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Shin Bet deports Spain’s most famous clown upon arrival in Israel

Ben Gurion Airport security officials detain Ivan Prado for six hours, accusing the Spanish entertainer of ties with Palestinian terror groups.

Barak Ravid | Haaretz | 09 May 2010

Ivan Prado, the most famous clown in Spain, did not expect to be put on a return flight back to Madrid soon after arriving at Ben-Gurion International Airport late last month, after spending six hours with officials from the Shin Bet security service and the Interior Ministry. The officials accused Prado of having ties to Palestinian terror organizations.

Foreign Ministry officials, meanwhile, say the incident caused grave damage to Israel’s image in Spain.

Prado, director of the International Clown Festival in Galicia, arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport on April 26 with a Spanish national of Arab origin. They planned to go to Ramallah to help organize a similar festival, but at passport control Prado was taken aside by a Shin Bet officer who asked him about his planned visit to the West Bank and about his connections to various Palestinian organizations. He and his female companion were held for six hours, during which they were questioned repeatedly, and their passports were confiscated.

They were sent back to Spain after an Interior Ministry official informed them that they would not be permitted into Israel.

After Prado returned to Madrid he launched a media campaign denouncing Israel and comparing the situation of Palestinians in the West Bank with Jews in Poland.

The incident sparked tension between the Israeli Embassy in Madrid and the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, prompted by questions to the embassy from Spanish journalists and fueled by the diplomats’ anger at the Foreign Ministry’s explanation that Prado was turned away at the airport “for security reasons.”

The Shin Bet issued a statement to Haaretz lacking significant details about the reasons behind the decision. “We recommended to the Interior Ministry to prevent his entry into Israel after the findings of the security check produced suspicions about him,” the statement said. “The man declined to provide complete information to the security people, especially in regard to his links with Palestinian terror organizations.”

May 11, 2010 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Israeli official in LA denounces National Geographic water exhibit

Ma’an -08/05/2010

Bethlehem – Israeli Consul General in Los Angeles Jacob Dayan reportedly sent a letter of complaint to the venue hosting a National Geographic photo exhibition highlighting Israel’s unequal water policy, Israeli media reported on Friday.

The Annenberg Space for Photography exhibit, coinciding with the magazine’s special issue Water: Our Thirsty World, features the works of award-winning photographers looking at water from environmental, social, political and cultural perspectives.

The Consul General voiced complaint over photo captions which include “Israelis relax by the Sea of Galilee, a lake near the Golan Heights that is fed by the Jordan River and that supplies a third of Israel’s fresh water. Since 1967, Israel has blocked Syria’s access to the shoreline,” the Israeli news site Yedioth Aharonot reported.

According to the news site Dayan’s letter said the venue is being used as a political tool to spread lies about Israel’s part in the global effort to provide clean and fresh drinking water, and the exhibit falsely depicts Israel as a country that steals water while its neighbors suffer from a drought. The opposite is true, wrote the consul general.

The original feature published in April 2010 by the National Geographic writes that since occupying the West Bank in 1967, settlements have been supplied water by Mekorot, Israel’s national water authority, “which has drilled 42 deep wells in the West Bank, mainly to supply Israeli cities.”

The article further said according to a 2009 World Bank report, “Israelis use four times as much water per capita as Palestinians, much of it for agriculture. Israel disputes this, arguing that its citizens use only twice as much water and are better at conserving it.”

In contrast, Don Belt writes, West Bank Palestinians “have been largely prevented from digging deep wells of their own, limiting their water access to shallow wells, natural springs, and rainfall that evaporates quickly in the dry desert air.”

When these sources run dry in the summer, experts told Belt, Auja’s Palestinians “have no choice but to purchase water from Israel for about a dollar a cubic yard—in effect buying back the water that’s been taken out from under them by Mekorot’s pumps, which also lower the water table and affect Palestinian springs and wells.”

The three Israeli, Jordanian and Palestinian experts interviewed by Belt were further featured in an a recent IRIN article, in which the environmentalists paint a grim picture of the state of the Jordan River, and urge swift action.

“If immediate action is not taken the River Jordan will run dry by 2011,” Baha Afaneh, Jordanian coordinator for the Jordan River Project of Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME), said at a conference in Amman on 3-4 May.

According to a FOEME report, the once mighty river is now barely a trickle, fed by saline water and sewage from Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority.

“Israel has diverted saline water from springs into the river. Today some 20,000 million cubic metres [of saline water] flow into the river annually,” said Gideon Bromberg, the Israeli director of FOEME.

Some three million cubic meters of untreated sewage per year pours into the river from Beit Shea’an Municipality in Israel, despite the fact that Israel is considered a leading country in the region in terms of sewage treatment, Bromberg said.

In March, four days after an Israeli minister threatened to restrict the West Bank’s water supply, Israeli authorities closed off the main water source used for agriculture in a Jordan Valley village committee members and lawyers said.

May 8, 2010 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Israel’s Stasi watch over Imams

By Jonathan Cook in Jaffa | The National | May 4, 2010

Job interviews for the position of imam at mosques in Israel are conducted not by senior clerics but by the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, a labour tribunal has revealed.

Sheikh Ahmed Abu Ajwa, 36, is fighting the Shin Bet’s refusal to approve his appointment as an imam in a case that has lifted the lid on Israel’s secret surveillance of the country’s Islamic leaders.

At a hearing last month, a senior government official admitted that 60 undercover inspectors were employed effectively as spies to collect information on Muslim clerics, reporting on political opinions they expressed in sermons and relaying gossip about their private lives.

Sheikh Abu Ajwa took his case to the tribunal after the Shin Bet rejected him three years ago as the imam of a mosque in Jaffa, next to Tel Aviv, despite his being the sole candidate. He was told after a security clearance interview that his views were “extremist” and too critical of Israel, even though an imam is not officially defined as a security-related position.

“During one interview with the Shin Bet, they told me they had been collecting information on me since I was 15,” Sheikh Abu Ajwa said.

“I am the first imam ever to challenge the Shin Bet’s role in our appointments. It’s important to win a precedent-setting ruling from the courts to stop this kind of interference.”

Michael Sfard, a human rights lawyer representing Sheikh Abu Ajwa, said that, as far as it could be determined, no similar vetting of rabbis took place before their hiring.

“This sort of surveillance relating to a non-security position like an imam comes straight out of the era of the Stasi police in East Germany or the McCarthy period in the United States,” he said.

