The Real Reason for the Afghan War?

Hey let's NOT forget the DRUGS $$$        

                   

The Real Reason for the Afghan War?

By Russ Baker on Sep 10, 2012

“Previously Unknown” mineral deposits in Afghanistan (Click to Enlarge)

When the United States decided to invade Afghanistan to grab Osama bin Laden—and failed, but stayed on like an unwanted guest—could it have known that the Afghans were sitting on some of the world’s greatest reserves of mineral wealth?
We’ve raised this topic before (see here)—where we noted the dubious 2010 claim, published by the New York Times, that “the vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was [recently] discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists.” Other evidence, and logic, point to the fact that everyone but the Western public knew for a long time, and before the 2001 invasion, that Afghanistan was a treasure trove.
So we were interested to see a new piece from the Times that emphasizes those riches without stressing the crucial question: Was the original impetus for the invasion really Osama—or Mammon?
The failure to pose this question is significant because the pretense of a “recent discovery” serves only to justify staying in Afghanistan now that the troops are already there—while ignoring the extent to which imperial-style resource grabs are the real drivers of foreign policy and wars, worldwide.
As long as we continue to dance around that issue, we will remain mired in disaster of both a financial and mortal nature. As long as we fail to tote up who are the principal winners and losers then we fail to understand what is going on.
Some of the least likely candidates for insight are waking up. To quote Alan Greenspan: “I’m saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Who will say the same about Afghanistan and its mineral wealth? Once we acknowledge what General Wesley Clark claims (and which the media keeps ignoring)—that he was told the U.S. had plans ready at the time of the 9/11 attacks to invade seven countries (including Iraq and Afghanistan)– then the larger picture begins to come into view.
At this point, we can’t help but revisit our WhoWhatWhy exclusive tying the 9/11 hijackers to that very reliable U.S. ally, the Saudi royal family— which itself needs constant external war and strife throughout the Middle East to keep its citizens from focusing on its own despotism and staggering corruption, and to maintain its position as an indispensable ally of the West in these wars. It was the actions of the Saudi-dominated 9/11 hijackers and their Saudi sponsor, Osama bin Laden, that created the justification for this endless series of resource wars. So, learning that the hijackers themselves may have been sponsored by, or controlled by elements of the Saudi royal family is a pretty big deal.
Nevertheless, the Times plays a key role in sending us in the wrong direction:

If there is a road to a happy ending in Afghanistan, much of the path may run underground: in the trillion-dollar reservoir of natural resources — oil, gold, iron ore, copper, lithium and other minerals — that has brought hopes of a more self-sufficient country, if only the wealth can be wrested from blood-soaked soil.

So, according to the world’s most influential opinion-making outlet, the fact of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth has nothing to do with why the United States and its allies want to stay—and why others want us to leave. No, we are told, it is just a fortuitous “discovery” that can benefit the Afghans themselves, make them “self-sufficient.” If only it can be extracted…..
Of course, this narrative continues, the suffering Afghans can only be helped to become self-sufficient if enough long-term military and technical might is applied to the country.
We’d love to see more reporting from The Times about what Western companies knew and when they knew it. Instead, we see JPMorgan Chase’s Afghan venture mentioned, in passing, between references to efforts by the Chinese to get their piece of the action:

Already this summer, the China National Petroleum Corporation, in partnership with a company controlled by relatives of President Karzai, began pumping oil from the Amu Darya field in the north. An investment consortium arranged by JPMorgan Chase is mining gold. Another Chinese company is trying to develop a huge copper mine. Four copper and gold contracts are being tendered, and contracts for rare earth metals could be offered soon.

The truth is, as long as the Chinese and Russians are cut in on the deal, their objections to military actions that enrich oligarchs everywhere are likely to be muted.
Imperial militaries exist in large part to grab and hold resources vital to the continuance of empires, while their paymasters back home reap benefits. That includes the rest of us, who must balance the security and creature comforts this approach provides against the death and destruction it inevitably entails. And we can’t begin to do the moral calculus until we acknowledge what’s being done in our name around the world, and why.

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GRAPHIC: http://www.a-w-i-p.com/media/blogs/articles/Directory2/AFG_mineral_map_44.jpg  & https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWwH16CH_HFvrygeBSswvghzEFEH6ZMwSEHtJVj_cBam1zcpAS50iRofHJf-M4yKBw_Dnv9vvXYDwNqAvO16KBm4TTzrwJaICj7IhMBPSC9dZ7Bp4kekJMBhmt0TpXkHLjXPOejFhNkJAK/s400/drum-of-gold-mine.bmp

Bradley Manning Lynching: Judge Runs A Shell Game, Public Excluded from Hearings

By Global Research News

Global Research, June 16, 2013

Reader Supported News

Region: USA

Theme: Law and Justice, Police State & Civil Rights

U.S. Army Cons Public With Three-Card Monte Sting in Form of Court-Martial 

 To Have a Constitutional Public Trial, Don’t You Have to Let the Public in?

 Public access to the Bradley Manning court-martial doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense, despite the demands of the U.S. Constitution or the Manual for Courts Martial United States (MCM) published by the U.S. Dept. of Defense, which is the prosecutor.

 

Court-martial judge Col. Denise Lind hasn’t exactly banned the public – or reporters, who are part of the public – from the courtroom or its extensions, but she has presided over a system that, so far, seems designed to protect the public’s right to know as little as possible.

It’s a scripted con game, a kind of judicial three-card monte in which the public is expected to keep believing it has a chance to know.  The following excerpts from the script, the unofficial court transcript, illuminate how the military plays the shell game of doing injustice while trying not to let injustice be seen to be done.

  The comments here are all by Judge Col. Lind from the June 10 morning session:

 “Just for the record, while the court is not interested in getting into the area of who is credentialed and who isn’t credentialed as it’s beyond the scope of this  trial, the court does note and so advised the parties in the RCM 802 that rules of court-martial are not structured to provide a contemporaneous transcript of proceedings.” 

 Nice distraction, putting attention on “who is credentialed” when the substantive issue us who gets access.  The Judge’s MCM has no index listing for “press” or “media.”  There is a listing for “public,” which by definition includes all reporters, as well as all military personnel.  That’s in Role 806(a), which also sets the primary expectation that “courts-martial shall be open to the public.”

 That “shall” in the rule means that it’s a judge’s primary obligation to open the court-martial to the public, not an option, although the rule provides limited exceptions under exigent circumstances.    The rule’s discussion section states: “However, such exigencies should not be manipulated to prevent attendance at a court-martial.”

 RCM 802 is a jargon reference to pre-trial hearings that have already been held.

 The provision of a “contemporaneous transcript” is another distraction that leads attention away from the need for a meaningfully public trial.

  That “the court is not interested” in all this bespeaks a disdain for the public that one would expect to be better concealed.

 And that the court has, in effect outsourced its responsibility to control the courtroom and access to it, as described in Rule 806(b)(1), suggests possible dereliction of duty.

