Monday, June 30, 2014

The Flavor of the Summer is Fear


Be very, very afraid America, the greatest threat to western civilization has now manifested itself with the mysterious Islamist group ISIS officially declaring the establishment of that dreaded caliphate that the neocons have been wailing about for years and have now hit the jackpot with the ultimate bogeyman to wage their Middle Eastern wars. It was inevitable that Americans would be bludgeoned again with that fear club, a powerful weapon of great influence that worked to perfection under Bush and Cheney and now that the Republicans or Hillary Clinton because what is really the difference smell blood like the political piranhas that they are. The rise of ISIS as some sort of monstrous army of Allah worshipping flesh-eating zombies couldn't be better constructed to scare the living crap out of the bewildered herd on the great star-spangled lemming colony and the state-corporate media is flogging this horse as hard as possible. The neocons must not believe their luck in having been able to return from what should have been permanent political exile to rule the roost again.
Things are never going to change in America, not since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center served the political class as well as the Reichstag Fire did the Nazis for it has served to justify every offense against the Constitution such as the stripping away of civil liberties, the elimination for all intents and purposes of both Habeas Corpus and the Posse Comitatus Act as we were dragged with nary a whimper into a now fully bloomed fascist totalitarian state. The Reichstag Fire gave Hitler his Enabling Act and the 9/11 events gave the US power structure their USA PATRIOT Act - not that there is much difference between the two other than the latter was written in German. Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, neither one of these enormously costly and failed wars were in the national interest and the USA!, USA!, USA! has pretty much gotten an ass kicking in both. Sure there was the great "SURGE" of the glorious General David Petraeus but it was just a public relations gimmick, sold to the public by seasoned, bloodthristy whores of the Military Industrial Complex like Senators McCain and Graham. It all worked so well and if the narrative coming out of Iraq and Syria is to be believed (and why in the Hell should anything that this corrupt government and power structure says should be given credibility given their record since 9/11) then the US involvement in the region and the destabilizing effect had more to do with ISIS than anything else. I still think that this all bears more than a slight whiff of bullshit and a massive psyops campaign to reengage upon the PNAC path to eternal glory and the harder that the media pushes it, the stronger that smell becomes.
But I digress...
This weekend commencing with the start of Ramadan, the baddest motherfuckers on Earth - I actually heard some dipshit referring to them as the Muslim Khmer Rouge and some rampaging horde out of Game of Thrones which I can't recall - have announced their intent to form the Caliphate. I excerpt the following from The Guardian story entitled  "Isis announces Islamic caliphate in area straddling Iraq and Syria":
Islamist militants have declared an Islamic "caliphate" in an area straddling Iraq and Syria, trumpeting the declaration in several videos.
One slick video, mostly in English, features a bearded fighter with an AK-47 on his back, explaining the new caliphate.
"This is not the first border we will break, we will break other borders," a jihadist from the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (Isis) warned in the video called End of Sykes-Picot, a reference to the agreement between France and Britain that divided up the Ottoman empire territories after the first world war.
Later the fighter pledges that jihadists will free Palestine. "We are not here to replace an Arab cahoot with a western cahoot. Rather our jihad is more lofty and higher. We are fighting to make the word of Allah the highest," the spokesman said.
He is filmed showing abandoned Iraqi army badges and vehicles left by fleeing soldiers. "There is no army in the world that can withstand the soldiers of Islam," he said.
The video features about a dozen men in a cell said to be captured troops and border police. A building, said to be a police station, is shown being blown up, as well as US-made Humvees captured from the border police. "Look how much America spends to fight Islam, and it ends up just being in our pockets," the spokesman taunted.
Isis, a breakaway group from al-Qaida, is notable for its hardline anti-Shia sectarianism, declaring Shia Muslims and other rivals as heretics that deserve death.
And that is only the "Shia Muslims", they would love nothing better than to come to America (or Europe) and launch their jihad to make western infidels bow as slaves (or rape their luscious white daughters)  to the glory of Allah under that Sharia Law that the anti-Muslim bigot fear pimps have been preaching about for years. Just the abundance of lurid tales that have been popping up lately reek of an intelligence operation of US and other allies. Just a few examples are: "200 Iraqis killed in mass executions by ISIS fighters, Human Rights Watch says""ISIL crucifies eight rival fighters, says monitoring group" and with pictures guaranteed to send shivers down lilly-white adherents of chicken fried Christianity in The Homeland at libertarian blog Zero Hedge "ISIS Declares A Caliphate; Crucifies 9 Syrian Rebels For Being "Too Moderate". Then there is Obama chiming in to provide cover to feckless coward Democrats in an election year who will be vilified for being terrorist appeasers with "Obama sees 'serious threat' to the U.S. from trained terrorists", the European angle to keep the NATO satellites buying the wares of various and sundry US arms manufacturers  "With ISIS surging in Iraq, Europe fears rise in ‘jihadi-tourists’" and hits the sweet spot with "Syria Threat Could Prompt Changes at Airports" from which I excerpt:
For months the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and other agencies have been quietly debating whether to boost the U.S. security posture and encourage overseas partners to take action too. The agencies have also been debating whether to make a public announcement on potential new security measures at airports.
The back-and-forth has been based on intelligence showing that a particularly extreme "subset" of terrorist groups in Syria was working alongside operatives from al Qaeda's prolific offshoot in Yemen to produce "creative" new designs for bombs, as one source put it.
Somebody is going to hit the fucking jackpot over new airport screening and harassment measures, just look at how former DHS head Michael Chertoff cashed in off of the ridiculous Christmas "Underwear Bomber" plot when his lobbying firm, The Chertoff Group played the fear card to fleece the American taxpayers for those naked body scanners.
This is all just horseshit, we have seen this movie before - it stank - and we all got fleeced. The criminal political class always plays the fear card in order to justify their own existence and with the newly minted Islamic devil of ISIS taking the place of Al-Qaeda Americans are being played for the suckers that they are anew. The great line from the movie Blade Runner by Rutger Hauer's Roy Baty replicant character put it "Quite an experience to live in fear isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave".
The political class, especially in corrupt and collapsing morally bereft societies - like ours - have nothing else to offer other than their "we will protect you" from the evildoers confidence game  and it works. So with all of us about to be dragged back to the quivering, pissing in your pants days of the early post 9/11 era - AGAIN - just so the scum can continue to feed like the vampires that they are upon the cattle I would strongly recommend a 2006 BBC series by documentary master Adam Curtis entitled "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear". His brilliant and groundbreaking trilogy examines both the rise of radical Islamist groups like al Qaeda as well as the neoconservatives and their ideological master Leo Strauss and to my knowledge have never been aired in America. These are all the more relevant today than they were back in 2004. They can be found in a number of locations by a simple Google search but I have found that Internet Archive (https://archive.org) is the most reliable location. All three installments Part One: Baby It's Cold Outside, Part Two: The Phantom Victory and Part Three: The Shadows in the Cave are available for viewing or download in multiple formats here: The Power Of Nightmares
Quite an experience to live in fear isn't it? That is what it is to be an American. 

