Obama Regime Releases bin Laden "Treasure Trove" Sans Pictures of Body

The Obama administration and it’s intelligence apparatus pushed back hard today against allegations that they lied about circumstances surrounding the killing of Osama bin Laden. After being caught with their pants down over the blockbuster expose by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that the official account of the terror master’s death may have been manipulated for political gain it was a foregone conclusion that the Emperor would strike back.

So this morning, the Obama junta launched a massive propaganda blitzkrieg and the corrupt mainstream media is all in to cover Barry's ass. There were a plethora of documents dumped including love letters and sinister plots as well as a reading list that should send shivers up the spines of Americans who are critical of U.S. foreign policy because you just may be a “terrorist” too if you have purchased any of these books. It was a total media swarm but one key item remains missing from the public sphere: pictures of bin Laden’s actual body.

As reported by Reuters in a story by longtime Washington press insider Mark Hosenball entitled “Bin Laden fixated on attacking U.S. interests: documents”:

Osama bin Laden was fixated on attacking U.S. targets and pressured al Qaeda groups to heal local rivalries and focus on that cause, according to documents the United States says were seized in his hideout in Pakistan and released on Wednesday.

The documents published by U.S. intelligence also contained details of purported negotiations between al Qaeda, its allies in the Pakistani Taliban and representatives of Pakistani intelligence, and what seemed to be an al Qaeda job application.

A July 2010 letter showed that bin Laden pressed al Qaeda in Yemen, one of the group's more active affiliates, to make peace with the government and focus on America.

AND

The documents released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence were part of a cache seized by U.S. commandos who conducted the May 2011 raid on bin Laden's house in Abbottabad, Pakistan when bin Laden was killed.

A document of several pages, which the United States says was printed on stationery carrying a watermark reading "The Security Committee - al Qaeda Organization" appeared to be a blank job application form for would-be al Qaeda members.

It said applicants should "please answer the required information accurate and truthfully," and "please write clearly and legibly."

It asked when an applicant had arrived "in the land of Jihad," how much of the Koran they had memorized, which sheikhs or Muslim dignitaries they knew, which countries they had visited, how many passports they possessed and whether they were interested in carrying out a "suicide operation."

The presstitutes were having orgasms but probably none more so than CNN’s terror “expert” Peter Bergen who weighed in with a bit of shtick called “Secrets of the bin Laden treasure-trove”. In a week when ABC’s $105 million man George Stephanopoulos showed just how slimy that the lamestream media can be it would seem that Bergen is giving him a run for the money. CNN never bothers to air any sort of disclaimer that their “expert” could stand to be damaged credibility wise if the official story were in any way debunked because he wrote the definitive book about it all.  The “Secrets of the bin Laden treasure trove” is just more of the same government bullshit fed to the public by their lackeys in the media. It is about as Earth shattering as when Geraldo pried open Al Capone’s vault and is just a repackaging of administration hogwash and regurgitated talking points.

So while Obama’s halo gets polished anew by his media toadies and fascist worshippers of weaponized big government, the entire thing has a rather nasty smell to it. Not only does the administration account get reestablished as the national gospel – minus the body of course – but the “bin Laden treasure trove” just happens to be launched into the media domain on the very day that the administration and the Senate are desperately trying to cram through a renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act. You just can’t make shit like this up.

Executive Order 12333: The Root of All Evil

The cornerstone of the post-September 11, 2001 new order of unaccountable mass surveillance, data-mining and the transformation of the United States of America into a land of war and woe called The Homeland truly began on December 4, 1981 with then President Ronald Reagan's Executive Order 12333. Long before the USA PATRIOT Act was rammed through a cowardly Congress in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks with no legitimate debate there was 12333 or "twelve-triple-tree" as insiders refer to it. With the continuing unveiling of different aspects of what is now obviously a "turnkey totalitarian" fascist state lurking just below the surface of the increasingly thinner outer veil that is the public government by whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, William Binney and Thomas Drake - as well as others who are still working anonymously (according to recent stories on NSA documents not provided by Snowden) we are on the precipice of losing even the pretense of freedom and democracy.