The traditional independence of the local Islamic authorities was removed at Israel’s creation in 1948, when the government confiscated almost all waqf property — endowments of land and property used for the benefit of the Palestinian Muslim community — removing the main source of income for clerics, the Islamic courts and charitable services.

According to experts, as much as a fifth of Palestine’s cultivated land was waqf property before 1948. Israel passed most of it to Zionist organisations like the Jewish National Fund or sold it to developers.

Responsibility for hundreds of mosques, cemeteries and other holy sites, meanwhile, was handed either to the religious affairs ministry or to Islamic boards of trustees appointed by the government.

Today, most imams and all Islamic judges must submit to a security clearance interview before being awarded a state salary.

Israel’s Arab minority, one fifth of the population, have long charged that many of its Muslim leaders are little more than government placemen, whose Islamic learning takes second place to their co-operation with the authorities.

Sabri Jiryis, a historian of Israel’s early years, has noted that the boards of trustees repeatedly rubber-stamped government decisions to sell off Islamic property to developers. Most notoriously Jaffa’s board approved in 1971 selling an Islamic cemetery in Tel Aviv on which the Hilton hotel was built.

Sheikh Abu Ajwa said: “In Jaffa, the government appointed many clerics because they had proved their loyalty, though not to other Muslims. They sold off our property — but you can’t sell what belongs to Allah.”

Jaffa, which was once the commercial capital of Palestine, today has a population of nearly 50,000 residents, of which two thirds are Jewish and the rest Muslim.

The sheikh has been preaching at the seafront Jabalya mosque, one of six in the town, since he was 19, making him reportedly the youngest person to serve as an imam in Israel’s history. He qualified as an imam at an Islamic college in the Israeli Arab city of Umm al Fahm in 1998.

The local community universally backed him as the new imam when his predecessor retired three years ago, but he cannot be officially recognised, and is ineligible for a salary, without the interior ministry’s approval.

As part of his application, he was interviewed by a Shin Bet officer named “Dror” who, he said, waved at him a folder of confidential information collected by undercover inspectors. “We will decide who is the next imam,” Dror told him, according to Sheikh Abu Ajwa. The sheikh was asked mainly about his political opinions and demonstrations he had attended.

The Shin Bet’s assessment, revealed to the tribunal, was that Sheikh Abu Ajwa’s appointment “may jeopardise security and peace in Jaffa”. In addition, the agency told the Haaretz newspaper that the sheikh “has had a long involvement in hostile activity, which manifested itself in incitement against the state and its Jewish citizens”.

Sheikh Abu Ajwa said this was a reference to his position as the leader in Jaffa of the popular northern wing of the Islamic Movement. Its leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, has raised the hackles of Jewish officials both by running a campaign warning of Israel’s intentions to take over the Al Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem and by promoting a boycott of parliamentary elections.

The head of the Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, warned in 2007 that his agency’s role was to prevent any activities, including democratic ones, that worked against the interests of a Jewish state.

Yaakov Salameh, the head of the religious minorities department at the interior ministry, told the tribunal last month that his inspectors collected information on Muslim religious leaders, including rumours about their private lives, such as whether they had had an affair or beat their children. The information was then handed to the Shin Bet, which assessed whether they were suitable to be appointed.

Mr Sfard said it was an “extraordinary” admission, given that under Israeli law the criminal records of candidates for religious appointments could only be considered if the applicant agreed to the information being handed over.

David Baker, a spokesman for the prime minister’s office, which is responsible for the Shin Bet, refused to comment on whether the appointment of rabbis followed the same procedures as those for imams.

Sheikh Abu Ajwa observed that many rabbis, particularly those in the settlements, said “very extreme things but no one spies on them. In fact, they have full government support.”

He admitted he was outspoken in his sermons, but said he had never broken any laws and never advocated violence. “I talk about our Palestinian identity and criticise the policies of the state in its treatment of us as a minority,” he said. “These are very sensitive things that they want to prevent us from talking about.”

During one Shin Bet interview, he said, he had been told: “We know everything about you, we are always watching you.”

The goal of such interviews was often to recruit Muslim clerics to become informers themselves, he added.

May 4, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , | Leave a comment

Obama’s Favorite Weapons

By Nat Hentoff | CATO | April 14, 2010

With President Barack Obama’s firm approval, CIA pilotless Predator and Reaper drone planes — firing Hellfire missiles — are killing actual and suspected high-level terrorists. As Jane Perlez reports (New York Times, April 4), “flying overhead, sometimes four at a time” in Pakistan, the drones are also engaged in targeted assassinations in Afghanistan. It has been reported — but the CIA and Obama give us no facts — that in his first year, Obama has authorized more of these strikes than in President George W. Bush’s eight years.

Operated half a world away by remote control in Langley, VA., and outside of Las Vegas, the deaths sometimes unintentionally include those of innocent civilians, and are criticized here and in the targeted countries as “extra-judicial executions.”

Amid the growing controversy, State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh insists that these drone attacks “comply with all applicable law, including the (international) laws of war.” (“Legality of Drone Strikes Still in Question,” InterPress Service, April 3).

The United States, he explains, “is in armed conflict with al-Qaida as well as the Taliban and associated forces in response to the horrific attacks of 9/11.”

Koh, when he was Dean of Yale Law School, was a strong critic of the legal rationalizations of the Bush-Cheney war on terrorism. He is now part of what I call “The Obama Metamorphosis,” along with such other vehement opponents of the previous administration’s “dark side” as Attorney General Eric Holder and CIA Director Leon Panetta. These former critics are now loyal members of the Obama team.

There is some concern within the Obama administration that the drone planes’ corollary termination of civilians may aid our enemies’ recruiting efforts, as did the Bush torture policies at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. But Koh claims it is required that “the damage to civilians caused by those attacks … not be excessive.”

However, The Economist in England speaks of “a moral quandary” when “drone attacks often kill civilians,” pointing to “June 23, 2009, for example, an attack on a funeral in South Waziristan” (in northwest Pakistan, bordering on Afghanistan.) Those Hellfire missiles “killed 80 non-combatants.”

Does Koh regard that “damage” as “excessive?” Does Panetta? The ACLU has filed a Freedom of Information Act request for answers to such questions, along with many other acutely relevant queries on what the Predators and Reapers are doing in our name. As of this writing, there has yet to be a reply to this uncomfortable FOIA request.

