Big Greenwald Story Delayed by US Government

Yesterday, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald let the news slip via Twitter that the long-awaited, new NSA story was to be published on The Intercept at midnight. This morning, much to the dismay of myself and many, many others it appears that the new website - already suspiciously devoid of material - has caved to government pressure tactics and has successfully delayed the story. According to a cryptic Tweet by Greenwald "After 3 months working on our story, USG today suddenly began making new last-minute claims which we intend to investigate before publishing". Gee, can any of those claims be based on trumped up charges that publication would play right into the hands of the magically appearing out of nowhere at the most convenient times for a new Middle Eastern war ISIS? This does not bode well for those really big "imminent" NSA releases that have been promised by Greenwald. Could a total retraction be far behind?

While I have been a skeptic to the allegations that the new First Look Media venture that lured Greenwald and others with the siren song of creating a new media venture that would offer a much needed alternative to the corrupt state-corporate US media that serve as protectors of the entrenched establishment was all just an attempt to eventually suppress the leaks of whistleblower Edward Snowden this only serves to bolster them. When you throw in with the billionaire wolves you will sooner or later being devoured and EBay founder Pierre Omidyar's agenda has already been found by some, such as journalist Chris Floyd to be suspect with links to both the Ukraine coup government as well as the new regime of new right-wing leader of India Narendra Modi. The problem is that at the end of the day all of these elite pigs stick together and Greenwald should have been far more skeptical of his associations.

It would have been a brilliant touch were the story of NSA surveillance of domestic political dissidents and well known figures were to have broken during the week of the orgy of flag-sucking excess that is the Fourth of July and Greenwald may have ill-advisedly tipped his hand during that interview with GQ "The Man Who Knows Too Much" when he alluded to fireworks:

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.

For now at least the fireworks show has been postponed, with the incessant fear-mongering that has now overtaken the USA!, USA!, USA! over the new Islamic caliphate and Obama sending more American troops back into Iraq it is probably better than even money that it will be cancelled altogether in the interests of national security.

Greenwald should have stayed at The Guardian. 

Obama Administration Plots Next Extrajudicial Murder

Having already acted as judge, jury and executioner and gotten away with it scot-free President Barack Obama, our constitutional law professor in chief is preparing to target yet another American citizen for termination with extreme prejudice. In a flurry of stories on Monday it has been stated that the Obama administration is about to launch another operation to carry out an extrajudicial murder of a so-called threat to America, reported to be a member of the now umbrella term that is applied to ALL Islamic militants - Al Qaeda.  The yet unnamed target of the coming murder without a trial is only identified as being a part of “Al Qaeda” which has become a resurgent Manichean devil serving perfectly the interests of a militarist surveillance state that is  increasingly losing the war of public opinion for its now obvious lawless and renegade nature. If the propaganda of the swarthy Muslim menace and their new Islamic caliphate accompanied by the coming activation of thousands of domestic sleeper cells to launch terrorist attacks and force Americans to heel to Sharia law can just be hammered home to keep the scrutiny at bay while the criminal hydra reconfigures then the pushback can begin in earnest. Pickup lists that are likely already being compiled by NSA spying will lead to mass arrests, mass detentions (per Justice Scalia) and the extrajudicial murders of domestic ‘troublemakers’ - this is the way that it always works in a nascent totalitarian state.

Obama has already set the precedent with the killing of American born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011. Alwaki had at one time been used as an example of a ‘good Muslim’ by the U.S. establishment to the extent that he was featured in a Washington Post puff piece about Ramadan. He however became increasingly radicalized by the vicious anti-Muslim response to the ‘day that changed everything’, September 11, 2001 and began to call for jihad thereby making him a perfect candidate for the Obama “kill list”. Not that I condone al-Awlaki’s calls for attacks on innocent Americans but that isn’t the point - we at least theoretically are a constitutional republic and as such there are certain rights that U.S. citizens are entitled to such as due process. It is a serious departure from the rule of law when a president is given the unaccountable powers of a king which is increasingly how the head of the executive branch is allowed to operate. When al-Awlaki was murdered instead of being apprehended and brought back to the U.S. to stand trial it was the equivalent of crossing the Rubicon. The Obama regime then followed up that killing with the murder by drone of his teenage son also without due process but very more ominously in what bodes ill for the future of all who oppose the criminal state as a sort of pre-crime form of intervention to prevent the son from avenging the father.

