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US claims of Assad’s chemical weapons are lies – Pushkov

RT | June 14, 2013

A senior Russian MP holds that the recent White House statement of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government is as false as the notorious reports about Iraqi WMDs.

“The data about Assad’s use of chemical weapons is fabricated by the same facility that made up the lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. Obama is walking George W. Bush’s path,” the head of the Duma’s Foreign Affairs Committee Aleksey Pushkov tweeted.

The Russian MP was referring to the 2003 invasion in Iraq prompted by the US and UK claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction that threatened neighboring nations. The UN probe into the matter was underway as the invasion started and no traces of WMD have been discovered on Iraqi territory since the war ended, prompting accusations that the US administration and special services fabricated the data to get an excuse to start the conflict.

In comments to Russian news agencies Pushkov noted that the supplies of arms from the US to the Syrian rebels would hardly lead to the overthrow of President Bashar Assad’s regime. He added that the government in Syria is supported by “a significant, if not the larger, part of the population” and the Syrian military “show a high degree of resistance.”

Pushkov also forecast that the United States would now attempt to further escalate the situation.

“Now they are arming the rebels but then they will come to some form of direct military involvement. We cannot exclude the possibility of cruise missile strikes and if this measure brings no result – of direct military intervention,” he said.

The statement was made shortly after US authorities publicly announced that they had proof that pro-government forces used chemical weapons, like the nerve agent sarin in the Syrian conflict, killing at least 150 people. At the same time, the US side claimed that there was no proof about similar actions from the rebels’ side.

US Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes has told the press that President Barack Obama has decided to boost the US support to the Syrian opposition forces and that this would now include military support. The detailed orders will be issued within the nearest weeks after Obama consults with the Congress, the official added.

Earlier last week UK and France said that their probes into the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria showed that the pro-government forces did it at least once causing casualties among rebels and called the international community for immediate action. Many officials, including top Russian politicians, noted that the impartiality of British and French researchers is under question and urged an independent probe.

The UN is currently preparing its own independent investigation, but it might take a long time. Syrian government has said it was ready to accept the UN delegation and help with the investigation.

In late March one of the conflicting parties in Syria allegedly used a sarin-charged missile near the city of Aleppo. The government and rebels now accuse each other of the attack that killed at least 25 people.

While the UK, France and now the United states accuse pro-Assad forces, Turkish media said in early June that the country’s security forces had found sarin gas in the homes of members of the Al-Qaeda-linked Al-Nusra Front – one of the main groups opposing the Syrian government.

Russian officials have repeatedly condemned the use of chemical weapons and urged an all-sided and unbiased research into all incidents connected with the issue.

June 14, 2013 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Who Killed the Syrian Peace Talks?

By Shamus Cooke | Worker’s Action | June 12, 2013

The long awaited Syrian peace talks — instigated by power brokers Russia and the United States — had already passed their initial due date, and are now officially stillborn.

The peace talks are dead because the U.S.-backed rebels are boycotting the negotiations, ruining any hope for peace, while threatening to turn an already tragic disaster into a Yugoslavia-style catastrophe… or worse.

The U.S. backed rebels are not participating in the talks because they have nothing to gain from them, and everything to lose.

In war, the purpose of peace negotiations is to copy the situation on the battlefield and paste it to a treaty: the army winning the war enters negotiations from a dominant position, since its position is enforceable on the ground.

The U.S.-backed rebels would be entering peace talks broken and beaten, having been debilitated on the battlefield. The Syrian army has had a string of victories, pushing the rebels back to the border areas where they are protected by U.S. allies Turkey, Jordan, and northern Lebanon. Peace talks would merely expose this reality and end the war on terms dictated by the Syrian government.

A rebel leader was quoted in The New York Times revealing this motive for the rebel’s abandonment of peace talks:

“What can we [rebels] ask for when we go very weak to Geneva [for peace talks]?… The Russians and the Iranians and the representatives of the [Syrian] regime will say: ‘You don’t have any power. We are controlling everything. What you are coming to ask for?’”

This is the reality as it exists in Syria, and realistic peace talks would recognize the situation in Syria and end the conflict immediately.

But first the rebel’s supporters — the United States and its lackeys Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar — must acknowledge this reality and demand that the rebels forge ahead with peace talks, on threat of being cut off politically, financially, and militarily.

If this happens, war is over.

But if the war ended tomorrow, Syrian President Bashar Assad, would still be in power, and President Obama has said repeatedly, “Assad must go.” Obama would be further humiliated by his Syria policy if he had to again recognize Assad as president after spending a year recognizing a group of rich Syrian exiles as “the legitimate government of Syria” and after his administration repeatedly announced that the Assad regime had ended over a year ago.

More importantly, if Assad stayed in power, U.S. foreign policy would appear weak internationally, which is one main reason that the U.S. political establishment wants to go “all in” for regime change in Syria: super powers must back up their threats, since otherwise other nations might choose to challenge the United States.

This is the real reason peace talks will not be held. The U.S. and its European allies want regime change in Syria, and they are prepared to allow many more people to die to make it so. This was made clear by the Obama administration. The New York Times reports:

“[Syrian] President Bashar al-Assad’s gains on the battlefield have called the United States’ strategy on Syria into question, prompting the Obama administration to again consider military options, including arming the rebels and conducting airstrikes to protect civilians and the Syrian opposition, administration officials said on Monday.”

The above quote mentions “conducting airstrikes to protect civilians.” This is the infamous language of the UN resolution that allowed U.S.-NATO to intervene in Libya; but Obama immediately overstepped “protecting civilians” and quickly jumped into “regime change,” a gross violation of international law and a Bush-like war crime.

The UN — though especially China and Russia — have learned from the Libya example and will doubtfully ever again approve of a “protect civilian” UN resolution. If the U.S. intervenes in Syria, it will do so with a Bush-style “coalition of the willing,” i.e. U.S. allies.

Obama’s dream of having a post-Assad Syria is further complicated by the fact that Assad is apparently more popular than he has ever been.

Many Syrians that didn’t previously support Assad now do, having concluded that Assad in power is better than their country being obliterated in an Iraq-style invasion, or being dominated by Islamic extremists, as the majority of the Syrian rebel groups are.

