Why I'm suing the US government to protect internet freedom
The NDAA means the US military can put anyone under suspicion of being a terror threat and detain them for ever
Birgitta Jónsdóttir
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 April 2012
Freedom for most people is something sacred, and many have been willing to sacrifice their lives for it. It is not just another word, for we measure the health of our democracies by the standard of freedom. We use it to measure our happiness and prosperity. Sadly, freedom of information, expression and speech is being eroded gradually without people paying much attention to it. Freedom of movement is permitted within certain zones, freedom of reading is disappearing, and the right to privacy is dwindling with the increased surveillance of our every move.
When the world wide web came into being, it was an unrestricted, free flowing world of creativity, connectivity and close encounters of the internet kind. It was as if the collective consciousness had taken on material (yet virtual!) form and people soon learned to use it to work, play and gather. Today's social and democratic reform is born and bred online where people can freely exchange views and knowledge. Some of us old-school internet freedom fighters understood this value way before the web became such a part of our daily lives. One of them is John Perry Barlow, who in 1996 wrote a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in a response to an attempt to legalise restrictions on this brand new world. In it he declares: "Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
Barlow inspired me and others to create the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), a parliamentary proposal unanimously approved by the Icelandic parliament in 2010, tasking the government to make Iceland a safe haven for freedom of information and expression, where privacy online would be as sacred and guarded as it is in the real world. The spirit of IMMI is in stark contrast with the serious attacks we are currently faced with. We have legal monsters like Acta, Sopa, Pipa and now Cispa; we have anti-terrorist acts abused to tear these liberties apart; we have armies of corporate lawyers scrutinising every bit of news prior to it getting out to us before we ever get to know the real stories that should remain in the public domain.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The US government legally hacks into other nations' parliamentary private social media data because it is stored on servers originating in the US, as in my Twitter case. The infamous EU data retention law is making us all into terrorist subjects by default, and now we have the newest addition in a dangerous cocktail of erosion of civil liberties online with the offline reality: meet the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), also known as the Homeland Battlefield Act. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes it thus:
"For the first time in American history, we have a law authorising the worldwide and indefinite military detention of people captured far from any battlefield. The NDAA has no temporal or geographic limitations. It is completely at odds with our values, violates the constitution, and corrodes our nation's commitment to the rule of law."
Since the US department of justice is ploughing my private data and WikiLeaks (whom I volunteered for in 2010 by co-producing Collateral Murder) are defined by the US vice-president as cyberterrorists, I felt under direct threat when NDAA was passed. I have not been able to travel to the US for more than a year under advice from the Icelandic state department. The only way for me to go is on a UN visa (the same kind as Gaddafi and Hussein got when going to the UN) when I plan to attend the UN assembly later this year. Basically what NDAA means is that the US military can put anyone, anywhere under the suspicion of being a terror threat or an associate and detain you for ever, without you having access to a lawyer or a court. So I joined Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg and other activists https://www.stopndaa.org/ in suing the United States government to stop the implementation of the NDAA. Naomi Wolf was kind enough to read my testimony at a US court last month, since I could not be there in person.
The good news is that cyberspace is full of hacktivists and our offline world has a growing Occupy movement, inspiring all of us into action, co-creating a different reality in the spirit of a true online and offline freedom.
Hard National Security Choices
Court Documents in Hedges et al v. Barack Obama
By Raffaela Wakeman
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Yesterday we mentioned that a suit had been filed in the Southern District of New York by a number of commentators and public figures, arguing that the NDAA’s detention provisions will apply to them in their “daily professional work” and that they could be detained under the provisions.
The plaintiffs include Christopher Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Jennifer Bolen, Noam Chomsky, Alexa O’Brien, U.S. Day of Rage, Kai Wargalla, and the Hon. Brigitta Jonsdottir (a member of parliament in Iceland). They’ve even got a website dedicated to their cause, which describes this initial lawsuit as “Round One”:
Round One is a group of individuals who have stepped forward because we have reason to believe we face the potential for serious harm under the NDAA. However, while the language of this law is so broad and vague, it could affect anyone. For this reason, In Round Two, we will be opening this lawsuit up to the entire US public and citizens of other nations. Then, you can either sign up to publicly support this lawsuit, or consider becoming an actual plaintiff. We are offering both options because we need to make sure our legal case is as strong as possible. More info soon, so stay tuned!
We’ve pulled together all the court documents that have been filed so far, including the complaint, the plaintiffs’ initial brief in support of the motion for a temporary restraining order as well as their supplemental brief on standing, the government’s memo in opposition to the injunction, and the declarations of Kai Wargalla, Alexa O’Brien, and Brigitta Jonsdottir.
The plaintiffs have two main arguments, which they summarize:
The Act improperly authorizes that civilians in the United States be detained indefinitely by the military, that they be tried by military commission or military court and that they may be subject to removal to other jurisdictions in violation of the Amendments V and VI of the Constitution.
The Act fails to give reasonable notice of the acts and conduct that will render a person liable to military detention and is overbroad thereby chilling and impinging upon protexted expressive and associative acts.
The government summarizes its counterargument in the following way:
Plaintiffs’ challenge to section 1021 must be rejected. Properly understood, section 1021 merely restates the detention authority that the government already had under the AUMF. In the statute’s own words, it “affirms” the AUMF’s detention authority while expressly not “expand[ing]” it, and defines those “covered persons” who may be detained in terms no more broad than the government has advanced before the courts—and that the courts have upheld—for years.
Based on their misunderstandings of the law, plaintiffs now purport to fear that they will be subjected to indefinite military detention simply for their political views and expression. But those fears are baseless. Plaintiffs do not assert that they or anyone similarly situated have ever been detained or threatened with detention under the identical preexisting authority provided by the AUMF. Nor can they demonstrate that their subjective fears are reasonable in light of the government’s implementation of its detention authority under the AUMF. For those reasons, plaintiffs lack standing, and therefore are unable to demonstrate a likelihood of success in this action, irreparable harm, or a balance of the equities involved that tips in their favor. Plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction, therefore, should be denied.
Southern District of New York Judge Katherine B. Forrest has not yet issued a decision on the plaintiff’s motion.
The NSA, which dwarfs the CIA, is so powerful that those with oversight are too intimidated to check its incursions on liberty
Amy Goodman
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 April 2012
Three targeted Americans: a career government intelligence official, a filmmaker and a hacker. None of these US citizens was charged with a crime, but they have been tracked, surveilled, detained – sometimes at gunpoint – and interrogated, with no access to a lawyer. Each remains resolute in standing up to the increasing government crackdown on dissent.
The intelligence official: William Binney worked for almost 40 years at the secretive National Security Agency (NSA), the US spy agency that dwarfs the CIA. As technical director of the NSA's world geopolitical and military analysis reporting group, Binney told me he was tasked to "see how we could solve collection, analysis and reporting on military and geopolitical issues all around the world, every country in the world."
Throughout the 1990s, the NSA developed a massive eavesdropping system codenamed ThinThread, which, Binney says, maintained crucial protections on the privacy of US citizens demanded by the US constitution. He recalled, "After 9/11, all the wraps came off for NSA," as massive domestic spying became the norm. He resigned on 31 October 2001. Along with several other NSA officials, Binney reported his concerns to Congress and to the Department of Defense.
