This Can't Be Happening!

This past Friday, Internet activist Jeremy Hammond stood in a federal courtroom and told Judge Loretta A. Preska why he released a trove of emails and other information uncovering the possibly illegal and certainly immoral collaboration of a major surveillance corporation called Stratfor with our government.

He also stressed what followers of his case already knew: that his activities were encouraged, organized and facilitated by an FBI informant turned operative. In short, his partner in these “violations of United States law” was the government of the United States.

He acknowledged that the Judge could sentence him to 10 years in jail but he never apologized for his actions or questioned their validity as political activism. And, in a statement remarkable for his courage and political principle (after 20 months in jail on this case), he established himself as one of the heroes of the struggle over for freedom and justice.

In a world in which people often seek to defend themselves in court by questioning whether they did what they are accused of, Hammond defended himself by saying that he did what they said he did and more — and that he was right to do it.

Jeremy Hammond; principles and courage
 

“The acts of civil disobedience and direct action that I am being sentenced for today are in line with the principles of community and equality that have guided my life,” he told the court. “I hacked into dozens of high profile corporations and government institutions, understanding very clearly that what I was doing was against the law, and that my actions could land me back in federal prison. But I felt that I had an obligation to use my skills to expose and confront injustice–and to bring the truth to light.”

This article first appeared in the magazine Retirement Income Journal
 

Helsinki—Mikko Kautto, impeccable in a blue suit and open-collared shirt, was sitting at a table in the cafeteria of the modern Centre for Pensions building on the outskirts of Finland’s capital city, answering questions about the operation of his Nordic country’s retirement system.

How, he was asked, does Finland—with its own graying bulge of Baby Boomers, low immigration rate and low birth rate—plan to deal with its version of the impending global retirement crisis?

Kautto, the director of research at the Centre for Pensions, looked surprised and a bit bemused. “We don’t see it as a crisis,” he said. “We see it as having a lot of older citizens that we need to make sure have a comfortable retirement, and we have been planning for that for years. It’s certainly a challenge, but it’s not a crisis.”

Finland's retirees get benefits designed to allow them to maintain their standard of living in retirement

Today my toast looks like Christ,
like planet earth,
like Venus
like me in a dinosaur-proof suit,
bristling with spikes
that I invented when I was afraid to fall asleep.
But I don’t have time for visions. Christ,
I don’t have time for anything!
Bombs in the basement. That’s for the NSA.
A toast to the NSA!
(Lift up your cups, your mugs, comrades!)
The NSA keeps us mad.
Mad as a Hatter.
Without madness I just start
thinking about whether I flossed last night.
I can’t tell you what I’m really thinking.
But it’s whispering.
(I tell spirit in the stone-people’s lodge, I
sweat out truths that are so far beyond
anything I can put to words.
Sometimes sweat speaks louder than words.)
I wish I trusted my instincts!
Damn this
buzzing in my head. Can’t
think clearly. Want a revolution.
You too?
(My toast wants a revolution!)
I’m a Vietnam peace-veteran. And
so much more. They took my childhood,
my youth, my old age.
(Next life I’m going to
get ‘em back.) They took my father’s soul for
Christ’s sake. . .He was a Marine. . .
But he got it back before he died.
I was there. He got it back!
Bombs, bombs, I mean Buddha
in the basement.
Good morning NSA.
It’s a metaphor, you idiots. You literalists.
It’s code for, you guys should get out more.
This whole piece of toast is looking like Snowden now
who looks like Christ, by the way,
who looks like you and me and Buddha
flossing under the Bodhi tree,
who looks like Snowden.
Dear Snowden,
It snowed yesterday.
And I still have gardens to put to bed. . .
 

— Gary Lindorff

 
Lara Logan is a formidable TV reporter who has covered wars and other stories at significant risk. She’s supremely confident and has a powerful journalistic institution supporting her. But as a would-be ethical journalist, she seems to rely too much on her sexual allure and to be too tight with elite elements of the US military establishment.

When it comes to TV reporters, the 42-year-old Logan’s persona epitomizes the pop adjective hot. She’s a beautiful South African blonde with a come-hither sultry voice. It’s noteworthy that she’s married to a US civilian defense contractor from Texas she met covering the war in Afghanistan. They have two young kids. She made her aggressive militarist credentials clear in a 2012 speech in which she unambiguously called for vengeance by US “clandestine warriors” following the Benghazi attack.