Sunday, June 29, 2014

The Republican Guantanamo Bay Torture Camp Fetish


Strangely absent from the public view has been outgoing Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, the fanatical authoritarian who is stepping down from a safely gerrymandered Michigan congressional seat for a career in right-wing talk radio. Rogers was a Sunday morning fixture for months as he defended the NSA Stasi for unconstitutional mass surveillance and data-mining as well as continued to pull out unsubstantiated allegations that former government contractor turned patriotic whistleblower Edward Snowden was a Russian spy. Well this Sunday he has made his return to the morning slimefest to champion the US offshore torture facility and concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.
The occasion for the puffy fascist's return to national television is that the recently abducted alleged mastermind of the 2012 Benghazi embassy attack Ahmed Abu Khattala is now in The Homeland awaiting trial in a - GASP - civilian court. Rogers, a real knuckle-dragger who used to work for the FBI Gestapo appeared on CNN's State of the Union to decree that Khattala was an "enemy combatant" - that wonderful little designation dreamed up by Bush administration legal eagles to circumvent the Constitution and should be thrown into captivity at the blot on the American global reputation at Gitmo. Rogers primary beef is that Khattala has to this point been "uncooperative" when interrogated by US goons and there is nothing like some torture and waterboarding in the balmy military occupied extrajudicial facility in Cuba to loosen his tongue and cop to the embassy attack.
According to a story in Politico (the actual SOTU transcript was not available) in a story entitled "Rogers: Khatallah process brings up more questions", Rogers who is a pathological liar for his history of bogus statements on Snowden and Glenn Greenwald makes the case for Gitmo as:
“Think about the sheer expense, the manpower, the planning to remove him from the battlefield, put him on a U.S. ship, steam him across the ocean to the United States to be presented to a U.S. federal judge, and we had to ask ourselves, is this, are we looking at what's happening in Iraq and Syria, is this a legal matter? Is this a criminal engagement or enemy combatants we need to strike and hold in a different way?” the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said on CNN's "State of the Union."
If this tactic is to be used during the apprehension of anyone engaged in terrorism around the world, the Michigan Republican said, “we better start building prisons by the dozens." The prison facility at Guantánamo Bay is already capable of holding such suspects, he said.
Rogers said that the time investigators spent interviewing Khatallah on his trip over the Atlantic was not enough and that he has been “compliant but not cooperative.”
“You can't say you'll do it in 10 days or three days or seven days. Remember, he's affiliated with Al Sharia in Libya, which is certainly affiliated with Al Qaeda — these are dangerous folks. If he doesn't give us anything, and we get him to put him in jail, what have [we] accomplished? I argue we've spent a lot of money and not gained anything valuable for pushing back on terrorists around the world,” Rogers said.
Rogers is once again just pulling stuff out of his ass. Foremost is the insistence of using the term "terrorists" as an all-encompassing one to describe what are effectively religious militants, such is al Qaeda and ISIS (which the US to some degree likely overtly or covertly supports) who are engaged in civil wars as such. The entire pretense of the phony war on terror is bullshit in that "terrorism" is a tactic and acts of war in the myriad of conflicts that Uncle Scam is fueling produces an array of militants, freedom fighters, holy warriors, insurgents etc and to label them all as "terrorists" is dishonesty of the utmost. But Rogers knows this very well being that the Guantanamo Bay legal limbo and torture facility is ultimately going to house American citizens, most of them domestic political dissidents and opponents of the fascist system that gives Rogers and his fellow traitors a hard on. What would the purpose be of building a totalitarian system of surveillance and the militarized police forces that support it if there aren't prisons into which to throw the targets?
This is all going to be coming home to roost very soon when the political climate is just right to go live with the full blown imposition of tyranny - the trigger could be an economic collapse (which is looming) or that new 9/11 event that Dick Cheney has been making the rounds promoting as though he knows something that the rest of us don't. Either of which would suit Rogers and his fellow torture fetishists in the GOP like Ted Cruz, Peter King, John McCain and Lindsey Graham as well as the legion of lesser known although equally depraved authoritarians for they will be the ones who are involved in deciding exactly who is going to end up in those prisons when the time comes. 

