Author: Dave LIndorff

The spectacle of the US threatening Hong Kong, China, Russia and now little Ecuador with all manner of reprisals if they don’t respect the “rule of law” and hand over whistleblower Edward Snowden to the tender mercies of the US national security apparatus is delicious to watch.

The very idea of Secretary of State John Kerry lecturing Russia about “following the law” is laughable. He cites seven common criminals that the US handed over to Russia over the past year, but Russia no doubt recalls cases where the US used diplomatic pressure to extradite Russian citizens from countries like Lithuania and Thailand that the Russians did not believe had committed extraditable crimes.

Also comical is Kerry and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) referring to Russia as an “ally” or “friend” and asking how President Vladimir Putin can then behave so badly in refusing to hand over the vile traitor Snowden. Ally? Friend? If so, why is the US emplacing anti-missile batteries around Russia? Why is the US National Security Agency, as Snowden disclosed, secretly tapping Russian leaders’ cell phones during a G-8 conference? This is the behavior of a “friend” and “ally”?

Beyond that, Kerry is a fine one to talk about betrayal. He has famously betrayed his own Vietnam War comrades-in-arms — veterans who had, with him, risked their careers in the military and their futures in the US by coming forward in the Winter Soldier movement during the early 1970s to speak out about US war crimes the US, and often they themselves, had committed in Vietnam. But Kerry, in the interest of pursuing his political career, later abandoned that honorable stance and became instead an avid supporter of US empire, even becoming an apologist for the Vietnam War in his failed 2004 campaign for the presidency, when he tried to capitalize on his alleged heroism as a Navy riverboat captain. Such a stunning betrayal of one’s comrades and one’s conscience is hard to even contemplate.

Also stunning is hearing Kerry and the US government lecture Ecuador and other Latin American nations that might be considering offering Snowden asylum about respecting the “rule of law,” and threatening them with “consequences” if they offer him haven from US prosecution.
Equadorian soldiers rescue President Correa (in gas mask) from a hospital where National Police coup leaders had been holding him in a 2010 coup widely believed to have covert CIA backing

Just for the sake of argument, let’s suspend our disbelief for a moment and pretend (I know it’s a stretch) that the Obama administration and the apologists for the nation’s spy apparatus in Congress, Democratic and Republican, are telling us the gods’ honest truth.

They have, as the Wall Street Journal puts it, “amped up” their defense of the NSA’s massive spying program, claiming that not two, but 50 terrorist plots have been foiled thanks to their metadata mining and their intrusive monitoring of our phone and email conversations and website browsing activity.

Think what that means: for years now, the Jihadists have known that the US spy apparatus is ubiquitous, and that it is able to track all their communications. Of course they knew this, because they would have seen all these plots being foiled (the real ones, not the many ones that were created by FBI or CIA provocateurs and plants), and, not being stupid, they would have put it together and realized that the plots that depended upon a lot of phone calls and internet communications were getting busted up, while ones that were handled either solo, or that were developed by careful word-of-mouth communication and courier were managing to succeed.

But we poor schmucks, the American people, have been left in ignorance, imagining that our carefully crafted and painstakingly memorized six or eight-digit passwords, including at least one letter and one number (or if we’re really good, some symbol or other), were doing the job of keeping our online lives private and that our unlisted numbers, or our decision not to list an address with the phone company, were keeping our telephonic communications secure.

Ho ho! Were we fooled!

But really (stepping back into the real world again now), are we going to believe this nonsense about 50 NSA-foiled plots?

The Washington Liar’s Club: President Obama, Congress and the Supreme Court

So New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and former Times executive editor Bill Keller are both saying that the massive NSA spying program on all Americans’ communications is a needed thing because if they don’t do it, then maybe there could be another major terrorist strike on the US, and democracy would be erased in the US.

What’s wrong with this argument?

What’s wrong is that it is news organizations like the New York Times that make that kind of twisted calculus work.