As a journalist, Logan always seems to be falling off Albert Camus’ famous ridgeline separating the two abysses of Frivolous Art and Propaganda. In her case, the Propaganda abyss she’s falling into involves her breathy, seductive adoration of male “warriors” and adventurers she is inclined to report on and interview.

Lara Logan, her interview with Morgan Jones (really Dylan Davies), his book and Benghazi burning

The dust-up over her October 27th 60 Minutes interview with a macho warrior cum bullshit artist about his fantasy heroics in Benghazi makes her sexy style a fair issue for discussion. Her story was timed perfectly and played right into the hands of men like California Rep. Darrel Issa, Senator Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity and other right-wing elements doing their mightiest to undermine the Obama administration.

It’s not that President Obama’s Libya actions don’t deserve fair criticism; it’s that Lara Logan’s story featuring “security officer” Dylan Davies (using the pseudonym Morgan Jones) posturing as a brave clandestine war hero turned out to be pandering, right wing militarist garbage. Even Fox News was leery of Davies and washed their hands of the man. Finally, Davies as Morgan Jones had produced a ghost-written book called The Embassy House published by Threshold Editions, a right wing imprint owned by Simon and Schuster, which is owned by Lara Logan’s boss, CBS, something she failed to mention in her interview.

So National Security Agency Director Keith B. Alexander, who, along with his boss, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., thinks that “if you can collect it, you should collect it,” now is asking whether it might not be such a good idea in the case of spying on the citizens of US allies like Germany, France, Spain et al.

“What’s more important,” the chief spook reportedly asked, following revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA has been spying on the electronic communications and phone conversations of millions of people in European other countries around the world. “Partnering with countries may be more important than collecting on them.”

This unusual moment of reflection came before the later disclosure that the Alexander’s super spying outfit was also tapping the cell phones of the leaders of America’s major allies, including France and Germany, not to mention Brazil.

Caught with his electronic pants down, Alexander, who is also a four-star active-duty general, is suddenly acknowledging that spying might have a downside.

In this case, the downside he is acknowledging is a diplomatic one: if you spy on the people — and the leaders — of a friendly state, violating a basic trust that had been taken for granted, you risk losing that trust and losing a long-time friend. Alliances can founder over such abuses of trust.

What Alexander and his truth-challenged boss Clapper are not considering, though, is whether there is also a bigger question: Isn’t maintaining democratic freedoms and the trust of the American people more important than collecting every possible datum of information about them, and monitoring their every move and every communication?”

The answer, of course, is obvious, which is why Alexander and Clapper are not asking it.

Spoof NSA T-shirt: Way back in 2011, the agency threatened to sue the company, LibertyManiacs.com, on the basis of an obsure federal law outlawing the “mutilation or alteration of government seals,” in order to prevent sale of the shirt (click on image to check out the company).

            In brutish, crass, profanity-spitting L.A., in developer-ravaged $2500-a-month “elegant density” L.A., in have-and-have-not ethnically separated L.A., in get-out-of-my-way-asshole, hit-and-run texting-and-primping-while-driving L.A. . . .

            Gentle things still happen.

            She sat at the front table at Papa Cristo’s, the Greek place at Pico and Normandie in the so-called Byzantine-Latino Quarter. Across the street from St. Sofia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral and St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, or, more appropriately considering that masses come with mariachis, Iglesia Santo Tomas Apostol.

            “This is excellent!” she said, and, really, it was amazing she could say anything at all, let alone in a clear, commanding voice. The withered and dry autumn leaves on the sycamore trees in the neighborhood were stronger. This was, to be indelicate, a corpse that hadn’t gotten around to officially dying. Stick limbs, prune skin, sunken cheeks. Talk about frailty, thy name is woman. . .

            “Okay, Babe,” said her companion, a young guy with brown curls pulled back in a pony tail. “I’ve got you.” And he steadied her as he removed her walker, and then helped her ease into a wooden chair at one of Papa Cristo’s wobbly tables. She didn’t seem comfortable.

            “Does your butt hurt?” said her companion.

            What butt, I wondered. Nothing there but bones.

Esther Cicconi, lifetime Communist and icon of LA's left fringe, says 'hello, not goodbye'

President Obama finds himself under fire on two disparate fronts these days, both for the botched rollout of his signature health care program and for the secret spying on allied heads of state.
– Peter Baker, The New York Times
 
It’s one of those elegant solutions to a mix of problems where you wonder why no one thought of it before.

President Obama is under assault for two very tricky problems. The first is the so-far ineffective communication program for the Affordable Care Act, a key component to the administration’s goal to improve the delivery of health care to all Americans.