Obama Wraps War Mongering in Phony Gay Rights Crusade


The American war machine is constantly working to sell perpetual war based on such false pretenses as making the world safe for democracy, killing those who hate us for our freedoms, stopping the global communist menace, the war on terror, preemptively taking out the latest “new Hitler” and now making the planet safe for gay rights. This is a masterpiece of bullshit from the Obama regime and it will play very well with the ongoing cynical manipulation of gay voters as the 2016 election campaign begins. Liberals who have learned to love the wars that they at one time wanted George W. Bush's head on a pike for now that the White House is occupied by a Democrat will no doubt be thrilled to line up and salute that rainbow pride flag that the imperialist Obama and soon Queen Hillary will be flying as they continue their crusade for global US hegemony or making the planet safe for McDonalds at the point of a gun.
This is raw political cynicism at its worst and every bit the equal of the Republicans firing up the Jesus juicing mouth breathers of their party base for years over the ridiculous culture wars and the drive to overturn Roe v. Wade which despite many years of iron-fisted GOP control over all three branches of the government still stands so potent it is as a political mobilizer. Under Obama the drive to make gay marriage the law of the land - and it should be the right of any individual to marry whoever the hell they damned well please - is the precursor to the branding of the USA! USA! USA! as the top global cop when it comes to protecting gay rights. Never mind the sheer hypocrisy that not only do many US states are overtly hostile to gay rights (primarily behind the cornbread curtain in Dixie) but our "ally" Saudi Arabia is one of the most oppressive countries towards homosexuality on God's green Earth.
The new strategy for selling violent corporate imperialism to the butterflies, moonbeams and zebras crowd that are the holier than thou liberals is explained in The Guardian in an article entitled  "Obama uses embassies to push for LGBT rights abroad" from which I excerpt:
President Barack Obama's administration has taken the US gay rights revolution global, using American embassies across the world as outposts in a struggle that still hasn't been won at home.
Sometimes US advice and encouragement is condemned as unacceptable meddling. And sometimes it can seem to backfire, increasing the pressure on those it is meant to help.
With gay pride parades taking place in many cities across the world this weekend, the US role will be more visible than ever. Diplomats will take part in parades and some embassies will fly the rainbow flag along with the Stars and Stripes.
AND
While some gay rights activists say support from the US and other western countries adds moral legitimacy to their cause, it can also cause a backlash.
Rauda Morcos, a prominent Palestinian lesbian activist, said local communities, particularly in the Middle East, have to find their own ways of asserting themselves. She criticized the US and western efforts in general to help gay communities elsewhere as patronizing.
"It is a colonial approach," she said. "In cases where it was tried, it didn't help local communities and maybe made things even worse."
An extreme case has been Uganda, which in February passed a law making gay sex punishable by a life sentence. In enacting the bill, President Yoweri Museveni said he wanted to deter the West from "promoting" gay rights in Africa, a continent where homosexuals face severe discrimination and even attacks. In response, the US imposed sanctions and Secretary of State John Kerry compared the policies to the anti-Semitic laws in Nazi Germany and apartheid in South Africa.
In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has waged an assault on what he considers the encroachment of decadent western values, and the government last year banned "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations among minors", making it a crime to hold gay rights rallies or to openly discuss homosexuality in content accessible to children. Afraid for their security, some Russian gay advocates try to keep their contacts with western officials quiet.
A couple of things really stand out in the excerpted pieces, first is the invoking of The Holocaust and Hitler's vile war against Europe's Jews in that: "Secretary of State John Kerry compared the policies to the anti-Semitic laws in Nazi Germany". This shtick is as abominable as it is predictable - there is nothing more repulsive than when political figures invoke the millions of dead Jews as justification for even more violence that will inevitably result in piles of corpses and atrocities but hey, it sells well to deep-pocketed liberal Jewish donors. It will only be a matter of time until Kerry and his ilk play the Holocaust card against Putin which brings me to a second excerpted bit of the story in that "In Russia, President Vladimir Putin has waged an assault on what he considers the encroachment of decadent western values". I suspect that a good part of the Obama administration global crusade for gay rights is more of the same sleazy anti-Putin propaganda that we have been beaten over the head with to justify the US backed coup d'etat in Kiev and the neo-Nazis that were installed along with the puppet regime. I ran across a brilliant essay on the big lies of the media (in this case the BBC) by Vera Graziadei, a British Ukrainian Russian actress and writer  entitled “The Cunning Demons of Russian Propaganda, or what the BBC forgot to warn us about” that is a must read when it comes to a blistering critique of the incessant anti-Russian propaganda and the US-EU-NATO Axis of Aggression crap that is peddled about what is really going on in Ukraine.
The Putin gay persecution narrative was a critical component of the gold medal winning Obama administration smear campaign undertaken by the US state-corporate media in the run up to the Sochi Winter Olympics and Obama milked it for all that it was worth by naming lesbian former tennis star Billie Jean King to his Olympic delegates. It was identity group based politics at its worst, particularly when considering how long that Obama shit on gays after he had their votes secured in 2008. The cruise missile liberals are going to love the new global crusade for gay rights even if they are too willfully blind to see that they are once again being played for chumps by a criminal Democratic party that is equally corrupt as the Republicans albeit not as overtly fascist. 