When 9-11 happened, the New York Times was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the ensuing undermining of civil liberties, was an integral part of the conspiracy to convince Americans that there was a grave threat to the US posed by Al Qaeda, that Saddam Hussein was linked to Al Qaeda and that he was developing nuclear, chemical and germ weapons that could be targeted against the US, and that we needed the Constitution-gutting PATRIOT Act, as well as invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, to protect us from this supposedly existential threat.

It could well be correct that if there were another major mass-casualty terrorist attack, even a fraction of the size of the one on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, on some iconic target in the US, democracy would go down the tubes here, but the reason that could happen is because news organizations like the Times, judging by past history, would be braying for it to happen.

If the corporate news media would do their assigned “Fourth Estate” Constitutional job of questioning authority — for example demanding to know why the FBI lied brazenly to the 9-11 commission about (for instance, the fact that it actually had found and has in its possession the four black boxes from the two planes that hit the World Trade Center towers), if the news media asked questions about why the Tsarnaev brothers are being tagged as the lone-wolf bombers of the Boston Marathon, when the two backpacks they were wearing look nothing like the exploded backpack in the FBI’s evidentiary photos, and also do not look in the surveillance photos like they have any significant weight in them — certainly not the weight of a fully-loaded 6-liter steel pressure cooker, if the media demanded answers now about the administration’s alleged evidence claiming to prove that the Syrian government is using Sarin gas, and about a report in the British Daily Mail that a British military contracting firm’s email appears to show it was asked to provide poison gas to the Syrian rebels to stage a “Washington-approved” false flag poison gas attack to justify US military intervention in Syria — if the US media were to do these things instead of just parrot the fear-mongering garbage spread by the Obama administration and by the war-mongers of both parties in Congress, we wouldn’t have the problem of our democracy being on the chopping block.

The Times' Bill Keller and Tom Friedman, apologists for and defenders of the national security state

Dave Lindorff talks about the US national security state on RT-TV's "Crosstalk" program (to play, click on the image)

I hate to do this, but I feel obligated to share, as the story unfolds, my creeping concern that the writer Naomi Wolf is not whom she purports to be, and that her motive in writing an article on her public Facebook page speculating about whether National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden might actually be still working for the NSA, could be to support the government’s effort to destroy him.

After all, with Snowden under vicious attack by both the government and the corporate media, being wrongly accused of treason, or portrayed as a drop-out slacker, a narcissist, a loser hoping to gain fame and even a “cross-dressing” weirdo, what defender of liberty would pile on with publication of a work of absolutely fact-free speculation as to whether he might also be a kind of “double agent” put out there by the NSA in order to discourage real potential whistleblowers from even considering leaking information about government spying on Americans.

Because that is exactly what Wolf has done on her website (the first clause at the opening of this article is a direct quote from the lead in Wolf’s Facebook piece, but with her name substituted for Snowden’s).

What basis does she offer for her wild-eyed speculation that Snowden is perhaps “not who he purports to be”?

Well, first of all she notes darkly that US spy agencies “create false identities, build fake companies, influence real media with fake stories, create distractions or demonizations in the local news that advance US policies, bug (technologically) and harass the opposition, disrupt and infiltrate the meetings and communications of factions that the US does not wish to see in power.” This, she says, touting her own now rather dated 2007 book The End of America, is “something you can’t not see if you spend time around people who are senior in both the political establishment and the intelligence and state department establishments. You also can’t avoid seeing it if you interview principled defectors from those systems, as I have done…”

Then, after having assuring us of how well-connected she is, she raises what she calls “red flags” about Snowden:

Who's acting in the interest of the NSA: Naomi Wolf or Edward Snowden?

It’s a pretty sad spectacle watching the US Congress toading up to the National Security Agency. With the exception of a few stalwarts like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and to a lesser extent Ron Wyden (D-OR), most of the talk in the halls of Congress is about how to keep the army of Washington private contractors from accessing too many of the government’s secrets (which need to be protected by government employees!), and about whether to try NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden for treason.