Then, in 2007, as then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was being questioned on Capitol Hill about the very domestic spying to which Binney objected, a dozen FBI agents charged into his house, guns drawn. They forced aside his son and found Binney, a diabetic amputee, in the shower. They pointed their guns at his head, then led him to his back porch and interrogated him. Three others were raided that morning. Binney called the FBI raid "retribution and intimidation so we didn't go to the judiciary committee in the Senate and tell them, 'Well, here's what Gonzales didn't tell you, OK.'" Binney was never charged with any crime.
The filmmaker: Laura Poitras is an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker, whose recent films include My Country, My Country, about the US occupation of Iraq, and The Oath, which was filmed in Yemen. Since 2006, Poitras has been detained and questioned at airports at least 40 times. She has had her computer and reporter's notebooks confiscated and presumably copied, without a warrant. The most recent time, 5 April, she took notes during her detention. The agents told her to stop, as they considered her pen a weapon. She told me:
"I feel like I can't talk about the work that I do in my home, in my place of work, on my telephone, and sometimes in my country. So the chilling effect is huge. It's enormous."
The hacker: Jacob Appelbaum works as a computer security researcher for the nonprofit organization the Tor Project, which is a free software package that allows people to browse the internet anonymously, evading government surveillance. Tor was actually created by the US Navy, and is now developed and maintained by Appelbaum and his colleagues. Tor is used by dissidents around the world to communicate over the internet. Tor also serves as the main way that the controversial WikiLeaks website protects those who release documents to it.
Appelbaum has volunteered for WikiLeaks, leading to intense US government surveillance. Appelbaum spoke in place of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, at a conference called Hackers on Planet Earth, or Hope, as people feared Assange would be arrested. He started his talk by saying:
"Hello to all my friends and fans in domestic and international surveillance. I'm here today because I believe that we can make a better world."
He has been detained at least a dozen times at airports:
"I was put into a special room, where they frisked me, put me up against the wall … Another one held my wrists … They implied that if I didn't make a deal with them, that I'd be sexually assaulted in prison … They took my cellphones, they took my laptop. They wanted, essentially, to ask me questions about the Iraq war, the Afghan war, what I thought politically."
I asked Binney if he felt that the NSA has copies of every email sent in the US. He replied, "I believe they have most of them, yes." Binney said two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have expressed concern, but have not spoken out, as, Binney says, they would lose their seats on the Senate select committee on intelligence.
Meanwhile, Congress is set to vote on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or Cispa. Proponents of internet freedom are fighting the bill, which they say will legalize what the NSA is secretly doing already. Before voting on Cispa, members of Congress, fond of quoting the country's founders, should recall these words of Benjamin Franklin:
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.
The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require the firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance.
In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned.
The FBI general counsel's office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.
In addition to the FBI's legislative proposal, there are indications that the Federal Communications Commission is considering reinterpreting CALEA to demand that products that allow video or voice chat over the Internet -- from Skype to Google Hangouts to Xbox Live -- include surveillance backdoors to help the FBI with its "Going Dark" program. CALEA applies to technologies that are a "substantial replacement" for the telephone system.
Yes. We merely have the illusion of freedom, security and access to things. Our rights are not concrete and therefore at a moments notice be taken away or abused in the name of justice or security of the state.
CONservative governMENt
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
I'm surprised anyone is even left to comment about this latest news after the majority of us were pulled from our homes when the Patriot Act was signed.
I'm surprised anyone is even left to comment about this latest news after the majority of us were pulled from our homes when the Patriot Act was signed.
My gulag came with complementary internet service!
If I was to smile and I held out my hand
If I opened it now would you not understand?
Totalitarianism? Really?! Again, study history. Learn what the terms you use actually connote.
Thanks for the advice, oh wise one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is when a government aims to control the political, economic, social, intellectual, and cultural lives of its citizens.[2] Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through an all-encompassing propaganda campaign, which is disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that is often marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of speech, mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror
2. absolute control by the state or a governing branch of a highly centralized institution.
Hmm, a single party, which is effectively what the U.S has had for decades, under the pretense of having two parties, although both are essentially under the total control of big business and the elites.
Totalitarianism? Really?! Again, study history. Learn what the terms you use actually connote.
Thanks for the advice, oh wise one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is when a government aims to control the political, economic, social, intellectual, and cultural lives of its citizens.[2] Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through an all-encompassing propaganda campaign, which is disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that is often marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of speech, mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror
2. absolute control by the state or a governing branch of a highly centralized institution.
Hmm, a single party, which is effectively what the U.S has had for decades, under the pretense of having two parties, although both are essentially under the total control of big business and the elites.
I'm surprised anyone is even left to comment about this latest news after the majority of us were pulled from our homes when the Patriot Act was signed.
I'm surprised anyone is even left to comment about this latest news after the majority of us were pulled from our homes when the Patriot Act was signed.
I'm surprised anyone is even left to comment about this latest news after the majority of us were pulled from our homes when the Patriot Act was signed.
Freedom for most people is something sacred, and many have been willing to sacrifice their lives for it. It is not just another word, for we measure the health of our democracies by the standard of freedom. We use it to measure our happiness and prosperity. Sadly, freedom of information, expression and speech is being eroded gradually without people paying much attention to it. Freedom of movement is permitted within certain zones, freedom of reading is disappearing, and the right to privacy is dwindling with the increased surveillance of our every move.
And that pretty much sums it up.. Pretty damn sad. By the time the masses wake up it will be to late..
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unsung
I stopped by on March 7 2024. First time in many years, had to update payment info. Hope all is well. Politicians suck. Bye. Posts: 9,487
The Amash amendment to NDAA failed today. We are screwed. They just trashed the bill of rights.
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brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 42,084
By the time the masses wake up it will be to late..
Have the masses ever been awake?
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” Variously credited to Mark Twain or Edward Abbey.
By the time the masses wake up it will be to late..
Have the masses ever been awake?
Yeah I think more people are engaged now than they-we used to be.. At the same time though I think a lot of people feel hopeless and they can't make a difference.
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brianlux
Moving through All Kinds of Terrain. Posts: 42,084
At the same time though I think a lot of people feel hopeless and they can't make a difference.
I suppose technology might be partly responsible for that as well. (I'm thinking about your Big Bro streetlights.)
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” Variously credited to Mark Twain or Edward Abbey.
Phillip Knightley: When is a terror threat not a terror threat? Let's ask a man called Felix...
All intelligence services rely on convincing the public there is a monster at large waiting to grab them
Phillip Knightley
Friday 11 May 2012
The British undercover agent in the underpants bomb plot that has emerged so sensationally in recent days, was recruited using a technique pioneered by the founder of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky. And Dzerzhinsky would be looking down from wherever he is now and smiling with satisfaction at the latest twists of an episode in which Western intelligence agencies have apparently foiled a plan to attack a US-bound plane.
Dzerzhinsky took over anti-terrorism duties in the newly-emerged Russia at the end of the First World War when the country was riven with revolt and violence. He realised that he had no chance of identifying all the terrorist threats and those planning to perpetrate them. Instead he developed a questionable technique that has become part of espionage theory throughout the international intelligence community: you lure the terrorist to you.
