Tag: ek Politics

Transcript

(W)hat I’ve really been outraged by this week, even though there have been some victories, is a photograph I saw that actually was issued or published on 9/11. And what I call it is I call it the meeting of the KK–not the KKK, but the KK, on 9/11. And it was astounding, the photograph, because what it shows was a meeting of two people. And you can’t make this stuff up. And it’s a picture of our secretary of state, John Kerry, with a former secretary of state, and that’s Henry Kissinger, two Ks getting together.

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(O)ne observation is striking about the photograph of Kerry and Kissinger, one who served Nixon, a Republican, and one who serves Obama, a Democrat. What does it say about U.S. foreign policy? What it says to me is something a lot of us have known for a long time is that U.S. foreign policy is more or less–and you would have to say more–consistent than you would ever think. It doesn’t make a lot of difference whether you get a Republican or a Democratic president or secretary of state. They both love the military. They brag about it as Obama has bragged about the military. They love to use it. And at their core, they’re imperialists through and through. Both Ks, both Ks believe in American exceptionalism.

Kerry, Kissinger and the Other Sept. 11

By Amy Goodman, Truth Dig

Posted on Sep 11, 2013

Kissinger’s role in plotting and supporting the 1973 coup in Chile becomes clearer as the years pass and the documents emerge, documents that Kissinger has personally fought hard to keep secret. Peter Kornbluh of the nonprofit National Security Archive has been uncovering the evidence for years, and has recently updated his book, “The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability.” Kornbluh told me that Kissinger was “the singular most important figure in engineering a policy to overthrow Allende and then, even more, to embrace Pinochet and the human-rights violations that followed.” He said that Kissinger “pushed Nixon forward to as aggressive but covert a policy as possible to make Allende fail, to destabilize Allende’s ability to govern, to create what Kissinger called a coup climate.”

The Pinochet regime was violent, repressive and a close ally of the United States. Pinochet formed alliances with other military regimes in South America, and they created “Operation Condor,” a campaign of coordinated terror and assassinations throughout Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Brazil. Operation Condor even reached onto the streets of Washington, D.C., when, on Sep. 21, 1976, a former Chilean ambassador to the U.S. during the Allende government, Orlando Letelier, along with his assistant, a U.S. citizen named Ronni Moffitt, were killed by a car bomb planted by Pinochet’s secret police on Embassy Row, just blocks from the White House.

Eventually, under increasing global condemnation and growing internal, nonviolent resistance, the Pinochet regime was forced to hold a plebiscite, a national vote, on whether Pinochet would continue as Chile’s dictator. With a resounding “No!” the public rejected him, ushering in the modern, democratic era in Chile.

At least two U.S. citizens were murdered during the 1973 coup. Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were in Chile to observe the democratic experience there, working as writers and journalists. Their abduction and murder by Pinochet’s forces, with the likely collaboration by the U.S. government, is depicted movingly in the 1982 Oscar-winning film “Missing,” directed by Costa Gavras, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. On the week of the coup’s 40th anniversary, Charles Horman’s widow, Joyce Horman, held a commemoration. The event, hosted in New York City by the Charles Horman Truth Foundation, attracted hundreds, many who were personally involved with the Allende government or who were forced into exile from Chile during those terrible years

Signatures of Sarin

Are We At War Yet?

Ooh Magoo, you have them now

Everybody’s got that thing, something different we all bring, dont you let it clip your wings

Everybody’s got their own kind of crazy, that’s what makes you so amazing

Get you checkin’ on my swag, Cause confomity so drag, it’s the esses not the tag

Monsanto Wins Case Of Seed Patents; Planting Your Own Legally Purchased & Grown Seeds Can Be Infringing

by Mike Masnick, Tech Dirt

Mon, May 13th 2013 12:49pm

(T)he key things here. Bowman did not break any license agreement over seeds that he bought. He also legally purchased other seeds that had been legally provided to grain elevators to be sold. All he did was plant those legally purchased seeds, for which he was not violating any license agreement, and then harvest and replant the seeds that came from them. And this, apparently, is illegal under our patent system.

Given the fire power that came out in support of Monsanto — including the federal government — it shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that the Supreme Court just gave a complete and total victory to Monsanto. The key issue was whether or not this was a case of “patent exhaustion.” There was a key case a few years ago that mostly said that once a patent holder sells a product, the patent is “exhausted” so that the patent holder can’t demand licensing fees up and down the supply chain. However, they distinguish this case by saying that this is different because it’s a “copy” of the legally purchased seed. I could see how that would make sense if we were talking about someone building a copy of a machine in a garage or something, but this is a seed. Copying itself is what seeds do. That’s kind of their entire purpose.