 Turning to Reader Supported News’s motion, without identifying it beyond “the request for public access or in the alternative motion to intervene to vindicate right to public access,” Judge Col. Lind made findings:

“One. The proceedings have been open to the public since the start of the trial….” 

  This may be technically correct and short of a false statement, but it suggests a non-existent state of affairs sharply at odds with the widely-observed restraints put on public access by the judge, the government, or its contractors.  “The court martial of Manning,” observed the Huffington Post, “has been surrounded by secrecy and security.”

  n example of what amounts to military doublespeak is that the court says it’s not “structured” to provide a daily transcript, as if that wasn’t something other courts do and the Army could do if it wanted to.  Worse, even though the Freedom of the Press Foundation is paying for its own stenographers, the judge continues to tolerate interference with the stenographers’ ability to do their job.

 “Two. Neither the court nor anyone acting pursuant to order of the court has specifically excluded any person from observing the proceedings either in court or in a designated overflow area.” 

One might argue that this is another technically correct statement in the furtherance of falsehood, but it’s more deceitful that that.  Dozens if not hundreds of members of the public have been excluded, by apparent design, either implemented or tolerated by the court.

But they have not been “specifically” excluded and that “specifically” has a serious lawyerly purpose in the worst sense of the word.  Rule 806(b)(1) says, in part: “When excluding specific persons, the military judge must make findings on the record establishing the reason for the exclusion, the basis for the military judge’s belief that exclusion is necessary, and that the exclusion is as narrowly tailored as possible.”

Here, where the court is allowing large-scale, random exclusions there’s no need for findings on the record of the basis for the exclusion, or concern that the exclusion is narrowly tailored.  The exclusion is not narrowly tailored and thus gives the appearance of bad faith.

“Three. Reasonable policies and procedures for media registration and credentialing have been established and published by the Military District of Washington as set forth in appellate exhibit 561.”

That there are “reasonable policies and procedures” is not self-evident and continues to be widely challenged.

More importantly, Rule 806 does not provide for the judge to outsource her responsibility for the courtroom to a third party who is neither answerable nor accountable in reasonably timely manner within the time-pressure of a court-martial. 

“Four. 806C prohibits photography and broadcasting to include audio and video recording.”

This is absolutely true, but only if you stop after the first sentence of Rule 806(c).

The second sentence begins, “However, the military judge may, as a matter of discretion permit contemporaneous closed-circuit video or audio transmission….”

  By making this finding, Judge Col. Lind effectively admits that she has chosen to use her discretion to severely limit public access to the court-martial under conditions explicitly anticipated in the rule – “when courtroom facilities are inadequate to accommodate a reasonable number of spectators.”

In what way are the judge’s deliberate truncating of public access not clear violations of at least the First and Fourth Amendment rights of the public and the press?

 “Five. The two parties to this trial are the United States and PFC Manning. Unless authorized by the rules for court-martial, or in special circumstances recognized by the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, only parties to the trial have standing to file motions to be considered by this court. ABC Inc. versus Powell, Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, 1997.“

 The opinion cited is not on point, as it deals with an investigative hearing, not a court-martial, and the issue leading to closing the hearing to the public was the protection of women whose sexual histories were likely to be explored during their testimony.

  The question of parties to the trial is not at issue in the opinion cited.  The petitioners in the case were media companies (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, and the Washington Post).   They filed a Writ of Mandamus requesting the court to open the hearing in question to the press and public.

  The court, in both its preliminary order and final order, ordered the hearings open to the press and public.  The court noted in passing that “we have consistently held that the Sixth Amendment right [to a public trial] does apply to a court-martial.”

So what is Judge Col. Lind talking about?  Certainly not the fact that one of the parties in the case is also her employer.

“Ruling. The court declines to consider [the request for public access] as it is from three individuals who are not parties to the trial and who under the circumstances lack standing to file a motion with the court.” 

Done and done.  The ruling ignores the clearly, repeatedly stated intent of both Rule 806 and the opinion cited to give primacy to the openness of the proceedings.

  It might be tempting to think that petitioners who are not parties to a case might be perpetrating a fraud upon the court, but that would be a stretch.  Here, it’s much less of a stretch to consider that perhaps the court is perpetrating a fraud on the public.

“Quia volo” is a seldom-used term in legal circles for judicial decisions of this nature.  It means, “Because I want to.”

William Boardman  panthers007@comcast.net       

The Government’s Spying Is Not As Bad As The Whistleblower Said … It’s WORSE

By Washington's Blog

Global Research, June 16, 2013

Washington's Blog

Region: USA

Theme: Intelligence, Police State & Civil Rights

Whistleblower Claims Validated … and Then Some

The government is attacking whistleblower Edward Snowden by claiming that he was lying about the scope of the NSA’s spying on Americans.
However, CNET reports today:

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls.
Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed “simply based on an analyst deciding that.”
If the NSA wants “to listen to the phone,” an analyst’s decision is sufficient, without any other legal authorization required, Nadler said he learned. “I was rather startled,” said Nadler, an attorney and congressman who serves on the House Judiciary committee.
Not only does this disclosure shed more light on how the NSA’s formidable eavesdropping apparatus works domestically, it also suggests the Justice Department has secretly interpreted federal surveillance law to permit thousands of low-ranking analysts to eavesdrop on phone calls.
Because the same legal standards that apply to phone calls also apply to e-mail messages, text messages, and instant messages, Nadler’s disclosure indicates the NSA analysts could also access the contents of Internet communications without going before a court and seeking approval.
The disclosure appears to confirm some of the allegations made by Edward Snowden, a former NSA infrastructure analyst who leaked classified documents to the Guardian. Snowden said in a video interview that, while not all NSA analysts had this ability, he could from Hawaii “wiretap anyone from you or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president.”
***
Earlier reports have indicated that the NSA has the ability to record nearly all domestic and international phone calls — in case an analyst needed to access the recordings in the future. A Wired magazine article last year disclosed that the NSA has established “listening posts” that allow the agency to collect and sift through billions of phone calls through a massive new data center in Utah, “whether they originate within the country or overseas.” That includes not just metadata, but also the contents of the communications.
***
A requirement of the 2008 law is that the NSA “may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States.” A possible interpretation of that language, some legal experts said, is that the agency may vacuum up everything it can domestically — on the theory that indiscriminate data acquisition was not intended to “target” a specific American citizen.
***
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the head of the Senate Intelligence committee, separately acknowledged this week that the agency’s analysts have the ability to access the “content of a call.”
Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell indicated during a House Intelligence hearing in 2007 that the NSA’s surveillance process involves “billions” of bulk communications being intercepted, analyzed, and incorporated into a database.
***
Former FBI counterterrorism agent Tim Clemente told CNN last month that, in national security investigations, the bureau can access records of a previously made telephone call. “All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not,” he said. Clemente added in an appearance the next day that, thanks to the “intelligence community” — an apparent reference to the NSA — “there’s a way to look at digital communications in the past.”