When the story of the foiled bomb plot first broke it seemed too good to be true. The security authorities had intercepted a man carrying a supposedly undetectable bomb which was being examined at the FBI laboratories in Quantico, Virginia. This suggested an amazing piece of intelligence work. What had led the authorities to the man? Why were they suspicious of him? Had they been tipped off? As details emerged it became apparent that the action was rather more straightforward.
In the tradition of Dzerzhinski, the Saudi intelligence service had apparently "dangled" one of its agents in front of known al-Qa'ida members hoping for a "bite". To make the bait attractive, the agent, it later emerged, was a British passport holder. Al-Qa'ida was fooled and handed him the bomb with instructions to smuggle it on a plane bound for the United States. He handed it over to the Saudis. It seems likely that the Saudis passed on the information the agent had gathered on al-Qa'ida to enable the US to mount a drone attack on an al-Qaida leader in Yemen. The Saudis are thought to have planned more operations for its star undercover agent but were forced to abandon them when the story leaked to the Western media. Thus espionage history repeated itself, and echoes can be heard of the most famous of all counter-espionage operations in the Soviet Union, the Trust.
The Trust appeared to be a huge anti-Bolshevik organisation working from Moscow to overthrow the Communists and reverse the revolution. Instead,Dzerzhinski used it to identify anti-communists. All he needed to do was set up the organisation and wait to see who joined it. He could then choose when to roll it up and arrest its members or whether to let it run in the hope of revealing bigger prey.
In intelligence circles the Trust became a textbook operation and its principles copied worldwide. But to be most effective required a ruthlessness that Western services often felt unable to carry out. For instance, if the authenticity of a front organisation was questioned, the KGB did not hesitate to initiate a terrorist incident to reinforce the organisation's reputation. So the Trust would plant bombs that would kill innocent people just so that possible recruits would think it a genuine organisation.
In the West, a front organisation could also run into legal difficulties when it came to winding it up and arresting those who had been tempted to join. Judges wanted convincing that the authority running the operation had not been tempted to act as agents provocateurs and had provoked people into acts that they would not otherwise have considered. This is why the main user of front organisations was at first the British Customs in drug busts rather than the Security Service, MI5, or the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, the thinking being that the courts would be more sympathetic if a huge haul of heroin was involved and not a bewildered possible terrorist.
British Customs actually advertised for recruits, placing notices in Pakistani journals asking for young Pakistanis going on holiday to Pakistan to contact the British High Commission if they were approached when on holiday to courier drugs back to Britain. Those who did were then instructed to deliver the drugs to the High Commission which took over their transport back to the UK where the Pakistani who had been recruited would deliver them as instructed. At the handover the Customs would pounce and arrest the ringleaders. The headlines in the British press would trumpet: "Huge drugs bust. Smugglers' plot foiled". But as evidence in court showed, the whole plot had been initiated by British Customs and the drugs brought into Britain by Customs themselves.
The difficulty the British Security Service MI5 has faced in its anti-terrorism operations is that it was created to face a Communist threat, and terrorism was at first beyond its ken. Give it a communist plot and it had files, informers and precedents to work with. But tasked after 9/11 with tacking possible terrorist cells in Britain it did not know where to start. Then someone remembered Felix Dzerzhinsky. Subsequent "successes" in fighting terrorism have sprung from operations modelled on the Trust.
But they are risky. How far can an undercover officer go in suggesting a terrorist operation before he risks a judge eventually ruling that he was acting as an agent provocateur? Are the violent sentiments of a member of the group real or just a fantasy? In most counter-terrorism operations of this nature there always remains the suspicion that the accused would not have acted in the way they did if not encouraged to do so by the undercover officer.
All intelligence services rely on convincing the public that there is a monster out there in the big wild world waiting to grab them. Only an alert intelligence service can protect them and keep them safe. All intelligence services promote this view which is what gives them more in common with each other than the governments that employ them. Genuine risk assessments of the dangers of terrorism tend to be played down because they show that the chances of an ordinary citizen dying in a terrorist attack is about the same as dying from a fall in the bath.
Phillip Knightley's books include 'The Second Oldest Profession', a history of espionage
Once again, social media proves to be more powerful then any tool the government could possibly realize ...
Twitter Gives Police Information on Source of Threatening Tweet
Twitter has now turned over information it had initially denied to NYC police about the user whose account issued threats of an attack "just like in Aurora" on the Broadway theater where Mike Tyson's one-man show is playing.
The New York Police Department subpoenaed Twitter Tuesday for the user's identity after the social media giant refused authorities' emergency request for the information.
"This s**t ain't no joke yo I'm serious people are gonna die just like in aurora," the user tweeted Aug. 1.
Police officials won't comment on whether they have spoken to the account's owner or the potential for any attack. Police said they have some indication of the direction their investigation might take, based on the information Twitter provided, but would not disclose it at this time.
The Twitter user's account seems to have been suspended because an error message now appears where the account was active as recently as Tuesday evening.
A few days before the Aug. 1 tweet, the unidentified person posted that he or she knew that the theater left its exit doors unlocked and was going to plan the shooting "step by step."
He actually then gripes that this awakening is causing political obstructions to important globalist policy efforts. Aww, dangnabbit. You mean you lie to man for ages, and then he wakes up to hate you because you never bothered to explain yourselves to him? Huh. Who'd a thunk. Der dee der.
If I was to smile and I held out my hand
If I opened it now would you not understand?
As the Pentagon's former top lawyer urges that the war be viewed as finite, the US moves in the opposite direction
Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 January 2013
Last month, outgoing pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson gave a speech at the Oxford Union and said that the War on Terror must, at some point, come to an end:
"Now that efforts by the US military against al-Qaida are in their 12th year, we must also ask ourselves: How will this conflict end? . . . . 'War' must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the 'new normal.' Peace must be regarded as the norm toward which the human race continually strives. . . .
"There will come a tipping point at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaida and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, that al-Qaida will be effectively destroyed."
On Thursday night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow interviewed Johnson, and before doing so, she opined as follows:
"When does this thing we are in now end? And if it does not have an end — and I'm not speaking as a lawyer here, I am just speaking as a citizen who feels morally accountable for my country's actions — if it does not have an end, then morally speaking it does not seem like it is a war. And then, our country is killing people and locking them up outside the traditional judicial system in a way I think we maybe cannot be forgiven for."
It is precisely the intrinsic endlessness of this so-called "war" that is its most corrupting and menacing attribute, for the reasons Maddow explained. But despite the happy talk from Johnson, it is not ending soon. By its very terms, it cannot. And all one has to do is look at the words and actions of the Obama administration to know this.
In October, the Washington Post's Greg Miller reported that the administration was instituting a "disposition matrix" to determine how terrorism suspects will be disposed of, all based on this fact: "among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade." As Miller puts it: "That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."
The polices adopted by the Obama administration just over the last couple of years leave no doubt that they are accelerating, not winding down, the war apparatus that has been relentlessly strengthened over the last decade. In the name of the War on Terror, the current president has diluted decades-old Miranda warnings; codified a new scheme of indefinite detention on US soil; plotted to relocate Guantanamo to Illinois; increased secrecy, repression and release-restrictions at the camp; minted a new theory of presidential assassination powers even for US citizens; renewed the Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping framework for another five years, as well as the Patriot Act, without a single reform; and just signed into law all new restrictions on the release of indefinitely held detainees.