Where does it all end?

The knuckle-dragging thug who is safely gerrymandered Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers who represents only a fraction of a percentage of the country yet due to our perverse system of government is able to lord it over the majority from his throne as House Intelligence Committee boss mouthed off during a hearing on security threats last week according to a Washington Post story published today:

“Individuals who would have been previously removed from the battlefield by U.S. counter terrorism operations for attacking or plotting to attack U.S. interests remain free because of self-imposed red tape”. He added that the new constraints on drone strikes are “endangering the lives of Americans at home and our military overseas in a way that is frustrating to our allies and frustrating to those of us who engage in the oversight of our classified activities.”

Rogers is a fascist scumbag, that much is beyond any reasonable argument and a lying one at that for his belching out of allegations that former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower is a Russian spy and that journalist Glenn Greenwald is a “thief”.  The man has an absolute hard-on to do it the John Wayne way and kill both of them and another Obama extrajudicial assassination of a U.S. citizen would bring him all that much closer to realizing that wet dream of his. Rogers is never called out for his bullshit nor asked for proof of his allegations but when you happen to hail from a state in which the high-rolling DeVos family has set up operations in and can ensure that those swinish gangsters can operate with impunity you are a made man in The Homeland circa 2014.

Speaking of Glenn Greenwald today marks the day of the launching of the long anticipated new media venture First Look Media. The first of several different online magazine is called “The Intercept” and will serve as an independent vehicle for the type of crusading, hold corrupt power accountable type of investigative journalism that has been nearly snuffed out in this country by a venal, consolidated and connected corporate media.The first story, in collaboration with journalist Jeremy Scahill (Dirty Wars) is perfectly timed given the Obama administration’s latest targeting of an American without the benefit of a trial in that the NSA has been providing targeting intelligence to the ongoing armed drone attacks that are a pox upon this one great country’s reputation. The piece is entitled "The NSA's Secret Role in the U.S. Assassination Program" details how the American Stasi assists in tracking cell phone coordinated for those targeted for killing. While this fails to surprise those who truly understand the vile and anti-American nature of the wretched hive of scum and villainy at Fort Meade the revelation that the stupid bastards fail to take into account exactly WHO is using the targeted cellphones only further cements the image of an agency that is a sucking black hole of taxpayer money and an abject failure in fighting "terrorism". I excerpt from the piece:

In one tactic, the NSA “geolocates” the SIM card or handset of a suspected terrorist’s mobile phone, enabling the CIA and U.S. military to conduct night raids and drone strikes to kill or capture the individual in possession of the device.

The former JSOC drone operator is adamant that the technology has been responsible for taking out terrorists and networks of people facilitating improvised explosive device attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan. But he also states that innocent people have “absolutely” been killed as a result of the NSA’s increasing reliance on the surveillance tactic.

One problem, he explains, is that targets are increasingly aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the tactic. Some have as many as 16 different SIM cards associated with their identity within the High Value Target system. Others, unaware that their mobile phone is being targeted, lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends, children, spouses and family members.

Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. “They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave,” the former drone operator says. “That’s how they confuse us.”

As a result, even when the agency correctly identifies and targets a SIM card belonging to a terror suspect, the phone may actually be carried by someone else, who is then killed in a strike. According to the former drone operator, the geolocation cells at the NSA that run the tracking program – known as Geo Cell –sometimes facilitate strikes without knowing whether the individual in possession of a tracked cell phone or SIM card is in fact the intended target of the strike.

“Once the bomb lands or a night raid happens, you know that phone is there,” he says. “But we don’t know who’s behind it, who’s holding it. It’s of course assumed that the phone belongs to a human being who is nefarious and considered an ‘unlawful enemy combatant.’ This is where it gets very shady.”

The former drone operator also says that he personally participated in drone strikes where the identity of the target was known, but other unknown people nearby were also killed.

“They might have been terrorists,” he says. “Or they could have been family members who have nothing to do with the target’s activities.”