Remember that Snowden also revealed that the NSA is tapping into the servers of 9 big internet companies. Two government officials have admitted that as many as 50 American companies are now feeding the NSA with real-time user data. And we’ve documented that the NSA gives information gained through spying to large corporations.
Bloomberg reports:

Thousands of technology, finance and manufacturing companies are working closely with U.S. national security agencies, providing sensitive information and in return receiving benefits that include access to classified intelligence, four people familiar with the process said. [We documented Tuesday that the government is illegally spying on all Americans ... and then giving the info to giant corporations.]
These programs, whose participants are known as trusted partners, extend far beyond what was revealed by Edward Snowden ….
Makers of hardware and software, banks, Internet security providers, satellite telecommunications companies and many other companies also participate in the government programs. In some cases, the information gathered may be used not just to defend the nation but to help infiltrate computers of its adversaries.
Along with the NSA, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and branches of the U.S. military have agreements with such companies to gather data that might seem innocuous but could be highly useful in the hands of U.S. intelligence or cyber warfare units, according to the people, who have either worked for the government or are in companies that have these accords.
***
Microsoft and other software or Internet security companies have been aware that this type of early alert allowed the U.S. to exploit vulnerabilities in software sold to foreign governments, according to two U.S. officials. Microsoft doesn’t ask and can’t be told how the government uses such tip-offs, said the officials, who asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential.
***
Some U.S. telecommunications companies willingly provide intelligence agencies with access to facilities and data offshore that would require a judge’s order if it were done in the U.S.…
***
Most of the arrangements are so sensitive that only a handful of people in a company know of them, and they are sometimes brokered directly between chief executive officers and the heads of the U.S.’s major spy agencies, the people familiar with those programs said.
Michael Hayden, who formerly directed the National Security Agency and the CIA, described the attention paid to important company partners: “If I were the director and had a relationship with a company who was doing things that were not just directed by law but were also valuable to the defense of the Republic, I would go out of my way to thank them and give them a sense as to why this is necessary and useful.”
***
Intel’s McAfee unit, which makes Internet security software, regularly cooperates with the NSA, FBI and the CIA, for example ….
***
In exchange, leaders of companies are showered with attention and information by the agencies to help maintain the relationship, the person said.
***
Following an attack on his company by Chinese hackers in 2010, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, was provided with highly sensitive government intelligence linking the attack to a specific unit of the People’s Liberation Army, China’s military, according to one of the people, who is familiar with the government’s investigation. Brin was given a temporary classified clearance to sit in on the briefing, the person said.
According to information provided by Snowden, Google, owner of the world’s most popular search engine, had at that point been a Prism participant for more than a year.
***
The information provided by Snowden also exposed a secret NSA program known as Blarney. As the program was described in the Washington Post (WPO), the agency gathers metadata on computers and devices that are used to send e-mails or browse the Internet through principal data routes, known as a backbone.
That metadata includes which version of the operating system, browser and Java software are being used on millions of devices around the world, information that U.S. spy agencies could use to infiltrate those computers or phones and spy on their users.
“It’s highly offensive information,” said Glenn Chisholm, the former chief information officer for Telstra Corp (TLS)., one of Australia’s largest telecommunications companies, contrasting it to defensive information used to protect computers rather than infiltrate them.
According to Snowden’s information, Blarney’s purpose is “to gain access and exploit foreign intelligence,” the Post said.
***
Lawmakers who oversee U.S. intelligence agencies may not understand the significance of some of the metadata being collected, said Jacob Olcott, a former cybersecurity assistant for Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.
“That’s what makes this issue of oversight so challenging,” said Olcott, now a principal at Good Harbor Security Risk Management in Washington. “You have a situation where the technology and technical policy is far outpacing the background and expertise of most elected members of Congress or their staffs.”
While companies are offered powerful inducements to cooperate with U.S. intelligence, many executives are motivated by patriotism or a sense they are defending national security, the people familiar with the trusted partner programs said.

Indeed, former top NSA executives Thomas Drake and William Binney, Congresswoman Loretta Sanchez – a member of the Committee on Homeland Security and the Armed Services Committee’s Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities – and others say that Snowden’s revelations are only “the tip of the iceberg”.

AP reports:

Interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.
Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet’s backbone. That program … copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.
***
Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world’s phone and Internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn’t need permission. That’s its job.
But Internet data doesn’t care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the United States. That’s the FBI’s job and it requires a warrant.
Despite that prohibition, shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to plug into the fiber optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans’ private conversations.
Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyze all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.
“You have to assume EVERYTHING is being collected,” said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.
***
The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at its San Francisco switching center, a spot where fiber optic cables enter the U.S.
***
Americans’ personal emails can live in government computers, but analysts can’t access, read or listen to them unless the emails become relevant to a national security investigation.
The government doesn’t automatically delete the data, officials said, because an email or phone conversation that seems innocuous today might be significant a year from now.
***
Two decades from now, the government could have a trove of American emails and phone records it can tap to investigative whatever Congress declares a threat to national security.
***
In slide made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from both Prism and from the fiber-optic cables.
Prism, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream. If eavesdroppers spot a suspicious email among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use information from Internet companies to pinpoint the user.
With Prism, the government gets a user’s entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.
Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.
That’s one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt.
In that way, Prism helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. But it’s the broader operation on the Internet fiber optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree.
“I’m much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the Internet backbone,” said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. “I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to.”
***
Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn’t really matter how Prism works, technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said.
He said it doesn’t matter what the government and the companies say, either …. “No one is telling the truth.”