Does that sound to you like a government anticipating the end of the War on Terror any time soon? Or does it sound like one working feverishly to make their terrorism-justified powers of detention, surveillance, killing and secrecy permanent? About all of this, the ACLU's Executive Director, Anthony Romero, provided the answer on Thursday: "President Obama has utterly failed the first test of his second term, even before inauguration day. His signature means indefinite detention without charge or trial, as well as the illegal military commissions, will be extended."
There's a good reason US officials are assuming the "War on Terror" will persist indefinitely: namely, their actions ensure that this occurs. The New York Times' Matthew Rosenberg this morning examines what the US government seems to regard as the strange phenomenon of Afghan soldiers attacking US troops with increasing frequency, and in doing so, discovers a shocking reality: people end up disliking those who occupy and bomb their country:
"Such insider attacks, by Afghan security forces on their Western allies, became 'the signature violence of 2012', in the words of one former American official. The surge in attacks has provided the clearest sign yet that Afghan resentment of foreigners is becoming unmanageable, and American officials have expressed worries about its disruptive effects on the training mission that is the core of the American withdrawal plan for 2014. . . .
"But behind it all, many senior coalition and Afghan officials are now concluding that after nearly 12 years of war, the view of foreigners held by many Afghans has come to mirror that of the Taliban. Hope has turned into hatred, and some will find a reason to act on those feelings.
"'A great percentage of the insider attacks have the enemy narrative — the narrative that the infidels have to be driven out — somewhere inside of them, but they aren't directed by the enemy,' said a senior coalition officer, who asked not to be identified because of Afghan and American sensitivities about the attacks."
In other words, more than a decade of occupying and brutalizing that country has turned large swaths of the population into the "Taliban", to the extent that the "Taliban" means: Afghans willing to use violence to force the US and its allies out of their country. As always, the US - through the very policies of aggression and militarism justified in the name of terrorism - is creating the very "terrorists" those polices are supposedly designed to combat. It's a pure and perfect system of self-perpetuation.
Exactly the same thing is happening in Yemen, where nothing is more effective at driving Yemenis into the arms of al-Qaida than the rapidly escalated drone attacks under Obama. This morning, the Times reported that US air strikes in Yemen are carried out in close cooperation with the air force of Saudi Arabia, which will only exacerbate that problem. Indeed, virtually every person accused of plotting to target the US with terrorist attacks in last several years has expressly cited increasing US violence, aggression and militarism in the Muslim world as the cause.
There's no question that this "war" will continue indefinitely. There is no question that US actions are the cause of that, the gasoline that fuels the fire. The only question - and it's becoming less of a question for me all the time - is whether this endless war is the intended result of US actions or just an unwanted miscalculation.
It's increasingly hard to make the case that it's the latter. The US has long known, and its own studies have emphatically concluded, that "terrorism" is motivated not by a "hatred of our freedoms" but by US policy and aggression in the Muslim world. This causal connection is not news to the US government. Despite this - or, more accurately, because of it - they continue with these policies.
One of the most difficult endeavors is to divine the motives of other people (divining our own motives is difficult enough). That becomes even more difficult when attempting to discern the motives not of a single actor but a collection of individuals with different motives and interests ("the US government").
But what one can say for certain is that there is zero reason for US officials to want an end to the war on terror, and numerous and significant reasons why they would want it to continue. It's always been the case that the power of political officials is at its greatest, its most unrestrained, in a state of war. Cicero, two thousand years ago, warned that "In times of war, the law falls silent" (Inter arma enim silent leges). John Jay, in Federalist No. 4, warned that as a result of that truth, "nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it . . . for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans."
If you were a US leader, or an official of the National Security State, or a beneficiary of the private military and surveillance industries, why would you possibly want the war on terror to end? That would be the worst thing that could happen. It's that war that generates limitless power, impenetrable secrecy, an unquestioning citizenry, and massive profit.
Just this week, a federal judge ruled that the Obama administration need not respond to the New York Times and the ACLU's mere request to disclose the government's legal rationale for why the President believes he can target US citizens for assassination without due process. Even while recognizing how perverse her own ruling was - "The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me" and it imposes "a veritable Catch-22" - the federal judge nonetheless explained that federal courts have constructed such a protective shield around the US government in the name of terrorism that it amounts to an unfettered license to violate even the most basic rights: "I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret" (emphasis added).
Why would anyone in the US government or its owners have any interest in putting an end to this sham bonanza of power and profit called "the war on terror"? Johnson is right that there must be an end to this war imminently, and Maddow is right that the failure to do so will render all the due-process-free and lawless killing and imprisoning and invading and bombing morally indefensible and historically unforgivable.
But the notion that the US government is even entertaining putting an end to any of this is a pipe dream, and the belief that they even want to is fantasy. They're preparing for more endless war; their actions are fueling that war; and they continue to reap untold benefits from its continuation. Only outside compulsion, from citizens, can make an end to all of this possible.
Post edited by Byrnzie on
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unsung
I stopped by on March 7 2024. First time in many years, had to update payment info. Hope all is well. Politicians suck. Bye. Posts: 9,487
I fucking love that Ruby quote ... the part about the Kennedy assassination where he is making it EXTRAORDINARILY CLEAR that he was ORDERED by "those in power" to kill Oswald (and if you look at the theatrical circumstances of the Oswald murder itself, you already knew this, without his say so) and that the reason for the murder of both Oswald AND Kennedy was related to deep-politics ... BUT I HAVE ***NEVER*** SEEN THE BACK HALF OF THAT QUOTE.
***What a Fucking Bombshell ...and What a Fucking Context For It***
I mean, fucking truly.
It FRAMES THE ENTIRE JFK ASSASSINATION.
That quote, now that i have seen it in full,
it almost becomes the ULTIMATE blurb regarding the events. It says EVERYTHING you need to know:
The Part I've Read And Seen Repeatedly (damning enough on it's own):
“Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred or my motives. The people that had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in will never let the true facts come above board to the world."
THE REAL FUCKING KNITTY GRITTY (the goddamn bombshell):
"Gentlemen, I want to tell you the truth, but I cannot tell it here. If you want a fair shake out of me you have to take me to Washington. I tell you that a whole new form of government is going to take over the country and I know I won’t live to see you another time.” - Jack Ruby (on JFK, and apparently the NWO)
***THANKS FOR THAT, DUSTIN***
!!!
If I was to smile and I held out my hand
If I opened it now would you not understand?
I fucking love that Ruby quote ... the part about the Kennedy assassination where he is making it EXTRAORDINARILY CLEAR that he was ORDERED by "those in power" to kill Oswald (and if you look at the theatrical circumstances of the Oswald murder itself, you already knew this, without his say so) and that the reason for the murder of both Oswald AND Kennedy was related to deep-politics ... BUT I HAVE ***NEVER*** SEEN THE BACK HALF OF THAT QUOTE.
***What a Fucking Bombshell ...and What a Fucking Context For It***
I mean, fucking truly.
It FRAMES THE ENTIRE JFK ASSASSINATION.
That quote, now that i have seen it in full,
it almost becomes the ULTIMATE blurb regarding the events. It says EVERYTHING you need to know:
The Part I've Read And Seen Repeatedly (damning enough on it's own):
“Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred or my motives. The people that had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in will never let the true facts come above board to the world."