Now that is reassuring isn't it? The more that you see exactly how the infrastructure of The Homeland operates as they justify their phony War on Terror and the thousand year reign of the New American Century operates the more they resemble their historical predecessors the Nazis, another corrupt and ultimately incompetent collection of perverts, thugs, petty bureaucrats drunk on power and an ideology that was destined for history's scrap heap from the minute Adolph Hitler stood on a table in a Munich beer hall. Rogers would have fit in nicely as would the vast majority of the decision makers in this collapsing empire of greed, lies, violence and stupidity.

Godwin's Law be damned, he never could have envisioned the criminal swine and vermin who have seized control of the at once free country and hijacked it as a vehicle for their own tyranny and corruption.

Time for Mike Rogers to Put Up or Shut Up

The preeminent defender of the gross illegality of the intrusions on privacy by the NSA Stasi, Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers who lords it over the House Intelligence Committee needs to put up or shut up. His ongoing accusations that former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is a Russian spy and that journalist Glenn Greenwald is a “thief” are thanks to the dismal dregs of what was once a free press continue to go unchallenged despite Rogers having no evidence to back up either claim.

Being a former FBI agent (which is rarely if ever noted) he displays the hammerhead type of mentality befitting of a seasoned government thug, the bull in a China shop that shits on what it doesn’t break during a rampage. He also exhibits a reverence for the type of snooping and hoarding of information for reasons of repression, harassment and blackmail for political purposes that mimic those for former FBI leader J. Edgar Hoover, a very sick man who abused the powers imbued in him by the government. Hoover not only presided over COINTELPRO but engaged in such tactics as threatening Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with exposure of extramarital affairs to induce the civil rights leader to commit suicide. This is a twisted man and it is long past time for him to be called out to produce proof to back up his endless series of accusations.

What Rogers and his fellow apple pie authoritarians, for example the insipid former NSA/CIA boss and probable felon Michael Hayden are attempting to do is to criminalize journalism. It is so obvious that even a blind man should be able to see it yet it evades the entrenched lazy, careerists who largely comprise the mainstream domestic media to whom protecting their own jobs is the apparent driving factor. There was a day when being a journalist actually meant something in this sick country, the First Amendment specifically mentions freedom of the press and that there should be no law infringing upon this. That is about as concrete as it gets but as with so many other rights that were once taken for granted today's rancid political class holds the Constitution in sneering contempt and has used the phony war on terror as the overriding reason to unchain the government from the founding document.

The urgency to take down Greenwald in particular is of the utmost of urgency to the corrupt controllers of the NSA intelligence colossus, his new venture First Look Media is set to debut this week and will most certainly want to roll out with a huge story. Greenwald contributed to the recent NBC News piece that the NSA's partners across the pond regularly engaged in spying for the purposes of sexual blackmail as well as launched cyber  'false flag' attacks to discredit activist groups such as Anonymous. Snowden already stated that the programs were utilized for the conducting of industrial espionage and it is only a matter of time until the really ugly stuff comes out - I personally suspect the manipulation of financial markets and the facilitating of the laundering of drug related money througth the banking system and even worse operations so vile that even normally disengaged and apathetic Americans could be driven to outrage. When it comes to the use of NSA programs to track and compile information on law-abiding citizens engaged in political activity for future persecution and which has been ongoing since before September 11, 2001 in the finest traditions of Hoover and COINTELPRO it may finally be a bridge too far. The IRS targeting of tea party related groups pales in comparison to what is coming and probably sooner rather than later if the pathological liar James Clapper is to be believed about an imminent Syrian based plot for terrorist attacks on The Homeland.

Both Snowden and Greenwald have been the targets of relentless smear campaigns outside of Rogers' unchallenged accusations.  Greenwald, obviously tiring of all of the malicious bullshit that is spewed forth by corrupt cretins like Rogers and his ilk may be preparing to “force the issue” according to his Slate piece and may soon visit the United States, risking arrest and torture. It would however put Rogers on the spot as well as the rest of the rogue government that has engaged in mass data-mining and unconstitutional warrantless spying on millions of law abiding citizens. The arrest of Greenwald could be the tipping point where the pushback finally begins but it also puts an enormous burden on Rogers and his fellow fascists in that if they don't arrest him that all of their bluster and bullying will be exposed as just so much hot air.

The demagogic Rogers is scheduled to make his normal rounds of the Sunday propaganda circuit later this morning and you can bet the proverbial farm that he will continue to build his case for the dismantling of a free press based on more of his lies and bombastic rhetoric.

(Image: The Nation)