The United States has been accused of bugging European Union offices and accessing EU computer networks, according to secret documents cited in German magazine Der Spiegel.
EXTRACT:
The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, says if the report is correct it will have a “severe impact” on relations between the EU and the United States.
“On behalf of the European Parliament, I demand full clarification and require further information speedily from the US authorities with regard to these allegations,” he said in a statement.
Luxembourg foreign minister Jean Asselborn told Der Spiegel, “if these reports are true, it's disgusting”.
“The United States would be better off monitoring its secret services rather than its allies,” he said.
The times, as Bob Dylan wrote, “are a`changin.” Conspiracy theories about journalist Michale Hastings' death – or murder – now have now been pumped out via “mainstream” vehicles, such as Huff Post, without it being just another exercise for bashing conspiracy theories with ridicule and rejection under the at-times hallucinatory influence of maximum prejudice and minimal knowledge. Maybe this change is due to mainstream media finding itself unable to continue freezing out serious consideration of conspiracies because of what someone wrote on this blog called the difficulty of distinguishing reality from conspiracy theories anymore. In this case though, they play it pretty safe by getting a mainstream media darling such as Richard Clarke to do the most of the talking:
Privacy – Christian Engström: I can’t say I’m surprised – but we’ve got the United States and its security bureaucrats digging through our e-mail in the European Parliament. Mashable reveals that the United States has demanded information from Google about the communications of two Wikileaks activists. One of them is the Icelander Smári McCarthy (pictured).
These events catch our interest here in Brussels, here at the Pirate Party office in the European Parliament. We know Smári, and we have contacted him as a consultant to produce a report on Iceland as an “information paradise” and a conceivable centre for cloud computing (www.islandsofresilience.eu).
This week he appeared on the Boiling Frogs Show and detailed how he had his hands “in the nitty-gritty, the nuts and bolts” during his 20 years as a U.S. intelligence analyst.
Tice claimed that he held NSA wiretap orders targeting numerous members of the U.S. government, including one for a young senator from Illinois named Barack Obama.
“In the summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a forty-some-year-old senator from Illinois. You wouldn't happen to know where that guy lives now would you? It's a big White House in Washington D.C. That's who the NSA went after. That's the President of the United States now.”
Tice added that he also saw orders to spy on Hillary Clinton, Senators John McCain and Diane Feinstein, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, Gen. David Petraeus, and a current Supreme Court Justice.
“These things go far beyond what most are even aware of”
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
June 24, 2013
Iraq war veteran Daniel Somers committed suicide following an arduous battle with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) that was caused by his role in committing “crimes against humanity,” according to the soldier’s suicide note.
Somers was assigned to a Tactical Human-Intelligence Team (THT) in Baghdad which saw him involved in more than 400 combat missions as a machine gunner in the turret of a Humvee, in addition to his role in conducting interrogations.
Somers’ suicide note is a powerful indictment of the invasion of Iraq and how it ruined the lives of both countless millions of Iraqis as well as innumerable US troops sent in to do the dirty work of the military-industrial complex.
“The simple truth is this: During my first deployment, I was made to participate in things, the enormity of which is hard to describe. War crimes, crimes against humanity,” wrote Somers. “Though I did not participate willingly, and made what I thought was my best effort to stop these events, there are some things that a person simply can not come back from. I take some pride in that, actually, as to move on in life after being part of such a thing would be the mark of a sociopath in my mind. These things go far beyond what most are even aware of.”
Somers also complains about how he was forced to “participate in the ensuing coverup” of such crimes.
Everybody play nice together while the bulk of already inadequate and dwindling resources are weighted to Navy and Air Force in the Pacific. [Oh, BTW, in separate Armed Forces Journal reporting, twp Army officers, a major general and a colonel, assert that former Chief of Naval Operations ADM (Ret) Gary Roughead and Hoover Institution analyst Kori Schake have recommended in a recent presentation at the Brookings Institution, that, “The active duty Army would be reduced by 200,000 soldiers from the 490,000 planned for the FY 2013 budget” to pay for it.