Saturday, June 28, 2014

Anti-Spying Blimp Flown Over Massive NSA Data Storage Facility in Utah


In an attempt to bring publicity to the mass surveillance and data-mining activities of the American Stasi a blimp with the message "Illegal Spying Below" was flown over that massive data storage facility that the NSA has built in Bluffdale, Utah. The blimp was a joint venture between three disparate activist groups GreenpeaceThe Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Tenth Amendment Center in an alliance that confounds the corrupt two-party power structure and the phony left-right paradigm and proves that people can set aside differences and unite against a shared enemy. I have long advocated for a coming together of libertarians, progressives and principled conservatives to push for a restoration of the rule of law as set forth in the US Constitution and the defeat of the creeping fascism that is now evolving into full-blown totalitarianism - largely thanks to the NSA - because if it isn't stopped or at least significantly slowed, then nothing else is really going to matter.
The Bluffdale center provides the government and those with the money to purchase political clout as well as vested special interests with a veritable wet dream of locking down their power for perpetuity by allowing for the hoarding and storage of every aspect of a person's life so that when a threat to the system is identified then a case will be able to be built for their prosecution and imprisonment. There has already been a revelation of "parallel construction" activities in which law enforcement uses data illegally provided by the NSA for targeting purposes and then goes about building a completely phony case against the individual. This is what one might expect to exist in a classical totalitarian state where government goons like the Gestapo, the NKVD, SAVAK or actual Stasi operated with impunity to crush dissent and to paraphrase Sinclair Lewis - it can happen here.
The world of Philip K. Dick's Minority Report and Pre-Crime is coming and coming soon once that data center is fully operational and stocked with information and the political climate dictates it. The NSA has always been about going after dissent and not any bullshit war on terror unless one realizes that the rogue state views us, it's own citizens as the "terrorists".  The real targets - and I am anxiously awaiting the "imminent" Glenn Greenwald story on Snowden's list - will be environmentalists, anti-government activists and writers, human rights activists and lawyers, supporters of Wikileaks, Anonymous and the Occupy movement, antiwar activists, climate change activists, privacy advocates, anti-corporate activists, ACLU members, bloggers and journalists, BDS activists and any other organization that serves to challenge the corrupt elite and those sympathetic to anti-establishment views. The crimes of hijacking the system, destroying democracy and stealing from the poor and middle class to enrich the elite have already been perpetrated and it is the job of the NSA and it's corporate partners to ensure that they are never discovered or challenged.
Other than the "Illegal Spying Below" blimp another NSA related story from Friday is the findings of a transparency report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) which is the agency headed up by pathological liar James Clapper. For what it's worth the report claims that the NSA only actually queried the phone records of 248 Americans, a ridiculously low number considering the extent of the mass surveillance and probably more of the total bullshit that has been shoveled down the throats of Americans by an agency that has no inclination to provide anything remotely resembling the truth. Per a story from The Guardian entitled "NSA queried phone records of just 248 people despite massive data sweep" from which I excerpt:
The National Security Agency was interested in the phone data of fewer than 250 people believed to be in the United States in 2013, despite collecting the phone records of nearly every American.
As acknowledged in the NSA's first-ever disclosure of statistics about how it uses its broad surveillance authorities, released Friday, the NSA performed queries of its massive phone records troves for 248 "known or presumed US persons" in 2013.
AND
The number of "selectors" NSA queried from that data trove, a term referring to an account and not necessarily an individual user, was 423 in 2013, an increase from the "less than 300 times" it searched through the data trove in 2012, according to former deputy NSA director John Inglis.
"This transparency report is significant because it shows for the first time on an annual basis both targets of business-record orders and the number of US persons specifically targeted with these metadata queries," said Alan Butler, a lawyer with the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
"These are critical numbers to review when talking about a program that sweeps in the records of hundreds of millions of Americans."
Considering the billions if not trillions of dollars invested in the surveillance colossus the "248" number is suspect for several reasons. First and foremost is that if that is a true number (just for argument's sake let's say it is) then the entire surveillance state Gomorrah is an enormous waste of money that exists to loot the American taxpayers to create jobs for the millions who are employed by the intelligence agencies, their extensive networks of contractors and the infrastructure that the politicians who benefit continue to fund. We have far too many legitimate problems in this country to throw money into an domestic surveillance apparatus that only finds "248" targets. Secondly, these are ODNI figures and again, James Clapper is a man who perjured himself in front of Congress so really, how much credence can possibly be put into such a report. Thirdly, the numbers are subject to being cooked in that the NSA has that extensive network of contractors as well as foreign partners such as the UK's GCHQ which as has been already revealed by the Snowden documents as engaged in critical activities such as sexual blackmail so as to ostensibly lend the NSA plausible deniability. The report just doesn't pass the smell test, again I excerpt from The Guardian: story:
"These are critical numbers to review when talking about a program that sweeps in the records of hundreds of millions of Americans."
Some privacy advocates expressed scepticism about how genuine and accurate an account of NSA surveillance the report actually provides.
"The ODNI report calls itself into question by saying they're providing numbers, but immediately saying those numbers are only true to the extent the intelligence community believes it can release them without compromising sensitive information," said Amie Stepanovich of the digital rights group Access.
"The numbers could be much greater, and made to look smaller because of what the intelligence community calls preserving intelligence programs.
Weasel words  if there ever were any - "preserving intelligence programs" -  that is just more of the same Orwellian nonsense like calling torture "enhanced interrogation techniques" but sadly the bastards continue to get away with it all.  

Friday, June 27, 2014

Ultimatum of the Finger Wagger: Kerry Again Threatens Russia


Secretary of State John Kerry, the epitome of the ugly American is once again wagging his finger in the face of Russia and President Vladimir Putin. According to Reuters, the top Skull and Bones alum over at Foggy Bottom has ordered Putin to immediately disarm anti-austerity, anti-fascist freedom fighters in Eastern Ukraine. Currently engaged in more plotting with his EU counterparts in Brussels to complete the absorption of Ukraine into the EU and later NATO, the buffoon that is the American top diplomat continues to push the envelope. The Obama regime's ongoing reckless actions towards Russia endanger the lives of billions and if just one hot-headed idiot decides to unleash a tactical nuke or two in a burst of the emotion that is being nurtured by their bellicosity it could bring doom on a global scale. This incredibly stupid personal vendetta by Kerry and Obama and their cadre of neocon fanatics is not going to end well for any of us and the only ones who are unable to see it are those with the ability to stop it.

