Sony to Release "The Interview" as Bizarre Tale Continues to Evolve

The ubiquitous and dyspeptic Senator John McCain is the proverbial gift that keeps on giving. Despite being censured by the Republican party leadership in his home state of Arizona for being too liberal the old war horse continues to be trotted out as the GOP’s go-to guy in the mainstream media. McCain, the shameless political con artist who succeeded "Mr. Conservative" himself in the Senate took to the air to wail that the Sony hacking was an “act of war”. McCain - a man who has never met a foreign policy situation that he would not send Americans off to die for – talks tough but don't expect him to ride the bomb down into the center of Pyongyang ala Major T.J. "King" Kong in Dr. Strangelove because he was just warming up. Better get used to seeing McCain a lot more too. The GOP takeover of the Senate has given him an even bigger megaphone with an Armed Forces Committee chairmanship from which he can bray endlessly to the delight of the presstitutes and stenographers in the corrupt media.

Emperor Barack Obama didn’t go as far as Senator “boots on the ground” did and as of Sunday was calling the mysterious breach an act of “cyber vandalism”  while vaguely vowing retaliation. Monday it was announced to much hoopla that the internet in North Korea went down which media outlets and political braggarts treated as an early Christmas present. It was a bit underwhelming though considering that the target country is a repressive, ass-backwards dictatorship of the worst type in which speech and communication are severely restricted.

As reported by Reuters in a story entitled “Downing North Korea's Internet not much of a scalp”:

If someone did just knock North Korea off the Internet for half a day, it wouldn't have taken much.

With barely 1,000 Internet addresses, one Internet service provider and one connection to the outside world via China, North Korea's cyberlinks are negligible - barely one percent of that of Afghanistan, a similarly impoverished country with a roughly comparable population.

By the same token, closing down the links wouldn't have had much of an effect within North Korea. For internal online communications it uses a closed Intranet network, but that was apparently not affected, according to officials across the border in the South.

North Korea is "one of the least connected countries in the world," said Matthew Prince, CEO of U.S.-based CloudFlare, which, among other services, protects websites against web-based attacks.

The Obama regime played down the  U.S. involvement in the internet takedown. State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf - who resembles one of the Hanson brothers in drag - refused to acknowledge any efforts to send a message to North Korea. As reported by a story from the website of ABC News:

"We aren't going to discuss publicly operational details about the possible response options or comment on those kind of reports in any way except to say that as we implement our responses, some will be seen, some may not be seen," Harf said. "So I can't confirm those reports, but in general, that's what the president has spoken to."

Batshit crazy North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, the target of a fictional assassination plot in the much hyped movie The Interview used the saber rattling by McCain and the rest of the useful idiots to grab some media attention of his own. Dear Leader (not to be confused with our own Obama) emerged to vow revenge against the Great Satan in America and specifically the White House. But story of the movie itself - The Interview – the centerpiece of the Sony hack story which has now been slated for release after initially being pulled may be more than meets the eye.

The whole tale just bears a funny smell and has from the beginning. Could it have been either a false flag or an inside job? Both are legitimate questions that need to be considered. This is even more so now that Sony is releasing  The Interview in hundreds of theaters on Christmas Day. Turns out that the whole sordid soiree was the best publicity that it ever could have received. Millions of dollars and hundreds of hours of free advertising by the mainstream media beating the sheeple over the head with the two most ass-kicking clubs in the bag: fear and patriotism.

FALSE FLAG: The “terrorist” threats against the movie theaters came at a perfect time, just as Congress is set to further stomp the big jackboot down on the privacy rights of Americans with an insane cybersecurity bill. All the usual suspects including outgoing House Intelligence Committee commissar Mike Rogers, the biggest pimp for the imposition of American fascism in recent years have been doing their best to close the deal. Rogers hit Fox News Sunday to spew his horseshit before officially departing his gig for a new one in talk radio. What is never divulged about Rogers is that he is a former fed himself and that his wife worked as a lobbyist for the very telecommunications industry that would benefit tremendously by the new cybersecurity regulations.

Not surprisingly, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the outgoing queen of Senate Intelligence Committee who has served as an impenetrable firewall of cellulite between the NSA Stasi and accountability also called for a crackdown. Easily cowed and duped Americans have already proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that they will meekly surrender their liberty at whatever bogeyman that the government conjures up at any given time and the timing of this hoopla sure is suspicious.

Stories have Surfaced that within the cache of hacked Sony emails there were references to contact with unnamed members of the State Department.  The references seem to indicate some level of involvement in the hopes that the movie would encourage an actual assassination of the North Korean whack-job. Don't forget that is the same State Department that is headed up by abject moron John “Skull and Bones” Kerry, the incompetent, stammering ass of a buffoon from Massachusetts who like fellow failed presidential candidate McCain should just go away.