The Economist’s report on “remote-control warfare” refers troublingly to an ongoing refinement in automated warfare aimed at answering those here and abroad who are questioning the ethics of this futuristic form of combat. Cited is Ronald Arkin of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing.

He “proposes involving the drone itself — or rather, the software that is used to operate it — in the decision to attack.

“In effect,” the article continues, “he plans to give the machine a conscience.”

Is this science-fiction? As I will demonstrate next week, Arkin is not alone among American high-tech explorers devising non-human target killings in attacks on terrorism. To elaborate on the inventive Arkin approach, “The software conscience that Dr. Arkin and his colleagues have developed is called Ethical Architecture.”

During attacks, the judgment of the automated and autonomous Predator or Reaper drone “may be better than a human’s because it operates so fast and knows so much. And — like a human but unlike most machines — it can learn.” After a strike, this ever-alert machine can indeed learn from other sources whether the damage it caused — including dead civilians — exceeded its intentions.

With this information, a drone with a conscience can more precisely tailor future attacks and instruct other drones on how to more carefully direct their Hellfire missiles. Thereby, these ethical drones can provide support to future American officials defending the use of killer drones by showing how carefully the United States is working to be humane in its self-defense against international terrorism.

On March 23, in testimony before the House National Security subcommittee’s largely pro-drone panel. John Edward Jackson, professor of unmanned systems at the U.S. Naval War College, warned:

“If trends in computer science and robotics engineering continue, it is conceivable that autonomous systems could soon be developed that are capable of making life and death decisions without direct human intervention.” (Dan Froomkin, commondreams.org, March 24).

Another witness, Edward Barrett — director of research for the U.S. Naval Academy’s ethics and military policy think tank at the Stockdale Center — focused on whether these autonomous drones would make waging war too easy as this intensive research on robotic warfare continues.

He asked whether these nonhuman attacks “reduce the vigor with which nonviolent alternatives are pursued, and thus encourage unnecessary — and therefore unjust — wars.”

Added ethicist Edward Barrett: “Would a self-conscious and willful machine choose its own ends?”

Next week: More specific factual information on the active planning to make robotic warfare more “humane” and, indeed, human. It would be very helpful if President Obama would tell us — at a nationally televised press conference — what his own concerns are about this rapidly developing global technology.

Will there be any mention of drones by candidates of either party in the midterm elections?

April 26, 2010 Posted by | Aletho News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | Leave a comment

What happened to “look forward, not backward”?

By Glenn Greenwald | April 16, 2010

The Obama Justice Department today announced that it has secured a ten-felony-count indictment against Thomas Drake, an official with the National Security Agency during the Bush years.  Drake’s indictment, of course, has nothing to do with the criminal surveillance undertaken by the NSA.  Rather, the DOJ alleges “that between approximately February 2006 and November 2007, a newspaper reporter published a series of articles about the NSA,” and it claims “Drake served as a source for many of those articles, including articles that contained classified information.”  In other words, he’s being subjected to what The New York Times’ Scott Shane calls a “highly unusual” prosecution for being a whistle-blower on the Bush era’s sprawling and secretive Surveillance State.  Although the indictment does not specify Drake’s leaks, it is highly likely (as Shane also suggests) that it is based on Drake’s bringing to the public’s attention major failures and cost over-runs with the NSA’s spying programs via leaks to The Baltimore Sun.*

Let’s spend just a moment thinking about what this means.  We’ve known since December, 2005, that Bush officials, including at the NSA, committed felonies by eavesdropping on Americans without the warrants required by law — crimes punishable by a five-year prison term and$10,000 fine for each offense.  All three federal judges to rule on the question have found those actions to be in violation of the law.  Yet there have been no criminal investigations, let alone indictments, for those crimes, and there won’t be any, due to Barack Obama’s dictate that we “Look Forward, Not Backward.”  Thus, the high-level political officials who committed crimes while running the NSA will be completely immunized for their serious crimes.

By stark contrast, an NSA official who brought to the public’s attention towering failures and waste at the NSA — revelations that led to exposés that, as Shane put it, were “honored with a top prize from the Society for Professional Journalists” — is now being prosecuted for crimes that could lead to a lengthy prison term.  Why doesn’t Obama’s dictate that we “Look Forward, Not Backward,” protect this NSA whistle-blower from prosecution at least as much as the high-level Bush officials who criminally spied on American citizens?  Isn’t the DOJ’s prosecution of Drake the classic case of “Looking Backward,” by digging into Bush-era crimes, controversies and disclosures?

Interestingly, the Bush DOJ long threatened to prosecute not only NSA whistle-blowers but also The New York Times for revealing its illegal spying.  It never did so, however, likely because, as Shane speculates, prosecutions for those leaks would cause light to be shined on what the NSA actually did when eavesdropping on Americans.  Yet here is the Obama DOJ prosecuting a whistleblower, a prosecution that is certain to intimidate and deter other whistle-blowers, thus choking off one of the very few avenues which Americans have left for learning about what this sprawling, obsessively secret Surveillance State does.  As Lucy Dalglish, Executive Director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Presss, told the NYT today:  “The whole point of the prosecution is to have a chilling effect on reporters and sources, and it will.”

For that reason, the DOJ’s aggressive prosecution of someone who exposed serious waste and mismanagement at the NSA could, as the NYT‘s Shane put it, “raise questions about whether the government is merely moving to protect itself from public scrutiny.”  Whatever else is true, decreeing that we must “Look Forward, not Backward” — and then bestowing that Imperial Generosity only to the crimes of the President and his aides but not to courageous whistle-blowers (or, for that matter, anyone else) — is anything but “Justice.”

* The Atlantic‘s Marc Ambinder summarizes The Baltimore Sun revelations which are almost certainly what Drake is accused of leaking:

In 2006 and 2007, Siobahn Gorman, a highly regarded intelligence reporter for the Baltimore Sun, wrote a series of articles about how the National Security Agency was (mis)managing a highly sensitive, very expensive collection program known as Trailblazer. Relying on interviews with current and former senior intelligence officials as well as internal documents, Gorman was able to show that the NSA’s “state-of-the art tool for sifting through an ocean of modern-day digital communications” was a boondoggle of sorts — and that the agency had removed several of the privacy safeguards that were put in place to protect domestic conversations and e-mails from being stored and monitored.

April 16, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

In Germany, 56% lose trust in Church

Press TV – April 11, 2010

In the Pope’s homeland, Germany, revelations of sex abuse by Catholic clergy have triggered an unprecedented lack of trust in the Church.