The second problem is that the National Security Agency has been listening very aggressively (and very competently) to the cell phone calls and emails of people like German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The NSA has been doing this to Merkel for the past 11 years, which includes the entire five years of the Obama presidency. Ms Merkel and others are now quite exercised and perturbed.

Thanks to the talented Edward Snowden we now know how effective the NSA has been in figuring out how to track and listen in on the phone calls and emails of world leaders, as well as ordinary Americans. Of course, we’re told, the NSA only monitors US citizen calls if we dial a potential foreign al Qaeda agent. The NSA’s credibility is such that the reaction to that has been a resounding: “Yeh, sure!” Still, you have to admit, it’s pretty incredible what they are able to do. Personally, I’m still awed by landline telephones and that our voices somehow travel with hundreds of other voices over wire or clear cable as laser light. But even that’s like two Campbell soup cans and a wire when it comes to the marvels of the 21st century technological communication skills harnessed by the NSA.

The Obama administration and the NSA are now acting like kids pointing their stubby little fingers at each other. “Gee, I didn’t know that was going on,” the president said. “Oh yeh? Well, we told your people what we were doing. If they didn’t tell you, that’s your problem,” the nation’s spy chiefs replied.

US chief spy General James E. Clapper, Edward Snowden and a common listening device

Top spy James E. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, conceded the President of the United States could not know everything, although reports on the NSA would suggest General Clapper was trying to reach that goal himself. It’s important to understand that the 66-year-old leviathan Clapper oversees does not shift with the political winds every four or eight years. The leadership of the NSA (and the CIA and the Pentagon, for that matter) does not have to kiss American voter ass to get re-elected. They operate on an inexorably rising through-line that began with the super confidence of the immediate post-World War Two moment and the Cold War infused fear of losing that dominant top-dog feeling. Accordingly, our intelligence matrix has been able to grow steadily, mostly in secret, since the current National Security State was officially enacted in 1947 and the NSA was added to the intelligence-gathering mix in 1952.

“We’re talking about a huge enterprise here,” Clapper recently told a congressional hearing. Spy chiefs, of course, are notorious masters of understatement, and what he rules is actually much larger than “huge.” It’s mind-boggling. We poor citizen schmucks have only the minutest hint of what the hell it does — for us and to us.

The technology of MUSCULAR, a program jointly carried on by the NSA and its British counterpart, isn’t hard to explain. Essentially, technologists at the spy agency have figured out a way to intercept data being exchanged among servers that store everything you do on Google and Yahoo.

A revealing page-one article in today’s New York Times (“Tap on Merkel Provides Peek a Vast Spy Net”) reports on how the NSA’s global spying program, dating back at least to early in the Bush/Cheney administration, was vacuuming up the phone conversations (and no doubt later the internet communications) of not just leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but opposition leader Merkel before her party took power in Germany.

As the Times puts it, the phone monitoring, which actually dates back to the Cold War Era before 1990, “is hardly limited to the 35 leaders of countries like Germany, and also includes their top aides and the heads of opposing parties.”

That’s pretty far-reaching, and the paper says that it has learned, primarily courtesy of revelations from the documents released by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, that the spying went even beyond that, to target up-and-coming potential leaders of so-called “friendly states.”

But the Times buys without question the explanation offered by professional liar James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence and ultimate head of the embattled National Security Agency, that the NSA’s spying on leaders and potential was and is and has been, first of all, well known to presidents, and secondly that its purpose was simply to see “if what they’re saying gels with what’s actually going on, as well as how other countries’ policies “impact us across a whole range of issues.”

That’s pretty broad. The first explanation is really a euphemistic way of saying the NSA wants to see if American’s purported friends and allies are lying. The second is a euphemistic way of saying that the US is spying to gain inside information about its allies’ political goals and strategies, and probably their negotiating positions on things like trade treaties, international regulations, etc.

What the Times does not ask in its entire report on this spying program on leaders and potential leaders is whether there could be another motive for this extraordinary spying campaign on leaders: blackmail.

Is President Obama listening in on others courtesy the NSA, or is the NSA listening in on him, and if so, for whom?

Nonetheless, at the time, most news organizations simply accepted at face value the shifting and thin official accounts of the strange events. Today few give the still-unfolding saga even the most minimal attention. And it is most certainly still unfolding, as we shall see. The Little-Noticed Post-Marathon Hunt The FBI’s strange obsession with marginal figures …

Continue reading “Feds Accused Of Harassing “Boston Bomber” Friends, And Friends Of Friends”