INSIDE JOB: Or it could have been engineered by Sony insiders to create publicity for from what from early accounts is a silly, tasteless, box office bomb of a movie. The hacking may have been the work of a disgruntled former insider and the North Korea angle provides a good cover. Sony executives were reportedly already dreading the imminent failure of the movie in overseas markets and it may not have been a hit in the U.S.A. either. There are only so many consumers of low-brow entertainment chock full of stupid dick jokes, sexual crudity, stoner references and scatological humor. It seems that the one most impressed is entitled Hollywood shitbag  Seth Rogen, the star of the movie. In a cover story from Rolling Stone magazine Rogen aka "Hollywood's Stoner King" gushes about - get this - the sound of a very small missile being inserted up his character's asshole:

Eventually they arrive at a scene where Rogen's character is, in the interest of international espionage, called upon to hide a small missile inside his rectum. (It's that kind of movie.) They play the moment back a few times, Rogen and Goldberg cracking up every time. Finally, Goldberg speaks up. "I'm wondering if it sounds too slimy . . . going into his butt?"

"Come on!" Rogen says.

"I'm not saying it's too gross! I'm just thinking about laughter."

"It's pretty funny," counters Rogen. "You want, like, a slurp? A scrape-y sound? A sandpaper-y, scrape-y sound?"

"Maybe just a slight suction-y sound," Goldberg says. The sound guy punches a few buttons, and a slight suction-y sound fills the theater. Rogen and Goldberg double over in laughter. "Ha!" says Rogen. "My butt is sucking the missile  

Now that Sony will be raking in the dough from the change of heart in releasing their piece of crap movie after all, that sucking sound should extend to all Americans who were just played like chumps - AGAIN.

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. 

Republican Swine Blast Freeing of Sgt. Bergdahl

You have to give the Republicans one thing in that they are consistently authority worshipping, anti-American, whiny, torture loving, warmongering media whores who no matter what the issue always have their eyes on whipping up the rabble for their next election. Take the just completed swap by the Obama regime of five of the occupants of the American concentration camp at Club Gitmo for captured US serviceman Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. The outrage was as fake as it was predictable and just in time for the Sunday morning propaganda shows too. Even the strangely out of the limelight uber-fascist, right-wing talk radio bound Congressman Mike Rogers slithered out from whatever rock that he has been hiding under to appear on CNN's State of the Union with the insipid blathering sow Candy Crowley this morning.

The reemergence of Rogers was inevitable given the all-in National Security State establishment smearing of the patriotic whistleblower Edward Snowden after his NBC interview earlier this week - much of which was left on the cutting room floor including his comments on 9/11 being preventable - and the outgoing House Intelligence Committee boss is a fountain of lies and innuendo on that particular topic. I excerpt the following from the CNN rush transcript of today's appearance with Crowley:

REP. MIKE ROGERS (R-MI), CHAIR, HOUSE INTELLIGENCE COMMITTEE: Well, I mean, obviously, we should be happy for the family. They have gotten their loved one back. That's very, very important.

 The methodology and what we used is very troublesome. Remember, al Qaeda in the Maghreb...

 CROWLEY: And by the methodology, you mean...

 ROGERS: Negotiating with terrorists.

 CROWLEY: OK.

 ROGERS: Remember, this was an individual who was held by a terrorist group in another country, Pakistan. We know that to be true.

Across Northern Africa, the number one way that al Qaeda raises money is by ransom, kidnapping and ransom. We have now set a price. So we have a changing footprint in Afghanistan, which would put our soldiers at risk for this notion that, if I can get one, I can get five Taliban released.

And the problem is, the way we're changing our footprint means we get less intelligence. And that's already starting to happen. And we will get more degradation of the ability to collect intelligence to even stop force protection efforts for our soldiers. That's why so many of us are so concerned about what really is a break with U.S. policy of not negotiating with terrorists.

AND

[following video from Susan Rice)

CROWLEY: Congressman, she said, look, the DOD, the Pentagon went to the Justice Department, asked them if it was OK given the laws surrounding who needs to be consulted about the release of these Gitmo prisoners and the Justice Department said, fine.

ROGERS: Well, there a reason that Congress is involved by law, by statute, by constitutional authority in these decisions prior to the notification has to be -- to keep Congress currently informed, number one. And the reason is you don't want to talk to each other about something as sensitive as this. That's why Congress is involved in these issues. And it happens frequently on some very sensitive issues.

Everything from the Osama bin Laden raid which was briefed to those members of us with the clearances literally months and months in advance and followed up to the day of the raid. So some notion that this was so secretive and so sensitive that it couldn't happen is just wrong.