Further helping Assad’s popularity is that Israel has bombed Syria recently on multiple occasions, while Syrians watch the unpopular United States funnel weapons to the rebels. As a result, Assad can now successfully portray himself as a defender of Syria’s sovereignty against foreign aggression.

But, Obama will not be deterred. After it became clear that the rebels were losing the war, the U.S. and its European allies removed the remaining legal barriers to further arming the rebels, while the religious leaders of Saudi Arabia and Qatar — both U.S. allies — assisted in the war effort by calling for Jihad against the Syrian government (the same week the leader of al-Qaeda did).

Behind this frenzy of rebel support lies the sick logic that, in order for successful peace negotiations to take place, the rebels need to be in a stronger battlefield position. Arm the rebels to the teeth for peace!

In response to this twisted logic, Oxfam International — a disaster relief coalition — responded by saying:

“Sending arms to the Syrian opposition won’t create a level playing field. Instead, it risks further fueling an arms free-for-all where the victims are the civilians of Syria. Our experience from other conflict zones tells us that this crisis will only drag on for far longer if more and more arms are poured into the country.”

Ultimately, the Syrian rebels would have already been defeated — and thousands of lives spared — if they had not been receiving support from the U.S. and other countries. The U.S.-backed rebels have said that a pre-condition for peace is “Assad must go;” but this demand does not coincide with the reality on the ground: the rebels are in no position to demand this, and the U.S. is using this unrealistic demand to artificially lengthen an already-bloody war.

Obama can either use his immense influence to end this bloody conflict by withdrawing support to the rebels, or he can extend the conflict and further tear to shreds the social fabric of the Middle East, while risking a multi-nation war that history will denounce as an easily-preventable holocaust.

June 13, 2013 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Obama Speaks with Forked Tongue on Surveillance

By Sheldon Richman | FFF | June 11, 2013

It’s bad enough the federal government spies on us. Must it insult our intelligence too?

The government’s response to Edward Snowden’s leaks about the National Security Agency’s secret monitoring of the Internet and collection of our telephone logs is a mass of contradictions. Officials have said the disclosures are (1) old news, (2) grossly inaccurate, and (3) a blow to national security. It’s hard to see how any two of these can be true, much less all three.

Can’t they at least get their story straight? If they can’t do better than that, why should we have confidence in anything else that they do?

Snowden exposed the government’s indiscriminate snooping because, among other things, it violates the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and he had no other recourse.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper says Snowden should have used established channels to raise his concerns, but there are no effective channels. Members of the congressional intelligence committees are prohibited from telling the public what they learn from their briefings. Two members of the Senate committee, Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, for years have warned — without disclosing secrets — that the Obama administration is interpreting the Patriot Act and related laws far more broadly than was ever intended by those who voted for those pieces of legislation. Their warnings have made no difference.

A court challenge wasn’t open to Snowden either. Glenn Greenwald, who published Snowden’s leaks in the Guardian, notes that for years the ACLU has tried to challenge the surveillance programs in court on Fourth Amendment grounds, but the Obama administration has blocked the effort by arguing that the ACLU has no standing to bring the suit. It’s a classic Catch-22. Since the surveillance is secret, no one can know if he has been spied on. But if no one knows, no one can go into court claiming to be a victim, and the government will argue that therefore the plaintiff has no standing to challenge the surveillance. Well played, Obama administration.

The administration should not be allowed to get away with the specious claim that telling its secrets to a few privileged members of Congress is equivalent to informing the people. It is not. It’s merely one branch of government telling some people in another branch. Calling those politicians “our representatives” is highly misleading. In what sense do they actually represent us?

Equally specious is the assertion that the NSA can’t monitor particular people without court authorization. The secret FISA court is a rubber stamp.

When Obama ran for president in 2008, he said Americans shouldn’t have to choose between privacy and security. Now he says that “one of the things that we’re going to have to discuss and debate is how are we striking this balance between the need to keep the American people safe and our concerns about privacy? Because there are some tradeoffs involved.”

What do you take us for, Mr. President? Do you say whatever serves your momentary interest?

It’s outrageous for Obama to say he welcomes this debate — when his regime is plotting to capture and prosecute the heroic whistleblower who made it possible.

The debate would be bogus anyway. No one has a right to make a security/privacy tradeoff for you. Our rights should not be subject to vote, particularly when a ruling elite ultimately will make the decision — out of public view!

Americans have learned nothing from the last 40 years if they have not learned that the executive branch — regardless of party — will interpret any power as broadly as it wishes. Congressional oversight is worse than useless; it’s a myth, especially when one chamber is controlled by the president’s party and the other chamber’s majority embraces big government as long as it carries a “national security” label.

Obama says, “If people can’t trust not only the executive branch but also don’t trust Congress and don’t trust federal judges to make sure that we’re abiding by the Constitution, due process and rule of law, then we’re going to have some problems here.”

That’s wrong. If the politicians’ only response to revelations that they’re violating our privacy is to ask for trust, then we already have problems.

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June 12, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Germany slams US for ‘Stasi methods’ ahead of Obama visit

RT | June 12, 2013

Germans are expressing outrage as details of a US internet spy program – revealed by a former CIA employee-turned-whistleblower – are prompting comparisons with that of former communist East Germany’s Ministry for State Security.

Unfortunately for Obama’s upcoming trip to Berlin, it was revealed that Germany ranks as the most-spied-on EU country by the US, a map of secret surveillance activities by the National Security Agency (NSA) shows.

German ministers are expressing their outrage over America’s sweeping intelligence-gathering leviathan, with one parliamentarian comparing US spying methods to that of the communist East Germany’s much-dreaded Ministry for State Security (Stasi).

Washington is using “American-style Stasi methods,” said Markus Ferber, a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Bavarian sister party and member of the European Parliament.

“I thought this era had ended when the DDR fell,” he said, using the German acronym for the disposed German Democratic Republic.

Clearly, enthusiasm for the American leader’s upcoming visit will be much more tempered than it was in 2008 when 200,000 people packed around the Victory Column in central Berlin to hear Obama speak of a world that would be dramatically different from that of his hawkish Republican predecessor, George W. Bush.

