United States Zionist lobby groups seek to limit the activities of Press TV in America over fears of losing the propaganda war, a human rights activist tells Press TV. This is while the US House of Representatives has recently approved a ‘defense bill’ that includes new anti-Iran sanctions on broadcasting, another almost USD500 million for the Israeli regime’s missile systems and approximately USD89 billion for its war in Afghanistan.
To further discuss this, Press TV’s News Analysis program has conducted an interview with William Spring, a human rights activist from London, Danny Schechter, editor with the mediachannel.org, from New York, and Omar Nashabi, Al-Akhbar Newspaper, from Beirut.
Following a recent move by the European satellite provider Hispasat to take Iranian channels, Press TV and Hispan TV, off the air in a flagrant violation of freedom of speech, the news networks’ viewers in the Americas can continue to watch the Iranian channels on the following frequency:
This is the English-language version of Defoliated Island, a Japanese award-winning documentary about the usage of Agent Orange on Okinawa during the Vietnam War. Produced by Okinawa TV station, QAB, the show won national acclaim in Japan when it was first aired in May 2012.
Originally aired on BBC2 in 1992, Operation Gladio reveals Gladio, the secret state-sponsored terror network operating in Europe. This BBC series is about a far-right secret army, operated by the CIA and MI6 through NATO, which killed hundreds of innocent Europeans and attempted to blame the deaths on Baader Meinhof, Red Brigades and other left wing groups.
Known as stay-behinds these armies were given access to military equipment which was supposed to be used for sabotage after a Soviet invasion. Instead it was used in massacres across mainland Europe as part of a CIA Strategy of Tension. Gladio killing sprees in Belgium and Italy were carried out for the purpose of frightening the national political classes into adopting U.S. policies.
The Saban Forum 2012 (which focuses on Middle East issues as related to U.S. foreign policy) kicked off with a keynote speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s remarks were immediately preceded by a tribute video to her career in service of the United States. President Barack Obama, Senator John McCain, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and others are featured offering praise for Secretary Clinton’s life, career, and good works.
The Mavrix, a South African band, are known for their solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Their musical message reached all the way into the hearts of the Palestinians of Gaza and received international acclaim, when they released their well-known music video “The New Black”, which also featured Palestinian Oud player Mohammed Omar from Gaza.
The music video that features the song from the album “Pura Vida”, draws parallels between South African apartheid and Israeli apartheid and the current occupation of Palestine. The band’s inclination to solidarity with Palestine against apartheid and oppression is also expressed on this album in the songs “Palestinian as One”, and a song written by founding member Jeremy Karodia called “Burnt Humus”, for his friend in Gaza, Haidar Eid.
Responding to the recent Israeli atrocities against the people of Gaza of last month, The Mavrix have made ‘Palestinian as One’ available for free download. You can listen to the song here, and download it. You can also watch this music video based on this song, that was not made by the Mavrix, but by a Youtube user using their song and combining it with pictures of worldwide pro-Palestine solidarity.
This unique South African band combines purity of sound and composition with a powerful and penetrating message.
History
The roots of The Mavrix go back to the 1980′s and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The founding members, composers/musicians, Jeremy Karodia and Ayub Mayet, floated in and out of their roles as activists and artists, artists and activists, finally settling as activist artists writing music that reflected life in apartheid South Africa. During that period, The Mavrix consisted of Karodia on guitar/vocals and Mayet on vocals.
After the birth of a new South African democracy in 1994, The Mavrix evolved by adding new songs and music to their repertoire with the addition of new musicians, Shahzaadee Karodia on violin, Ketan Parshotham on tabla and Reshma Lalla on santoor to accompany Karodia’s guitar and Mayet’s vocals.
Styled in Western Folk and fused with African and North Indian rhythms and melodies, the band recorded their first album, “Guantanamo Bay”, in 2004 as a response to the growing phenomenon of global poverty, political detentions, drug abuse, domestic violence, child abuse and occupation/invasion and war. The album fused Western instruments with Indian and African instruments. Reza Khota on guitar, Godfrey Mgcina on African percussion and Marc Duby on bass played as session musicians on the cd.
Guantanamo Bay
The title song, “Guantanamo Bay”, was written to highlight the parallels between the United States’ infamous Guantanamo Bay prison and apartheid South Africa’s own political detention camp, Robben Island, on which most of the liberation movement’s political leaders including Nelson Mandela, were incarcerated. Other songs such as “Promised Land” highlighted the invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Palestine.
In 2007 the band began writing new songs and had a change in personnel. With Parshotham and Lalla having left the band, Ravi Naidoo on vocals, Corvin Brady on violin and Pravesh Vallabh on tabla joined the group. The Mavrix began work on a new album called “Pura Vida”.