And you know, she said she notified. I'm mystified by that. They didn't notify Congress appropriately and here is why. Other places that we have let the Gitmo prisoners go to these particular countries, by the way, which we paid them to take them, has been a disaster. It hasn't worked, which is one of the things that last year we brought up to them, it's not working.

So, if we're ever going to continue this, you need to change it. Well, they didn't like the advice and counsel they got from Congress and apparently decided they were going to go their own direction. I always think that's dangerous, just like the secret negotiations with Iran has huge consequences with our allies, this is going to cost huge consequences as well.

And I just don't understand why you wouldn't engage with people who have done this for a long time and bring, I think, good advice and counsel could have alleviated some of the problems that they're going to get into in the next days and months ahead, including the risk to our U.S. soldier.

Just the standard issue horseshit and lip-service to putting American servicemen and women at danger when the REAL thing that puts them in peril are the wars that Rogers and his fellow swine in Congress continue to bring home the bacon for their backers who profit enormously off of death. In any sane country guys like Mike Rogers would not only be barred from holding public office but mocked as the corrupt stooges of the blood barters and military contractors that they truly are. Unfortunately we don’t live in one. The other loudmouths bitching about "dealing with terrorists" are legion and more will be jumping on the bandwagon when Monday's RNC talking points email hits their inboxes. The hypocrites will spend days inveighing against the "Kenyan" in the White House over this one.  

But the biggest fraud in America when it comes to military heroism, Senator John McCain oozed his typical angry and deranged character traits in denouncing Obama for negotiating the release of Sgt. Bergdahl.  The official statement issued by McCain is as follows from his website:

“I am pleased that Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl is finally being returned safely to his family and loved ones after nearly five years of captivity. All Americans share in the joy that the Bergdahl family feels today and for which they have waited so long.

“I have been informed that, in exchange for Sgt. Bergdahl’s release, the Administration is now in the process of transferring five Taliban detainees from Guantanamo to Qatar. These particular individuals are hardened terrorists who have the blood of Americans and countless Afghans on their hands. I am eager to learn what precise steps are being taken to ensure that these vicious and violent Taliban extremists never return to the fight against the United States and our partners or engage in any activities that can threaten the prospects for peace and security in Afghanistan. The American people, and our Afghan partners, deserve nothing less.”

The psychotic old war criminal  loves to have it both ways and in terms of sheer loathsomeness is right up there with his Vietnam era cohort John Kerry. McCain has a long and sordid history of talking out of both sides of his mouth with the most recent example being his palling around with neo-Nazis in Kiev right before the overthrow of the democratically elected leader by such elements. He also has built his career off of exploiting his time in Nam, not that dropping bombs on women and children, getting shot down, taken prisoner and then currying favorable treatment from his captors at the expense of other guests at the Hanoi Hilton whose fathers weren't admirals in the US Navy. His comments about Sgt. Bergdahl also show that the no soldier left behind military code of honor doesn't resonate with McCain, it was he who shamefully worked to sink efforts to find US prisoners of war in Vietnam. I excerpt the following from an article by Sydney Schanberg "McCain and the POW Cover-Up" that was re-published by The American Conservative in 2010:

John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn’t return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain’s role in it, even as the Republican Party has made McCain’s military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn’t talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that “men were left behind.” This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the U.S. prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.

The article is well worth the time spent reading it although anyone who is awake knows that truth about McCain and his political career built on the myth that he was some kind of war hero but the bigger question on his participation in the POW cover-up is why?

Despite all of the angry bullshit dispersal exercises undertaken by the rancid Republicans all of that squealing and demagoguery about "not negotiating with terrorists" is laughable. These are the same people after all who have no qualms about arming Islamist militants, cannibals and al Qaeda affiliates in Syria nor throwing in with neo-Nazi goons in Ukraine. They are liars and always will be liars. When it comes to liars though, one need not exclude their reigning king who sits upon the throne at 1600 W. Pennsylvania Avenue. Obama could give a rat's ass about the troops and that includes Sgt. Bergdahl but like their more overtly fascist counterparts, Democrats too have elections upcoming in November so this is good public relations on their part, cynical as hell but it plays to the rubes.

In the end it all comes down to the festering boil on the ass of Uncle Scam at Guantanamo Bay - Republicans HATE losing their holy site for torture and Obama won't close it down because despite the power to do exactly that with a simple executive order he is a hypocrite of enormous proportion. The Republicans real problem is that after the trade that they will have five less live bodies to subject to torture - time to get the rest of them out of there close that filthy offshore future penal colony down - forever. 

So good for Sgt. Bergdahl, as much as I am opposed to the ongoing series of money-making, fucking wars launched by both the Democrats and the Republicans the man has done his duty and deserves to come home. The political scrum that the degenerate swine in this country and their bought and paid for media only spits on the troops with their continuing use of them as nothing more than props and political footballs.