I Sold My Soul For Mind Control

• Posted on June 11, 2013
• by Clyde Lewis
• in Articles

I SOLD MY SOUL FOR MIND CONTROL

The Declaration of Independence, in all of its arcane glory, tells us that the truth written in it is self–evident and that all men are created equal.
However, as civilization makes its plodding course through the first century of the new millennium, we see that time has ceased to progress and that the course we take now is more self–evident: the majority of Americans unfortunately remain on their knees and some even ‘roll over and play dead’ because they have been programmed to go with the flow and to be mindful of the power wielded over them from the elite.
We are realizing now that when someone makes a move to somehow honor the constitution instead of the leviathan government, the well mentally controlled herd cries out that there is a traitor among us. However this so called traitor has to flee in order to protect his life.
This is a unique time for all of us because there is a majority of America that does not think beyond their politics or even their religious bias.
Many Americans have been solidly programmed to not function independently but to find themselves indentured to popes, presidents, kings, holy clerics and dictators. Many, if not all, of these so-called leaders have in recent history demonstrated that while they claim divinity and mandate, they continue their betrayal and they rob the innocent of their virtue.
They are no longer satisfied with a citizen who obeys the law. They are now looking for full spectrum dominance of all things on the planet. In their quest for this they are now collecting blood, taking down the digits, putting them in biometric chips and data mining information about you.
If you think about information on an esoteric level you can actually determine that the data we create, all the thoughts we have and the conversations we have are what make us who we are personally. Our thoughts and our communication, all the information about us is technically part of what we call the soul.
So not only do we see the attempts at taking your DNA –we are also seeing the illegal and intrusive way a government steal your soul. The data of course can be used for all sorts of things from incrimination to mind control.
A friend of mine tipped me off to a book she was reading that reminds me of the situation we are in now with the PRISM scandal. The book had been written long before this had happened and I thought it was an appropriate analogy for where we find ourselves now in this country. The book is called “The Broken Window” By Jeffery Deaver. The book was written in 2008 and is a crime thriller about a killer that has access to the world’s biggest data mining company called Strategic Systems Datacorp. He is using detailed information to commit crimes and blame them on innocent people.
Not only does the book create a motive for why our government would want to use data mining illegally but it also makes a point that our data is actually what makes us immortal. The every fact that we have information about us from the time we are born till the time we die is quite literally the contribution we have made in our lifetime and that it is quite frankly part of our soul.
Furthermore, the killer that’s using the data to frame people for crimes does not think of the people as human beings but as “sixteens” which are merely sixteen-digit identification numbers.
The killer then makes a chilling statement about what he does and why he uses data information against the sixteens:
“What most sixteens, including my pursuers, don’t understand and what puts them at a pathetic disadvantage is this: I believe in the immutable truth that there is absolutely nothing morally wrong with taking a life.
Because I know that there is eternal existence completely independent of these bags of skin and organ we cart around temporarily. I have proof: Just look at the trove of data about your life, build up from the moment you’re born. It’s all permanent, stored in a thousand places, copied, backed up, invisible and indestructible. After the body goes, as all bodies must, the data survives forever.
And if that’s not the definition of an immortal soul, I don’t know what is.”—The Broken Window, 2008
This whole idea makes the PRISM scandal even more chilling if not an important and vital issue. This is more than some scandal that is rocking the Obama presidency; it is a very primitive way of your government attempting to get into the minds of Americans and in essence reading and interpreting the collective consciousness, the very soul of every citizen which puts us all at a pathetic disadvantage.
Think of a future where all biometric data includes your DNA, medical records, and what your words and thoughts and core beliefs are. What was once personal is placed in a chip or a tattoo and once a forbidden thought or belief enters into your head the data can be erased and you then become a mentally controlled serf educated for your purpose and leaving behind free will and the ability to question and rebel.
The idea of stealing or selling your information is the modern equivalent of selling or having someone steal or hijack your soul for their advantage. Stealing the soul or the data that makes you who you are is one more way the authorities want to play god.
Full spectrum control is mind control, physical control and slavery to the oligarchy. It is not constitutionally correct for any reason. There is no excuse for the stealing of one’s soul, or even the data that makes them who they are.
With advances in determining mental propensities and collecting data you are now literally open and vulnerable to being erased from history. Your loved ones may remember you, but you could wind up being a killer, a terrorist, or something worse all by data transference or even disappear at the the push of a delete button.
The question is now which is worse?
Those in power permit belief and they create crisis and provide solutions to the problems they create. They can also shut down certain beliefs and replace them with new histories and program us for new ideologies that can benefit the globalist empire they wish to control. It is unfortunate that they can make you laugh, make you cry, and even ask you to lay down and die for them. They have deep pockets, and they have their own public relations firms to tell you that what they want will not harm you.
They also have political “true believers” that will sell you out if it means their pockets are lines with their fake money. They will malign and ridicule those who see the danger in their illegal activities and call them traitors if it satisfies their need to rob American citizens of their soul.
We now are aware that these psychopathic individuals have somehow found their positions in the network control centers of our culture. Many of them have lost contact with the past and refuse to see what might be a bright future. So they have decided that it is the moment to take all they can and hoard it because there will be a time where resources will eventually dry up, including human resources.
Yet ignorance still has its grasp on the consensus reality because there are those who refuse to use our new technology for solitary study and will not commit to getting a well rounded story because it interferes with passive forms of entertainment and socialization.
Our day-to-day schedules prevent us from taking time out to think about whose side we are truly on.
Spiritual self–reflection without the aid of religious and political badgering is a rarity now. People are beginning to experience anxiety, depression, self–absorption, emptiness and a loss of self–esteem.
Why is it that this is becoming a psychological plague?
Because we have unwittingly sold our souls for mental control, we are not looking at how deep this data mining can steal one’s soul and destroy cognitive liberty.
The idea of data mining as soul stealing is not too far of a leap when you realize that your data and your soul are interchangeable and that you are your information, you are your DNA and if they have it and can produce it they can not only manipulate it but erase it and with the act of erasing you, you are completely silenced, you have no voice, and no existence.
I remember another book that I read called “A Wind in The Door” and how in the story your name and your information were part of who you were. Being named and existing was an act of love it is what made up your soul.
However, there were these dark entities known as the Echthroi and they would come down as empty souls and erased names and individual histories making them meaningless and eventually all things they unnamed were ignored and unloved.
The Echthroi, the enemy or the un-namers, tried to destroy individuals by turning someone into no one, something into nothing, gradually making all things meaningless and banal.
The Echthroi would take all things that were important and destroyed them. Eventually these important things and important people would be ignored and their contributions to the world null and void.
Names have power. Your data and personal thoughts and conversations have power. Giving consideration and appropriate respect has power. It is the power of good that fills the emptiness. The emptiness and the chaos are so easily obtained that most people today choose it because of its convenience.
The Echthroi represents inertia against all things that can be creative and helpful in our lives. They fight against that which moves us toward new life, health, new love, wisdom, risks, openness and truth.
As I have said in the past, the truth may set you free, but it may piss you off trying to get to it. Now the word “truth” seems to be an abused word, and the word “free” also has to be looked at with a jaundiced eye.
These words have been reduced to meaningless, watered–down euphemisms for tyranny. They have been bastardized because of the human tendency to make absolutes out of what limited truth we can grasp at any particular time. The “truth” most people grasp is the half–truths and disinformation that have been infused into the consensus reality through the network of social controls.
We see now that not only do we have to give up freedom for national security we must sell our souls, have our DNA collected, allow our data to be mined, our ideas and thoughts exploited and have all of that data exploited and used to eventually control us.
There are many people in power today who abuse your trust and good faith in order to move along their agendas. They wrap themselves in protective myths and they are able to wrap you up in them as well.
It is hard to explain to people that some of the most evil entities hide behind the mask of respectability.
Thomas Merton, a well-known poet and monk, said that perhaps we should look at those in power and ask if they are truly sane. He poked fun at the “pop culture’s” creation of idols of respectability.
“Now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the well–adapted ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have prepared.” — Thomas Merton
Tell me now the sanity of defending these acts of soul stealing. Tell me about who the traitors are and who the patriots are. Have we truly been programmed to follow the mob and have we truly surrendered our souls to the centralized intelligence hub?
George Orwell once made the statement that, “Circus dogs jump and do somersaults when the trainer cracks his whip. But the really well-trained dog is the one that jumps and does somersaults when there is no whip.”
There seem to be many dogs already trained to defend government over constitutional law, and there are those who scream traitor when they should evaluate their charge to defend human freedom and our rights to life, liberty and the preservation of the human spirit.
It looks as if the so-called ‘mark of the beast‘ is here and the people behind it want your blood and your soul, otherwise they will erase you from existence. Not physically but electronically, and with the importance we place in technological data bases your soul can be reduced to just a couple of digits and those digits can easily be erased along with anything you ever achieved, expressed, or even contributed to your family, friends or even your country.                  