True to the sound of their first cd, “Guantanamo Bay”, released in 2004/2005, the new album reflects the band’s diverse brand of fusing African, Indian classical and Western musical styles in the “folk/rock” genre. The 14 songs are just as diverse in lyrical content as the variety of instrumentation on the album.
The album features an array of talented and versatile local and international musicians who accompanied the band to create an album embellished by multiple instruments and musical arrangements. Johannesburg based Denny Lalouette and Gregs Moonsammy on bass, Pahlad Singh on accordion, Kreasan Moodley on harmonium, a string trio featuring Ruby Ngoasheng on viola, Kagiso Molete on violin and Sizekello Shuba on cello, Wian Joubert on percussion, Durban based santoor player, Ashwin Morar and Palestinian Oud player, Mohamed Omar helped create a unique style that The Mavrix have become known for.
Pura Vida
Whilst The Mavrix compose songs passionately about global issues that affect communities in their day to day lives, the band have also written and composed songs on the “Pura Vida” album about spirituality and romance. Songs such as the title track, “Pura Vida” and “Legend”, expose a spiritual feel in musical arrangement and content. “Chapatti Girl”, “Angel” and “This house ain’t cold no more” are compositions that reflect the “non activist” side of the band.
“Pura Vida”, in Spanish, means pure life and after 28 years of performing, composing and writing music based on struggle and human interests, the album title reflects the band’s commitment towards global justice and world peace.
Activists in France have launched a campaign to disband the French branch of the Jewish Defense League (JDL), which is reportedly protected by the French government, Press TV reports.
Pointing to numerous acts of violence committed by the JDL, the activists censured the French government’s tolerance of the Jewish group and reaffirmed their determination to continue their campaign to ban the JDL.
The United States considers the JDL as a terrorist group. It is a Jewish far-right organization whose stated goal is to expel Palestinians from their homeland and “protect Jews from anti-Semitism by whatever means necessary.”
Under former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, the group’s ties with the French government surfaced after French police allowed JDL members to use their sports facilities for military training.
The group has committed hundreds of violent acts in France, but their crimes have gone unpunished and even unreported, with merely a single conviction on record.
In a latest instance of violence, JDL thugs recently attacked Olivia Zemor, a leader of the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign, sprayed a very toxic paint all over her body and posted the video of the assault on their website. French police arrested no one with regard to the attack.
“Any time they see a Palestinian voice, they attack them and they run away, because the French government is an accomplice to that,” said Nicolas Shahshahani, Zemor’s husband.
The JDL also attacked Shahshahani’s bookstore in 2006, using tear gas and dousing his books with cooking oil, but none of the perpetrators was apprehended.
The FBI has the e-mails of nearly all US citizens, including congressional members, according to NSA whistleblower William Binney. Speaking to RT he warned that the government can use information against anyone it wants.
One of the best mathematicians and code breakers in NSA history resigned in 2001 because he no longer wanted to be associated with alleged violations of the constitution.
He asserts, that the FBI has access to this data due to a powerful device Naris.
This year Binney received the Callaway award. The annual award was established to recognize those, who stand out for constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.
RT: In light of the Petraeus/Allen scandal while the public is so focused on the details of their family drama one may argue that the real scandal in this whole story is the power, the reach of the surveillance state. I mean if we take General Allen – thousands of his personal e-mails have been sifted through private correspondence. It’s not like any of those men was planning an attack on America. Does the scandal prove the notion that there is no such thing as privacy in a surveillance state?
William Binney: Yes, that’s what I’ve been basically saying for quite some time, is that the FBI has access to the data collected, which is basically the e-mails of virtually everybody in the country. And the FBI has access to it. All the congressional members are on the surveillance too, no one is excluded. They are all included. So, yes, this can happen to anyone. If they become a target for whatever reason – they are targeted by the government, the government can go in, or the FBI, or other agencies of the government, they can go into their database, pull all that data collected on them over the years, and we analyze it all. So, we have to actively analyze everything they’ve done for the last 10 years at least.
RT:And it’s not just about those, who could be planning, who could be a threat to national security, but also those, who could be just…
WB: It’s everybody. The Naris device if it takes in the entire line, so it takes in all the data. In fact they advertised they can process the lines at session rates, which means 10 gigabit lines. I forgot the name of the device (it’s not the Naris) – the other one does it at 10 gigabits. That’s why the building Buffdale, because they have to have more storage, because they can’t figure out what’s important, so they are just storing everything there. So, e-mails are going to be stored there for the future, but right now stored in different places around the country. But it is being collected – and the FBI has access to it.
RT:You mean it’s being collected in bulk without even requesting providers?
WB:Yes.