Yet, throughout the decision, the court (with a decision written by Justice Kagan) acts as if Bowman just built a replica. But that ignores the fact that this is nature we’re talking about seeds that replicate themselves naturally, because that’s what seeds do. The court has no problem with this, but it seems somewhat ridiculous that someone can legally buy something, have it do what it naturally does (and has done for nearly all of history) and then be told that violates a patent. When addressing Bowman’s point concerning the fact that seeds by nature, replicate themselves, they basically brush that aside by noting that Bowman then harvested them. As if he’s supposed to ignore what’s happening?

Another thing to note is that the bio-engineering in question is the so-called “Roundup Ready” gene that renders plants immune to one of Monsanto’s main products, the herbicide “Roundup”.  You can decide for yourself how much you like poison saturated produce.

Rania Masri and Chris Hedges On Obama’s Syria Address

Transcript

Chris Hedges and Rania Masri On What the Future May Hold For Syria

Transcript

Exclusive: Interview with Congressman Grayson on Syria

Transcript

Kerry And McCain’s Source For Moderate Syrian Rebel Claim Fired For Fraud

By: DSWright, Firedog Lake

Wednesday September 11, 2013 10:39 am

The parallels to the run up to the Iraq War just keep coming. A key source for both Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator John McCain on the “moderate” rebels in Syria, Elizabeth O’Bagy, has been fired for fraud. Somewhere Curveball is smiling.

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But not just lying on her resume about her qualifications but also about her connections to said “moderate” rebels. Her WSJ piece failed to make the disclosure that she worked and was essentially lobbying for the Syrian rebels.

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If you needed yet another reason to back off this aggressive war here it is – the opposition is heavily influenced by Al Qaeda and those telling you different have been caught lying. Although it could be reasonably argued the lack of a coherent justification for American military involvement should also be considered.

The more we learn about the claims being made to justify this war the more unconvincing it is.

WSJ op-ed writer Elizabeth O’Bagy fired for resume lie

By MACKENZIE WEINGER and KATE BRANNEN, Politico

9/11/13 12:49 PM EDT

The Syria researcher whose Wall Street Journal op-ed piece was cited by Secretary of State John Kerry and Sen. John McCain during congressional hearings about the use of force has been fired from the Institute for the Study of War for lying about having a Ph.D., the group announced on Wednesday.

“The Institute for the Study of War has learned and confirmed that, contrary to her representations, Ms. Elizabeth O’Bagy does not in fact have a Ph.D. degree from Georgetown University,” the institute said in a statement. “ISW has accordingly terminated Ms. O’Bagy’s employment, effective immediately.”

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O’Bagy’s op-ed piece for the Journal, “On the Front Lines of Syria’s Civil War,” was cited by both Kerry and McCain last week. McCain read from the piece last Tuesday to Kerry, calling it “an important op-ed by Dr. Elizabeth O’Bagy.” The next day, Kerry also brought up the piece before a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing and described it as a “very interesting article” and recommended that members read it.

But the piece had also come under fire for misrepresenting her affiliations. Originally the op-ed only listed O’Bagy, 26, as only “a senior analyst” at the ISW, later adding a clarification that disclosed her connection to a Syrian rebel advocacy group.

“In addition to her role at the Institute for the Study of War, Ms. O’Bagy is affiliated with the Syrian Emergency Task Force, a nonprofit operating as a 501(c)(3) pending IRS approval that subcontracts with the U.S. and British governments to provide aid to the Syrian opposition,” the WSJ added in its clarification.

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O’Bagy, who has traveled widely with rebel forces in Syria, had been a senior research analyst with ISW. Her biography on the site before she was fired, according to a Google cache from Sept. 4, stated that “Dr. Elizabeth O’Bagy is a Senior Research Analyst and the Syria Team Lead at the Institute for the Study of War, where she focuses on Syrian politics and security. Her major reports on the Syrian opposition include: The Free Syrian Army, Jihad in Syria, and Syria’s Political Opposition.” Her online bio was also updated last Friday in response to the online furor – spurred in part by a report in The Daily Caller about her affiliation with the SETF – over the WSJ piece to read: “I work with the Syrian Emergency Task Force in an advisory capacity on a number of humanitarian aid and governance building contracts.”

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On Monday, O’Bagy responded to critics of her work on Syria.

“I’m not a war monger,” she told POLITICO. “I’m not advocating the United Staets start a war or get in the middle of one. At heart, I’m just a researcher. I love being in the field. I love doing the interviews and collecting the data.”