THE REAL FUCKING KNITTY GRITTY (the goddamn bombshell):
"Gentlemen, I want to tell you the truth, but I cannot tell it here. If you want a fair shake out of me you have to take me to Washington. I tell you that a whole new form of government is going to take over the country and I know I won’t live to see you another time.” - Jack Ruby (on JFK, and apparently the NWO)
***THANKS FOR THAT, DUSTIN***
!!!
You're welcome! Took a whie to write, but I finally got it where it needed to be for publication. Glad you enjoyed. Keep posting your stuff, i'll keep reading. I always enjoy.
"All I Ever Knew" available now in print and digital formats at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and iBooks.
Here's a thought I always have when reading that speech by Eisenhower where he "warns' against the military industrial complex...was he able to stop/prevent or otherwise put an end to this complex? Most assuredly, this is a significant problem in the US and warning against it was one thing but participating in it is something else altogether which I believe that he, at least to a certain extent. I know that was not the gist of your article(which was really great BTW) but since it was in there I thought I would throw that thought out
Are we getting something out of this all-encompassing trip?
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
Comments
Why I'm suing the US government to protect internet freedom
The NDAA means the US military can put anyone under suspicion of being a terror threat and detain them for ever
Birgitta Jónsdóttir
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 18 April 2012
Freedom for most people is something sacred, and many have been willing to sacrifice their lives for it. It is not just another word, for we measure the health of our democracies by the standard of freedom. We use it to measure our happiness and prosperity. Sadly, freedom of information, expression and speech is being eroded gradually without people paying much attention to it. Freedom of movement is permitted within certain zones, freedom of reading is disappearing, and the right to privacy is dwindling with the increased surveillance of our every move.
When the world wide web came into being, it was an unrestricted, free flowing world of creativity, connectivity and close encounters of the internet kind. It was as if the collective consciousness had taken on material (yet virtual!) form and people soon learned to use it to work, play and gather. Today's social and democratic reform is born and bred online where people can freely exchange views and knowledge. Some of us old-school internet freedom fighters understood this value way before the web became such a part of our daily lives. One of them is John Perry Barlow, who in 1996 wrote a Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in a response to an attempt to legalise restrictions on this brand new world. In it he declares: "Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather."
Barlow inspired me and others to create the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), a parliamentary proposal unanimously approved by the Icelandic parliament in 2010, tasking the government to make Iceland a safe haven for freedom of information and expression, where privacy online would be as sacred and guarded as it is in the real world. The spirit of IMMI is in stark contrast with the serious attacks we are currently faced with. We have legal monsters like Acta, Sopa, Pipa and now Cispa; we have anti-terrorist acts abused to tear these liberties apart; we have armies of corporate lawyers scrutinising every bit of news prior to it getting out to us before we ever get to know the real stories that should remain in the public domain.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The US government legally hacks into other nations' parliamentary private social media data because it is stored on servers originating in the US, as in my Twitter case. The infamous EU data retention law is making us all into terrorist subjects by default, and now we have the newest addition in a dangerous cocktail of erosion of civil liberties online with the offline reality: meet the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), also known as the Homeland Battlefield Act. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes it thus:
"For the first time in American history, we have a law authorising the worldwide and indefinite military detention of people captured far from any battlefield. The NDAA has no temporal or geographic limitations. It is completely at odds with our values, violates the constitution, and corrodes our nation's commitment to the rule of law."
Since the US department of justice is ploughing my private data and WikiLeaks (whom I volunteered for in 2010 by co-producing Collateral Murder) are defined by the US vice-president as cyberterrorists, I felt under direct threat when NDAA was passed. I have not been able to travel to the US for more than a year under advice from the Icelandic state department. The only way for me to go is on a UN visa (the same kind as Gaddafi and Hussein got when going to the UN) when I plan to attend the UN assembly later this year. Basically what NDAA means is that the US military can put anyone, anywhere under the suspicion of being a terror threat or an associate and detain you for ever, without you having access to a lawyer or a court. So I joined Chris Hedges, Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg and other activists https://www.stopndaa.org/ in suing the United States government to stop the implementation of the NDAA. Naomi Wolf was kind enough to read my testimony at a US court last month, since I could not be there in person.
The good news is that cyberspace is full of hacktivists and our offline world has a growing Occupy movement, inspiring all of us into action, co-creating a different reality in the spirit of a true online and offline freedom.
Hard National Security Choices
Court Documents in Hedges et al v. Barack Obama
By Raffaela Wakeman
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Yesterday we mentioned that a suit had been filed in the Southern District of New York by a number of commentators and public figures, arguing that the NDAA’s detention provisions will apply to them in their “daily professional work” and that they could be detained under the provisions.
The plaintiffs include Christopher Hedges, Daniel Ellsberg, Jennifer Bolen, Noam Chomsky, Alexa O’Brien, U.S. Day of Rage, Kai Wargalla, and the Hon. Brigitta Jonsdottir (a member of parliament in Iceland). They’ve even got a website dedicated to their cause, which describes this initial lawsuit as “Round One”:
Round One is a group of individuals who have stepped forward because we have reason to believe we face the potential for serious harm under the NDAA. However, while the language of this law is so broad and vague, it could affect anyone. For this reason, In Round Two, we will be opening this lawsuit up to the entire US public and citizens of other nations. Then, you can either sign up to publicly support this lawsuit, or consider becoming an actual plaintiff. We are offering both options because we need to make sure our legal case is as strong as possible. More info soon, so stay tuned!
We’ve pulled together all the court documents that have been filed so far, including the complaint, the plaintiffs’ initial brief in support of the motion for a temporary restraining order as well as their supplemental brief on standing, the government’s memo in opposition to the injunction, and the declarations of Kai Wargalla, Alexa O’Brien, and Brigitta Jonsdottir.
The plaintiffs have two main arguments, which they summarize:
The Act improperly authorizes that civilians in the United States be detained indefinitely by the military, that they be tried by military commission or military court and that they may be subject to removal to other jurisdictions in violation of the Amendments V and VI of the Constitution.
The Act fails to give reasonable notice of the acts and conduct that will render a person liable to military detention and is overbroad thereby chilling and impinging upon protexted expressive and associative acts.
The government summarizes its counterargument in the following way:
Plaintiffs’ challenge to section 1021 must be rejected. Properly understood, section 1021 merely restates the detention authority that the government already had under the AUMF. In the statute’s own words, it “affirms” the AUMF’s detention authority while expressly not “expand[ing]” it, and defines those “covered persons” who may be detained in terms no more broad than the government has advanced before the courts—and that the courts have upheld—for years.
Based on their misunderstandings of the law, plaintiffs now purport to fear that they will be subjected to indefinite military detention simply for their political views and expression. But those fears are baseless. Plaintiffs do not assert that they or anyone similarly situated have ever been detained or threatened with detention under the identical preexisting authority provided by the AUMF. Nor can they demonstrate that their subjective fears are reasonable in light of the government’s implementation of its detention authority under the AUMF. For those reasons, plaintiffs lack standing, and therefore are unable to demonstrate a likelihood of success in this action, irreparable harm, or a balance of the equities involved that tips in their favor. Plaintiff’s motion for a preliminary injunction, therefore, should be denied.