Merkel will question Obama about the NSA program when he visits in Berlin on June 18, government spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters on Monday. Some political analysts fear the issue will dampen a visit that was intended to commemorate US-German relations on the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech.

Bush excesses, Obama digresses

One year into his second term, Barack Obama seems powerless to roll back the military and security apparatus bolted down by the Bush administration in the ‘War on Terror.’

One consequence of this failure of the Obama administration to reign in Bush-era excesses emerged last week when former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden, 29, blew the whistle on a top-secret intelligence system named Prism, which collects data on individuals directly from the servers of the largest US telecommunications companies.

According to documents leaked to the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers, PRISM gave US intelligence agencies access to emails, internet chats and photographs from companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Verizon and Skype.

Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said leaked reports that US intelligence services are able to track virtually all forms of Internet communication demanded an explanation.

“The more a society monitors, controls and observes its citizens, the less free it is,” she wrote in a guest editorial for Spiegel Online on Tuesday. “The suspicion of excessive surveillance of communication is so alarming that it cannot be ignored. For that reason, openness and clarification by the US administration itself is paramount at this point.”

All of the facts must be put on the table, the minister added.

Obama has defended the intelligence-gathering system as a “modest encroachment” that Americans should be willing to accept on behalf of security.

“You can’t have 100 per cent security and also then have 100 per cent privacy and zero inconvenience,” he said. “We’re going to have to make some choices as a society. There are trade-offs involved.”

The United States, however, is not legally restricted from eavesdropping on the communications of foreigners, meaning in theory that Washington could be listening to and collecting the private communications of individuals anywhere in the world.

Peter Schaar, Germany’s federal data protection commissioner, said the leaked intelligence was grounds for “massive concern” in Europe.

“The problem is that we Europeans are not protected from what appears to be a very comprehensive surveillance program,” he told the Handelsblatt newspaper. “Neither European nor German rules apply here, and American laws only protect Americans.”

Meanwhile, German opposition parties hope to gain from the scandal, especially with parliamentary elections approaching in September, and Merkel looking to win a third term.

“This looks to me like it could become one of the biggest data privacy scandals ever,” Greens leader Renate Kuenast told Reuters.

Obama is scheduled to hold talks and a news conference with Merkel on Wednesday followed by a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate, the 18th triumphal arch that is one of Germany’s most recognizable landmarks.

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June 12, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

NSA Document Leak Proves Conspiracy To Create Big Brother Style World Control System

By Lee Rogers | Blacklisted News | June 10, 2013

The Obama regime which was already in the midst of three high profile scandals now has a fourth one to deal with. Top secret documents were recently leaked to the Washington Post and the London Guardian detailing a vast government surveillance program code named PRISM. According to the leaked documents, the program allows the National Security Agency (NSA) back door access to data from the servers of several leading U.S. based Internet and software companies. The documents list companies such as Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL and Apple as some of the participants in the program. There have also been other reports indicating that the NSA is able to access real-time user data from as many as 50 separate American companies. Under the program, the NSA is able to collect information ranging from e-mails, chats, videos, photographs, VoIP calls and more. Most importantly is the fact that PRISM allows the NSA to obtain this data without having to make individual requests from the service providers or without having to obtain a court order. To say that this is a violation of the Fourth Amendment which forbids unreasonable searches and seizures would be a gross understatement. This is actually much more than that. This is a program designed specifically to serve as a Big Brother like control grid and to end privacy as we know it.

In some ways this is not really a new story. This is just confirmation of what many people involved in the alternative research community have known for years. Going as far back as the 1990s there were reports revealing how Microsoft provided the NSA with back door access to their Windows operating system. Google’s cozy relationship with the NSA has also been discussed off and on over the past decade. There have even been other whistleblowers that have come forward previously detailing a number of unconstitutional and unlawful abuses conducted by the agency. This includes revelations of how the NSA was spying on American service members stationed overseas. The only difference with this is that these newly leaked documents provide definitive details on just how wide reaching the NSA’s activities have become.

It is now painfully obvious that James Clapper the Director of National Intelligence when testifying before the Senate this past March blatantly lied when asked by Senator Ron Wyden if the NSA was involved in collecting data from the American people. Clapper flatly denied that the NSA was engaged in these types of domestic surveillance activities. What makes the situation such a joke is that the Obama regime is not focused on the fact that Clapper lied to the Senate which in of itself is unlawful. Instead they have been more focused on determining the source of the leak that exposed these broad abuses of power. This is probably not surprising considering that this is a regime that rewards corruption by promoting people involved in all sorts of questionable activity. The promotion of Susan Rice as Obama’s new National Security Advisor is a perfect example of this considering her involvement in spreading bogus Benghazi related talking points. On the other hand, the Obama regime has severely punished a variety of whistleblowers who have dared to expose any wrong doing.

At least the Obama regime won’t have to spend much time and energy trying to identify the whistleblower as this person who leaked these documents has already come forward publically. At his own request the Guardian revealed his identity as Edward Snowden a 29-year old Information Technology specialist who has been working at the NSA for different contractors including Booz Allen Hamilton and Dell. Snowden had previously worked at an NSA office in Hawaii but boarded a flight to Hong Kong a few weeks ago where he has stayed since turning over these documents to the media. He expects that he will never set foot on U.S. soil again and may possibly seek political asylum in a country like Iceland. The Guardian interviewed Snowden over several days and has recently posted an interview transcript that provides more detail on the abuses he became aware of and why he decided to come forward as a whistleblower. In the interview Snowden confirms that the NSA has the infrastructure that allows them to intercept almost any type of data that you can imagine from phone records, e-mails to credit cards. He also reveals how the U.S. government is engaged in hacking systems everywhere around the world and how the NSA has consistently lied to Congress about their activities. There is little doubt that Snowden is thus far one of the most important whistleblowers to come along in the 21st century and he will likely face retaliation considering the vast reach and capabilities of the U.S. intelligence community.