Lying Snake Rogers Slithers Out on Sunday Morning Blabfest

Having laid rather low as of late which is an enormously difficult task for a pathological liar of a bully like Michigan Congressman Mike Rogers it was only a matter of time until he surfaced on the Sunday morning ‘news’ show circuit. Rogers is the very definition of the tyranny of the minority in that he has been anointed the exalted Grand Poobah of the US House Intelligence Committee based upon only actually representing a fraction of less than one percent of the population of the USA. This is one of the more serious problems with the US Congress as it exists in that districts are already gerrymandered to prevent any sort of real challenge to the incumbent and that people like Rogers end up representing the entire country by the time that they get to Washington and are placed in control of a powerful committee that is really only comprised of a fraction of Congress. The system is broken and it’s not only Rogers, former chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission Harry Reid hails from a state that has less than three million residents yet he has lorded it over the Democratic party Senate leadership since 2005. These are but two of many examples yet they serve as an illustration of just how badly that the political system in this country has been taken far past the point where it can be salvaged.

Rogers has made quite the name for himself since the emergence of former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and recently accused the man of being a Russian spy so it was no shock when the joined in the Putin pile on yesterday morning. On ABC’s “This Week” the former FBI thug spewed his trademark venomous bullshit over the western backed coup in Ukraine. I am very surprised that he didn’t somehow find a way to turn it into a call for launching a drone strike against Snowden or journalist Glenn Greenwald but give it some time. Rogers also floated the first of what will be many surveillance state pimped insinuations of what happened to that Malaysian passenger jet that went missing over the weekend. Being the sleazy opportunist that he has always been Rogers will find some way to blame it all on terrorism and then profit from it all, just like former Homeland Security head Michael Chertoff did off of the “underwear bomber” This guy just pulls stuff out of his ass every time that he is a guest on one of the propaganda pulpits, sure the jetliner may have been brought down by a terrorist bomb but it also could be due to mechanical failure or even scooped up by fucking space aliens the latter having as much real info to support it as does Rogers with his terrorist malarkey.

Also appearing was the Texas Zamboni Ted Cruz, fresh off his pandering to the knuckle-draggers at the CPAC gathering of warmongering swine. The Canadian born Texas Senator took the opportunity to rip fellow Senator Rand Paul who brought the house down at CPAC for going off the reservation and calling for the reigning in of the NSA Stasi, swearing no loyalty oath to Israel and – gasp – quoting the lyrics from a Pink Floyd song. Paul’s speech was a stark diversion from the rancid display of bigotry, religious nonsense, calls for war and slavering worship of the state that speaker after speaker belched forth. It was as if Paul had somehow been a booking mistake for he truly had no place at the annual gathering of the confederacy of dunces. Cruz as very Republican degenerate fascist of the past quarter century cloaked his moral repugnance and statist rhetoric in the talismanic cloak of The Gipper:

“I think U.S. leadership is critical in the world. And I agree with him that we should be very reluctant to deploy military force abroad. But I think there is a vital role, just as Ronald Reagan did… The United States has a responsibility to defend our values.”

Horseshit! What values? Wasting trillions of dollars that could be better spent within our own borders by building a modern infrastructure while employing thousands isn’t likely on Ted’s list nor is the moral obscenity of sending billions of taxpayer dollars to prop up a US backed puppet in Ukraine who goes by the nickname of “Yats” and has risen to power through a coup d’etat. Those billions of dollars that are to be pumped into the bastard regime of former central banker turned overseer of the dismantling of Ukraine for the benefit of the global finance mafia are also going towards backing extremists including actual neo-Nazis. There is something divinely obscene about the US support of a regime backed by such neo-Nazi elements, refresh my memory but did not tens of thousands of Americans die in ‘the good war’ fighting the Nazis? Cruz is a vile hypocrite and that he now gets to appear as some sort of foreign policy expert on the Sunday morning propaganda launch pad is a repugnant reminder of just how badly that this country has been destroyed by scum such as he. I can dig why he has a hard-on for another conflict with Russia, his ideological predecessor is one Senator Joseph McCarthy, a rat bastard if there ever were one and a man who was allowed to do enormous damage to our once democratic society precisely because he was never called on his bullshit.

Rand Paul had best familiarize himself with the lyrics to another Pink Floyd song that is befitting of what he is going to be facing from all of the lackeys of the permanent warfare machine in the New American Century as they sharpen their knives:

Bleating and babbling I fell on his neck with a scream.

Wave upon wave of demented avengers

March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

Have you heard the news?

The dogs are dead!

You better stay home

And do as you're told.

Get out of the road if you want to grow old.

- Pink Floyd "Sheep"

Snowden Declares Victory, Calls out Rogers and Feinstein

“I am not trying to bring down the NSA, I am working to improve the NSA…I am still working for the NSA right now. They are the only ones who don’t realize it.”