An opinion poll conducted by the Focus magazine found that 56 percent of the 600 German participants have no confidence in the Church, which has been rocked by an unending stream of sex abuse allegations against priests.

In Addition to the uproar from the disturbing nature of some of the cases, accusations of decades-long cover-ups by the Catholic officials, which allowed some pedophile priests to find new victims, have further tainted the Church’s reputation.

Some 26 percent of the country’s Catholic population is now considering quitting the Church, according to the study which is to be published in the magazine on Monday. The respondents said that this is regardless of the consequences of the move on their income tax.

The figure shows a notable rise compared to a poll conducted by the Stern magazine last month, which indicated that 19 percent of those surveyed were undecided about following the Church.

Germany is among a number of European countries that impose Church tax (8-9%) on followers of any religious congregation, unless a member officially quits their communion.

Munich reportedly lost 472 Catholic worshippers last month alone, nearly four times the number for the past three months. Since the German tax department documents deregistrations at the cost of EUR 30 (USD 40), the figures are precise.

The tax provides 70% of the German Church’s revenues.

Since January, hundreds of cases of sexual abuse connected to the Catholic Church have come to light in Germany, including one of the most high-profile revelations that centered on mishandled abuse complaints in the Pope’s former diocese in Bavaria.

April 11, 2010 Posted by | Corruption, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

The Dark Underbelly of Israel’s Security State

The Anat Kamm Affair

By JONATHAN COOK | April 9, 2010
Israeli forces have extrajudicially executed hundreds of Palestinians during the past several years. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Next week 23-year-old Anat Kamm is due to stand trial for her life — or rather the state’s demand that she serve a life sentence for passing secret documents to an Israeli reporter, Uri Blau, of the liberal Haaretz daily. She is charged with spying.

Blau himself is in hiding in London, facing, if not a Mossad hit squad, at least the stringent efforts of Israel’s security services to get him back to Israel over the opposition of his editors, who fear he will be put away too.

This episode has been dragging on behind the scenes for months, since at least December, when Kamm was placed under house arrest pending the trial.

Not a word about the case leaked in Israel until this week when the security services, who had won from the courts a blanket gag order — a gag on the gag, so to speak — were forced to reverse course when foreign bloggers began making the restrictions futile. Hebrew pages on Facebook had already laid out the bare bones of the story.

So, now that much of the case is out in the light, what are the crimes committed by Kamm and Blau?

During her conscription, Kamm copied possibly hundreds of army documents that revealed systematic law-breaking by the Israeli high command operating in the occupied Palestinian territories, including orders to ignore court rulings. She was working at the time in the office of Brig Gen Yair Naveh, who is in charge of operations in the West Bank.

Blau’s crime is that he published a series of scoops based on her leaked information that have highly embarrassed senior Israeli officers by showing their contempt for the rule of law.

His reports included revelations that the senior command had approved targeting Palestinian bystanders during the military’s extra-judicial assassinations in the occupied territories; that, in violation of a commitment to the high court, the army had issued orders to execute wanted Palestinians even if they could be safely apprehended; and that the defence ministry had a compiled a secret report showing that the great majority of settlements in the West Bank were illegal even under Israeli law (all are illegal in international law).

In a properly democratic country, Kamm would have an honorable defence against the charges, of being a whistle-blower rather than a spy, and Blau would be winning journalism prizes not huddling away in exile.

But this is Israel. Here, despite a desperate last-stand for the principles of free speech and the rule of law in the pages of the Haaretz newspaper today, which is itself in the firing line over its role, there is almost no public sympathy for Kamm or even Blau.

The pair are already being described, both by officials and in chat forums and talkback columns, as traitors who should be jailed, disappeared or executed for the crime of endangering the state.

The telling comparison being made is to Mordechai Vanunu, the former technician at the Dimona nuclear plant who exposed Israel’s secret nuclear arsenal. Inside Israel, he is universally reviled to this day, having spent nearly two decades in harsh confinement. He is still under a loose house arrest, denied the chance to leave the country.

Blau and Kamm have every reason to be worried they may share a similar fate. Yuval Diskin, the head of the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, which has been leading the investigation, said yesterday that they had been too “sensitive to the media world” in pursuing the case for so long and that the Shin Bet would now “remove its gloves”.

Maybe that explains why Kamm’s home address was still visible on the charge sheet published yesterday, putting her life in danger from one of those crazed talkbackers.

It certainly echoes warnings we have had before from the Shin Bet about how it operates.

Much like Blau, Azmi Bishara, once head of a leading Arab party in Israel, is today living in exile after the Shin Bet put him in their sights. He had been campaigning for democratic reforms that would make Israel a “state of all its citizens” rather than a Jewish state.

While he was abroad in 2007, the Shin Bet announced that he would be put on trial for treason when he returned, supposedly because he had had contacts with Hizbullah during Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006.

Few experts believe Bishara could have had any useful information for Hizbullah, but the Shin Bet’s goals and modus operandi were revealed later by Diskin in a letter on its attitude to Bishara and his democratisation campaign. The Shin Bet was there, he said, to thwart the activities of groups or individuals who threatened the state’s Jewish character “even if such activity is sanctioned by the law”.

Diskin called this the principle of “a democracy defending itself” when it was really a case of Jewish leaders in a state based on Jewish privilege protecting those privileges. This time it is about the leaders of Israel’s massive security industry protecting their privileges in a security state by silencing witnesses to their crimes and keeping ordinary citizens in ignorance.

Justifying his decision to “take the gloves off” in the case of Kamm and Blau, Diskin said: “It is a dream of every enemy state to get its hands on these kinds of documents” — that is, documents proving that the Israeli army has repeatedly broken the country’s laws, in addition, of course, to its systematic violations of international law.

Diskin claims that national security has been put at risk, even though the reports Blau based on the documents — and even the documents themselves — were presented to, and approved by, the military censor for publication. The censor can restrict publication based only on national security concerns, unlike Diskin, the army senior command and the government, who obey other kinds of concerns.

Diskin knows there is every chance he will get away with his ploy because of a brainwashed Israeli public, a largely patriotic media and a supine judiciary.

The two judges who oversaw the months of gagging orders to silence any press discussion of this case did so on the say-so of the Shin Bet that there were vital national security issues at stake. Both judges are stalwarts of Israel’s enormous security industry.