Many individuals within the Obama regime including Obama himself have claimed that this type of widespread data collection is needed to fight terrorism and is used for national security purposes. Even if we were to assume that the war on terror is real, this claim is ridiculous and absurd on its face. It would be one thing if they were collecting information based upon a specific criteria identified by legitimate human intelligence. Instead they are collecting indiscriminate amounts of information which makes it much more difficult to analyze and target anything that might indicate a potential threat. If the NSA’s goal is really to detect and target terrorism then all they are doing is making their job more difficult by vastly increasing the noise they have to filter through. Either the people running the NSA are incredibly stupid or the goal of this program is to establish the infrastructure necessary to centrally collect data from communications everywhere around the world.

Other evidence to support this notion is the fact that the NSA is building a huge new facility in Utah that is being designed to store an enormous amount of data. A Fox News report indicates that, when completed, the facility will be able to store billions of terabytes worth of information. It is hard to fathom how the NSA would need this much storage space unless it was being used to collect and store any and all communications.

The Obama regime has tried to justify all of this by saying that PRISM helped stop an alleged New York City subway bomb plot back in 2009. This has been proven to be factually incorrect as regular police work and help from the British were larger factors in stopping the plot. This is assuming you even believe the official story of this terror plot to begin with. The government and more specifically the FBI have manufactured so many fake terror plots that it is difficult to determine fact from fiction at this point. So with this said, there is really no proof that PRISM has even helped to stop any so-called terror plot. They are collecting information simply for the sake of collecting information with no probable cause or reasonable justification.

At this point it is an undeniable fact that the NSA has been illegally collecting information on the American people. For years what has been dismissed as conspiracy theory is now without question a conspiracy fact. It is laughable that Obama and his assorted cronies are even trying to defend this program as a useful tool to fight terrorists. It is more likely that this program is being used to help find people domestically who dislike the government and would potentially fight back against it. A striking similarity to what is depicted in George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984 where political dissidents are identified as thought criminals. A tool the NSA uses called Boundless Informant which counts and categorizes the information they collect shows that more data is actually gathered from domestic sources in the U.S. than from Russia. So based on this one could argue that the NSA almost seems to view the American people as more of a threat to national security than the Russians.

The three scandals the Obama regime was dealing with prior to this new scandal are all grounds for impeachment and one could easily argue that this one is many times worse than the previous three. Obama should resign in disgrace but being that he’s a narcissist who seems unwilling to admit making any mistakes it is highly doubtful he will do this. Obama and the rest of the useful idiots in his regime who have tried to defend and justify this and other criminal programs need to be … removed from office and put on trial. The criminal activity from the Obama regime is so vastly transparent it has become a complete and total joke to anyone who is even remotely paying attention.

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June 11, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The “Congress knew” defense

left i on the news | June 07, 2013

President Obama defends his super-snooping program, claiming that “they’re not secret in the sense that when it comes to telephone calls, every member of Congress has been briefed on this program.” First of all, I note he also says that “the relevant intelligence committees are fully briefed on these programs,” which suggests that “every member of Congress”, to whom the word “fully” isn’t applied, may or may not know very much at all. But even if every member of Congress were in fact fully briefed, there’s a little problem with that. Because they were briefed in secret and unable to convey that information to their constituents. So if they wanted to, say, campaign for reelection on the grounds of supporting (or opposing) that policy, they couldn’t do so. Furthermore, no challenger could campaign against them on a platform of ending these policies, because no challenger would have known about the policies.

On a related issue, talking to FOX’s Shep Smith earlier today (actually being grilled by Smith, who was having none of his double-talk and evasions), the former deputy director of the NSA claimed that the program was ipso facto Constitutional because “all three branches of government” were involved with it. But the “FISA Court” is a special, secret court. Not only have they never denied a single government request, but no citizen can challenge a decision they make, because their decisions are all secret. Therefore the Constitutionality of the court itself, or of any decision it has made, is not subject to review by the Supreme Court, the only institution which can actually rule on the Constitutionality of a law.

~

Related video:
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June 9, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite, Video | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The NYT and Chemical Weapons in Syria

By Michael McGehee | NYTX | June 7, 2013

Last month when UN investigator Carla Del Ponte came out publicly to say, “There are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated,” and, “This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities,” it was quickly met with suspicion and denial, from the UN and the White House.

Jay Carney, the White House press secretary, said as much to reporters.

“We are highly skeptical of the suggestion that the opposition could have or did use chemical weapons,” Mr. Carney said. “We find it highly likely that any chemical weapon use that has taken place in Syria was done by the Assad regime. And that remains our position.” (NYT, 05/07/2013)

In the previous month both the US and Israel came out with the claim that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons.

On Tuesday the UN issued a report on the war-torn country, and The New York Times reported that, “There are reasonable grounds to believe limited quantities of toxic chemicals were used.”

However, the “paper of record” conveniently failed to note that the report immediately goes on to say that “It has not been possible, on the evidence available, to determine the precise chemical agents used, their delivery systems or the perpetrator.”

But there are two very important developments to this story which have been met with total silence.

The first is the hacking of Britam, a British defense company. Four months ago it was reported by Yahoo! that:

The Obama administration gave green signal to a chemical weapons attack plan in Syria that could be blamed on President Bashar al Assad’s regime and in turn, spur international military action in the devastated country, leaked documents have shown.

One of the leaked documents was an email. The email:

Phil

We’ve got a new offer. It’s about Syria again. Qataris propose an attractive deal and swear that the idea is approved by Washington.

We’ll have to deliver a CW to Homs, a Soviet origin g-shell from Libya similar to those that Assad should have.

They want us to deploy our Ukrainian personnel that should speak Russian and make a video record.

Frankly, I don’t think it’s a good idea but the sums proposed are enormous. Your opinion?

Kind regards

David

One of the parties who continues to feed the UN information about the use of chemical weapons in Syria is the United Kingdom. The NYT reported on Wednesday, Britain “repeated an earlier assessment that ‘a growing body of limited but persuasive information’ pointed to the use of the same toxin.”

After the email was leaked, claims of chemical weapons usage were made and then President Obama was hounded to act swiftly. Syria’s President Assad allegedly crossed Washington’s “red line.”

The June 4th UN panel report claims that, “It is possible that anti-Government armed groups may access and use chemical weapons. This includes nerve agents, though there is no compelling evidence that these groups possess such weapons or their requisite delivery systems.”