-Edward Snowden

In an extensive interview former government contractor Booz-Allen-Hamilton employee turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden proclaimed that in the battle over the exposure of unconstitutional spying programs that he is the victor and it would be hard to argue this point. The interview, conducted by Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman was published Monday following what has arguably been the worst week for the American Stasi at Fort Meade since the initial leaks were published. It was not a festive holiday season for fascists across the fruited plain as CBS propaganda vehicle 60 Minutes NSA puff piece was met with ridicule, federal judge Richard Leon ruled that the activities of the rogue agency were likely “unconstitutional” and “Orwellian”, Barack Obama was read the riot act at a White House meeting with tech executives and the NSA review panel report was less the total whitewash than expected. Mr. Snowden certainly deserves his props for risking his life to out the darkest machinations of the post September 11, 2001 fascist Homeland and has to this point avoided being abducted and imprisoned at a CIA black site where he would assuredly be tortured six ways from Sunday.

The published comments and story are a part of a 14 hour series of interviews granted by Snowden from Russia where he has been chased and trapped by Obama and Holder’s police state goons who are without a doubt desperately working to get him into a U.S. secret court for a show trial and public vilification by a corrupt state-corporate media. It would be Orwell’s “two minute hate” 24/7 if the government managed to somehow abduct Snowden and he would be utterly crushed by the full fury of the state in order to discourage more patriotically inclined Americans who have had it with the ruination of a once great country by corrupt sociopaths and may be encouraged to reveal the vast institutional con games of a government gone to rot.  It would take ten Guantanamo Bays to hold all of the criminals within the system, the abusers of the public trust and the war criminals were the rule of law to ever be restored in this collapsing empire of greed, vileness and hate and the hijackers of the system would never allow that to happen least they end up occupying those cells or in the words of neocon war criminal John Bolton find themselves swinging from a tall oak tree.

In Snowden’s published comments he not only declared victory: “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated” but reclaimed that most lamentable two word phrase so abused by former President George W. Bush in 2003 when he stated that: “For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished.” Bush’s enormous waste of taxpayer money for a staged event where he landed in full military gear on the deck of the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln off San Diego was a propaganda coup that would have been choreographed by Leni Reifenstahl herself and such garish shows were instrumental in laying the foundations of the NSA fascist programs and the public acceptance of them. The Iraq war of course has been a historical disaster and now over ten years after Dubya’s costly publicity stunt and subsequent proclamation of “Mission Accomplished” the country is roiling with violence again and Uncle Sam is once again sending arms into the area that could and will likely end up in the hands of Islamic militants, this was revealed in a story in today's New York Times. That however is a still developing, ugly story that will receive its due very soon.

Snowden also managed to get in a few shots at two of the most contemptible fascists in a rotten congress with his great denouncing of Republican House Intelligence Committee head Mike Rogers and the impenetrable firewall of cellulite that protects the NSA from scrutiny Senate Intelligence Committee queen Diane Feinstein:

“Dianne Feinstein elected me when she asked softball questions” in committee hearings, he said. “Mike Rogers elected me when he kept these programs hidden. . . . The FISA court elected me when they decided to legislate from the bench on things that were far beyond the mandate of what that court was ever intended to do. The system failed comprehensively, and each level of oversight, each level of responsibility that should have addressed this, abdicated their responsibility.”

Touche. The failure of congress and particularly powerful committee heads to enforce oversight is a stunning example of the degree of the contempt for the Constitution and the very principles of American freedom and liberty that is held by those who are at least in theory supposed to provide representation to the people. It is very obvious by now exactly who Rogers, DiFi and their ilk truly represent and that is the mega-money of the military industrial complex and the surveillance state. They are long overdue for a public shaming and deserve far worse, removal from office, a trial and a jail cell would be far more appropriate for that sort of treasonous scum.

Let the new year bring even more revelations of what the NSA's real purpose is now that it is being revealed that these programs haven't a damned thing to do with preventing terrorism as advertised.

The Face of Fascism: Mike Rogers and the Surveillance State

This week's Sunday morning demagoguery featured rising star Mike Rogers, House Intelligence Committee Chairman and the new face of American fascism.  The foremost defender of unconstitutional NSA spying programs was featured on CNN’s State of the Union on the weekly bloviation circuit where is is rapidly establishing himself as a regular. Rogers took batting practice from Candy Crowley where he was lobbed softballs that will become the establishment talking points this coming week. He was joined by the reprehensible reprobate Dianne Feinstein, the impenetrable firewall of cellulite that is standing between the run amok NSA and any potential oversight.