NSA Director James Clapper was able to lie bald-facedly to the Senate Intelligence Committee last week without even a reprimand, much less a contempt citation, claiming that the NSA does not spy on millions of Americans’ telecommunications. That type of behavior by members of the executive branch makes a laughing stock out of Congress, but the members of Congress don’t seem to care. They know that they are already viewed as corrupt and loathsome toadies by the broad spectrum of Americans who continue to elect them to office, their collective approval rating now having fallen to a record low of 10% (who are those 10%, anyhow, the extended families of the members of Congress, or dead people in Chicago whose names are being forged on polling forms?). I guess the attitude among Congresspersons must be that they don’t have anything to lose by being accommodating to the march of the national security state. They have hit bottom already.

Poor Snowden, who has put his life on the line in an attempt to try and wake up the somnolent American public to how our free society has been hijacked by a fascist consortium of security agencies and private corporations, has to watch as the broad mass of Americans turn away from the news and switch to the endless stream of police dramas, where the Constitution is viewed as an anachronistic impediment to justice, and the cops are all good guys dedicated to protecting the rest of us.

The frightened and vengeful police state is intent on shutting Snowden down.

Fortunately, Snowden is no slouch, and has given himself some personal insurance in the form of downloaded information that, as he put it in his initial television interview from Hong Kong, could “shut down” the US intelligence machine overnight.

Hong Kong residents march to a rally in front of the US Consulate in defense of NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden, demanding that Hong Kong authorities and Hong Kong courts not extradite him back to the US.

A lot of people in the US media are asking why America’s most famous whistleblower, 29-year old Edward Snowden, hied himself off to the city state of Hong Kong, a wholly owned subsidiary of the People’s Republic of China, to seek at least temporary refuge.

Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the US, they say. And as for China, which controls the international affairs of its Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, while granting it local autonomy to govern its domestic affairs, its leaders “may not want to irritate the US” at a time when the Chinese economy is stumbling.

These people don’t have much understanding of either Hong Kong or of China.

As someone who has spent almost seven years in China and Hong Kong, let me offer my thoughts about why Snowden, obviously a very savvy guy despite his lack of a college education, went where he did.

Hong Kong civil liberties and human rights activists and organizations are already working to build support for Snowden, demanding that he be protected from US prosecution for his whistleblowing. They are starting with a march and rally set for Saturday — putting Hong Kong citizens out ahead of Snowden’s own compatriots in the US when it comes to standing up against the NSA’s Stasi-like tactics.

Many years ago, back in 1975 when Gerald Ford was the nation’s default president, I spent a summer living in the home of two Minneapolis friends, both important anti-war academics, who had two young children. One of their kids, Jacob, who was about seven at the time and smart as a whip, had been given the gift of a can of compressed air which carried a label claiming it contained a miracle product called “Bullshit Repellent.” Whenever someone in the house — family member, me, or some other guest — would say something ridiculous, stupid or false, someone would inevitably yell out, “Jacob, get the Bullshit Repellent!” Jacob would come running in enthusiastically with the can and would spray it proudly at whoever was uttering the BS.

I sure wish I had Jacob and his spray can right now. I simply cannot believe the BS being spouted by President Obama, National Security Agency Director James Clapper, or the members of Congress who should be demanding their heads for the unprecedented surveillance and spying on all Americans that has just been exposed.

Let’s begin at the top: Our president (who once boasted of having taught Constitutional law), decried, way back in 2007 when he was contemplating a run for the White House, what he correctly labeled the Bush-Cheney administration’s “false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.” Fast forward to the president today, after his all-encompassing monitoring of all the phone and internet communications of all Americans, and here’s what he’s saying now (speaking last Friday in San Jose) after the humongous pervasiveness and intrusiveness of the spying was exposed in the U.K Guardian newspaper and the Washington Post:
 

“I think it’s important for everybody to understand … that there are some trade-off’s involved. You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. You know, we’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”
 

Jacob, quick! The bullshit repellent!

Where to start? A security-for-liberty trade-off, he says? Where’s the security? We just had a bombing in Boston that would have been spotted in a minute if the FBI were monitoring the Tsarnaev brothers‘ websites (assuming they are the guilty parties). But the FBI claims it “stopped” monitoring Tamerlan Tsarnaev after interviewing him several times, and “closed” his case, despite his having travelled to Dagestan, a former Soviet struggling with separatist Islamic rebels, and despite warnings from Russian intelligence. This is the kind of “100 percent security” we get in return for losing 100% of our privacy on the phone and online? What incredible BS!