Einat Ron was appointed a civilian judge in 2007 after working her way up the ranks of the military legal establishment, there to give a legal gloss to the occupation. Notoriously in 2003, when she was the chief military prosecutor, she secretly proposed various fabrications to the army so that it could cover up the killing of an 11-year-old Palestinian boy, Khalil al-Mughrabi, two years earlier. Her role only came to light because a secret report into the boy’s death was mistakenly attached to the army’s letter to an Israeli human rights group.

The other judge is Ze’ev Hammer, who finally overturned the gag order this week — but only after a former supreme court judge, Dalia Dorner, now the head of Israel’s Press Council, belatedly heaped scorn on it. She argued that, with so much discussion of the case outside Israel, the world was getting the impression that Israel flouted democratic norms.

Judge Hammer has his own distinguished place in Israel’s security industry, according to Israeli analyst Dimi Reider. During his eight years of legal study, Hammer worked for both the Shin Bet and Israel’s Mossad spy agency.

Judge Hammer and Judge Ron are deeply implicated in the same criminal outfit — the Israeli security establishment — that is now trying to cover up the tracks that lead directly to its door. Kamm is doubtless wondering what similar vested interests the judges who hear her case next week will not be declaring.

Writing in Haaretz today, Blau said he had been warned “that if I return to Israel I could be silenced for ever, and that I would be charged for crimes related to espionage”. He concluded that “this isn’t only a war for my personal freedom but for Israel’s image”.

He should leave worrying about Israel’s image to Netanyahu, Diskin and judges like Dorner. That was why the gag order was enforced in the first place. This is not a battle for Israel’s image; it’s a battle for what is left of its soul.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel.

April 9, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism | Leave a comment

Israeli Police Break Into Media Office In East Jerusalem, Attack Locals and Visitors

By Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies – April 02, 2010

The Israeli Police attacked on Thursday Wadi Hilwa Media Center, in Silwan’s Wadi Hilwa neighborhood, in occupied East Jerusalem, and violently attacked employees and visitors, leading to several injuries, the Palestine News Network (PNN) reported.

Fakhri Abu Diab, head of the Committee for Defending the Lands and Properties of Silwan, said that Jawad Siyam, head of the center was wounded in his shoulder and back, while employee Ramadan Al Banna, and resident Ahmad Al Natsha suffered eye injuries, while two women, visiting the center, were violently pushed around by the police.

The police also kidnapped Yazan Siyam, 14, while he was at the center and violently attacked his younger brother, Ali, as he followed the soldiers crying, while they dragged his brother.

Abu Diab slammed the Israeli attack, especially since the soldiers were accompanied by extremist Jewish settlers.

Speaking from his hospital bed at the Al Makassid Hospital in East Jerusalem, Jawad Siyam, said that the attack is “barbaric” , and that when he asked the police about a warrant, the police and the settlers said “we are the law here, nothing is above us”, and started attacking and insulting every person who was there.

On Thursday at dawn, the Israelis invaded Al Bustan neighborhood and kidnapped five residents identified as Khalaf Odah, 62, Mohammad Odah, 38, Hammouda Siyam, Sa’id Zaytoun, and Daoud Siyam.

Khalad, Mohammad and Hammouda were released on bail, while the remand of the Sa’id and Daoud was extended until Sunday for further interrogation.

Abu Diab stated that Silwan is subject to frequent Israeli military and settler attacks, and that the provocative acts of the police and fundamentalist settlers are meant to terrify the residents to force them out of their homes and lands.

April 1, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation | Leave a comment

Israel army ‘routinely’ fires on Palestinian journalists

Ma’an – 01/04/2010

Bethlehem – Reporters Without Borders has deplored the frequency of alleged press freedom violations by the Israeli military, whose forces the Paris-based press freedom group says routinely fire on Palestinian journalists.

At least eight journalists were injured by shots fired by Israeli soldiers during March in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

“The incidents continue with complete impunity,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The IDF soldiers involved are rarely punished and, less still, disowned by the superiors, who endorse the use of violence against media personnel. It is time this stopped.”

In the most recent incident, Falestin TV journalist Harun Amayra was injured in the foot by a shot fired by an Israeli soldier while he was covering a peaceful demonstration marking Earth Day in Badras, a village to the west of Ramallah, on 30 March. Around 10 demonstrators were also injured by Israeli gunfire. Amayra was hospitalized in Ramallah.

A crew working for satellite TV station Al-Quds were blocked for several hours by Israeli troops at the Qalandiya checkpoint on 25 March while on their way to present a live broadcast from Jerusalem. After interrogating presenter Raed Fathi, the soldiers banned him from entering the city for a week.

Falestin TV reporter Harun Amayra and cameraman Najib Sharoneh were doing a report in the village of Badras on 19 March when Israeli soldiers accosted them, hit them and then detained them for nearly four hours.

The same day, Israeli soldiers banned journalists from entering the village of Ni’lin, near Ramallah, where the reporters had wanted to cover the weekly protest against Israel’s West Bank barrier.

An Israeli soldier fired a tear-gas grenade at photographer Nasser Al-Shouyoukhi of The Associated Press during clashes between Israeli troops and Palestinian youths on 17 March in Hebron. Rubber-coated bullets and tear-gas canisters were also fired at photographer Issam Al-Rimawi while he was covering events at the Qalandiya checkpoint.

Israeli soldiers fired rubber bullets at three Palestinian photographers – Mahmoud Alyan and Mahfouz Abou Turk (who both work for the daily Al-Quds) and Ahmed Al-Gharabli of Agence France-Presse – while they were covering clashes between soldiers and Palestinian youths outside the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem on 5 March.

April 1, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Illegal Occupation, Subjugation - Torture | Leave a comment

The criminal NSA eavesdropping program

By Glenn Greenwald | April 1, 2010

While torture and aggressive war may have been the most serious crimes which the Bush administration committed, its warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens was its clearest and most undeniable lawbreaking.  Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker yesterday became the third federal judge — out of three who have considered the question — to find that Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program was illegal (the other two are District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor and 6th Circuit Appellate Judge Ronald Gilman who, on appeal from Judge Taylor’s decision, in dissent reached the merits of that question [unlike the two judges in the majority who reversed the decision on technical “standing” grounds] and adopted Taylor’s conclusion that the NSA program was illegal).