The round-faced former FBI man’s recitation of the fascist talking points that “terrorist” groups were “changing behavior” due to ongoing revelations of NSA transgressions is just more of the same standard horse crap and fear mongering. Rogers was on a roll as he delivered the following from the transcript with the conflict of interest ridden DiFi chiming in. I excerpt the following and add comments in brackets:

----

CROWLEY: The big question that's always asked, are we safer now than we were a year ago, two years ago? In general?

FEINSTEIN: I don't think so. I think terror is up worldwide, the statistics indicate that, the fatalities are way up. The numbers are way up. There are new bombs, very big bombs, trucks being reinforced for those bombs. There are bombs that go through magnatometers. The bomb maker is still alive. There are more groups that ever and there's huge malevolence out there. [brings to mind the ludicrous story of the surgically implanted bombs used to evade TSA naked body scanners that was floated earlier this summer]

CROWLEY: So congressman, I have to say, that is not the answer I expected. I expected to hear, oh, we're safer. Do you agree?

ROGERS: Oh, I absolutely agree that we're not safer today for the same very reasons. [fear is the key to more power for Rogers and his ilk]

So the pressure on our intelligence services to get it right to prevent an attack are enormous. And it's getting more difficult because we see the al Qaeda as we knew it before is metastasizing to something different, more affiliates than we've ever had before, meaning more groups that operated independently of al Qaeda have now joined al Qaeda around the world, all of them have at least some aspiration to commit an act of violence in the United States or against western targets all around the world. [the bogeyman that justifies all of the unconstitutional spying must be preserved at all costs and it has reconfigured since Emanuel Goldstein Osama bin Laden was killed]

They've now switched to this notion that maybe smaller events are okay. So if you have more smaller events than bigger events, they think that might still lead to their objectives and their goals. That makes it exponentially harder for our intelligence services to stop an event like that. [smaller justifies spying on EVERYBODY]

CROWLEY: Because essentially one person can do a small event. [NSA couldn't stop Boston Marathon bombers]

ROGERS: Absolutely.

CROWLEY: So, one of the things that the senator said was that there is more hatred out there, more -- and why is that? [I am sure it has nothing to do with drone strikes, murdering civilians and occupying Middle East countries]

 FEINSTEIN: I think there is a real displaced aggression in this very fundamentalist, jihadist, Islamic community. And that is that the west is responsible for everything that goes wrong, and that the only thing that's going to solve this is Islamic Sharia law and the concept of the caliphate [This is pure bloody red meat for the rubes who eat up the Muslim bashing as though it were a cherished treat]. And I see more groups, more fundamentalists, more jihadists more determined to kill to get to where they want to get. So, it's not an isolated phenomenon. You see these groups spread a web of connections. And this includes North Africa, it includes the Middle East, it includes other areas as well.

CROWLEY: Lots of times we look at kind of some of these splinter groups going, yeah, but their interest is local.

ROGERS: And here's the -- but here's the concern of that. Now, remember, you have somewhere near 25 states that have some failed level of governance, meaning they can't secure large spaces of their own country. Those are always attractive for safe havens when it comes to any terrorist organization. And we're finding they're taking advantage of that.

So you see what's happening in a place like Syria where you have a pooling of al Qaeda members and affiliates of al Qaeda in a way we've never seen before at the level of numbers that we have never seen before, and here's the scary part of this, some thousands of people showing up to participate in that in their mind jihadist effort are westerners, meaning they have western passports.

A percentage of them have already gone home, including the United States [hey Americans, they are under your beds and hiding in your closets so be very afraid], by the way, is included in that western number. We are very, very concerned that these folks who have western paper have gone there, participated in combat events, are trained, are further radicalized, now have the ability to go back in western countries. [what is the over/under on bogus threats aimed at shopping malls this holiday season? This guy is shameless]

We know that those--

CROWLEY: And to ply that trade.

ROGERS: Well, to ply that trade. And now they have a connection, a direct connection to al Qaeda affiliates operating in a place where most people would say, well, we have no interest in Syria. Well, clearly we do. And clearly, that's just one place. And it's starting to spread.

You saw what happened in Lebanon recently.

CROWLEY: In Lebanon, that's right.

ROGERS: Where they blew up the Iranian embassy. [or was it Mossad?]