THE GROWING TRANSHUMANIST SCRAPBOOK: GENETIC DISEASE MODELING

June 16, 2013 By Joseph P. Farrell

This was was shared with me by Ms. P.H. and I have to share it with you, and it’s another one to file in the growing transhumanist scrapbook. It seems that Cellular Dynamics International has now expanded is product line:
Cellular Dynamics International Expands MyCell Products Line with Disease Models, Genetic Engineering Patents
The Wall Street Journal is, of course, focusing on the obvious latent benefits of this technology:

“CDI’s MyCell Products now offer access to a number of disease models, including cardiomyopathies and arrhythmias, vision disorders, neurological disorders, and muscular dystrophies. In addition, the company is actively working on expanding its disease model offering, currently working on additional disease models for neurodegenerative disorders and drug-induced liver injury (DILI).
“Within the MyCell Products line, CDI maintains the iPSC line of each of the disease models, enabling customers to request manufacture of differentiated cells, such as cardiomyocytes, neurons, hepatocytes, and endothelial cells, for their discovery research.
“In addition, CDI has licensed Life Technologies’ GeneArt(R) Precision TALs (TALENs) and Sigma’s CompoZr(R) ZFN technologies, which act like genomic scissors to cut DNA in a precise location. These nuclease technologies facilitate efficient genomic editing by creating double-stranded breaks in DNA at user-specified locations, stimulating the cell’s natural repair process and enabling targeted gene insertions, deletions, or modifications. CDI will use the TALENs and ZFN technologies to perform genetic engineering specified by the customer, for example to introduce or correct a specific mutation, thus creating human disease models and isogenic controls.
This expansion of the MyCell Products line is the next step in our growing disease-in-a-dish portfolio and allows our customers more ready access to diseases of interest from our growing catalog of iPSCs,” said Chris Parker, CDI chief commercial officer.(emphasis added)

One can envision from this an emerging genetic-therapy for certain diseases tailored to the specific individual suffering various diseases. And that, of course, is a good thing.
But here, as always, it is possible to indulge in some high octane speculation, one that might, perhaps, warm the heart of some mad Dr. Moreau on an island, or, worse, ensconced in some military biological weapons laboratory, working on the ultimate in biological pathogens, or, as the article so euphemistically puts it, “disease in a dish.”
What do I mean? Well, pause and consider for a moment how we’ve thus far thought of the implications of genetic engineering for biological weapons. The literature and the internet are rife with books and articles about using genetic technologies and genome mapping to pinpoint genes unique to certain population groups within humanity, and then tailoring a biological weapon to target only that particular population and no other. It would have an obvious appeal to eugenicists or, for that matter, bigoted nutcases like a Hitler, anxious to preserve the “purity” of a particular “race” from “contamination” from another “race.”  Such people always seem to forget, of course, that genetic diversity actually contributes to the overall health of a species, but no matter. Science, for them, is not about a check on their dogmas, but rather, about a technique to create a deceptive fulfillment of those dogmas.
But with the emerging capabilities, it might become possible to imagine the ultimate horror in the assassin’s arsenal: a biological weapon designed not to target a specific group, but rather, a specific individual person. Initially, such weapons – sparingly used – would not draw attention to authorities. After all, why track a mysterious illness affecting, seemingly, only a handful of the population, a minute handful so small as not to be statistically significant, a disease not appearing in any physician’s handbook of diseases nor any oncologist’s lexicon or archive of tissues.
Here, as always, I suspect that the actual capabilities being publicly talked about probably lag behind what has already been done by some Dr. Moreau, on some well-funded black projects “island” in the underground archipelago of black projects skunk works. Perhaps it is time to add to our own growing transhumanist lexicon the idea of “individual-based genetically engineered diseases.”

Read more: THE GROWING TRANSHUMANIST SCRAPBOOK: GENETIC DISEASE MODELING

revenue STREAMS , revenue STREAMS ! revenue Streams ~   we r ALL criminals in the EYES of OUR Gov.            

No Surprise Here: Man Arrested for DUI Blows .000

Posted on June 7, 2013 by Philip Hodges filed under Corruption, Email Featured, Law Enforcement, Police State

Surprise is actually the name of a city in Arizona. When you read a news article about an incident there, you keep waiting for some kind of punch line. In Surprise, Arizona, there was a Surprise man who was arrested by Surprise police officers.
The surprise in this particular incident however is not really all that surprising. A 64-year-old retired firefighter named Jesse Thornton was arrested for DUI even though he blew a .000.
His schedule is such that he sleeps during the day and runs errands and works out during the night. He changed his schedule so that it would match up more with his wife’s schedule. She works 12-hour shifts as an ER nurse.
Obviously, because of his schedule change, he’s out on the road at night all the time. He said he’s been pulled over 10 times, and he’s received 4 four tickets.
In this last incident, he had just left LA Fitness where he was doing laps in a swimming pool. He got pulled over for “failure to maintain lanes,” and when the cop approached Mr. Thornton, he noticed he had bloodshot eyes. The cop then “knew” beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was drunk, despite Thornton informing him that he had just been in a chlorine pool.
The officer told Thornton that they had to do a sobriety test. Thornton was very compliant but told the officer that he had hip and knee problems, and that he was scheduled for hip replacement surgery in 2 days. His hip and knee problems might have made him look drunk if the cop had him walk the line. The man wasn’t lying. Medical documents prove that he did have hip and knee problems, and that he really was scheduled to have surgery 2 days after his run-in with the Surprise Police Department.
A local ABC affiliate explained what ensued:

 “Thornton said two other officers arrived and he conducted the sobriety test. ‘At one point, one of the officers shined the light in my eye and said, “Oh, sorry,” and asked the other officer if he was doing it right,’ said Thornton. Thornton said he was then placed in handcuffs and told to sit on the curb. ‘I couldn't even sit on the ground like that, and they knew it, and I was lying on the ground, then they put me in the back of an SUV, and when I asked the officer to move her seat up ‘cause my hip hurt she told me to stop whining,’ said Thornton. According to documents provided to ABC15 from the City of Surprise, Thornton was taken to police headquarters where he took a breathalyzer test. The test, according to the police documents came back with a blood alcohol level of 0.000.”

 While at the police station, a drug recognition expert (DRE) was called over to test Thornton as well. The DRE even commented to Thornton that he wouldn’t have arrested him, because he didn’t appear impaired at all.
So why’d they arrest him for DUI even though he wasn’t drunk? Because they could. Their job isn’t so much to protect and serve anymore. It’s to arrest and ticket people. Bring in revenue. Once the arrest or ticket is complete, their chores are done. Let the judge sort out the rest.
And that’s just what is going to happen. I think Thornton has had enough of these police surprises, so he’s filed a lawsuit against the department for $500,000. I hope he gets every penny.