The Turkish news agency, Zaman, reported on May 28, 2013—that is, a week before the UN report was published—that Syrian rebels were arrested in Turkey and had Sarin gas in their possession.

While Russia Today covered the development, as well as Voice of Russia and Iran’s PressTV, no Western source published the development.

In all the coverage provided on Syria and chemical weapons—in the last year the NYT has provided more than 1,100 news items—we should suppose that a hacked email showing Washington supports a plan to use chemical weapons in Syria and blame it on the regime, and that rebels have been caught with Sarin nerve gas in Turkey, simply is not “all the news fit to print.”

June 8, 2013 Posted by | Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

DHS defends suspicionless searches of laptops and cell phones

RT | June 6, 2013

The United States government doesn’t need a reason to seize and search the cell phones, laptops and other electronic devices of Americans entering the country, according to a Department of Homeland Security document provided to the press this week.

The DHS has long insisted that border agents and immigration officers are allowed to collect the electronics of US citizens crossing into the country without reason or cause, but a December 2011 document made public this week once and for all shines a light on a sparsely discussed security-measure that has attracted the attention of privacy advocates and others who’ve equated the practice as a constitutional violation.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Associated Press jointly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the document earlier this year after the DHS published a two-page executive summary briefly explaining the results of an audit conducted by the department’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. In that statement, the DHS auditor concluded that Customs and Border Protection agents and officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement were not violating either the First or Fourth Amendments to the US Constitution by seizing the electronics of Americans without clear suspicion of a crime.

“We conclude that CBP’s and ICE’s current border search policies comply with the Fourth Amendment,” Tamara Kessler wrote for the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in the summary. “We also conclude that imposing a requirement that officers have reasonable suspicion in order to conduct a border search of an electronic device would be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefits.”

Now with the full 23-page paper in their possession — albeit a version that’s seen a fair share of redactions — the AP and ACLU have published the document in order to expose a post-9/11 policy that has remained intact under President Barack Obama, but to little discussion.

“This is striking,” ACLU fellow Brian Hauss wrote Wednesday, “because it is the first time, as far as we know, that the government has explained why purely suspicionless searches supposedly enhance security.”

The government’s reasoning, according to the document, is that the blanketing ability to collect and assess the devices of anyone thought to be entering the country is crucial to thwart high crimes. That being said, the government attests that requiring actual probable cause before seizing a device would, in the eyes of the DHS, hinder their ability to counter terrorism.

“[A]dding a heightened [suspicion-based] threshold requirement could be operationally harmful without concomitant civil rights/civil liberties benefit,” the document found. “First, commonplace decisions to search electronic devices might be opened to litigation challenging the reasons for the search. In addition to interfering with a carefully constructed border security system, the litigation could directly undermine national security by requiring the government to produce sensitive investigative and national security information to justify some of the most critical searches.”

“Even a policy change entirely unenforceable by courts might be problematic,” it continued. “Under a reasonable suspicion requirement, officers might hesitate to search an individual’s device without the presence of articulable factors capable of being formally defended, despite having an intuition or hunch based on experience that justified a search.”

Speaking to AP, ACLU staff attorney Catherine Crump said the government’s reasoning is “just not good enough” and demonstrates purely inadequate reasoning.

“A purely suspicionless search opens the door to ethnic profiling,” Crump said.

Hauss, the legal fellow for the group’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, said the government’s line of thought in defending the policy is faulty for a few different reasons. “DHS claims that giving Americans the opportunity to challenge laptop searches in court would lead to the divulgence of national security secrets, but this is obviously wrong,” he wrote. “The government has numerous resources at its disposal to prevent the disclosure of sensitive information. The ‘state secrets privilege,’ to take just one example that is used in court cases, has been criticized on many grounds, but no one has ever seriously suggested that its protections are too anemic. Although DHS might fear the prospect of being called into open court to explain its actions, executive accountability before the law is the bedrock on which our system of constitutional self-government is built.”

Last year, the US Supreme Court upheld an earlier ruling that legally permitted the use of suspicionless roadblocks anywhere within 100 miles of an international border, subjecting nearly 200 million Americans around the country to spontaneous and sporadic inspections of vehicles and their possessions.

On Tuesday, ACLU spokesperson Peter Boogaard told Bloomberg News that a 2009 policy change restricted how long the DHS can hold on to seized electronics. Earlier this week, though, it was suggested that the department did not necessarily see any problems with duplicating that information to be held on to indefinitely.

David House, a founding member of the Bradley Manning Support Network, sued the DHS in 2011 after his computer and cell phone were seized after an international flight he was on landed at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. On behalf of the ACLU, House sued DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano on the accusation that his belongings were searched solely on the basis of his association with the Support Network, an organization that has paid in full the legal bills for the 25-year-old Army private accused of committing espionage and aiding terrorists by sharing sensitive files with the website WikiLeaks. House’s devices were held for 49 days by ICE — longer than the 30 days allowed legally — and the contents of those electronics were copied by investigations. House dropped his lawsuit last after the DHS agreed to delete its copy of the data.

“They’re giving us exactly what we wanted,” House told Wired.

June 7, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Four Years Ago Obama Promised to Investigate Afghan Massacre. Has Anything Happened Since?

Physicians for Human Rights sent forensic experts to conduct a preliminary forensic assessment of various mass graves in northern Afghanistan, including the one at Dasht-e-Leili. (Physicians for Human Rights)

By Cora Currier | ProPublica | June 4, 2013

In his first year in office, President Barack Obama pledged to “collect the facts” on the death of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Taliban prisoners of war at the hands of U.S.-allied Afghan forces in late 2001.

Almost four years later, there’s no sign of progress.

When asked by ProPublica about the state of the investigation, the White House says it is still “looking into” the apparent massacre. Yet no facts have been released and it’s far from clear what, if any, facts have been collected.

Human rights researchers who originally uncovered the case say they’ve seen no evidence of an active investigation.

The deaths happened as Taliban forces were collapsing in the wake of the American invasion of Afghanistan. Thousands of Taliban prisoners had surrendered to the forces of a U.S.-supported warlord named Abdul Rashid Dostum. The prisoners, say survivors and other witnesses, were stuffed into shipping containers without food or water. Many died of suffocation. Others were allegedly killed when Dostum’s men shot at the containers.