This is all starting to spread. Iraq is having its problems now. It's spreading into Lebanon, Jordan has issues, Turkey along the border has issues. This is very, very, very concerning. [a continued military presence in the region is imperative because it makes big money for DiFi's defense contractor hubby as well as justifies the trillions of dollars that go into NSA surveillance and it's civilian offshoots - two key words "campaign contributions]

FEINSTEIN: There is now a bomb that can go through magnatometers. People can get on aircraft with those bombs. They have tried to send four into this country, two in printer cartridges, one by Abdulmutalleb, and one, asset, was able to obtain out of Yemen. [groan]

These were coming into this country, two of them aimed at synagogues in Illinois. Now, having said that, the only way to stop this was with intelligence. The only way you could stop that is putting clues together to ferret out where this was coming from. [this fat slob has no qualms whatsoever at blatantly encouraging hate crimes against law abiding American Muslim citizens]

CROWLEY: So where is our weakest point? [Might I suggest the U.S. Congress]

ROGERS: Well, I mean, I think -- the threat level has never been more diverse than it is today. And that's one of the bigger, I think, concerns that we have. And I think why both -- we both would agree that the threat is higher today and we are probably less safe is the more efforts they try, the more perfect you have to be in order to stop something. And that's a huge challenge.

CROWLEY: And lucky.

ROGERS: And lucky.

And so, you think about what's happened with recent disclosures. We have now three al Qaeda affiliate groups have changed the way they communicate means it's less likely that we're going to be able to detect something prior to an event that goes operational, meaning that they've already started the final planning stages to blow something up or shoot someone. [do those "changing the way they communicate" also include U.S. citizens who don't want their entire lives spied on by a fascist NSA? Or American tech companies who are changing their ways thanks to the threats against their business models courtesy of the surveillance?]

And so we're fighting amongst ourselves here in this country about the role of our intelligence community that is having an impact on our ability to stop what is a growing number of threats. [it's called following the Constitution]

And so we've got to shake ourselves out of this pretty soon and understand that our intelligence services are not the bad guys. The bad guys, the al Qaeda affiliates, Russian intelligence services, Chinese intelligence services, the Quds force that operates terrorism events all around the world, those are the folks we need to focus our attention and our energy on in order to keep America safe.

CROWLEY: So it seems to me what both of you are saying you haven't liked this focus on the NSA and the complaints about the NSA in terms of the breadth of what they're collecting. [low speed softball over home plate]

ROGERS: Well, I would argue it allows them to focus on the problem. We spend a lot of time now internally focused, their up -- I can't tell you the thousands of man hours they have spent trying to prepare people to understand fact from fiction, what is happening versus what is not happening.

And we both -- both of our committees take great pride in our real oversight function of which we participate in to make sure they're not violating the law. [whopper of the week]

Well, we've had to recreate all of that work over and over and over again every time there's a disclosure. And our fear is, every time we do that, we take them away from their focus, which is what is al Qaeda's next event? Who is moving somewhere in the world is trying to get into the United States or an allied country to kill somebody. And that part seems to have gotten lost in the fact that we have new threats. I think people think what the senator was talking about, Dianne was talking about, was people think, well, we've got this thing beat, it's kind of over. We don't have to worry about al Qaeda anymore. And what we see is that's not the case.

---

These people just do not get it as they and the state continue to blame the messenger for their own enabling of an out of control surveillance state as well as their blatant violations of their oaths of office. It is the fault of former government contractor Booz-Allen employee Edward Snowden for blowing the whistle as well as those who have written about it and the few decent members of the filthy corrupt Congress that are trying to bring it under control.

Hell any serious “terrorist” groups would be savvy enough to understand that everything is being watched and to avoid the internet altogether. No this is about the J. Edgar Hoover style vacuuming up of the sexual and otherwise browsing habits for blackmail purposes. There is no coincidence that the pig that is the former FBI fascist Rogers coming out the very weekend when it was revealed that the NSA is also monitoring the porn sites and looking to use the private sexual preferences of those who have committed no crime other than being rabble rousers against the abuses. Being that the adult entertainment industry is enormous there is no shortage of blackmail material being piped into that massive NSA facility in Utah.

Rogers and Feinstein both belong in jail and Crowley is about the poorest excuse for a 'journalist' operating today which is quite a statement.

Sunday Morning Propaganda Organs Defend NSA Spying

The usual corporate-state media defenders of Obama’s unconstitutional NSA Stasi surveillance apparatus were busily hosting establishment shills this Sunday morning, performing the usual damage control for the rogue government of The Homeland. It had been another week of damaging revelations, primarily the NSA spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private communications since 2002. Barry’s ass is in hot water on his goon squads and justifiably so, reports have begun to surface that none other than Obama himself knew about the snooping on Merkel which flies in the face of his statements to the contrary. Being that the reports put the origination of the spying at the beginning of the George W. Bush administration it was a marvelous bit of serendipity when none other than Richard B. Cheney, war criminal and traitor was trotted out on the prestigious electronic platform of ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos.  The former Bill Clinton flack turned celebrity talking head rolled out the red carpet for Cheney in the sort of dignified type of atmosphere more befitting a benevolent former statesman other than a sadistic, lying, torture-mongering, , mass murderer whose disembowelment of the constitution set the standard for Obama’s police state policies.