Read more: http://politicaloutcast.com/2013/06/no-surprise-here-man-arrested-for-dui-blows-000/#ixzz2WOMt64gJ

IRS Promises To Use Their AR-15 Assault Rifles “Appropriately”

IRS Promises To Use Their AR-15 Assault Rifles “Appropriately”

Guess What Is Hidden In The Immigration Bill? (Video)

Saturday, June 15, 2013 8:24

(Before It's News)

 

Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf)  is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.

 

 

Basically, a biometric national ID database.   What kind of democracy is it when lawmakers are able to sneak things into legislation and not have to tell anyone about it?  Based on history and the factsI’d have to say that democracy is broken, it doesn;t work and people need to come up with a new system for things to actually work.  Corruption rots everything.  -Mort                   

Thank God! Press release: Judge Lamberth, Chief Judge of the USDC for the District of Columbia gives leave of court to file 74 pages of motions and documents providing undeniable evidence of Obama’s use of a stolen Social Security number and seeking release of the original application for the aforementioned number

Thank God! Press release: Judge Lamberth, Chief Judge of the USDC for the District of Columbia gives leave of court to file 74 pages of motions and documents providing undeniable evidence of Obama’s use of a stolen Social Security number and seeking release of the original application for the aforementioned number

The NSA “scandal” isn’t important. Keep your eyes on the IRS plot, where the criminality lies.

Posted on June 16, 2013 by Paraclete

Bob Owens
“Ace” at Ace of Spades has built one of the more successful political blogs on a balanced combination of snark, community-building (who else can can boast of a community that proudly/ironically calls themselves “morons?”) and very insightful observations that a lot of folks simply miss.
Last night, I read (twice) a post he wrote called Snowden’s Looking a Little Dodgy, which was written in regards to the stories surrounding NSA leaker Edward Snowden that has been dominating the news cycle for the past few days. I’d suggest that you read it all and think over it’s ramifications.  

The government must have a good reason for all of this. We don’t know what that reason is, but you’d have to be some kind of wild-eyed Birther type to think that a cover story that makes no sense at all is worth asking a few questions about.
So what I’m worried about here is that this Snowden doesn’t know what he’s talking about and has overhyped his disclosures, and that, in the coming days, we’ll find out that PRISM is less and less than he originally claimed it was. And then, the Institutional Class, having rubbished NSA-gate as also “akin to Birtherism,” will then take the IRS scandal to also be akin to Birtherism, and the EPA’s shellacking conservative groups with hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for FOIA requests while freely providing them to liberal groups will be taken as akin to Birtherism, and suspicions about the James Rosen matter will be akin to Birtherism, and so on.
I am always fearful about seizing upon weak evidence especially when we have so much strong evidence — because mark my words, if the NSA scandal peters out, this will be the only scandalthe Institutional Class will deign to discuss, and will categorize all other scandals as “like the so-called overblown NSAscandal.”

There is a distinct possibility Snowden’s story is being hyped by the Administration itself to divert us away from the real scandals—the joint ATF/EPA/FBI/IRS/OSHA/etc. harassment of Tea Party activists to cripple them organizations and prevent them from affecting the 2012 elections as they did the 2010 elections, for example—that should see the Obama Administration forced out of office.
The NSA scandal may be much ado about policy without criminality, distracting us from the real scandal an Administration that may have criminally abused their power across multiple Executive Branch agencies in order to effectively “steal” an election.
How do we know that the IRS (and I’m using that term as a loose identifier; it is in no way limited to just the IRS) scandal is where the fire is under all the smoke? By the Administration’s dogged determination to completely bury the issue and not give one inch.

Rep. Dave Camp, the Michigan Republican who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, told a legal policy conference on Wednesday that his investigators still don’t know who inside the Obama administration first told IRS agents to aggressively target right-wing groups for extra scrutiny when they applied for tax-exempt status.
But, he said, he and his Republican colleagues have confirmed the partisan program did not originate in the agency’s Cincinnati, Ohio office – something Democrats have claimed.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has described the IRS’s ‘activity in Cincinnati’ as ‘line IRS employees in Cincinnati improperly scrutinizing 501(c)(4) [tax-exempt] organizations.’
‘We know it [the targeting] didn’t originate in Cincinnati,’ Camp said. ‘We still don’t know who did originate this.’
‘We have a lot of work to do,’ he told The Hill. ‘We’re not anywhere near being able to jump to conclusions. And there are a lot more people we have to talk to,’
But recent indications are that officials in Washington, either inside the IRS or higher up in the administration, had a hand in directing the activity of those Cincinnati agents.

We know, for a fact, that Tea Party groups were targets by multiple executive branchagencies for harassment and intimidation, and so we know on a logical level that orders for this coup d’etat camp from within the West Wing of the White House.
Forcing the media and Congress to focus on this scandal at the exclusion of everything else they would rather focus our attention on, is the only chance we have to get to the bottom of what can only be described as a direct assault on the electoral process by a sitting President.
Let me be very clear: Barack Obama would not be the current President of the United States if he had not directed executive branch agencies to criminally abuse their power in a broad conspiracy to target the Tea Party groups which decimated the Democrats in the House in the 2010 mid-term elections.This conspiracy was a frontal assault on the Constitution. Let’s force them to treat this plot as the crime it so clear is, and not just a political “scandal.”
http://www.bob-owens.com/2013/06/the-nsa-scandal-isnt-important-keep-your-eyes-on-the-irs-crimes-plot-where-the-criminality-lies/

While working for spies, Snowden was secretly prolific online

Reuters –  http://news.yahoo.com/while-working-spies-snowden-secretly-015908216.html

• 
  View PhotoReuters - Protesters supporting Edward Snowden, a contractor at the National Security Agency (NSA), hold a photo of Snowden during a demonstration outside the U.S. Consulate in Hong Kong June 13, 2013. REUTERS/Bobby …more 