A few months later, a mass grave was found nearby in Dasht-i-Leili, a desert region of northern Afghanistan.

The New York Times reported in 2009 that the Bush administration, sensitive to criticism of a U.S. ally, had discouraged investigations into the incident. In response, Obama told CNN that “if it appears that our conduct in some way supported violations of the laws of war, I think that we have to know about that.”

A White House spokeswoman told ProPublica that there has indeed been some kind of review – and that it’s still ongoing: “At the direction of the President, his national security team is continuing its work looking into the Dasht-i-Leili massacre.” She declined to provide more details.

“This seems quite half-hearted and cynical,” said Susannah Sirkin, director of international policy at Physicians for Human Rights, the group that discovered the grave site in 2002 and since then has pushed for an investigation.

The group sent a letter to the president in December 2011, the tenth anniversary of the incident. In a follow-up meeting some months later, senior State Department officials told Physicians for Human Rights that there was nothing new to share.

“This has been a hot potato that no one wanted to deal with, and now it’s gone cold,” said Norah Niland, former director of human rights for the United Nations in Afghanistan.

Human rights advocates have long said the responsibility for a comprehensive investigation lies with the U.S., because American forces were allied with Dostum and his men at the time. Surviving prisoners have also claimed that Americans were present when the containers were loaded, though that’s never been corroborated.

A Pentagon spokesman told ProPublica that the Department of Defense “found no evidence of U.S. service member participation, knowledge, or presence. A broader review of the facts is beyond D.O.D.’s purview.” That initial review has never been made public.

At this point, say advocates, an investigation should address not just the question of U.S. involvement, but also what the U.S. did in the years that followed to foster accountability.

“I’m not saying Dostum ordered these people killed, and I’m not saying U.S. troops participated,” said Stefan Schmitt, a forensic specialist with Physicians for Human Rights. “All I’m saying is there are hundreds if not thousands of people that went missing. In a country that’s looking to have peace, to be under the rule of law, you need to answer these questions.”

Initially excited by Obama’s statement, researchers with Physicians for Human Rights peppered the administration with their findings. But the response was “murky at best,” said Sirkin.

“We were never very clear on who within the administration was delegated the task,” she said. Current and former administration officials interviewed by ProPublica couldn’t say which agency or department had the job.

Sirkin and others eventually resigned themselves to the fact that Obama, in his televised remarks, had not specifically called for a full investigation. With the U.S. now withdrawing from Afghanistan, many observers say it’s no surprise that investigating Dasht-i-Leili is no longer a priority.

Dostum still holds considerable sway in Northern Afghanistan, though he has fallen in and out of favor with the U.S. and with Afghan president Hamid Karzai. The Times recently reported Dostum is one of several former warlords to whom Karzai passes on thousands of dollars in cash he receives from the CIA each month. (We were unable to reach Dostum himself for this story.)

The Obama administration has been cool toward him in recent years, saying ahead of Afghanistan’s elections in 2009 that the U.S. “maintains concerns about any leadership role for Mr. Dostum in today’s Afghanistan.”

Back in 2001, Dostum was far more important to the U.S. He was a U.S. proxy, fighting the Taliban as part of the Northern Alliance. American Special Forces famously rode on horseback alongside Dostum’s men, advising and calling in airstrikes. The alliance took the city of Mazar-i-Sharif from the Taliban in one of the first major victories of the invasion in early November 2001.

The shipping container deaths occurred a few weeks later, when Taliban fighters who had surrendered to the Northern Alliance at the city of Kunduz were en route to a prison about 200 miles away.

That winter, Physicians for Human Rights discovered a mass grave at Dasht-i-Leili. A preliminary investigation exhumed several bodies that appeared to have died from suffocation. Stories began to circulate in the region and Newsweek and others published detailed accounts from surviving prisoners, truck drivers, and other witnesses.

The Times also reported that an FBI agent interviewing new Afghan arrivals to Guantanamo Bay prison in early 2002 heard consistent accounts of prisoners “stacked like cordwood,” and death by suffocation and shooting. When the agent pressed for an investigation, he was reportedly told it was not his responsibility.

Dostum has said that he would welcome an investigation. He said that some 200 prisoners had indeed died in transit, but that the deaths were unintentional, the result of battlefield wounds.

Other estimates put the toll much higher.

A widely cited State Department memo from fall 2002 said that “the actual number may approach 2,000.”

Around the same time, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell tasked his Ambassador for War Crimes, Pierre-Richard Prosper, with looking into Dasht-i-Leili. Prosper told ProPublica that due to the U.S. alliance with Dostum, Washington felt the U.S. should not take the lead in an investigation.

“We were in the middle of fighting, and we thought we should keep the lines clear, let someone else, the U.N. or Afghans, handle this,” said Prosper.

But the newly installed Afghan government had neither the will nor the resources for a thorough investigation, and U.N. officials said they could not guarantee security. Witnesses and others involved in Dasht-i-Leili had already been killed and harassed, according to State Department memos.

A declassified Defense Department memo from February 2003 indicates the U.S. was not providing security for an investigation. The memo’s author, Marshall Billingslea, told the Times in 2009, “I did get the sense that there was little appetite for this matter within parts of D.O.D.” (Billingslea did not respond to our requests for comment.)

As the years went by, no one from the U.S., the U.N., or Afghanistan guarded the grave site. In 2008, reporters and researchers found empty pits where they had once found human remains. Satellite photos obtained later showed what appeared to be earth-moving equipment in the desert in 2006. Locals told McClatchy that Dostum’s men had dug up the graves.

After Obama pledged in 2009 to look into the case, a parallel inquiry was begun the next year in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired by current Secretary of State John Kerry.

The fate of that investigation is also unclear. The lead investigator, John Kiriakou, was a former CIA officer who was caught up in a criminal leak prosecution and is now in prison. Other Senate staffers could not provide details on Kiriakou’s efforts. Physicians for Human Rights says contact from the committee fizzled out within a year.

New attention to Dasht-i-Leili had also been sparked within the U.N.’s mission in Afghanistan and the organization’s High Commission on Human Rights, former U.N. officials said.