Southern District of New York Judge Katherine B. Forrest has not yet issued a decision on the plaintiff’s motion.
How the National Security Agency has gone rogue
The NSA, which dwarfs the CIA, is so powerful that those with oversight are too intimidated to check its incursions on liberty
Amy Goodman
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 26 April 2012
Three targeted Americans: a career government intelligence official, a filmmaker and a hacker. None of these US citizens was charged with a crime, but they have been tracked, surveilled, detained – sometimes at gunpoint – and interrogated, with no access to a lawyer. Each remains resolute in standing up to the increasing government crackdown on dissent.
The intelligence official: William Binney worked for almost 40 years at the secretive National Security Agency (NSA), the US spy agency that dwarfs the CIA. As technical director of the NSA's world geopolitical and military analysis reporting group, Binney told me he was tasked to "see how we could solve collection, analysis and reporting on military and geopolitical issues all around the world, every country in the world."
Throughout the 1990s, the NSA developed a massive eavesdropping system codenamed ThinThread, which, Binney says, maintained crucial protections on the privacy of US citizens demanded by the US constitution. He recalled, "After 9/11, all the wraps came off for NSA," as massive domestic spying became the norm. He resigned on 31 October 2001. Along with several other NSA officials, Binney reported his concerns to Congress and to the Department of Defense.
Then, in 2007, as then Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was being questioned on Capitol Hill about the very domestic spying to which Binney objected, a dozen FBI agents charged into his house, guns drawn. They forced aside his son and found Binney, a diabetic amputee, in the shower. They pointed their guns at his head, then led him to his back porch and interrogated him. Three others were raided that morning. Binney called the FBI raid "retribution and intimidation so we didn't go to the judiciary committee in the Senate and tell them, 'Well, here's what Gonzales didn't tell you, OK.'" Binney was never charged with any crime.
The filmmaker: Laura Poitras is an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker, whose recent films include My Country, My Country, about the US occupation of Iraq, and The Oath, which was filmed in Yemen. Since 2006, Poitras has been detained and questioned at airports at least 40 times. She has had her computer and reporter's notebooks confiscated and presumably copied, without a warrant. The most recent time, 5 April, she took notes during her detention. The agents told her to stop, as they considered her pen a weapon. She told me:
"I feel like I can't talk about the work that I do in my home, in my place of work, on my telephone, and sometimes in my country. So the chilling effect is huge. It's enormous."
The hacker: Jacob Appelbaum works as a computer security researcher for the nonprofit organization the Tor Project, which is a free software package that allows people to browse the internet anonymously, evading government surveillance. Tor was actually created by the US Navy, and is now developed and maintained by Appelbaum and his colleagues. Tor is used by dissidents around the world to communicate over the internet. Tor also serves as the main way that the controversial WikiLeaks website protects those who release documents to it.
Appelbaum has volunteered for WikiLeaks, leading to intense US government surveillance. Appelbaum spoke in place of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, at a conference called Hackers on Planet Earth, or Hope, as people feared Assange would be arrested. He started his talk by saying:
"Hello to all my friends and fans in domestic and international surveillance. I'm here today because I believe that we can make a better world."
He has been detained at least a dozen times at airports:
"I was put into a special room, where they frisked me, put me up against the wall … Another one held my wrists … They implied that if I didn't make a deal with them, that I'd be sexually assaulted in prison … They took my cellphones, they took my laptop. They wanted, essentially, to ask me questions about the Iraq war, the Afghan war, what I thought politically."
I asked Binney if he felt that the NSA has copies of every email sent in the US. He replied, "I believe they have most of them, yes." Binney said two US senators, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, have expressed concern, but have not spoken out, as, Binney says, they would lose their seats on the Senate select committee on intelligence.
Meanwhile, Congress is set to vote on the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or Cispa. Proponents of internet freedom are fighting the bill, which they say will legalize what the NSA is secretly doing already. Before voting on Cispa, members of Congress, fond of quoting the country's founders, should recall these words of Benjamin Franklin:
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.
The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require the firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance.
In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned.
The FBI general counsel's office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.
In addition to the FBI's legislative proposal, there are indications that the Federal Communications Commission is considering reinterpreting CALEA to demand that products that allow video or voice chat over the Internet -- from Skype to Google Hangouts to Xbox Live -- include surveillance backdoors to help the FBI with its "Going Dark" program. CALEA applies to technologies that are a "substantial replacement" for the telephone system.
(More in the Article/Report)
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57428067-83/fbi-we-need-wiretap-ready-web-sites-now/
Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a law-breaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. - Louis Brandeis
My gulag came with complementary internet service!
If I opened it now would you not understand?
Thanks for the advice, oh wise one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism
Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is when a government aims to control the political, economic, social, intellectual, and cultural lives of its citizens.[2] Totalitarian regimes stay in political power through an all-encompassing propaganda campaign, which is disseminated through the state-controlled mass media, a single party that is often marked by political repression, personality cultism, control over the economy, regulation and restriction of speech, mass surveillance, and widespread use of terror
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/totalitarianism
to·tal·i·tar·i·an·ism
2. absolute control by the state or a governing branch of a highly centralized institution.
Hmm, a single party, which is effectively what the U.S has had for decades, under the pretense of having two parties, although both are essentially under the total control of big business and the elites.
Yes, yes, and yes
No worries, big brother is watching you.
Well played
And that pretty much sums it up.. Pretty damn sad. By the time the masses wake up it will be to late..
Have the masses ever been awake?
Yeah I think more people are engaged now than they-we used to be.. At the same time though I think a lot of people feel hopeless and they can't make a difference.
The internet certainly has been helpful that way.
I suppose technology might be partly responsible for that as well. (I'm thinking about your Big Bro streetlights.)
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 37812.html
Phillip Knightley: When is a terror threat not a terror threat? Let's ask a man called Felix...
All intelligence services rely on convincing the public there is a monster at large waiting to grab them
Phillip Knightley
Friday 11 May 2012
The British undercover agent in the underpants bomb plot that has emerged so sensationally in recent days, was recruited using a technique pioneered by the founder of the KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky. And Dzerzhinsky would be looking down from wherever he is now and smiling with satisfaction at the latest twists of an episode in which Western intelligence agencies have apparently foiled a plan to attack a US-bound plane.
Dzerzhinsky took over anti-terrorism duties in the newly-emerged Russia at the end of the First World War when the country was riven with revolt and violence. He realised that he had no chance of identifying all the terrorist threats and those planning to perpetrate them. Instead he developed a questionable technique that has become part of espionage theory throughout the international intelligence community: you lure the terrorist to you.
When the story of the foiled bomb plot first broke it seemed too good to be true. The security authorities had intercepted a man carrying a supposedly undetectable bomb which was being examined at the FBI laboratories in Quantico, Virginia. This suggested an amazing piece of intelligence work. What had led the authorities to the man? Why were they suspicious of him? Had they been tipped off? As details emerged it became apparent that the action was rather more straightforward.
