The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Marine Colonel Speaks Out: “We're building a domestic army”
StormCloudsGathering August 15, 2013
Four videos below the line, the last one sums up a common public concern.
NSA violated privacy rules thousands of times, audit finds
Transgressions ranged from serious legal violations to typos that led to unintended data collection, according to documents supplied to The Washington Post.
The National Security Agency exceeded its legal authority and broke agency rules thousands of times since it was granted broader powers in 2008, according to an internal agency audit obtained by The Washington Post.
Most violations involved unauthorized surveillance of Americans or foreign intelligence targets in the U.S., according to the documents, which were supplied to the newspaper by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. The documents show infractions ranging from serious legal violations to typographical errors that resulted in unintended data collection, The Post reported.
The agency was not always forthcoming with the details of its transgressions, the Post found. A quality assurance report not shared with an oversight committee found that a “large number” of calls were placed to Egypt 2008 when the U.S. area code 202 was mistakenly entered as 20. In another case, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which reviews NSA warrant requests, was not made aware of a new collection method until it had been in place for several months. The court ultimately ruled it unconstitutional, the Post reported.
The audit, dated May 2012, uncovered 2,776 incidents in the preceding 12 months of unauthorized collection, storage, access to or distribution of legally protected communications, the Post reported. One of those cases involved the unauthorized use of data on 3,000 Americans and green-card holders.
Google Claims Gmail Users Have no ‘Reasonable Expectation’ Their Emails Are Private
DOMINIC RUSHE, The Raw Story/The Guardian (U.K.) – The If you use Gmail you need to know this.
Gmail users have no ‘reasonable expectation” that their emails are confidential, Google has said in a court filing.
Consumer Watchdog, the advocacy group that uncovered the filing, called the revelation a ‘stunning admission.” It comes as Google and its peers are under pressure to explain their role in the National Security Agency’s (NSA) mass surveillance of US citizens and foreign nationals.
Esam Al-Amin is the author of The Arab Awakening Unveiled: Understanding Transformations and Revolutions in the Middle East. He can be contacted at alamin1919@gmail.com. follow him on Twitter: @al_arian1919.
COUNTERPUNCH
August 15, 2013
Bloodbath on the Nile
In June 1967, it took Israeli forces only six hours to rout the Egyptian military and devastate its air force, inflicting the most humiliating defeat on the Arab world in the last half century. In the 1973 October war, the Egyptian army killed 2600 Israeli soldiers in 20 days of combat. Nearly forty years later, the Egyptian military turned its guns on its own citizens to much devastation: on August 14, it took the combined forces of Egypt’s army and police twelve hours to disperse tense of thousands of unarmed peaceful protesters in two sit-in camps in the eastern and western suburbs of Cairo. It was a determined effort by the July 3 coup leaders to not only defeat their political opponents, but also to strike a decisive blow to democracy and the rule of law in Egypt and across the Arab world.
Since June 28, Islamists led by the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) have been camped out at these two sites, initially as a show of support to President Mohammad Morsi as he was being challenged by the opposition. But since he was deposed on July 3, the protesters have been demanding his return, the restoration of the suspended constitution, and the reinstatement of the dissolved parliament. For 48 days, the sit-ins and demonstrations across Egypt attracted millions of Morsi supporters as well as pro-democracy groups, who protested the coup’s nullification of their presidential and parliamentary votes and their ratification of the referendum on the new constitution.
An Obstinate Military Enabled by Liberal and Secular Forces and Western Powers
Continue reading “Esam Al-Amin: Egypt's Shameful Day — Bloodbath on the Nile”
US “death squad envoy” arrives in Egypt – and the slaughter begins
My new Press TV article, published Monday, is looking prophetic – or as we Muslims prefer to say “precognitive.”
When the US sends a “death squad ambassador” to Egypt, you can figure that the big slaughter is about to begin. As of today, it has begun. Just as I predicted, the mass slaughter of Morsi/democracy supporters was triggered by false-flag terror.
Yahoo News reports: “Live (Egyptian) television footage on several channels appeared to show hooded Brotherhood (sic) gunmen brandishing what appeared to be small automatic rifles and firing them in the direction of soldiers.”
In fact, the “hooded gunmen” – like those who set off the Sunni-Shia violence in Iraq in Iraq and Syria – are professional killers working for the Empire and its current Egyptian stooge, el-Sisi. The purpose: To demonize Islam, destroy democracy, and perpetrate a genocide in Egypt.
-KB
Is the US government targeting Egypt for destabilization – and eventual destruction?
The recent appointment of death squad organizer Robert Ford as US Ambassador to Egypt suggests as much.
Ford’s appointment sends a clear message: US policymakers want to destroy Egypt in the same way they have destroyed Iraq and Syria – by using death squads and false-flag terror to incite civil war.
Former CIA Spy Jose Rodriguez’s Truly Sociopathic ’60 Minutes’ Interview
By: Kevin Gosztola
dissenter.firedoglake.com, Monday April 30, 2012
Former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Counterterrorism Center and its former Deputy Director of Operations Jose Rodriguez appeared on CBS’ “60 Minutes” to flaunt his new book Hard Measures, which details how he came to be in charge of CIA torture against terror suspects at “black site” prisons, why he believes torture was effective and why it should not be vilified.
The segment with Lesley Stahl has the same title as Rodriguez’s book. The title sounds like the name of a film starring an action movie star like Chuck Norris or Steven Seagal, which makes it appropriate because each answer from Rodriguez is dripping with bravado. From Rodriguez’s first answer to the last, one cannot help but realize he believes it is somehow unmanly to be concerned that torture of terror suspects violates the rule of law. He appears in his sleek white Camaro rolling down the highway to the CIA. And he says at one point, “We needed to get everyone in government to put their big boy pants on and give us the authorities we needed.”
Of course, like most establishment media interviews, the torture is not called torture. It is called “harsh techniques.” Or the official term Cheney coined for it—“enhanced interrogation techniques.”
*Here are both parts of the interview: Part 1 / Part 2
The first words in the segment are, “After the attacks of 9/11…” That phrase is all one needs to hear to know that this is going to be a tireless exercise in explaining away acts that historically have been considered war crimes when carried out.
Read full post with quotes and links.
See Also:
Review: Hard Measures – How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives
There is No Way to Stop Fukushima Radioactive Water Leaking into the Pacific
The rate at which contaminated water has been pouring into the Pacific Ocean from the disabled Fukushima nuclear plant is worse than previously thought, an Industry Ministry official said Wednesday as PM Shinzo Abe pledged to step up efforts to halt the crisis. The Voice of Russia contacted Arnold Gundersen, founder and president of Fairewinds Associates, to discuss the crisis and its possible solutions. The expert suggests radioactive material will continue to leak into the global seas unless the plant is surrounded with a trench filled with zeolite. Even then however, toxic material will still flow into the Pacific through underwater routes.
Letting Tepco “Clean Up” Fukushima Is Like Letting a Murderer Do Brain Surgery On a VIP
In 3 Months, Do We Want to Entrust U.S. “National Security” and Perhaps Even “Human Survival” In the Northern Hemisphere to These Guys?
Fukushima: A Nuclear War without a War
The Unspoken Crisis of Worldwide Nuclear Radiation
Michel Chossudovsky (Editor)
I-Book No. 3, January 25 2012