The Reuters Story, entitled "Kerry tells Russia to disarm Ukraine separatists 'in hours'" states that:

Washington and other Western powers have stepped up pressure on Russia to take concrete action to defuse the conflict in eastern Ukraine, where a ceasefire between Russian-speaking rebels and government forces has appeared to be crumbling.
"We are in full agreement that it is critical for Russia to show in the next hours, literally, that they're moving to help disarm the separatists, to encourage them to disarm, to call on them to lay down their weapons and to begin to become part of a legitimate process," Kerry told reporters in Paris.

He added that EU leaders would discuss possible sanctions on Russia at their summit in Belgium on Friday.

Washington has said it also has new sanctions ready to go, but Kerry said the United States would prefer not to be in "sanctions mode" and wanted Russia to take action without pressure.
"We would like to see a cooperative effort between the United States, Europe and Russia and the Ukrainians," Kerry added.

Separatist rebellions erupted in eastern Ukraine in early April after street protests in Kiev toppled Moscow-backed leader Viktor Yanukovich, and Russia in turn annexed the Crimean peninsula. Eastern rebels have called for union with Russia. Moscow denies Western accusations that it has allowed fighters to cross into Ukraine along with heavy weapons to confront Ukrainian government forces.

The proposed next round of U.S. and EU sanctions would target Russia's financial, defense and high-tech industries, said U.S. officials.

Could the act of war that is the launching "financial neutron bomb" be coming soon? Pay no mind that Putin just acted to deescalate the situation by requesting parliament revoke his authorization to use military force in Ukraine and is continuing to be the the only rational party involved in this mess. It wasn't Putin who started it, that is unless you go back to last summer when he intervened to prevent the imminent US massive air attack on Damascus bringing both Obama and Kerry much embarrassment and then there is that Snowden asylum thing too. The propaganda machine is already spinning Putin's move as just another one of this devilish acts of trickery while the new Cold War and all of the trillions of dollars that it would generate in profits to the death industry gets ever closer.

Americans have no idea whatsoever of the reality in Ukraine, the state-corporate media has covered up this gross violation of international law from the onset. There was the fomenting of unrest by organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy to turn out the protesters in the streets of Kiev against legitimately elected president at the time Viktor Yanukovych and the subsequent infiltration and hijacking of the protests by bloodthirsty neo-Nazi thugs who were able to introduce violence. Senator John McCain, a psychopath and by the way that he is treated by the media, the de facto US President was photographed in Kiev palling around with neo-Nazis right before the sh*t hit the fan. Then there was that still mysterious killing of both police and protesters by snipers that ignited the smoldering powder keg and led to the ouster of Yanukovych along with the installation of a US backed puppet regime lead by former central banker Arseniy Yatsenyuk or "Yats" as he is affectionately known by former Dick Cheney aide and current Assistant US Secretary of State Victoria "f*ck the EU" Nuland. She is also the woman who handed out cookies to anti-government protesters in Kiev in a public relations exercise and boasted to US corporate interests about the $5 billion dollars of American taxpayer money that has been funneled into Ukraine over the years to ensure that the country would be safe for corporate plunder when the time came.

The best laid plans to surprise Putin with the Ukraine coup d'etat being executed while he was occupied with the Sochi Winter Olympics naturally weren't without failures. Really, anything that the neocons touch as a result of their lunatic dreams of global conquest carry within it the seeds of their own destruction and Ukraine is the latest example. There was Putin's initial request to use military force in Ukraine and then the lightning fast secession of Crimea along with the subsequent vote to join Russia along with the official annexation. This was an unforgivable transgression despite the fact that Crimea always was a part of Russia until Nikita Kruschev (legend has it he was drunk at the time) gave it away in 1954. The corporate forces that were ready to pillage and loot with impunity after the installation of "Yats" were furious as were the neocon geniuses whose prized target - the Russian naval base at Sevastopol was snatched from their claws immediately. The puppet government struck back and into the east went the goons and neo-Nazi militias to commit their heinous atrocities such as the murderous and barbaric acts at the Odessa trade union building which has for all intents and purposes been flushed down the memory hole. Christ know that we can't tell Americans the truth that their government is now on the side of the same Nazi scum that their fathers and grandfathers risked all to defeat in World War II.

The people in the east, knowing from history the full potential of the horrors wrought by Nazi ideology unleashed did what they could do - they fought back and are holding their own to this day despite the US-EU-NATO Axis of Aggression sanctioned use of they military on civilians - including the use of incendiary munitions such as the ones used in Gazaand Fallujah. Ukraine has a new puppet leader, a corrupt oligarch installed to much hoopla in a bogus election named Petro Poroshenko aka "the Chocolate King" and early indications show that he is hellbent on doing the bidding of the US power structure in crushing the uprising in the east under that evil and ubiquitous justification of fighting "terrorists" - which is coming very soon to America.
Poroshenko is eager to please his western masters and after formalizing the deal with the devil for the Ukranian people that is the EU austerity agreement his is upping his rhetoric towards Putin. According to The Guardian in a story entitled "Ukraine president accuses Russia of doing nothing to end 'disastrous' war" the Chocolate King was providing the cover for the coming round of sanctions in the Obama regime's ongoing provocations of Russia. I excerpt the following:

Speaking in Brussels, Poroshenko stated bluntly that the rebels were under the control of Vladimir Putin's Kremlin. "I think now Russia has done nothing," he said. "We are talking of Russian citizens, Russian officers, Russians by origin, Russian soldiers of fortune." He characterised the Kremlin's strategy in Ukraine as "not very pragmatic" and "very emotional".