In the tradition of Dzerzhinski, the Saudi intelligence service had apparently "dangled" one of its agents in front of known al-Qa'ida members hoping for a "bite". To make the bait attractive, the agent, it later emerged, was a British passport holder. Al-Qa'ida was fooled and handed him the bomb with instructions to smuggle it on a plane bound for the United States. He handed it over to the Saudis. It seems likely that the Saudis passed on the information the agent had gathered on al-Qa'ida to enable the US to mount a drone attack on an al-Qaida leader in Yemen. The Saudis are thought to have planned more operations for its star undercover agent but were forced to abandon them when the story leaked to the Western media. Thus espionage history repeated itself, and echoes can be heard of the most famous of all counter-espionage operations in the Soviet Union, the Trust.
The Trust appeared to be a huge anti-Bolshevik organisation working from Moscow to overthrow the Communists and reverse the revolution. Instead,Dzerzhinski used it to identify anti-communists. All he needed to do was set up the organisation and wait to see who joined it. He could then choose when to roll it up and arrest its members or whether to let it run in the hope of revealing bigger prey.
In intelligence circles the Trust became a textbook operation and its principles copied worldwide. But to be most effective required a ruthlessness that Western services often felt unable to carry out. For instance, if the authenticity of a front organisation was questioned, the KGB did not hesitate to initiate a terrorist incident to reinforce the organisation's reputation. So the Trust would plant bombs that would kill innocent people just so that possible recruits would think it a genuine organisation.
In the West, a front organisation could also run into legal difficulties when it came to winding it up and arresting those who had been tempted to join. Judges wanted convincing that the authority running the operation had not been tempted to act as agents provocateurs and had provoked people into acts that they would not otherwise have considered. This is why the main user of front organisations was at first the British Customs in drug busts rather than the Security Service, MI5, or the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, the thinking being that the courts would be more sympathetic if a huge haul of heroin was involved and not a bewildered possible terrorist.
British Customs actually advertised for recruits, placing notices in Pakistani journals asking for young Pakistanis going on holiday to Pakistan to contact the British High Commission if they were approached when on holiday to courier drugs back to Britain. Those who did were then instructed to deliver the drugs to the High Commission which took over their transport back to the UK where the Pakistani who had been recruited would deliver them as instructed. At the handover the Customs would pounce and arrest the ringleaders. The headlines in the British press would trumpet: "Huge drugs bust. Smugglers' plot foiled". But as evidence in court showed, the whole plot had been initiated by British Customs and the drugs brought into Britain by Customs themselves.
The difficulty the British Security Service MI5 has faced in its anti-terrorism operations is that it was created to face a Communist threat, and terrorism was at first beyond its ken. Give it a communist plot and it had files, informers and precedents to work with. But tasked after 9/11 with tacking possible terrorist cells in Britain it did not know where to start. Then someone remembered Felix Dzerzhinsky. Subsequent "successes" in fighting terrorism have sprung from operations modelled on the Trust.
But they are risky. How far can an undercover officer go in suggesting a terrorist operation before he risks a judge eventually ruling that he was acting as an agent provocateur? Are the violent sentiments of a member of the group real or just a fantasy? In most counter-terrorism operations of this nature there always remains the suspicion that the accused would not have acted in the way they did if not encouraged to do so by the undercover officer.
All intelligence services rely on convincing the public that there is a monster out there in the big wild world waiting to grab them. Only an alert intelligence service can protect them and keep them safe. All intelligence services promote this view which is what gives them more in common with each other than the governments that employ them. Genuine risk assessments of the dangers of terrorism tend to be played down because they show that the chances of an ordinary citizen dying in a terrorist attack is about the same as dying from a fall in the bath.
Phillip Knightley's books include 'The Second Oldest Profession', a history of espionage
Once again, social media proves to be more powerful then any tool the government could possibly realize ...
Twitter Gives Police Information on Source of Threatening Tweet
Twitter has now turned over information it had initially denied to NYC police about the user whose account issued threats of an attack "just like in Aurora" on the Broadway theater where Mike Tyson's one-man show is playing.
The New York Police Department subpoenaed Twitter Tuesday for the user's identity after the social media giant refused authorities' emergency request for the information.
"This s**t ain't no joke yo I'm serious people are gonna die just like in aurora," the user tweeted Aug. 1.
Police officials won't comment on whether they have spoken to the account's owner or the potential for any attack. Police said they have some indication of the direction their investigation might take, based on the information Twitter provided, but would not disclose it at this time.
The Twitter user's account seems to have been suspended because an error message now appears where the account was active as recently as Tuesday evening.
A few days before the Aug. 1 tweet, the unidentified person posted that he or she knew that the theater left its exit doors unlocked and was going to plan the shooting "step by step."
http://news.yahoo.com/twitter-gives-police-information-source-threatening-tweet-143151322--abc-news-topstories.html
Sha la la la i'm in love with a jersey girl
I love you forever and forever
Adel 03 Melb 1 03 LA 2 06 Santa Barbara 06 Gorge 1 06 Gorge 2 06 Adel 1 06 Adel 2 06 Camden 1 08 Camden 2 08 Washington DC 08 Hartford 08
Actually, B
Stumbled on this recently:
Brzezinsky at CFR posits mass global political awakening as second of two major political shifts of the age ... at 2min apps.
He actually then gripes that this awakening is causing political obstructions to important globalist policy efforts. Aww, dangnabbit. You mean you lie to man for ages, and then he wakes up to hate you because you never bothered to explain yourselves to him? Huh. Who'd a thunk. Der dee der.
If I opened it now would you not understand?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ss-johnson
The 'war on terror' - by design - can never end
As the Pentagon's former top lawyer urges that the war be viewed as finite, the US moves in the opposite direction
Glenn Greenwald
guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 January 2013
Last month, outgoing pentagon general counsel Jeh Johnson gave a speech at the Oxford Union and said that the War on Terror must, at some point, come to an end:
"Now that efforts by the US military against al-Qaida are in their 12th year, we must also ask ourselves: How will this conflict end? . . . . 'War' must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs. We must not accept the current conflict, and all that it entails, as the 'new normal.' Peace must be regarded as the norm toward which the human race continually strives. . . .
"There will come a tipping point at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaida and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, that al-Qaida will be effectively destroyed."
On Thursday night, MSNBC's Rachel Maddow interviewed Johnson, and before doing so, she opined as follows:
"When does this thing we are in now end? And if it does not have an end — and I'm not speaking as a lawyer here, I am just speaking as a citizen who feels morally accountable for my country's actions — if it does not have an end, then morally speaking it does not seem like it is a war. And then, our country is killing people and locking them up outside the traditional judicial system in a way I think we maybe cannot be forgiven for."
It is precisely the intrinsic endlessness of this so-called "war" that is its most corrupting and menacing attribute, for the reasons Maddow explained. But despite the happy talk from Johnson, it is not ending soon. By its very terms, it cannot. And all one has to do is look at the words and actions of the Obama administration to know this.
In October, the Washington Post's Greg Miller reported that the administration was instituting a "disposition matrix" to determine how terrorism suspects will be disposed of, all based on this fact: "among senior Obama administration officials, there is broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade." As Miller puts it: "That timeline suggests that the United States has reached only the midpoint of what was once known as the global war on terrorism."
The polices adopted by the Obama administration just over the last couple of years leave no doubt that they are accelerating, not winding down, the war apparatus that has been relentlessly strengthened over the last decade. In the name of the War on Terror, the current president has diluted decades-old Miranda warnings; codified a new scheme of indefinite detention on US soil; plotted to relocate Guantanamo to Illinois; increased secrecy, repression and release-restrictions at the camp; minted a new theory of presidential assassination powers even for US citizens; renewed the Bush/Cheney warrantless eavesdropping framework for another five years, as well as the Patriot Act, without a single reform; and just signed into law all new restrictions on the release of indefinitely held detainees.