Stephanopoulos slobbered over the evildoer while lobbing softballs that were easily smacked out of the park by well-prepared talking points. Cheney defended activities of Obama’s NSA Stasi “It's something that we have been involved in for a long time. And the -- I think the unfortunate aspect of it is that Mr. Snowden has, in fact, divulged a lot of information which is damaging to the United States” as well as pimped his deranged neocon daughter Liz’s run for the upcoming Wyoming Senate seat. The bulk of Cheney’s airtime was however dedicated to a continuation of the promotion of standard neocon world dominance doctrine primarily pushing for an attack on Iran, long the apple of the eye of the PNAC imperialists:

“I don’t have a lot of confidence in the administration to be able to negotiate an agreement. I think sanctions offer some prospect of bringing the Iranians around. I’ve talked to my friends in that part of the region. I still know them, a lot of them, and they’re very fearful that the whole Iranian exercise is going to go the same way as the Syrian exercise; that is, that there will be bold talk from the administration. But in the final analysis, nothing effective will be done about the Iranian program,”

Croaked Cheney in his trademark serpentine whisper, his “friends” likely his benefactors in the House of Saud and the right-wing government of Israeli strongman Bibi Netanyahu, two regimes that squeal the loudest for American blood and treasure to be shed to protect their own power base that don’t have the stones to go it alone. Not that I would expect anything else from an elitist turd like Stephanopoulos but a question on Cheney’s view on comments by Republican mega-donor and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson suggesting a nuclear strike on Iran would have been a relevant thing to ask given that he will likely be her sugar daddy.

Following Cheney was arch neocon propagandist William Kristol, a coward’s coward who has never met a Middle East war that he wouldn’t send some other poor bastard off to die in all the while grinning like some obscene Chesire cat. The credibility that is afforded to these ridiculously phony political discussion programs would make probably be an embarrassment to Joseph Goebbels but that is the way we roll in The Homeland. In fact the quicker that the appearances are booked, just look at defense industry pitchmen John McCain and Lindsey Graham who on any given Sunday morning will be seen selling death to credulous viewers along with their morning orange juice. Then of course there is Peter King, a hypocritical fanatic whose anti-Muslim tribunals are an embarrassment to any concept of a free and decent society. The Long Island demagogue routinely rails against “terrorists” yet it is never once pointed out that he himself long supported the militant wing of the Irish Republican Army that murdered civilians with relish.

The ever swinish King was front and center as was the uber-fascist House Intelligence Committee head Mike Rogers, a former FBI agent and by nature a man who gets his rocks off with seeing federal thugs conducting home invasions under mysterious and trumped up evidence. Absent was the usual false equivalence nor any serious alternative voices that place the gross constitutional violations of the big-money surveillance state in a context outside of that permitted by the state.  This is where the mythology of a government paralyzed by internal strife, party civil wars and rancorous partisan paralysis is exposed as the crap that it truly is. When it comes to matters of suppressing civil liberties, hypocrisy, war, torture and thuggery and most of all being able to gather information from everyone on earth for some vague future usage that probably involves “selling” intelligence secrets to big corporations by government operatives for industrial espionage the unified voices of state power are all singing in unison from the same hymnal. King provided Obama with the 'bipartisan' cover for the Merkel surveillance, invoking the treasured talisman of flag-draped fascism 9/11 - "As far as Germany, that's where the Hamburg Plot began, which led to 9/11. They've had dealings with Iran and Iraq, North Korea -- the French and the Germans, other European countries."  It might be noted that the Germans also had past dealings with Nazis, a group that both King and Rogers would fit in very nicely with.

Saturday’s Washington rally against NSA intrusions on privacy predictably get much press here in the fascist states of America, the walkoff World Series win by the St. Louis Cardinals over the Boston Red Sox on a controversial “obstruction” call dominated this morning’s big stories. Whatever coverage that was offered up tried to downplay the number of participants that gathered in D.C., this Reuters story refers to “hundreds” while more reputable foreign news sources reported the presence of “thousands”. I suppose that Reuters is at least technically right being that ten times one hundred equals one thousand but it was just more of the same dishonesty, propaganda and outright balderdash that is spoon fed to the lemmings by a media teeming with rats, paid operatives and careerists that long ago abrogated the responsibility of a free press that the First Amendment was supposed to guarantee.

Be sure not to miss tonight's 60 Minutes, which will feature former CIA official Michael Morrell capping off the day vilifying former Booz Allen government contractor employee and NSA whistleblower for revealing the existence of the "black budget".  In a preview of what promises to be a grand promenade of big fascist government lies Morrell cries wolf that Snowden has put Americans in danger and that outing the black budget is - "I think this is the most serious leak-- the most serious compromise of classified information in the history of the U.S. intelligence community".  It does'nt take much to see who the true enemies of America are, just turn on your television every Sunday morning.