RT:Then what about Google, you know, releasing this biannual transparency report and saying that the government’s demands for personal data is at an all-time high and for all of those requesting the US, Google says they complied with the government’s demands 90% of the time. But they are still saying that they are making the request, it’s not like it’s all being funneled into that storage. What do you say to that?
WB: I would assume, that it’s just simply another source for the same data they are already collecting. My line is in declarations in a court about the 18-T facility in San Francisco, that documented the NSA room inside that AST&T facility, where they had Naris devices to collect data off the fiber optic lines inside the United States. So, that’s kind of a powerful device, that would collect everything it was being sent. It could collect on the order over one hundred billion one thousand character e-mails a day. One device.
RT:You say they sift through billions of e-mails. I wonder how do they prioritize? How do they filter it?
WB: I don’t think they are filtering it. They are just storing it. I think it’s just a matter of selecting when they want it. So, if they want to target you, they would take your attributes, go into that database and pull out all your data.
RT:Were you on the target list?
WB: Oh, sure! I believe I’ve been on it for quite a few years. So I keep telling them everything I think of them in my e-mail. So that when they want to read it they’ll understand what I think of them.
RT:Do you think we all should leave messages for the NSA mail box?
WB: Sure!
RT:You blew the whistle on the agency when George W. Bush was the President. With President Obama in office, in your opinion, has anything changed at the agency – in the surveillance program? In what direction is this administration moving?
WB: The change is it’s getting worse. They are doing more. He is supporting the building of the Buffdale facility, which is over two billion dollars they are spending on storage room for data. That means that they are collecting a lot more now and need more storage for it. That facility by my calculations that I submitted to the court for the electronic frontiers foundation against NSA would hold on the order of 5 zettabytes of data. Just that current storage capacity is being advertised on the web that you can buy. And that’s not talking about what they have in the near future.
RT:What are they going to do with all of that? Ok, they are storing something. Why should anybody be concerned?
WB: If you ever get on the enemies list, like Petraeus did or… for whatever reason, than you can be drained into that surveillance.
RT:Do you think they would… General Petraeus, who was idolized by the same administration? Or General Allen?
WB: There are certainly some questions, that have to be asked, like why would they target it (to begin with)? What law were they breaking?
RT:In case of General Petraeus one would argue that there could have been security breaches. Something like that. But with General Allen – I don’t quite understand, because when they were looking into his private e-mails to this woman.
WB: That’s the whole point. I am not sure what the internal politics is… That’s part of the program. This government doesn’t want things in the public. It’s not a transparent government. Whatever the reason or the motivation was, I don’t really know, but I certainly think, that there was something going on in the background, that made them target those fellows. Otherwise why would they be doing it? There is no crime there.
RT:It seems that the public is divided between those, who think that the government surveillance program violates their civil liberties, and those, who say: “I’ve nothing to hide. So, why should I care?” What do you say to those, who think that it shouldnt concern them.
WB: The problem is if they think they are not doing anything that’s wrong, they don’t get to define that. The central government does, the central government defines what is right and wrong and whether or not they target you. So, it’s not up to the individuals. Even if they think they are doing something wrong, if their position on something is against what the administration has, then they could easily become a target.
RT:Tell me about the most outrageous thing that you came across during your work at the NSA.
WB: The violations of the constitution and any number of laws that existed at the time. That was the part that I could not be associated with. That’s why I left. They were building social networks on who is communicating and with whom inside this country. So that the entire social network of everybody, of every US citizen was being compiled overtime. So, they are taking from one company alone roughly 320 million records a day. That’s probably accumulated probably close to 20 trillion over the years. The original program that we put together to handle this to be able to identify terrorists anywhere in the world and alert anyone that they were in jeopardy. We would have been able to do that by encrypting everybody’s communications except those, who were targets. So, in essence you would protect their identities and the information about them until you could develop probable cause, and once you showed your probable cause, then you could do a decrypt and target them. And we could do that and isolate those people all alone. It wasn’t a problem at all. There was no difficulty in that.
RT:It sounds very difficult and very complicated. Easier to take everything in and…
WB: No. It’s easier to use the graphing techniques, if you will, for the relationships for the world to filter out data, so that you don’t have to handle all that data. And it doesn’t burden you with a lot more information to look at, than you really need to solve the problem.
RT:Do you think that the agency doesn’t have the filters now?
WB: No.
RT:You have received the Callaway award for civic courage. Congratulations! On the website and in the press release it says: “It is awarded to those, who stand out for constitutional rights and American values at great risk to their personal or professional lives.” Under the code of spy ethics (I don’t know if there is such a thing) your former colleagues, they probably look upon you as a traitor. How do you look back at them?