That means that all 3 federal judges to consider the question have concluded that Bush’s NSA program violated the criminal law (FISA).  That law provides that anyone who violates it has committed a felony and shall be subject to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense.  The law really does say that.  Just click on that link and you’ll see.  It’s been obvious for more than four years that Bush, Cheney, NSA Director (and former CIA Director) Michael Hayden and many other Bush officials broke the law — committed felonies — in spying on Americans without warrants.  Yet another federal judge has now found their conduct illegal.  If we were a country that actually lived under The Rule of Law, this would be a huge story, one that would produce the same consequences for the lawbreakers as a bank robbery, embezzlement or major drug dealing.  But since we’re not such a country, it isn’t and it doesn’t.

Although news reports are focusing (appropriately) on the fact that Bush’s NSA program was found to be illegal, the bulk of Judge Walker’s opinion was actually a scathing repudiation of the Obama DOJ.  In fact, the opinion spent almost no time addressing the merits of the claim that the NSA program was legal.  That’s because the Obama DOJ — exactly like the Bush DOJ in the case before Judge Taylor — refused to offer legal justifications to the court for this eavesdropping.  Instead, the Obama DOJ took the imperial and hubristic position that the court had no right whatsoever to rule on the legality of the program because (a) plaintiffs could not prove they were subjected to the secret eavesdropping (and thus lacked “standing” to sue) and (b) the NSA program was such a vital “state secret” that courts were barred from adjudicating its legality.

Those were the arguments that Judge Walker scathingly rejected.  All of the court’s condemnations of the DOJ’s pretense to imperial power were directed at the Obama DOJ’s “state secrets” argument (which is exactly the same radical and lawless version, as TPM compellingly documented, used by the Bush DOJ  to such controversy).  From the start, the Obama DOJ has engaged in one extraordinary maneuver after the next to shield this criminal surveillance program from judicial scrutiny. Indeed, their stonewalling at one point became so extreme that the court actually threatened the Obama DOJ with sanctions.  And what TPM calls the Obama DOJ’s “Bush-mimicking state secrets defense” has been used by them in one case after the next to conceal and shield from judicial review a wide range of Bush crimes — including torture, renditions and surveillance.  As the Electronic Frontiers Foundation put it:  “In Warrantless Wiretapping Case, Obama DOJ’s New Arguments Are Worse Than Bush’s.”

That’s why this decision is such a stinging rebuke to the Obama administration:  because it is their Bush-copying tactics, used repeatedly to cover up government crimes, which the court yesterday so emphatically rejected.  And it’s thus no surprise that media accounts tie the Obama administration to the cover-up of this program at least as much as the Bush administration.  See, for instance:  Charlie Savage and James Risen in The New York Times (“A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal, rejecting the Obama administration’s effort to keep shrouded in secrecy one of the most disputed counterterrorism policies of former President George W. Bush”); Time (“The judge’s opinion is pointed and fiercely critical of the Obama Administration’s Justice Department lawyers” and “The judge claims that the Obama Administration is attempting to place itself above the law“).  The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals also previously condemned the Bush/Obama “state secrets” position as abusive and lawless.

In December, 2005, The New York Times revealed that the Bush administration had been doing for years exactly that which the law unambiguously said was a felony:  eavesdropping on the electronic communications of Americans (telephone calls and emails) without warrants.  We knew then it was a crime.   Three federal judges have now concluded that it was illegal.  And yet not only do we do nothing about it, but we stand by as the Obama administration calls this criminal program a vital “state secret” and desperately tries to protect it and the lawbreakers from being subject to the rule of law.  This decision may make it more difficult for the Obama administration to hide behind sweeping secrecy claims in the future, but it won’t negate the fact that we have decided that our leading political officials are completely free to commit crimes while in power and to do so with total impunity.

* * * * *

One related note:  back when Judge Diggs Taylor ruled that the Bush NSA program was unconstitutional, law professors Orin Kerr and Ann Althouse (the former a sometimes-Bush-apologist and the latter a constant one) viciously disparaged her and her ruling by claiming that she failed to give sufficient attention to the Government’s arguments as to why the program was legal.  Althouse was even allowed to launch that attack in an Op-Ed in The New York Times. But as I documented at the time, the argument made by these right-wing law professors to attack Judge Taylor was grounded in total ignorance:  the reason the court there didn’t pay much attention to the legal justifications for the NSA program was because the Bush DOJ — just like the Obama DOJ here — refused to offer any such justifications, insisting instead that the court had no right even to consider the case.

That’s why I find it darkly amusing that, today, the same Orin Kerr is solemnly lecturing The New York Times that Judge Walker here did not consider the merits of the claims about the program’s legality because the Obama DOJ argued instead “that Judge Walker couldn’t reach the merits of the case because of the state secrets privilege.”  Kerr is wrong when he says that this ruling does not constitute a decision that the Bush NSA program was illegal — it does exactly that, because the plaintiffs offered evidence and arguments to prove it was illegal and the Obama DOJ (like the Bush DOJ before it) failed to offer anything to the contrary — but he ‘s right that Judge Walker did not focus on the merits of the defenses to the NSA program because the Obama DOJ (like the Bush DOJ) refused to raise any such defenses.  But exactly the same thing was true for Judge Taylor when she ruled three years ago that the NSA program was illegal, which is why the right-wing attacks on her judicial abilities back then (led by Kerr and Althouse) were so frivolous and misinformed.

April 1, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | Leave a comment

NSA Wiretap Program Declared Illegal

Marc Ambinder | The Atlantic | March 31, 2010

The National Security Agency broke the law when it wiretapped two American lawyers working for the El-Haramain Charity Foundation, an judge ruled Wednesday.

The government has not decided whether to appeal this long-awaited decision, as it touches on subjects ranging from the state secrets privilege to the breadth of President Bush’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.”

The ruling is a major symbolic victory for civil libertarians, although its effects on future cases will be limited, and no more information about the program will be disclosed. El-Haramain v. Obama has bounced back and forth from District Court Judge Vaughn Walker, the chief judge for federal courts in Northern California, to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected a government motion to dismiss it entirely. Another important victory for civil libertarians: Vaughn held that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act should be given more weight than the state secrets privilege.

For months, the government argued that the charity could not possibly establish, using unclassified information, that it had been spied upon. It argued that even though the TSP had been revealed, it could not turn over other evidence in the case without jeopardizing national security. Several judges have seen the evidence and disagreed. People familiar with the case believe that the evidence relates to the mechanism by which the surveillance program was carried out: perhaps a third country, or private contractors, assisted the NSA.