However, Peter Galbraith, who was the U.N.’s deputy special representative for Afghanistan until the fall of 2009, told ProPublica that “an investigation would’ve required a push from the U.S. It required the cooperation of the coalition forces.” (Neither the U.N. mission in Afghanistan nor the office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights responded to our requests for comment.)

The mass grave at Dasht-i-Leili is one of many left unexamined in Afghanistan. In late 2011, the nation’s Independent Human Rights Commission concluded a massive report on decades of war crimes and human rights abuses, which reportedly documents 180 mass graves across the country. The region near Dasht-i-Leili is also believed to hold the remains of civilians massacred by the Taliban in 1998, in what Human Rights Watch called “one of the single worst examples of killings of civilians in Afghanistan’s twenty-year war.” In all, the report named 500 individuals responsible for mass killings – some of whom hold prominent government positions.

American and Afghan officials reportedly discouraged publication of the report, and the commission has still not made it public. “It’s going to reopen all the old wounds,” an American Embassy official told the New York Times last year. Afghanistan also recently adopted an amnesty law offering blanket immunity for past war crimes.

Nader Nadery, the commissioner responsible for the report, told ProPublica: “I haven’t seen any political or even rhetorical support of investigations into Dasht-i-Leili or any other investigation into past atrocities, from either Bush or Obama.”

A History of Inaction

Nov. 24, 2001: As Taliban forces surrender to the U.S.-backed Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, several thousand prisoners of war are transported in shipping containers. Survivors and witnesses later allege as many as 2,000 prisoners died — some suffocated while others were shot — and are buried in a grave site at Dasht-i-Leili.

February 2002: Physicians for Human Rights visits the graves at Dasht-i-Leili. That spring, under the auspices of the U.N., PHR conducts an initial forensic investigation of the graves, exhuming a number of recent remains that indicated death by suffocation.

Spring and Summer 2002: Media reports detail eyewitness allegations about deaths in the containers.

Fall 2002: U.S., U.N. and Afghan authorities say that a full investigation is warranted, but none gets off the ground.

2006: Satellite photos show disturbances at the grave sites at Dasht-i-Leili.

2008: Researchers and reporters find empty pits where graves had once been.

July 10, 2009: The New York Times reports that Bush administration officials had discouraged U.S. government investigations into Dasht-i-Leili.

July 13, 2009: Obama tells CNN, “I’ve asked my national security team to… collect the facts for me that are known.”

Early 2010: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee begins an inquiry into Dasht-i-Leili. The scope and result of that investigation is not clear.

May 2013: A White House spokesperson says that the president’s “national security team is continuing its work looking into the Dasht-i-Leili massacre.”

June 6, 2013 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Perpetual War – and Obama’s Perpetual Con Game

By Glen Ford | Black Agenda Report | May 29, 2013

Barack Obama is a master trickster, a shape-shifter, and a methodical liar. The man who has arrogated to himself the right to kill at will, anywhere on the globe, accountable only to himself, based on secret information and classified legal rationales, now says he is determined that Washington’s “perpetual war” must one day end – sometime in the misty future after he is long gone from office. He informed his global audience of potential victims that he had signed a secret agreement (with himself?) that would limit drone strikes to targets that pose “a continuing, imminent threat to Americans” and cannot be captured – a policy that his White House has always claimed (falsely) to be operative. He promises to be more merciful than before, “haunted” as he is by all the nameless deaths, although he admits to having done no wrong.

He is a man of boundless introspection, inviting us to ride with him on his wildly spinning moral compass. But, most of all, he is not George Bush – of that we can be certain, if only because he is younger and oratorically gifted and Black. “Beyond Afghanistan,” he said, “we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror,’ but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America.” Thus, magically, he redefined the U.S. war on terror out of existence (in perpetuity) by breaking the conflict down to its daily, constituent parts, while simultaneously affirming that America will soon travel “beyond Afghanistan” despite the fact that many thousands of Special Operations troops will continue their round the clock raids in the countryside while drones rain death from the skies for the foreseeable future.

Such conflicts, we must understand, are necessitated by the “imminence” of threats posed to U.S. security, as weighed and measured by secret means. His Eminence is the sole judge of imminence. He is also the arbiter of who is to be detained in perpetuity, without trial or (public) charge, for “association” with “terrorists” as defined by himself. He has no apologies for that.

America must turn the page on the previous era, because “the threat has shifted and evolved from the one that came to our shores on 9/11.” A reevaluation is in order, since “we have to recognize that the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11.” In that case, why not call for repeal of the layers of war on terror legislation that have accumulated over the last 12 years, including Obama’s own NDAA preventive detention bill? Or, he could simply renounce these measures and refuse to employ them as a matter of policy. Instead, the president defended his own maximalist interpretation of the law, and claimed that the legal basis for his kill-at-will authority is firmly rooted in the Congress’s 2001 Authorization of Military Force (AMUF). Although he made vague reference to changes that Congress might make in the AMUF, there was no substantive indication that he sought to impose restrictions on his own or any other president’s authority to wage war precisely as he has for the last four years.

Obama’s blanket interpretation of AMUF – the legal logic – had previously been considered a state secret. It was news to much of the U.S. Senate, too, until assistant secretary of defense Michael Sheehan, in charge of special operations (death squads) at the Pentagon, told lawmakers earlier this month that the AMUF allows Obama to put “boots on the ground” anywhere he chooses, including “Yemen or the Congo,” if his classified logic compelled him to do so.

The senators were stunned – although it is no secret that Obama has already put U.S. Special Forces boots on the ground in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan, and has sent a combat brigade on permanent posting on the continent. Central Africa is one part of the world in which al Qaida has found little traction. The purported “bad guy” hiding in the bush, Joseph Kony, is the Christian leader of the remnants of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Obama authorized the deployment under the doctrine of Humanitarian Military Intervention, or Responsibility to Protect (R2P), a war-making notion that is, at best, ill-defined under international law and non-existent in U.S. statutes. However, if Obama is sincere (!) in wanting to phase out AMUF, as he averred last week, he’s always got R2P as a backup.