By John Shiffman, Mark Hosenball and Kristina Cooke

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - While working for U.S. intelligence agencies, Edward Snowden had another secret identity: an online commentator who anonymously railed against citizen surveillance and corporate greed.
Throughout the eight years that Snowden worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency contractors, he posted hundreds of messages on a public Internet forum under a pseudonym.
"I can't hope to change the way things are going by overtly complaining, writing letters, or blowing things up," Snowden wrote in 2003 in response to a discussion about corporate greed on the Ars Technica online forum.
"That's not the way a good person does things. I will, however, do what I can with the tools that are available to me."
New information discovered by Reuters about Snowden's employment record, online postings and education comes as U.S. lawmakers grill intelligence officials about how a 29-year-old high school dropout managed to gain access to such top secrets as the NSA's electronic surveillance programs.
According to sources briefed on the matter, Snowden was employed by an unidentified classified agency in Washington from 2005 to mid-2006, by the CIA from 2006 to 2009, when he primarily worked overseas, and by Dell Inc (DELL.O) from 2009 to 2013, when he worked in the United States and Japan as an NSA contractor.
He was also a prolific commentator on technology forum Ars Technica, posting approximately 750 messages using the screen name "The True HOOHA" from late 2001 to 2012.
Most of the postings were not political in nature: he dispensed advice about government careers, polygraphs and the 2008 stock market crash. He claimed to own the same gun as James Bond and posted glamour photos of himself. He jokingly compared the video console Xbox Live to NSA surveillance.
One of his postings, however, dealt with the now familiar issue of corporate compliance with government eavesdropping programmes. On February 4, 2010, while working for Dell, Snowden commented on a discussion about a major technology company that allegedly was giving the U.S. government access to its computer servers.
"It really concerns me how little this sort of corporate behavior bothers those outside of technology circles," Snowden wrote. "Society really seems to have developed an unquestioning obedience towards spooky types."
It is not clear if his former employers knew about his online persona. The CIA, NSA, Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton (BAH.N) - which most recently employed Snowden - declined to comment.
One former national security official said the government should have scrubbed his record harder. But Stewart Baker, former general counsel for the NSA, said holding such views did not automatically disqualify someone for a sensitive government job.
"Maybe the government will have to look at that again but that's a difficult thing to decide," Baker said.
UNDER SCRUTINY
According to the sources, Snowden told employers he took computer classes at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, earned a certificate from the University of Maryland's campus in Tokyo, and expected in 2013 to earn a master's degree in computer security from the University of Liverpool in England.
A Johns Hopkins spokeswoman said she could not find a record of Snowden's attendance but he may have taken correspondence courses for which records are not kept. A Maryland official confirmed Snowden attended at least one summer class. A Liverpool spokeswoman said Snowden registered for an online master's degree in computer security in 2011, but did not complete it.
Born in 1983 in North Carolina, Snowden grew up in a Maryland suburb near the NSA headquarters. He left high school in 10th grade and later earned a G.E.D. At 18, he worked as a webmaster for Ryuhana Press, a start-up promoting Japanese anime artists.
Snowden began posting on Ars Technica on December 29, 2001. He sought technical help for his work at the anime site and a website company called Clockwork Chihuahua.
As early as 2002, Snowden wrote online of his desire to work in Japan: "It is pretty far-fetched, but I've always dreamed of being able to make it in Japan."
An avid gamer, he posted on the ethics of video game piracy in 2003: "I feel the megacorporation is promoting hyper-materialism and I don't like that. That means I want to punish the company in any way I can."
"Legality does not factor into this, getting away with it (OMG dispensing justice LOL!) in order to do it again does," Snowden added. "If my actions contribute to driving the corporation I view as "evil" into the ground, I'll sleep easier at night knowing I have (in my mind) done society a service."
On Ars Technica, Snowden gave more advice than he sought. To others hoping to land U.S. government jobs, he bemoaned high living costs and commuting hassles in Washington.
"My life is great except for the fact that while I'm making twice the average income, I could not afford a house in my zip code without robbing a bank," he wrote in 2006.
And he wrote of life: "We're all in this crazy boat together. Best of luck, comrade." (Reporting by John Shiffman and Mark Hosenball in Washington, and Kristina Cooke in San Francisco; Additional reporting by Robin Respaut in New York; Editing by Marilyn W. Thompson, Tiffany Wu, Doina Chiacu)

Snowden's Looking a Little Dodgy

June 12, 2013 http://ace.mu.nu/archives/340855.php

Snowden's Looking a Little Dodgy

Before I get into all of this, let me explain why I feel we're being snookered on this, and why it bothers me.
The media and the Institutional Class generally have dismissed every scandal allegation as akin to Birtherism. The Benghazi cover-up was dismissed by the media, and the Institutional Class, as some ginned-up fake conspiracy theory spread by crazy people. Just like the Birth Certificate thing.
This was a hard stance to maintain, given that the Talking Points were clearly a fiction from the get-go and that there was an avalanche of evidence that the attack was known to be a coordinated, planned attack from the start, and no evidence whatsoever that it was a "spontaneous demonstration" at all, but yet the Institutional Class advanced its own political interests anyway in suggesting the whole kerfuffle was a fever-swamp fantasia cooked up by the extreme rightwing.
Fast & Furious, too, of course. To this day no one in the media can tell you how a government gun-tracking program could track guns without actually tracking guns, and yet they continue to even trouble themselves to ask the government how tracking can be had without tracking, but, you know, Birtherism.
The government must have a good reason for all of this. We don't know what that reason is, but you'd have to be some kind of wild-eyed Birther type to think that a cover story that makes no sense at all is worth asking a few questions about.
So what I'm worried about here is that this Snowden doesn't know what he's talking about and has overhyped his disclosures, and that, in the coming days, we'll find out that PRISM is less and less than he originally claimed it was. And then, the Institutional Class, having rubbished NSA-gate as also "akin to Birtherism," will then take the IRS scandal to also be akin to Birtherism, and the EPA's shellacking conservative groups with hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs for FOIA requests while freely providing them to liberal groups will be taken as akin to Birtherism, and suspicions about the James Rosen matter will be akin to Birtherism, and so on.
I am always fearful about seizing upon weak evidence especially when we have so much strong evidence -- because mark my words, if the NSA scandal peters out, this will be the only scandal the Institutional Class will deign to discuss, and will categorize all other scandals as "like the so-called overblown NSA scandal."
I don't know what the NSA is doing, and as the days pass, I'm less sure that I even know what I thought I knew five days ago. it's now being claimed that PRISM isn't even the intelligence gathering program at all, but rather the data management tool -- i.e., the user interface -- used for looking into suspect data.

The administration is pushing back on the definition of what Prism actually is – that it’s not a snooping programme but a data management tool. The call logging accusations are pretty much beyond doubt (and reason enough to scream Big Brother) but the Prism angle is a little less clear. Extremetech points out that it is a programme that has hidden in public sight, that Prism is in fact, “the name of a web data management tool that is so boring that no one had ever bothered to report on its existence before now. It appears that the public Prism tool is simply a way to view and manage collected data, as well as correlate it with the source.” This is not to say that there isn’t a scandal to investigate here: “What is much more important is to pay attention to what data is being collected, and how.” But Prism might not be the smoking gun. None of this debunks outright Snowden’s claims that the NSA is gathering data, that it has extraordinary power or that it has lied to Congress about it. But it does smack of a lack of fact checking on the part of The Guardian and it risks giving credibility to those who think this is a lot of fuss about nothing (and I'm not one of them). As Joshua Foust of Medium.com suggests, the problem probably rests with Snowden. He first approached the Washington Post via a freelancer and demanded that they publish everything without time for fact checking or government comment. The Post hesitated – so Snowden went to The Guardian instead. This forced the Post to speed up publication of its own story. Frost: “Both papers, in their rush, wound up printing misleading stories.” If so, they're in trouble.

Now, of course, a data-management tool implies there is data to manage, so Snowden's story is not completely debunked. The NSA is obviously gathering lots of data. But I'm not sure we know much more about this from Snowden's disclosures than we did before.
We have his say-so on some of this, but lacking actual proof, we have to rely on his word, and that is becoming a perilous proposition:

Snowden’s backstory is not entirely accurate. Booz Allen says that his salary was 40 per cent lower than thought and a real estate agent says that his house in Hawaii was empty for weeks before he vamoosed. Does the fact that he only worked for three months with Booz Allen and the NSA suggest he was planning a hit and run all along – that he took the job with the NSA with the intention of stealing the documents?