So,  the Justice Department asserted the “state secrets privilege” and refused to provide the plaintiffs with classified evidence that would show whether or not the charity had actually been wiretapped.

Of course, this was a bit of a game, because the government accidentally gave the plaintiffs a number of classified documents which proved conclusively that the charity’s phone lines were tapped by the National Security Agency.

Still, it was up to the charity to establish that its communications were intercepted solely on the basis of the public record — and that the wiretapping was, on its merits, illegal.  The judge agreed today that both thresholds had been reached. Some civil libertarians wanted him to order a full trial, which would have revealed more about the program. This, Walker did not do. Still, his ruling, if it stands, will serve as a check on the unconstrained use of executive power.

Walker, an inventive and creative judge who is also presiding over the trial about the legality of the gay-marriage-banning Proposition 8, was clearly skeptical of the government’s contentions and its legal tactics.

Still, he went out of his way to give the government a chance to make its case. And he did not declare the use of the state secrets privilege to be invalid, which may be one reason why the government might decide not to appeal the ruling.

April 1, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

Mike McConnell, the Washington Post & the dangers of sleazy corporatism

By Glenn Greenwald | March 29, 2010

In a political culture drowning in hidden conflicts of interests, exploitation of political office for profit, and a rapidly eroding wall separating the public and private spheres, Michael McConnell stands out as the perfect embodiment of all those afflictions.  Few people have blurred the line between public office and private profit more egregiously and shamelessly than he.  McConnell’s behavior is the classic never-ending “revolving door” syndrome:  public officials serve private interests while in office and are then lavishly rewarded by those same interests once they leave.  He went from being head of the National Security Agency under Bush 41 and Clinton directly to Booz Allen, one of the nation’s largest private intelligence contractors, then became Bush’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), then went back to Booz Allen, where he is now Executive Vice President.

But that’s the least of what makes McConnell such a perfect symbol for the legalized corruption that dominates Washington.  Tellingly, his overarching project while at Booz Allen and in public office was exactly the same:  the outsourcing of America’s intelligence and surveillance functions (including domestic surveillance) to private corporations, where those activities are even more shielded than normal from all accountability and oversight and where they generate massive profit at the public expense.  Prior to becoming Bush’s DNI, McConnell, while at Booz Allen, was chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the primary business association of NSA and CIA contractors devoted to expanding the privatization of government intelligence functions.

Then, as Bush’s DNI, McConnell dramatically expanded the extent to which intelligence functions were outsourced to the same private industry that he long represented.  Worse, he became the leading spokesman for demanding full immunity for lawbreaking telecoms for their participation in Bush’s illegal NSA programs — in other words, he exploited “national security” claims and his position as DNI to win the dismissal of lawsuits against the very lawbreaking industry he represented as INSA Chairman, including, almost certainly, Booz Allen itself.  Having exploited his position as DNI to lavishly reward and protect the private intelligence industry, he then returns to its loving arms to receive from them lavish personal rewards of his own.

It’s vital to understand how this really works:  it isn’t that people like Mike McConnell move from public office to the private sector and back again.  That implies more separation than really exists.  At this point, it’s more accurate to view the U.S. Government and these huge industry interests as one gigantic, amalgamated, inseparable entity — with a public division and a private one.  When someone like McConnell goes from a top private sector position to a top government post in the same field, it’s more like an intra-corporate re-assignment than it is changing employers.  When McConnell serves as DNI, he’s simply in one division of this entity and when he’s at Booz Allen, he’s in another, but it’s all serving the same entity (it’s exactly how insurance giant Wellpoint dispatched one of its Vice Presidents to Max Baucus’ office so that she could write the health care plan that the Congress eventually enacted).

In every way that matters, the separation between government and corporations is nonexistent, especially (though not only) when it comes to the National Security and Surveillance State.  Indeed, so extreme is this overlap that even McConnell, when he was nominated to be Bush’s DNI, told The New York Times that his ten years of working “outside the government,” for Booz Allen, would not impede his ability to run the nation’s intelligence functions.  That’s because his Booz Allen work was indistinguishable from working for the Government, and therefore — as he put it — being at Booz Allen “has allowed me to stay focused on national security and intelligence communities as a strategist and as a consultant. Therefore, in many respects, I never left.”

As the NSA scandal revealed, private telecom giants and other corporations now occupy the central role in carrying out the government’s domestic surveillance and intelligence activities — almost always in the dark, beyond the reach of oversight or the law.  As Tim Shorrock explained in his definitive 2007 Salon piece on the relationship between McConnell, Booz Allen, and the intelligence community, in which (to no avail) he urged Senate Democrats to examine these relationships before confirming McConnell as Bush’s DNI:

[Booz Allen’s] website states that the Booz Allen team “employs more than 10,000 TS/SCI cleared personnel.” TS/SCI stands for top secret-sensitive compartmentalized intelligence, the highest possible security ratings. This would make Booz Allen one of the largest employers of cleared personnel in the United States.

Among those on Booz Allen’s payroll are former CIA Director and neoconservative extremist James Woolsey, George Tenet’s former Chief of Staff Joan Dempsey, and Keith Hall, the former director of the National Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret organization that oversees the nation’s spy satellites.  As Shorrock wrote:  “Under McConnell’s watch, Booz Allen has been deeply involved in some of the most controversial counterterrorism programs the Bush administration has run, including the infamous Total Information Awareness data-mining scheme” and “is almost certainly participating in the agency’s warrantless surveillance of the telephone calls and e-mails of American citizens.”  For more details on the sprawling and overlapping relationships between McConnell, Booz Allen, the INSA, the Government and the private intelligence community, see Shorrock’s interview with Democracy Now and his 2008 interview with me.

Aside from the general dangers of vesting government power in private corporations — this type of corporatism (control of government by corporations) was the hallmark of many of the worst tyrannies of the last century — all of this is big business beyond what can be described.  The attacks of 9/11 exploded the already-huge and secret intelligence budget.  Shorrock estimates that “about 50 percent of this spending goes directly to private companies” and “spending on intelligence since 2002 is much higher than the total of $33 billion the Bush administration paid to Bechtel, Halliburton and other large corporations for reconstruction projects in Iraq.”