NSA shares raw intelligence including Americans’ data with Israel

Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, The Guardian

Wednesday 11 September 2013 10.40 EDT

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

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The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet.

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The memorandum says: “Raw Sigint includes, but is not limited to, unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence metadata and content.”

According to the agreement, the intelligence being shared would not be filtered in advance by NSA analysts to remove US communications. “NSA routinely sends ISNU [the Israeli Sigint National Unit] minimized and unminimized raw collection”, it says.

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The memorandum of understanding, which the Guardian is publishing in full, allows Israel to retain “any files containing the identities of US persons” for up to a year. The agreement requests only that the Israelis should consult the NSA’s special liaison adviser when such data is found.

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Israeli intelligence is allowed “to disseminate foreign intelligence information concerning US persons derived from raw Sigint by NSA” on condition that it does so “in a manner that does not identify the US person”. The agreement also allows Israel to release US person identities to “outside parties, including all INSU customers” with the NSA’s written permission.

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The Guardian asked the Obama administration how many times US data had been found in the raw intelligence, either by the Israelis or when the NSA reviewed a sample of the files, but officials declined to provide this information. Nor would they disclose how many other countries the NSA shared raw data with, or whether the Fisa court, which is meant to oversee NSA surveillance programs and the procedures to handle US information, had signed off the agreement with Israel.

Secret Deal Between NSA, Israel Likely Involves Sharing of Data from Americans’ Communications

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Wednesday September 11, 2013 12:15 pm

A memorandum of understanding (MOU) or agreement between the NSA and the Israeli-Sigint National Unit (ISNU) “pertaining to the protection of US persons” supposedly was drafted to ensure that the provision of intelligence data, including “raw” intelligence data “not reviewed for foreign intelligence purposes or minimized” was “consistent with the requirements placed upon the NSA by US law and Executive Order to establish safeguards protecting the rights of US persons under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.” But, if raw and unreviewed data is being handed over, how could the NSA know whether it is abiding by any requirements?

The agreement indicates that the “NSA has agreements with Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom that require it to protect information associated with UK persons, Australian persons, Canadian person and New Zealand persons using procedures and safeguards similar to those applied for US persons.” This suggests the possibility that raw and unreviewed data on the citizens of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom may have wound up in the possession of Israeli intelligence as well.

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This is alarming because it appears this makes it possible for Israel to share what a US citizen might be saying about a US government policy or activity or the views of a US official. Such an understanding would clearly enable the targeting of political activists while giving the NSA the cover to claim it did not think it was intercepting such communications because it never reviewed those communications because they were provided to Israel.

The section on US government officials also is alarming. It suggests the NSA intercepts data on US government officials. There is no information on whether the data is collected or stored, but, certainly, if the NSA is establishing parameters of use for such information if found in raw intelligence, that means interception of US government officials’ communication is taking place.

In 2009, it became known that the NSA had obtained FISA court authorization to wiretap Representative Jane Harman. She was caught allegedly exchanging favors with a suspected Israeli agent, but, instead of allowing the FBI to open up an investigation, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales used the opportunity to maintain Harman’s support for the warrantless wiretapping program.

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In some way, shape or form, the information being provided to Israel is probably being abused, as Israel uses the intelligence to twist the arms of US government officials to maintain policies toward Israel and the Middle East that it desires.

American Civil Liberties Union deputy legal director Jameel Jaffer reacted, “On what authority is NSA monitoring the phone calls of US judges, legislators?” Also, “On what authority is the NSA sharing Americans’ information with Israel?” And, “Did the [FISA Court] sign off on this, and, if so, where’s that opinion?”

Imagine the Informants You Can Coerce When You Can Spy on Every Single American

By: emptywheel

Wednesday September 11, 2013 9:01 am

Two years ago, I noted a chilling exchange from a 2002 FISA suit argued by Ted Olson. Laurence Silberman was trying to come up with a scenario in which some criminal information might not have any relevance to terrorism. When he suggested rape, Olson suggested we might use evidence of a rape to get someone to inform for us.

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In the 7 years since this program (now allegedly scaled back significantly, but still very very broad) has existed, the dragnet has only helped, however indirectly, to capture 12 terrorists in the US (and by terrorist, they also include people sending money to protect their country against US-backed invasion).

Which means the real utility of this program has been about something else.

The ability to track the relationships of every single American. And they were using it to find informants.

Even while the number of terrorists this program discovered has been minimal, the number of FBI informants has ballooned, to 15,000. And those informants are trumping up increasingly ridiculous plots in the name of fighting terrorism.

The ability to track the relationships of every single American (or now, a huge subset of Americans, focusing largely on Muslims and those with international ties). And they were (and presumably still are) using it to find informants.