Death squad honcho Sheehan is a believer in the perpetual lifespan of AMUF, which he considers operative until al Qaida has been consigned to the “ash heap of history” – an eventuality that is “at least 10 to 20 years” away. Since this is the guy who carries out Obama’s kill orders (the identity of his counterpart in the CIA is, of course, a secret), one would think that Sheehan and Obama would be on the same page when it comes to al Qaida and AMUF. But then, we are told that page has turned.

Obama is very good at flipping pages, changing subjects, hiding the pea in his hand while we try to figure out which bowl it’s under. His call for Congress to come up with a substitute for AMUF – without yet offering his own version – is a ploy to more explicitly codify those powers assumed by Bush and expanded upon by the Obama administration. Or, the Congress can do nothing – a very likely outcome – and Obama can pretend to be the reluctant, self-restrained global assassin, preventive detainer and regime changer for the rest of his term.

Not a damn thing has changed.

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June 3, 2013 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Charles Krauthammer “weeps” because his beloved War on Terror might be ending

By Justin Doolittle | Crimethink | 5.31.2013

Charles Krauthammer likes war. Any war, really, but the War on Terror in particular. It’s kind of his raison d’être; no one cares what he has to say about domestic policy, so if this glorious clash between the Last, Best Hope on Earth and The Islamofascistterroristevildoers were to end, he might just sink into relative irrelevance.

Charles has written a new column and he is very upset that President Obama seems to believe that this war should not continue into eternity:

Obama says enough is enough. He doesn’t want us on “a perpetual wartime footing.” Well, the Cold War lasted 45 years. The War on Terror, twelve so far. By Obama’s calculus, we should have declared the Cold War over in 1958 and left Western Europe, our Pacific allies, the entire free world, to fend for itself — and consigned Eastern Europe to endless darkness.

This is actually false. Krauthammer is evidently unaware that the War on Terror was first declared by the Reagan administration in 1983. It was re-declared by the Bush administration in 2001. The United States has been waging its War on Terror, in fact, for thirty years now. Moving on:

This is John Lennon, bumper-sticker foreign policy – “Imagine World Peace.” Obama pretends that the tide of war is receding.

Just take a minute to consider the absurdity of these two sentences. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out in a recent column, Barack Obama “has spent almost five years killing people in multiple countries around the world.” It’s simply delusional to claim that Obama is some Lennon-like hippie who rejects military violence; his prosecution of this war, in several areas, has been even more ruthless and intense than that of his predecessor. Obama has surely surpassed Krauthammer’s wildest expectations in his penchant for killing Muslims around the world. Apparently, though, it’s not sufficient. More death and destruction are needed.

Krauthammer then spends a few paragraphs paying tribute to one of the other loves of his life, the prison at Guantanamo Bay, and excoriating Obama for not thinking it’s awesome and wanting to keep it open forever. Then he lies about Obama wanting to “return us to pre-9/11 defenselessness,” whatever the hell that means. Writing this column, and contemplating the possibility that more Muslims will not be killed, apparently sent Krauthammer into an emotional tailspin, because he finishes by stating that Obama’s radical pacifism is “enough to make you weep.”

This is the guy considered by Villagers to be a particularly “sophisticated” critic of Obama.

May 31, 2013 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

President Foreshadows New Internet Surveillance Proposal During National Security Speech

By Trevor Timm | EFF | May 30, 2013

President Obama gave an influential speech on counter terrorism and national security policy last week, and while much of the media coverage discussed the President’s remarks on Guantanamo prison and drone strikes, buried in the speech was a line just as critical to civil liberties online.

Half way through the speech, Obama said he wanted to “review […] the authorities of law enforcement, so we can intercept new types of communication, and build in privacy protections to prevent abuse.”

We certainly agree with the president, we need new privacy protections for our digital communications, and it’s encouraging to hear him suggest support for such proposals. After all, we know that the vast surveillance authorities have given to law enforcement over the last decade—like the Patriot Act, FISA Amendments Act, and National Security Letters—have been serially abused. Unfortunately, President Obama has actively defended these laws and policies in Congress and the courts, despite promising to reform them as a candidate.

There are still many measures his administration could support in the coming months to protect American’s communications. The White House could formally support reform of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which still says law enforcement agencies do not need warrants to obtain emails over 180 days old. The White House could come out in favor of warrant protection for cell-phone location information since it’s requested by authorities literally millions of times a year without a warrant. In the wake of the Associated Press scandal, Obama could also support a bill to require a court order for call records of all Americans.

But the first half of Obama’s statement—about “review […] the authorities of law enforcement, so we can intercept new types of communication”—is quite troubling. The line is likely an allusion to CALEA II, a dangerous proposal the New York Times has reported the administration “is on the verge of backing.” The measure would force companies like Google and Facebook to install backdoors in all of their products to facilitate law-enforcement access, putting both our privacy and security at risk.

Law enforcement certainly doesn’t need more legal authorities to conduct digital surveillance. As mentioned above, Congress has already been provided a huge amount of new surveillance authority that has been abused. As former White House Chief Counselor for Privacy Peter Swire said in 2011, “today [is] a golden age for surveillance.”

Indeed, it seems that law enforcement is working at cross-purposes with folks concerned about actual cybersecurity. Just a few months ago in his State of the Union address, Obama himself talked about hackers who “steal people’s identities and infiltrate private e-mail” and  “foreign countries and companies [that] swipe our corporate secrets.” Requiring real-time back doors into all of our communications would make those kinds of attacks easier. Recently, a group of more than a dozen of the nation’s best cybersecurity experts published a paper explaining why such a proposal would be a disaster for Internet security, giving hackers all over the world a central point of vulnerability to target.

And of course the FBI has still failed to put forth any evidence showing a bill to “intercept new kinds of communications” is needed at all. According to government statistics, from 2006-2010, the FBI has been ultimately thwarted by encryption zero times in their criminal investigations.

Citing privacy concerns, the White House commendably has threatened to veto CISPA, the cybersecurity bill. It should also jettison this ill-conceived CALEA II proposal in favor of privacy and security.

Email and call the White House today to tell them you oppose any plan to make Internet companies build government backdoors into your communications.

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May 31, 2013 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Progressive Hypocrite | , , , , , | Leave a comment

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