* * * * *

All of that is crucial background for understanding just how pernicious and deceitful is the Op-Ed published this weekend by The Washington Post and authored by McConnell.  The overarching theme is all-too-familiar:  we face a grave threat from Terrorists and other Very Bad People (“cyber wars”), and our only hope for protection is to vest the Government with massive new powers.  Specifically, McConnell advocates a so-called “reeingeer[ing] of the Internet” to allow the Government and private corporations far greater capability to track what is being done over the Internet and who is doing it:

The United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and we are losing. It’s that simple. . . . If an enemy disrupted our financial and accounting transactions, our equities and bond markets or our retail commerce — or created confusion about the legitimacy of those transactions — chaos would result. Our power grids, air and ground transportation, telecommunications, and water-filtration systems are in jeopardy as well.

Scary!  And what do we need to submit to in order to avoid these calamaties?  This:

The United States must also translate our intent into capabilities. We need to develop an early-warning system to monitor cyberspace, identify intrusions and locate the source of attacks with a trail of evidence that can support diplomatic, military and legal options — and we must be able to do this in milliseconds.  More specifically, we need to reengineer the Internet to make attribution, geolocation, intelligence analysis and impact assessment — who did it, from where, why and what was the result — more manageable.

In one sense, this is just typical fear-mongering of the type the National Security State has used for decades to beat frightened Americans into virtually full-scale submission:  you are in grave danger and you can be safe only by vesting in us far greater power, which we’ll operate in secret:  here, allowing us to “reengineer” the Internet so we can control it.

Think about how dangerous that power is in relationship to the war I wrote about this weekend being waged on WikiLeaks, which allows the uploading of leaked, secret documents that expose the corruption of the world’s most powerful interests.  This “reengineering of the Internet” proposed by McConnell would almost certainly enable the easy tracing of anyone who participates.  It would, by design, destroy the ability of anyone to participate or communicate in any way on the Internet under the shield of anonymity.  Wired‘s Ryan Singel — noting that “the biggest threat to the open internet is . . .  Michael McConnell” — documents the dangers from this “cyber-war” monitioring policy and how much momentum there now is in the Executive and Legislative branches for legislation to implement it (as a result of initiatives that began during the Bush era, under McConnell, and which continue unabated).

But there’s something even worse going on here.  McConnell doesn’t merely want to empower the Government to control the Internet this way; he wants to empower private corporations to do so — the same corporations which pay him and whose interests he has long served.   He notes that this “reengineering” is already possible because “the technologies are already available from public and private sources,” and explicitly calls for a merger of the NSA with private industry to create a sprawling, omnipotent network for monitoring the Internet:

To this end, we must hammer out a consensus on how to best harness the capabilities of the National Security Agency, which I had the privilege to lead from 1992 to 1996.   The NSA is the only agency in the United States with the legal authority, oversight and budget dedicated to breaking the codes and understanding the capabilities and intentions of potential enemies. The challenge is to shape an effective partnership with the private sector so information can move quickly back and forth from public to private — and classified to unclassified — to protect the nation’s critical infrastructure.

We must give key private-sector leaders (from the transportation, utility and financial arenas) access to information on emerging threats so they can take countermeasures. For this to work, the private sector needs to be able to share network information — on a controlled basis — without inviting lawsuits from shareholders and others. . . .

[T]the reality is that while the lion’s share of cybersecurity expertise lies in the federal government, more than 90 percent of the physical infrastructure of the Web is owned by private industry. Neither side on its own can mount the cyber-defense we need; some collaboration is inevitable. Recent reports of a possible partnership between Google and the government point to the kind of joint efforts — and shared challenges — that we are likely to see in the future.

No doubt, such arrangements will muddy the waters between the traditional roles of the government and the private sector. We must define the parameters of such interactions, but we should not dismiss them. Cyberspace knows no borders, and our defensive efforts must be similarly seamless.

In other words, not only the Government, but the private intelligence corporations which McConnell represents (and which are subjected to no oversight), will have access to virtually unfettered amounts of information and control over the Internet, and there should be “no borders” between them.  And beyond the dangerous power that will vest in the public-private Surveillance State, it will also generate enormous profits for Booz Allen, the clients it serves and presumably for McConnell himself — though The Washington Post does not bother to disclose any of that to its readers.  The Post basically allowed McConnell to publish in its Op-Ed pages a blatant advertisement for the private intelligence industry while masquerading as a National Security official concerned with Keeping America Safe.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the “cyber-war” policies for which McConnell is shilling is the top priority of the industry he serves.  Right this very minute, the front page of the intelligence industry’s INSA website (previously chaired by McConnell) trumpets the exact public-private merger for “cyber-war” policies which McConnell uses the Post to advocate:

The Report just published by that that industry group (.pdf) is entitled “Addressing Cyber Security Through Public-Private Partnership.”  The industry’s Report sounds like a virtually exact replica of what McConnell just published in the Post:  America is under grave threat and can Stay Safe only by transferring huge amounts of public funds to these private corporations in order to restructure the Internet to allow better detection and monitoring.  And look at the truly Orwellian and unintentionally revealing logo under which the Report is written:  showing a complete linkage of Government institutions (such as Congress and regulatory agencies), the Surveillance State, private intelligence corporations, and the Internet (click on image to enlarge):

Readers of The Washington Post, exposed to McConnell’s Op-Ed, would know none of this.  They would think that they were reading the earnest National Security recommendations of a former top military and government official, and would have no idea about the massive profit motives driving him.  Although the Op-Ed, at the end, identifies McConnell as “executive vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, which consults on cybersecurity for the private and public sector” (as well as a former NSA head, DNI, and retired Admiral), there’s no hint that Booz Allen, its multiple clients, and the industry it represents (along with McConnell himself) would stand to benefit greatly from the very policies he advocates in The Post.  Indeed, just like the INSA, the Booz Allen website, at the top, this very minute promotes the exact policies McConnell advocates:

So here we have a perfect merger of (a) exploiting public office for personal profit, (b) endless increases in the Surveillance State achieved through rank fear-mongering, (c) the rapid elimination of any line between the public and private sectors, and (d) individuals deceitfully posing as “objective commentators” who are, in fact, manipulating our political debates on behalf of undisclosed interests.

And, as usual, it is our nation’s largest media outlets (in this case The Washington Post) which provide the venue for these policies to be advocated and glorified, all the while not only failing to expose — but actively obscuring — the bulging conflicts of interests that drive them.  While “news” outlets distract Americans with the petty partisan dramas of the day, these factions — whose power is totally impervious to changes in party control — continue to expand their stranglehold on how the Government functions in ways that fundamentally alter our core privacy and liberties, and radically expand the role private corporations and government power play in our lives.

March 31, 2010 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Leave a comment

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