Update: Note how in Keith Alexander’s description of the alert list, the standard to be on it is “the identifier is likely to produce information of foreign intelligence value” that are “associated with” one of the BR targets (Alexander 33). This is very similar to the language Olson used to justify getting data that didn’t directly relate to terrorism.

We know the NSA has blanket collected every single communication going into and coming out of Washington.  Maybe we also now know the reason Institutional Washington, including both government officials and “journalists”, are so eager for a war the United States people do not want.

According to The New York Times exit polling de Blasio not only has a comfortable lead in the Democratic Mayoral Primary, but looks to have enough of a margin to avoid a run-off.

Unfortunately (or not, liberal identifying voters give him a strong margin) according to the same exit polling Scott Stringer seems poised to defeat Eliot Spitzer in the Comptroller race.

The victory for de Blasio is good news because it represents a strong rebuke to City Council Chair Christine Quinn who has nothing but identity politics and tribalism to distinguish herself from Bloomberg whom she has enabled for years.

Ex-FBI lawyer linked to surveillance abuses poised for federal judge post

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Friday 6 September 2013 10.08 EDT

A former senior FBI official implicated in surveillance abuses is poised to become a federal judge in one of the US’s most important courts for terrorism cases.

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Caproni has come under bipartisan criticism over the years for enabling widespread surveillance later found to be inappropriate or illegal. During her tenure as the FBI’s general counsel, she clashed with Congress and even the Fisa surveillance court over the proper scope of the FBI’s surveillance powers.

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A 2010 report by the Department of Justice’s internal watchdog found that the FBI misused a type of non-judicial subpoena known as an “exigent letter” to improperly obtain more than 5,500 phone numbers of Americans.

“The FBI broke the law on telephone records privacy and the general counsel’s office, headed by Valerie Caproni, sanctioned it and must face consequences,” said John Conyers, then the chairman of the House judiciary committee, in April 2010, who called for then-FBI director Robert Mueller to fire her.

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In an April 2008 House hearing, Caproni told lawmakers that if a phone number obtained from a telephone company using a nonjudicial subpoena ostensibly authorized by the Patriot Act was unrelated to a “currently open investigation, and there was no emergency at the time we received the records, the records are removed from our files and destroyed”.

In fact, the NSA, at the time of Caproni’s testimony and today, stores phone records such as phone numbers on practically all Americans for up to five years, whether or not they are connected to an “open investigation”.

Numerous intelligence, Justice Department and law enforcement officials have testified this summer that the NSA can pass phone records to the FBI that it has “reasonable articulable suspicion” are connected to terrorism, although NSA deputy director John C Inglis could not cite a single case where the phone records have clearly disrupted a domestic terror attack.

“Caproni knew that the Bush administration could use or was using the Section 215 provision in the Patriot Act to obtain Americans’ phone records on a broad scale, an issue that has recently been documented by the whistleblower material first printed in the Guardian,” said Graves, a former deputy assistant attorney general who dealt with Caproni extensively while working on national security issues for the ACLU.

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A 2008 Justice Department inspector general’s report into surveillance under the Patriot Act found that Caproni clashed with the Fisa court, a secret court that oversees surveillance for the purposes of foreign intelligence, over the scope of the court’s authority.

The heavily redacted report found that in 2006, the Fisa court indicated it would not sign off on an FBI request for business records under section 215 of the Patriot Act – the section used to justify the bulk phone-records database – “because of first amendment concerns.” It is extremely rare for the Fisa court to deny the government a surveillance request.

Caproni, the FBI’s general counsel at the time, “told the OIG [office of inspector general] that the Fisa court does not have the authority to close an FBI investigation,” according to a footnote in the report.

I find it quite telling that after all the revelations about NSA and GCHQ (and for that matter the Bundesnachrichtendienst) eavesdropping, Kerry and the Obama Administration are left with mere assertions we’re supposed to accept on faith alone while the BND is providing actual intercepts that tell a quite different story.

Syrian forces may have used gas without Assad’s permission: paper

Reuters

Sun Sep 8, 2013 8:17am EDT

Syrian brigade and division commanders had been asking the Presidential Palace to allow them to use chemical weapons for the last four-and-a-half months, according to radio messages intercepted by German spies, but permission had always been denied, the paper said.

This could mean Assad may not have personally approved the attack close to Damascus on August 21 in which more than 1,400 are estimated to have been killed, intelligence officers suggested.

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Bild said the radio traffic was intercepted by a German naval reconnaissance vessel, the Oker, sailing close to the Syrian coast.