The NSA’s $2-billion National Cybersecurity (sic) Initiative Data Center nearing completion in Utah. Feeling safer now?

Anyone who was a fan of the old ABC TV series “The Untouchables” or of the later series, also on ABC, called “The FBI,” would know something is terribly fishy about the FBI slaying of Ibragim Todashev.

According to the FBI, Todashev, 27, who was an acquaintance, or friend, of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, was shot and killed by an FBI agent who was interviewing the young man, at his home, at midnight, allegedly because Todashev had suddenly attacked him, causing the agent to feel threatened.

There are an astonishing number of conflicing versions of this official story, involving a variety of different weapons and multiple explanations for how it happened. These versions variously had Todashev threatening the agent with a sword, a knife, a chair, a pipe, a metal pole or even a broomstick. But one thing that stands out is that the agent in each version was alone with Todashev, who was suspected of having been an participant, with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, in an as yet unsolved September 11, 2011 slaying of three suspected young drug dealers in Waltham, Mass. at least one of whom was also a friend of the Tsarnaev brothers.

The critical word here is “alone.”

Watchers of those FBI TV programs know that FBI agents always work in pairs. This is not just Hollywood. It’s FBI policy.

Ibragim Todashev and autopsy photo showing FBI agent's "kill shot" to the head during a midnight household "interrogation"

Some on the left are writing hopefully these days that perhaps President Obama has finally realized he needs to back off on his warlike posture on drones and the War on Terror. They are seeing his talk about scaling back the use of drone killing machines and of reconsidering or having his “Justice” Department “investigate” its own outrageous attacks on the press and its use of leaks by government whistle-blowers, as a sign that he is perhaps regaining his constitutional senses and perhaps even “moving” to the left to rebuild support he has been losing in droves.

Put aside for a moment the fact that so far it’s all been just talk. We know the drones are still flying and killing people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere (and there’s no talk of not opening a new drone piloting base in my home county of Montgomery, PA this October). And the national security spy state is going about its nasty business as usual. But in any case, the big test, I submit, of whether this president is actually moving away from his prior five years as president of selling out his liberal, working-class and poverty-struck base to stand instead for traditional liberal and progressive ideals will be Social Security.

On Friday the Social Security Administration will announce that the Trust Fund of money collected through the FICA payroll tax from working Americans over the course of several generations will reach $2.8 trillion this year, up from $2.7 trillion at the end end of 2011. The SSA will further report that this fund will continue to grow, as taxes collected remain greater than the funds being paid out in the form of Social Security benefit checks, until about 2020, seven years from now, when they will reach over $3 trillion. At that point, with increasing numbers of Baby Boomers — that wave of people born between 1946 and 1964 who began hitting retirement age in 2011 — beginning to really pile into retirement, the fund will start to shrink as planned. But even with the unprecedented number of retirees, the report will state that the system should be able to pay promised benefits in full — that’s in full without any changes in the way inflation is factored into benefit amounts — until 2033. And even after that, if no changes were made at all to increase revenues, current taxes paid in by workers at that point would be able to fund 78% of promised benefits indefinitely into the future, even though we’re all living longer than planned back when the fund was being set up.

Hmmmm. In 2033, as a 1949 Baby Boomer, I will be 84 — assuming I live well beyond my expected life expectancy of 76. Maybe I’ll be lucky, but statistically speaking it’s unlikely that I, or most of my cohort, male and female, born before 1960, will be around at that point. Get that? This is a critical point nobody in the kill Social Security crowd likes to mention, but the truth is that by the time Social Security runs out the Trust Fund, the population it was created to try to anticipate will have basically lived on their benefits and passed on to that Great Beyond where Social Security checks aren’t needed anymore.

Money spent on war has long been and continues to be borrowed (stolen) from the Social Security Trust Fund