The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
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Hillary Clinton compares Putin moves to Hitler's: Report
Former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has compared Russian President Vladimir Putin's recent steps in Ukraine to aggression by Adolf Hitler in 1930s Nazi Germany, a local paper reported.
The political theorist Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “banality of evil” to describe her highly controversial thesis that “the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths, but by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.” [source: Wikipedia]
Arendt argued that Adolf Eichmann's crimes resulted “not from a wicked or depraved character but from sheer ‘thoughtlessness': he was simply an ambitious bureaucrat who failed to reflect on the enormity of what he was doing. His role in the mass extermination of Jews epitomized ‘the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil' that had spread across Europe at the time. Arendt's refusal to recognize Eichmann as “inwardly” evil prompted fierce denunciations from both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals. Her argument, which has been criticized by many, came out of her coverage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 for the New Yorker.” [source: Encyclopaedia Britannica]
Whether or not you accept Arendt’s thesis in regard to the perpetration of the Holocaust, it is impossible to deny the thoughtless, faceless, bureaucratic banality implicit in the briefing slides below support her thesis. These official briefing slides, leaked from the Snowden Archive and analyzed by Glen Greenwald, clearly describe in antiseptic, logically-disconnected, powerpoint detail how the employees of NSA and its cohorts plan to use cyber operations as a covert means to coerce the American people, as well as foreigners, into accepting the totalitarian premises of the emerging American State.
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: How the Secret World Destroys Reputations – The Banality of Evil”
Q&A: Daniel Ellsberg on US surveillance
The famed American whistle-blower discusses US national security, and those who expose its overreach.
Sadie Luetmer
Al Jazeera, 24 February 2014
Huntingdon, United States – In 1971, US military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked thousands of pages of a top-secret study on the Vietnam War to the American press. The Pentagon Papers, as the leak would come to be called, revealed previously shrouded layers of deception on the part of the US executive branch regarding decades of military involvement in Indochina.
The famed whistle-blower has since remained active politically, and is a vocal supporter of WikiLeaks and other government challengers such as Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning and Edward Snowden. US Army Private Manning leaked classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, and was convicted in 2013 of violating the Espionage Act.
Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, released classified documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in 2013, and is currently residing in Russia.
Citing a wide array of historical and contemporary American intelligence programmes and policies, Ellsberg advocates critical consideration of the privacy needs of a free press and an active citizenry.
Nearing 83 years old, Ellsberg's political energy shows no sign of atrophy. He spoke to Al Jazeera after giving a speech at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.
Al Jazeera: For a lot of Americans it seems obvious that national security requires secrecy, but you have described some of the dangers of “secrecy culture”. Why is secrecy culture problematic?
Daniel Ellsberg: “Well I certainly don't take the point of view that no secrecy is justified, or that national security never required secrecy. For example, in the Second World War, the time and place of the Normandy invasion was a very well kept secret, and moreover secured by lies as well as secrecy. It's an interesting example, by the way – which people often bring up – because, of course, the necessary secrecy for that date and place expired rather rapidly in the course of June 1944. And yet, my guess is that there still are thousands of pages, perhaps more, tens or hundreds of thousands, that are still classified from that period. I could be wrong, by this time maybe it's all been declassified; but it could have all been declassified certainly by 1946-47, and was not until many years later, if ever.
“Most of the documentation still called classified by this country, and I'm talking now about billions and billions of pages, most of that has long ago lost any justification for being held secret from the American people. The need is generally measured more in weeks, months, or a year or two, and yet it remains classified indefinitely. Why?
“Really, if you want to know the answer to that, my best guess as someone who worked inside the system, is that they never know what part of that may become embarrassing at some point in the future. What prediction will turn out to look absurd? Not merely wrong, but discreditable. What action may appear as part of the programme that all in all is unconstitutional, or illegal? What policy will appear to have been not only unsuccessful, but undertaken for unjustifiable, self-interested motives? It's very hard to predict that, so simply keep it all secret, if possible, forever.”
Continue reading “Daniel Ellsberg: US Culture of Secrecy & Security Overreach”
Suppressed Proof: Saudi Arabia Was Complicit in 9/11
“Since 15 of the 19 alleged suicide terrorist were from Saudi Arabia and none were from Iraq, would it not have made more sense to have invaded Saudi Arabia instead of Iraq?”
Veterans Today, 23 February 2014
It has now become clear that a major cover-up has been imposed on the Saudi connection to the Israeli/CIA “false flag” attack of 9/11, where the Saudis put up the patsies.
There were traitors inside the US Air Force at NORAD who assisted the Neo-Cons in the Department of Defense and the CIA in the execution of the atrocities of 9/11.
Its purpose was to drive the US into an otherwise entirely unprovoked and unjustified series of wars in the Middle East, which Prince Bandar may have even planned, whose principal beneficiaries would be Israel and Saudi Arabia. For the US, it has been an expensive (now over $4 trillion) proposition.
India-Afghanistan: Indian Minister of External Affairs Slaman Khurshid said on 15 February that India will provide helicopters to Afghanistan.
“We are giving them helicopters and we will be supplying them very soon,” Khurshid told reporters accompanying him on a day-long visit to the Afghan city of Kandahar, where he inaugurated an agricultural university built with Indian aid. “We also have been giving them some logistical support and we hopefully will be able to upgrade and refurbish their transport aircraft.”
Khurshid did not specify the number or type of helicopters to be provided to Afghanistan. Nor did he elaborate on transport aircraft contracts.
Germany, France to mastermind European data network – bypassing US
Angela Merkel and Francois Hollande will review plans to build up a trustworthy data protection network in Europe. The challenge is to avoid data passing through the US after revelations of mass NSA spying in Germany and France.
Merkel has been one of the biggest supporters of greater data protection in Europe since the revelations that the US tapped her phone emerged in a Der Spiegel news report in October, based on information leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
Earlier, France learned from reports in Le Monde that the NSA has also been recording dozens of millions of French phone calls, including those of the French authorities. According to the report, in just one month between December 10, 2012 and January 8, 2013, the NSA recorded a total of 70.3 million French phone calls.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Germany, France to mastermind European data network – bypassing US”
DroneShield warns of low-flying UAVs with 18 nations demanding the device – inventor
The Voice of Russia, 14 February 2014
In a matter of a few years, tons of drones could be whizzing around residential zones, taking away tiny pieces of privacy people once had. DroneShield is a fresh new concept that alerts of nearby low-flying UAV devices in the area. John Franklin, one of the developers, told the Voice of Russia that 18 countries, including Russia, have already put in orders for the gadget and has been creating buzz ever since.