WB: That’s pretty easy. They are violating the foundation of this entire country. Why this entire government was formed? It’s founded with the constitution and the rights were given to the people in the country under that constitution. They are in violation of that. And under executive order 13526, section 1.7 (governing classification) – you can not classify information to just cover up a crime, which this is- and that was signed by President Obama. Also President Bush signed it earlier executive order, a very similar one. If any of this comes into Supreme court and they rule it unconstitutional, then the entire house of cards of the government falls.
RT:What are the chances of that? What are the odds?
WB: The government is doing the best they can to try to keep it out of court. And, of course, we are trying to do the best we can to get into court. So, we decided it deserves a ruling from the Supreme court. Ultimately the court is supposed to protect the constitution. All these people in the government take an oath to defend the constitution. And they are not living up to the oath of office.
Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) has captured a US ScanEagle drone over the Persian Gulf waters upon its intrusion into the Iranian airspace.
IRGC Navy Commander Rear Admiral Ali Fadavi made the announcement on Tuesday, adding that the Iranian armed forces enjoy full intelligence command over foreign movements in the Persian Gulf region.
Referring to the captured ScanEagle drone, the Iranian commander pointed out, “Such drones are usually launched from large aircraft carriers.”
The ScanEagle drone, which has a 10ft (3m) wingspan, is a long-endurance aircraft built by Insitu, a subsidiary of Boeing.
Iran has released footage of the captured drone.
A report on the website of the Wall Street Journal on Sunday cited US officials as saying that Washington has stepped up its spying operations on Bushehr nuclear plant in southern Iran “over the past two months”. The report said that the increased spying missions by the US on the Iranian nuclear facility “has been conducted in part with the Pentagon’s fleet of drones operating over the Persian Gulf.”
Commander Fadavi further said that the IRGC Navy is fully monitoring all the movements of the foreign forces in the Persian Gulf and the strategic Strait of Hormuz to counter any potential threats against the country.
Earlier in December 2011, the Iranian military also grounded a US RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft while it was flying over the Iranian city of Kashmar, some 140 miles (225km) from the Afghan border.
The US RQ-170 Sentinel stealth aircraft was downed with minimal damage by the Iranian Army’s electronic warfare unit. The drone was one of America’s most advanced spy aircraft.
Last month, Iran repelled a US drone that had entered the country’s airspace above the territorial waters of the Islamic Republic in the Persian Gulf.
Brigadier General Amirali Hajizadeh, the commander of the Aerospace Division of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC), said that the drone had been driven away by Iranian forces as it attempted to gather intelligence around Kharg Island in southern Iran.
Hajizadeh also warned that the country’s armed forces would respond with stronger action if US drones attempted to violate Iran’s airspace again.
Anyone who knows a little bit of history realizes that when there is situation where a people has refused to surrender and abandon its rights, oppressing it will not work. The only ones who may live in denial of this fact are the oppressor and those who support it. Their wishful thinking thus leads them to trying different types of violence and criminality, coupled with mass lies and distortion campaign.
In Palestine today, this is merely one layer of the issue. The Israeli regime has convinced itself not only that it can get the Palestinian people to surrender, forget and let go, but also that the whole world should be supporting its racist policies and actually help it achieve its goals. Everyone else in the world, who has not fallen prey to the Israeli PR campaigns, do not doubt the inevitable outcome of the struggle of the Palestinians: justice and equality.
Imagine that into your beautiful vibrant city moves this woman, who, along with her highly-funded terrorist friends, tries to take it over through genocide. This is the reality in Hebron, Palestine.
Meet Miriam Levinger, U.S. citizen from the Bronx, New York… the mother of the Israeli colonial settlers in the ‘West Bank’
Filmed in Tel Rumeida, Hebron, Palestine
To see the second video in this series, click here:
Our world is run by oligarchs, the holders of vast wealth from monopolies in banking, resource extraction, manufacturing, and technology. Oligarchs have such power that most of the world doesn’t even know of their influence over our lives. Their overall agenda is global power — a world government, run by them — to be achieved through planned steps of social engineering. The oligarchs remain in the background and have heads of state and entire governments acting in their service. Presidents and prime ministers are their puppets. Bureaucrats and politicians are their factotums.
Who are politicians? Politicians are people who work for the powerful while pretending to represent the people who voted for them. This double-dealing involves a lot of lying, so successful politicians must be good at it. It’s not an easy job to make the insane agenda of the powerful seem reasonable. Politicians can’t reveal this agenda because it almost always goes against the interests of their constituents, so they become adept at sophistry, mystification, and the appearance of authority. For example, wars for Israel have been part of the agenda of the powerful for years. Since 2001, wars for Israel have been sold as “the war on terror” and lots of lies had to be made up as to why the war on terror was a real thing. The visible faces promoting the war on terror were neoconservatives in the US, almost all of whom were advocates for Israel, or Zionists. Zionists are not the only members of the oligarchy, but they seem to be its lead actors. ... continue
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