Does that sound to you like a government anticipating the end of the War on Terror any time soon? Or does it sound like one working feverishly to make their terrorism-justified powers of detention, surveillance, killing and secrecy permanent? About all of this, the ACLU's Executive Director, Anthony Romero, provided the answer on Thursday: "President Obama has utterly failed the first test of his second term, even before inauguration day. His signature means indefinite detention without charge or trial, as well as the illegal military commissions, will be extended."
There's a good reason US officials are assuming the "War on Terror" will persist indefinitely: namely, their actions ensure that this occurs. The New York Times' Matthew Rosenberg this morning examines what the US government seems to regard as the strange phenomenon of Afghan soldiers attacking US troops with increasing frequency, and in doing so, discovers a shocking reality: people end up disliking those who occupy and bomb their country:
"Such insider attacks, by Afghan security forces on their Western allies, became 'the signature violence of 2012', in the words of one former American official. The surge in attacks has provided the clearest sign yet that Afghan resentment of foreigners is becoming unmanageable, and American officials have expressed worries about its disruptive effects on the training mission that is the core of the American withdrawal plan for 2014. . . .
"But behind it all, many senior coalition and Afghan officials are now concluding that after nearly 12 years of war, the view of foreigners held by many Afghans has come to mirror that of the Taliban. Hope has turned into hatred, and some will find a reason to act on those feelings.
"'A great percentage of the insider attacks have the enemy narrative — the narrative that the infidels have to be driven out — somewhere inside of them, but they aren't directed by the enemy,' said a senior coalition officer, who asked not to be identified because of Afghan and American sensitivities about the attacks."
In other words, more than a decade of occupying and brutalizing that country has turned large swaths of the population into the "Taliban", to the extent that the "Taliban" means: Afghans willing to use violence to force the US and its allies out of their country. As always, the US - through the very policies of aggression and militarism justified in the name of terrorism - is creating the very "terrorists" those polices are supposedly designed to combat. It's a pure and perfect system of self-perpetuation.
Exactly the same thing is happening in Yemen, where nothing is more effective at driving Yemenis into the arms of al-Qaida than the rapidly escalated drone attacks under Obama. This morning, the Times reported that US air strikes in Yemen are carried out in close cooperation with the air force of Saudi Arabia, which will only exacerbate that problem. Indeed, virtually every person accused of plotting to target the US with terrorist attacks in last several years has expressly cited increasing US violence, aggression and militarism in the Muslim world as the cause.
There's no question that this "war" will continue indefinitely. There is no question that US actions are the cause of that, the gasoline that fuels the fire. The only question - and it's becoming less of a question for me all the time - is whether this endless war is the intended result of US actions or just an unwanted miscalculation.
It's increasingly hard to make the case that it's the latter. The US has long known, and its own studies have emphatically concluded, that "terrorism" is motivated not by a "hatred of our freedoms" but by US policy and aggression in the Muslim world. This causal connection is not news to the US government. Despite this - or, more accurately, because of it - they continue with these policies.
One of the most difficult endeavors is to divine the motives of other people (divining our own motives is difficult enough). That becomes even more difficult when attempting to discern the motives not of a single actor but a collection of individuals with different motives and interests ("the US government").
But what one can say for certain is that there is zero reason for US officials to want an end to the war on terror, and numerous and significant reasons why they would want it to continue. It's always been the case that the power of political officials is at its greatest, its most unrestrained, in a state of war. Cicero, two thousand years ago, warned that "In times of war, the law falls silent" (Inter arma enim silent leges). John Jay, in Federalist No. 4, warned that as a result of that truth, "nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it . . . for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans."
If you were a US leader, or an official of the National Security State, or a beneficiary of the private military and surveillance industries, why would you possibly want the war on terror to end? That would be the worst thing that could happen. It's that war that generates limitless power, impenetrable secrecy, an unquestioning citizenry, and massive profit.
Just this week, a federal judge ruled that the Obama administration need not respond to the New York Times and the ACLU's mere request to disclose the government's legal rationale for why the President believes he can target US citizens for assassination without due process. Even while recognizing how perverse her own ruling was - "The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me" and it imposes "a veritable Catch-22" - the federal judge nonetheless explained that federal courts have constructed such a protective shield around the US government in the name of terrorism that it amounts to an unfettered license to violate even the most basic rights: "I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret" (emphasis added).
Why would anyone in the US government or its owners have any interest in putting an end to this sham bonanza of power and profit called "the war on terror"? Johnson is right that there must be an end to this war imminently, and Maddow is right that the failure to do so will render all the due-process-free and lawless killing and imprisoning and invading and bombing morally indefensible and historically unforgivable.
But the notion that the US government is even entertaining putting an end to any of this is a pipe dream, and the belief that they even want to is fantasy. They're preparing for more endless war; their actions are fueling that war; and they continue to reap untold benefits from its continuation. Only outside compulsion, from citizens, can make an end to all of this possible.
And they still are. Anyone seen Cindy Sheehan lately? Maybe she is out front of Obama's Chicago house protesting and I missed it.
holy SHIT !!!
I fucking love that Ruby quote ... the part about the Kennedy assassination where he is making it EXTRAORDINARILY CLEAR that he was ORDERED by "those in power" to kill Oswald (and if you look at the theatrical circumstances of the Oswald murder itself, you already knew this, without his say so) and that the reason for the murder of both Oswald AND Kennedy was related to deep-politics ... BUT I HAVE ***NEVER*** SEEN THE BACK HALF OF THAT QUOTE.
***What a Fucking Bombshell ...and What a Fucking Context For It***
I mean, fucking truly.
It FRAMES THE ENTIRE JFK ASSASSINATION.
That quote, now that i have seen it in full,
it almost becomes the ULTIMATE blurb regarding the events. It says EVERYTHING you need to know:
The Part I've Read And Seen Repeatedly (damning enough on it's own):
“Everything pertaining to what’s happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred or my motives. The people that had so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive for putting me in the position I’m in will never let the true facts come above board to the world."
THE REAL FUCKING KNITTY GRITTY (the goddamn bombshell):
"Gentlemen, I want to tell you the truth, but I cannot tell it here. If you want a fair shake out of me you have to take me to Washington. I tell you that a whole new form of government is going to take over the country and I know I won’t live to see you another time.” - Jack Ruby (on JFK, and apparently the NWO)
***THANKS FOR THAT, DUSTIN***
!!!
If I opened it now would you not understand?
You're welcome! Took a whie to write, but I finally got it where it needed to be for publication. Glad you enjoyed. Keep posting your stuff, i'll keep reading. I always enjoy.
Here's a thought I always have when reading that speech by Eisenhower where he "warns' against the military industrial complex...was he able to stop/prevent or otherwise put an end to this complex? Most assuredly, this is a significant problem in the US and warning against it was one thing but participating in it is something else altogether which I believe that he, at least to a certain extent. I know that was not the gist of your article(which was really great BTW) but since it was in there I thought I would throw that thought out
Seems my preconceptions are what should have been burned...
I AM MINE