AND

Asked if Ukraine would get Crimea back during his presidential term, Poroshenko smiled and said: "Yes"

It was more of the same vintage Russia-baiting as that recent absurd accusation from NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen that the Putin government was secretly working in close coordination with European environmentalists in fighting the "fracking" industry. From The Guardian story "Russia 'secretly working with environmentalists to oppose fracking'":
The head of one of the world's leading groups of democratic nations has accused Russia of undermining projects using hydraulic fracturing technology in Europe.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen, secretary-general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato), and former premier of Denmark, told the Chatham House thinktank in London on Thursday that Vladimir Putin's government was behind attempts to discredit fracking, according to reports.
Rasmussen said: "I have met allies who can report that Russia, as part of their sophisticated information and disinformation operations, engaged actively with so-called non-governmental organisations - environmental organisations working against shale gas - to maintain European dependence on imported Russian gas."

It was something straight out of the John Birch Society Blue Book and yet here is the leader of NATO hurling about a dangerous and baseless charge that could have dire ramifications in the United States where the fight against the destructive practice of "fracking" is facing growing opposition. Given the actions of the NSA and the constitutional wrecking crew of both the Obama and Bush administrations it is not much of a reach to believe that US domestic activists are already being subjected to surveillance and cases are already being built against them. it is a certainty that these are exactly the targets that the NSA is really going after and this will likely be exposed once Snowden's list is revealed. They will have good company too in that antiwar activists and bloggers and independent media writers who dare to question the corrupt system that now dominates politics in The Homeland are going to be on it too.

The runaway train that is hurtling towards a hideous endgame over Ukraine that will likely result in World War III continues to pick up speed, Poroshenko's demagoguery and the predictable reaction by Russian political figures who have again been stabbed in the back by the west continue to jack up the tensions. Not that Putin adviser Sergei Glazyev was wrong when he called the new boss in Kiev "a Nazi" for the recently inked austerity deal as reported by The Guardian:

Sergei Glazyev, an adviser to Putin, told the BBC before the signing that "Europe is trying to push Ukraine to sign this agreement by force" and said Petro Poroshenko, the president, lacked the legitimacy to make the deal.

"They organised [a] military coup in Ukraine; they helped Nazis to come to power. This Nazi government is bombing the largest region in Ukraine." He said he "of course" believed the Ukrainian president was a Nazi.

Not that you will read about that in the US state-corporate media, at least not in anything even resembling the actual context but his is correct - the coming carnage in the east is going to make that slaughter at the Odessa trade union building look like a picnic. The real way that the Kiev junta think about their Russian speaking countrymen has been made obvious by not only the murderous actions of rampaging neo-Nazi militias but also by Yatsenyuk himself when he slipped up about two weeks ago and referred to the anti-austerity fighters as "subhumans" or as the many in Ukraine who cling to the legend of their hero, Nazi-collaborator and mass-murderer Stepan Bandera would describe them - untermensch.

But Kerry continues to pontificate, threaten and wave that damned finger of his as though this country still has that most priceless commodity that is the moral high ground - only the rubes, drunk on their star-spangled fat asses off of the toxic elixir of "American exceptionalism" as preached by snake oil salesmen like Obama believe that garbage - because when you throw in with the admirers of the twentieth century's greatest criminals the Nazis, it has been ceded forever.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

The Executive Order Hypocrisy of John Boehner


Finally free from having to constantly defend himself from an overthrow by the back-stabbing little guttersnipe Eric Cantor, House Speaker John Boehner is cranking up the election year outrage. Boehner is filing a lawsuit against President Barack Obama's use of executive orders to bypass a gaggle of paid off obstructionists hellbent at wrecking America. Braying about Obama's circumventing of Congress in issuing the orders to deliberately flout the quaint and antiquated system of checks and balances that is pretty much extinct in the corrupt, lawyered-up and spied upon modern political system is pure hypocrisy on Boehner's part. But when it comes to the day to day operations within the brothel that is housed within the US Capitol building hypocrisy is the coin of the realm.

Boehner's publicity stunt is par for the course - he will inevitably call a press conference and may even break down into one of those fake crying jags that he was famous for prior to his ascension to Speaker - but his ridiculous lawsuit is going nowhere. The issuance of executive orders has always been used and abused by US Presidents although it is particularly dangerous in the era of the Unitary Executive which bestows the powers of a king upon the sitting president. Further exposing Boeher's cynicism and his grandstanding in rolling out this dog and pony show prior to the mid-terms in November is that Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush issued nearly three hundred such orders and I don't seem to recall any objection from the luminous, orange-tinted wino from Ohio. In fact Mr. Boehner himself personally wrote to President Bush requesting an executive order to be issued to exempt the historic steamboat Delta Queen from a certain maritime law so the suit against Obama is more of the same cheap political horseshit.

In fact the hallowed Ronald Reagan, who has become to Republicans what Vladimir Lenin once was to the communists in Russia issued 381 such orders (more than Bush or Obama) with the most dangerous being Executive Order 12333. Reagan, who in signing off on what is referred to by insiders as "twelve-triple-three" could even be tabbed as the father of the modern surveillance state instead of the father of the country that Boehner and the rest of his sleazy criminal syndicate party try to sell him to voters as being. According to a recent McClatchy story, Reagan's 12333 is the basis for all of the ongoing unconstitutional NSA mass warrentless surveillance and data-mining that has been ongoing and exposed by patriotic whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The McClatchy story on 12333 is entitled "Most of NSA's data collection authorized by order Ronald Reagan issued"and I excerpt the following from this story:

The National Security Agency's collection of information on Americans' cellphone and Internet usage reaches far beyond the two programs that have received public attention in recent months, to a presidential order that is older than the Internet itself.