Answer: The timeline strongly suggests something like that happened. H/t @comradearthur. And more so by the moment.

NSA leaker Ed Snowden claimed to have broken both of his legs while training for Special Forces. ...
That is simply not true as the statement from the Special Warfare Center & School below clearly points out.

Much, much more troubling than some resume-fabulations is this: Snowden is now not only blabbing about programs which may be objectionable and legitimate topics of national debate, but about programs which aren't objectionable and are not legitimate topics of national debate.
It's one thing to inform the American people what the the American government is doing.
It's another thing entirely to inform the Chinese people what the American government is doing.

n a new interview with Hong Kong newspaper The South China Morning Post, National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden says the U.S. has been hacking Chinese and Hong Kong computers since 2009. The paper said it viewed documents supporting Snowden's claim, but was unable to verify them. The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald - the journalist who first broke the story of the NSA's vast surveillance system - told CNN "The Lead's" Jake Tapper Monday that there are more stories to come.
Wednesday's revelation demonstrates that Snowden will continue to share information.

Of course the US hacks Chinese systems, and of course we spy on China. But such espionage is clearly proper-- especially because the Chinese penetration of American secrets is so much more advanced and extensive than our own.
While disclosing a debatable, controversial surveillance program into the private files of American citizens may be a useful and permissible leak, disclosing the basic and proper functions of the American intelligence community is simply not. This is what we pay these agents to do.
This is purely gratuitous, vindictive attack on the American intelligence community-- and America itself-- for no better reason than petty spite, or some kind of misguided Hero Complex, or perhaps an intense belief in the mid-seventies-based leftist paranoia of Ron Paul, in which all countries are highly ethical actors, except the US, which is an egregious privacy-violating secretive hegemon which occasionally forces freedom-loving, peacefully-intended countries like the Soviet Union and Iran to take action in retaliation to our own imperialistic maneuverings.
The only difference between Noam Chomsky and Ron Paul on this point is that Noam Chomsky is better and more widely read and doesn't obsess as much about dimes.
Don't believe me? Here's Edward Snowden, Hater of the American Security/Surveillance State, speaking kindly about.... Russia.

“All I can do is rely on my training and hope that world governments will refuse to be bullied by the United States into persecuting people seeking political refuge,” he said. He also hinted, though did not claim explicitly that other governments may ultimately welcome him.
“Asked if he had been offered asylum by the Russian government, he said: ‘My only comment is that I am glad there are governments that refuse to be intimidated by great power,’” the Morning Post reported.

He so hated the secrecy and control of the American Surveillance State he fled to... China, and may soon seek greener pastures in... Russia.
Like Julian Assange, or Ron Paul for that matter, the hatred here is not for totalitarian systems of control generally, but for the American one specifically, and that is worrisome.
And it's worrisome because most of what we think we know about this scandal comes not from documents and verified proofs but from Snowden himself.
Earlier today I read this Ron Fournier piece, "Why I Don't Care About Edward Snowden," and was strongly inclined to agree, believing that the whole "Is Snowden a hero or a villain?" subplot was a bit of baby-talk to interest the low thinkers who cannot think in anything but those terms, in terms of people and personalities rather than ideas and principles, and who prefer such personality-based thinking to occur in the most baby-talk-ish of all possible manners of debate: Is this person completely Good and completely a Hero or is he completely Evil and completely a Villain?
And thus the political debate becomes MySpace: ROXXOR or SUXXOR? Upding or Downding? Let's get #HeroSnowden #trending over #VillainSnowden.
And I agreed, I thought, with his conclusion that such talk was a complete misdirection away from the actual questions at hand: Do we support this program? Do we even know enough about it to make that determination? Isn't the government now hiding from us not only the details of secret projects, but even the most elementary and basic information about the broad parameters of goals of such programs, such that we are denied the ability to actually make any sort of sensible judgment at all?
Is the government not essentially telling us to simply Trust Our Betters, and denying the most important of all principles underlying what was once called America-- the idea that common citizens shall make informed decisions about how their country shall operate?
And while I still mostly agree with that, I have to dispute that a bit, because much of what is claimed about this program is claimed by Edward Snowden, and I am not taking his word for it anymore than I'm taking the perjurious word of James Clapper for it. And, as Clapper's dishonesty and agenda weighs in the balance when we consider his claims, so too should such things weigh in the balance when we consider Snowden's.
The Timeline: Neo-Neocon does some thinking and realizes that Snowden seems to be have been "working with" Glenn Greenwald since just about the day he took the job.
So that would mean he probably took the posting to get the documents, and was not, in case you thought this, subject to a crisis of conscience due to what he saw there. He had the crisis of conscience before the job interview.
But there is a more important implication: This means that Snowden probably did not learn what he found objectionable about US intelligence by his three months of work for it, but rather that he already knew what he found objectionable about US Intelligence and spent his three months of work for it finding evidence to support his already-believed conclusions.
Having an agenda does not make someone a Bad Man or a Villain or SUXXOR.
It does, however, mean one should be careful in sifting through his claims for the truth. Most likely, most of the information he's giving you is stained, splattered, and soaked-through with his pre-existing agenda.
I Hereby Promise to Administer the Most Transparent Blog in American History: And with that, let me put some cards on the table.
I am jealously guarding the primacy of my favorite scandals, the IRS, James Rosen, and Benghazi, plus the perjury. I do not like other scandals sharing the limelight. I do not think they add to my favorite scandals. I think they steal spotlight. I think they crowd the stage.
And I want my Stars front and center.
Here's the thing: The IRS scandal is plainly a partisan illegal political scandal done for corrupt motives.
Unconstitutional ones, too. This gets to the very heart of the American experiment.
The NSA scandal, if it pans out, is an illegal scandal, yes, but unlikely done for partisan or corrupt motives. It would be a case of overreach and constitutional violation, yes, but probably not with partisan or corrupt motives.
And it's the latter that hang someone. Mistakes or differences of opinion do not. If the NSA turns out to be an overreach, but one done without partisan or corrupt motives... well, no one's getting impeached for going too far to protect the American people from a terrorist attack.
George Bush got reelected on that platform, for crying out loud. He practically announced, "I intend to go too far."
That doesn't mean that this isn't worrisome or unconstitutional. It means, at the end of the day, the IRS and Benghazi scandals are threats to this corrupt administration in a way the NSA scandal never will be (or is extremely unlikely to be).
And so yeah, I'm kind of like: "Let's stick on the one where we have them, and not this other one where Obama will say 'gee I'm sorry if I'm more concerned about American lives than conservatives are, but I guess we'll just have to disagree."
You can disagree with the principle behind that line, but you can't argue it's a good defense, politically, and that the LIVs of the American Idiocracy won't think it sounds pretty good to them, now let's get back to watching The Bachelorette.

posted by Ace at 05:50 PM