Intercepts caught Assad rejecting requests to use chemical weapons, German paper says

By Matthew Schofield, McClatchy

Monday, September 9, 2013

Syrian President Bashar Assad has repeatedly rejected requests from his field commanders for approval to use chemical weapons, according to a report this weekend in a German newspaper.

The report in Bild am Sonntag, which is a widely read and influential national Sunday newspaper, reported that the head of the German Foreign Intelligence agency, Gerhard Schindler, last week told a select group of German lawmakers that intercepted communications had convinced German intelligence officials that Assad did not order or approve what is believed to be a sarin gas attack on Aug. 21 that killed hundreds of people in Damascus’ eastern suburbs.

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The newspaper’s article said that on numerous occasions in recent months, the German intelligence ship named Oker, which is off the Syrian coast, has intercepted communications indicating that field officers have contacted the Syrian presidential palace seeking permission to use chemical weapons and have been turned down.

The article added that German intelligence does not believe Assad sanctioned the alleged attack on August 21.

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European foreign ministers on Saturday issued a statement calling the Aug. 21 attack a “war crime,” but said nothing should be done without U.N. approval. New opinion polls over the weekend in France, Germany and Great Britain showed strong disapproval of military action in Syria. The British poll, done for The Sunday Telegraph, indicated only 19 percent of the population backs the idea of military action with the United States, while 63 percent oppose it. The polls in France and Germany showed similar margins of opposition.

Meanwhile, a new tabulation of the dead from the Aug. 21 incident raised more questions about Obama administration officials’ account of what took place.

The Damascus Center for Human Rights Studies, an anti-Assad group, said that it had been able to document 678 dead from the attacks, including 106 children and 157 women. The report said 51 of the dead, or 7 percent, were fighters from the Free Syrian Army, the designation used to describe rebels that are affiliated with the Supreme Military Council, which the U.S. backs.

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U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has said 1,429 people died Aug. 21, included 426 children, but has not said how the United States obtained the figures. Other estimates have ranged from a low of “at least 281” by the French government to 502, including “tens” of rebel fighters and about 100 children, by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based group that tracks violence in Syria.

Obama’s Case for Syria Didn’t Reflect Intel Consensus

Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service

Sep 9 2013

The evidence indicates that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper culled intelligence analyses from various agencies and by the White House itself, but that the White House itself had the final say in the contents of the document.

Leading members of Congress to believe that the document was an intelligence community assessment and thus represents a credible picture of the intelligence on the alleged chemical attack of Aug. 21 has been a central element in the Obama administration’s case for war in Syria.

That part of the strategy, at least, has been successful. Despite strong opposition in Congress to the proposed military strike in Syria, no one in either chamber has yet challenged the administration’s characterisation of the intelligence. But the administration is vulnerable to the charge that it has put out an intelligence document that does not fully and accurately reflect the views of intelligence analysts.

Former intelligence officials told IPS that that the paper does not represent a genuine intelligence community assessment but rather one reflecting a predominantly Obama administration influence.

In essence, the White House selected those elements of the intelligence community assessments that supported the administration’s policy of planning a strike against the Syrian government force and omitted those that didn’t.

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The issuance of the document by the White House rather than by Clapper, as had been apparently planned, points to a refusal by Clapper to put his name on the document as revised by the White House.

Clapper’s refusal to endorse it – presumably because it was too obviously an exercise in “cherry picking” intelligence to support a decision for war – would explain why the document had to be issued by the White House.

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A clear indication that the White House, rather than Clapper, had the final say on the content of the document is that it includes a statement that a “preliminary U.S. government assessment determined that 1,429 people were killed in the chemical weapons attack, including at least 426 children.”

That figure, for which no source was indicated, was several times larger than the estimates given by British and French intelligence.

The document issued by the White House cites intelligence that is either obviously ambiguous at best or is of doubtful authenticity, or both, as firm evidence that the Syrian government carried out a chemical weapons attack.

It claims that Syrian chemical weapons specialists were preparing for such an attack merely on the basis of signals intelligence indicating the presence of one or more individuals in a particular location. The same intelligence had been regarded prior to Aug. 21 as indicating nothing out of the ordinary, as was reported by CBS news Aug. 23.

The paper also cites a purported intercept by U.S intelligence of conversations between Syrian officials in which a “senior official” supposedly “confirmed” that the government had carried out the chemical weapons attack.

But the evidence appears to indicate that the alleged intercept was actually passed on to the United States by Israeli intelligence. U.S. intelligence officials have long been doubtful about intelligence from Israeli sources that is clearly in line with Israeli interests.

You know, it’s not like Assad isn’t aware we’re spying on him so who are we protecting the “sources and methods” from?  Congress?  The United States people?