Approved by President Ronald Reagan in 1981, Executive Order 12333 (referred to as "twelve-triple-three") still governs most of what the NSA does. It is a sweeping mandate that outlines the duties and foreign intelligence collection for the nation's 17 intelligence agencies. It is not governed by Congress, and critics say it has little privacy protection and many loopholes. What changes have been made to it have come through guidelines set by the attorney general or other documents.

The result is a web of intelligence law so complicated that it stymies even those tasked with interpreting it. As one former executive official said, "It's complicated stuff."
Confusing though it may be, the order remains the primary authority under which the country's intelligence agencies conduct the majority of their operations.

Neither the office of Attorney General Eric Holder nor that of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper would comment about 12333.

AND

The impact of 12333 is enormous -- and largely unknown. Documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden suggest that less than half of the metadata the NSA has collected has been acquired under provisions of the USA Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the two laws that have received the most attention for permitting NSA programs.

Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, has ratified that impression, saying that the majority of NSA data is collected "solely pursuant to the authorities provided by Executive Order 12333."

Boehner never really challenges the NSA Stasi does he? That is other than the standard lip service that is paid by the pack of thieves, liars, grifters, obstructionists and de-facto lobbyists when it comes to putting an end to bulk collection of metadata (a limited hangout) but not real reform or accountability. He also is one of the many rats in high places who has referred to Snowden as a "traitor" for his act of great service to the American people. Just like the slime-coated Darrell Issa with his abuse of taxpayer funds to conduct his inquisitions into Benghazi and the IRS allegedly targeting right-wing political front groups abusing non-profit status Boehner is all about his own political survival. That is because his survival means a permanent tax payer funded occupation of his congressional seat where he can suckle at the teat of the very big government that he decries for the purpose of his own self-enrichment and aggrandizement. Neither Boehner nor Issa will do one damned thing about the rogue activities of the NSA nor address the executive order that their idol Reagan imposed upon the American people that has led us to the brink of turnkey totalitarianism. No, it is all about sticking it to the BLACK guy in the WHITE House and nothing fires up the rabble in an off year election than some good-old fashioned race baiting, we saw it in 2010 and will see it again in 2014.

In a functional democratic system as was set out by the Founding Fathers the suing an out of control Executive Branch in order to maintain that bygone system of checks and balances would be both right and admirable, too bad that we don't live in one and it is largely due to the corruption and moral bankruptcy of reprobates like John Boehner and his ilk.

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Greenwald Touts Imminent Release of Shocking NSA Story


Having successfully forced the hand of the US power structure in returning to America despite threats of his arrest and imprisonment - where he likely would have been tortured - Glenn Greenwald has been hitting the media circuit to speak and promote his book "No Place to Hide". This really must burn the Obama regime although they due to their own arrogance and foolhardy recklessness have other fish to fry with percolating foreign opportunities for regime change in Russia, Syria and now Iraq but having Greenwald hauled in by government thugs and disappeared into the bowels of our massive prison system would have just been too much bad publicity - especially in an election year.
Greenwald has let slip that a new story, with shocking details as to who exactly is being spied on by the NSA Stasi and their bogus "anti-terrorist" mass surveillance and data-mining programs is "imminent". In an interview with FOX News in which the host Sheppard Smith continued to pepper Greenwald with talking points by protectors of the fascist state who still peddle the hogwash that former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower being some sort of sinister Russian operative and the most recently "why doesn't he come home to face the judicial system" or to as the insidious Skull and Bones pedigreed US Secretary of State John Kerry puts it "man up". Greenwald was attacked by the sleazy anti-Muslim bigot Bill Maher on HBO over the weekend along with the media's  go-to veteran "activist" Paul Reickhoff who accused Snowden of helping "terrorists" and posed the same question. Of course any fair trial of Snowden is a joke and only food for the lemmings because he would be disappeared into some military prison and tortured, never to be heard from again except for the obligatory show trial -where under the archaic and anti-American 1917 Espionage Act that Obama and Holder so adore - he would not even be able to defend himself. Greenwald continues to emphasize this but it will not resonate with Americans who are historically ignorant of all but the state sanctioned indoctrination of exceptionalist glory.
Waiting for Greenwald's big revelations, originally promised by the Pulitzer Prize winner in a GQ interview "The Man Who Knows Too Much" as well as in another interview with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now has been an exercise in frustration. It does appear from Greenwald's reference to "imminent" that something big is finally, after all of this time coming.  For reference I excerpt from the GQ article:
We published the first article [about the NSA collecting Verizon phone records] while I was in Hong Kong last June and won’t stop until we’re done. I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.
As well as from Democracy Now:
AMY GOODMAN: And the document you include from October 3rd, 2012, about the NSA targeting of, quote, "radicals"?
GLENN GREENWALD: You know, one of the interesting things is, obviously, people are very aware of the COINTEL abuses. I know you’ve had people on your show who actually participated in the break-in of the FBI and took the documents that unveiled that program. People are aware of J. Edgar Hoover’s abuses. The nature of that series of events is that the United States government looks at people who oppose what they do as being, quote-unquote, "threats." That’s the nature of power, is to regard anybody who’s a threat to your power as a broad national security threat. And a lot of times people will say, "We don’t yet have the reporting in this case that shows that kind of abuse." And a lot of that reporting is still reporting that we’re working on and that I promise you is coming.
I suspect that the story will divulge what many have long suspected in that political dissidents, activists and any who represent a threat to the new post-September 11, 2001 order of fascism at home and militarism and murder abroad will be the ones who are targeted. I also suspect that journalists will be among the targets, there was a program that was revealed several years back FIRSTFRUITS that specifically targeted members of the media. Washington's Blog recently ran a series of pieces based on interviews conducted with pre-Snowden NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake and I except at length from the first of the pieces:
But after 9/11, NSA instead adopted the competing “Stellar Wind” system, which didn’t protect Americans’ privacy, and was less effective and more expensive.
THOMAS DRAKE: Part of what I discovered is that part of the surveillance system, part of the Stellar Wind system – and that’s an umbrella term in itself – there were offshoots of that.
It metastasized. It grew like a cancer on the body politic.
One of the things that was done was [along the lines of]: “You know what? We’ve got to make sure” (because they were paranoid) “we’ve got to make sure that this stuff doesn’t get out … oh yeah, the press. Let’s violate the Fourth Amendment and just monitor the press.”
The whole story of that has not come out.
There was a program called “First Fruits”. They’ve no doubt changed the name of the program [since then.]
And that First Fruits program was a cutout which was designed from all of the domestic surveillance take. “Let’s just pipe off from all” that is involving designated [reporters] … or in some cases whole groups of reporters and journalists.
So you’re targeting actual newspapers. You’re targeting media outlets.
And you’re monitoring – on a persistent basis – their communications.
The surveillance of reporters and news organizations who can't simply be bought off like the plethora of dishonest and dishonorable scumbags who are eager to serve the state for money, celebrity and inclusion at the right events, dinners and cocktail parties of the Beltway elite is a given and while Obama has escalated it the programs had their roots under Bush-Cheney and even before. Obama and the longtime fixer Eric Holder have waged a war against journalism that is unprecedented in the history of this country or at least since Woodrow Wilson's filthy Espionage Act was passed. Let's hope that Greenwald's "imminent" story finally provides a wake up call that can no longer be ignored despite the thorough corruption of the domestic "mainstream" media.

Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Prolific WaPo Neocon Blogger Jennifer Rubin is Foaming at the Mouth


The neocon central propaganda transmission station at the Washington Post is as usual engaged in pushing agitation and lies to send more American money and bodies into a sucking black hole of death where we have absolutely no business in being. While it is hard to pick out the most wretched of the WaPo propagandists - they have an amazingly deep bench - I would have to say that Jennifer Rubin more than merits a share of the prize. Her ongoing screeds, often in the number of several a day call into question as to whether she actually writes this bullshit herself for just works from material provided by the William Kristol-Robert Kagan machine and simply repackages it. As could be expected with the carnival of perversion of the architects of the Iraq debacle engaged in a ghoulish media tour to revise history and jump start the PNAC Middle East domination plans Rubin provides plenty of supporting fire, sniping from the gutter as usual.
Rubin has long had a particular ax to grind with Senator Rand Paul or more particularly the non-intervention that he is selling which is incompatible with neocon fever dreams, keeping the millions employed by the government in the military and surveillance colossus on the Potomac and most importantly of all allowing for the right-wing regime of Benjamin Netanyahu to continue to flout international law and basic human decency in carving out lebensraum for Israel. Rubin and the neocons are representative of an Israeli fifth-column or as as described by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their groundbreaking book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy". The amount of clout that Israeli right-wingers exercise in the United States is well known and understood with the corrupt US Congress effectively being in the words of Patrick J. Buchanan - "Israeli occupied territory" where a swine like Netanyahu is afforded nearly three dozen standing ovations and the William Kristol propaganda network as well as numerous think tanks providing the content to editorial pages and churning out policy "experts" to sell schemes that while beneficial to Israel are detrimental to long-term US interests. Israel also conducts (and has long conducted) some of the most aggressive spying operations within in the United States - some of which may explain the fealty of the Congress (blackmail perhaps) to recklessly commit the country to regional wars to the benefit of Israel.
But I digress..
Rubin's latest column drags out Israeli loyalist and Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams as though he is an elder statesman instead of the vile warmonger and longtime cloak and dagger operative who keeps turning up through the decades when he belongs rotting in prison. Abrams in his book "Faith or Fear" once advocated for what was essentially eugenics in making the case for American Jews to adhere to only marrying within their own religion and group - sounds eerily Aryan as well as incompatible with American values but Abrams is a monster and a go to guy for Rubin who picks up the baton from Dick Cheney in her latest offering "Who is the non-proliferation president?":
 Elliott Abrams, former deputy national security adviser, reminds us: “The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.” Add to that a new Rand Corporation study showing terrorist groups’ activity has increased 50 percent in the last three years and the near-collapse of the nuclear non-proliferation architecture and you have a truly troubling conflagration: more terrorists, fewer functioning central governments and the potential widespread possession of weapons of mass destruction (already used multiple times with no consequences by Bashar al-Assad).
That Abrams and Rubin are still selling the lie that Syrian President Assad gassed those people last summer at the Damascus suburb of Ghouta is telling as to who is really going to benefit from the coming back door attack on the Assad regime that is currently being ginned up by the convenient appearance of ISIS in Iraq. That report by the RAND Corporation - a notorious hive of scum and villainy that only exists to sell war - that Cheney has been invoking also gets mention which makes the entire ISIS narrative even more smelly than it already is. Things are probably going to get even worse very soon as the top diplomatic moron in America John "Skull and Bones" Kerry is sliming around in Iraq right now and wherever he goes disaster follows, the man is a virtual hurricane of bullshit.
Ironic in that the Washington Post is also running one of those stupid animal tales that Americans so adore with the heart-warming story of Peanuts, the world's ugliest dog which is cuter than Rubin and would have the good sense to stay away from a devil like Abrams.