Executive Order 12333, which gave the intelligence apparatus a blank check to operate with impunity, to the point where it is arguable that it essentially created a shadow government  has been getting some long-deserved attention as of late. A story in McClatchy last year entitled "Most of NSA’s data collection authorized by order Ronald Reagan" is where the highly secret circumvention of the US Constitution broke out of the darkness and a recent follow-up editorial was published in the Washington Post entitled "Meet Executive Order 12333: The Reagan rule that lets the NSA spy on Americans" further shedding light on this most anti-American of diktats.  That 12333 was unleashed by Reagan, whose administration served as an incubator for the neocons who would resurface during the Bush-Cheney years after 9/11 was used as both a political cudgel to batter critics of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as to implement new NSA domestic surveillance programs that far exceeded the legitimate governing principles of the US. Reagan's administration also spawned the Iran-Contra cowboys, in particular Lt. Colonel Oliver North who facilitated covert arms and drug sales to finance extremist right-wing militias in Nicaragua.

North also had a fetish for surveillance, notable a program called REX 84 that was a prototype for martial law in America and dabbled with the advanced PROMIS software to spy on political dissidents and under a vaguely defined "national emergency" would suspend the constitution and put the control of the government under FEMA. Several years back journalist Christopher Ketcham did an outstanding piece entitled "The Last Roundup" which addressed the metastasizing cancer of the authoritarian surveillance-police state and the lists that were then being compiled for potential internment when that "national emergency" was declared. I excerpt the following from Ketcham:

The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in post-war American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to "accumulate the names, identities, and activities" of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding "security index," according to declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by "the National Military Establishment." By 1960, a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included "professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid" to unnamed "subversive elements." This same FBI "security index" was allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the time).

FEMA, however—then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency—already had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford's character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans, which contained information gleaned from wideranging computerized surveillance. The database was located in the agency's secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator's findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers"—a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's databases were run "without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate."

Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan,"—code named REX 84—which called "for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run

state and local governments." The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps.

North's program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas Congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks said. "I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, "That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir." Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed.

Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individuals—prisoners, for example—by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, "Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist looks downright crude." Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs.

In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts it, "The gloves seemed to come off." What is not yet clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, "How extreme were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?" Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out.

12333 was very fortuitous for the opportunist North, a traitor if there ever were one and the rest of his Iran-Contra cabal who are to this day turning up in positions of influence as the Obama regime relentlessly targets that longtime neocon object of hatred Russia. Reagan's executive order is now even more dangerous given the ridiculous criteria that the US government is using to place law-abiding citizens on an ever expanding "terorist" watch list as was just documented in a huge story by Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Devereaux at The Intercept entitled  "Blacklisted: The Secret Government Rulebook for Labeling You a Terrorist" where the secret Obama administration enhanced rulebook was published. What we have here is absolute power with absolutely no accountability and with the courts and congress being weaponized against the people no realistic chance to effect any meaningful reform of these out of control agencies and programs.

While it is somewhat encouraging that "twelve-triple-three" is finally getting noticed and according to a story that was published yesterday in The Guardian entitled "US warned: surveillance reform hinges on change to Reagan executive order" the same former State Department official who wrote the Washington Post editorial on 12333 is pushing for awareness that any serious reform must start with the rollback of this crown jewel of the fascist state. I excerpt from The Guardian piece:

Like Snowden, Tye means to spark a debate on the proper boundaries of NSA authorities. His focus is on an obscure, Reagan-era executive order that serves as a foundational set of rules for the intelligence apparatus. The order, known as Executive Order 12333, renders the current surveillance debate hollow, he said, even as it shows signs of traction in the Senate.

"Without reform of activities under 12333, changes to the 215 program won't address the major challenges to Americans' privacy from the NSA," Tye, who until April worked on promoting internet freedom issues at Foggy Bottom, told the Guardian, using legal shorthand for the domestic phone data collection.

Without recourse to the trove of documentation Snowden disclosed to journalists – and speaking somewhat obliquely to underscore his stated refusal to discuss classified information – Tye said that 12333 provides NSA with a pathway to collect and retain Americans' data without a warrant, routing around laws intend to restrict and control both.

Tye is correct but the clock is ticking and time is rapidly running out. With half the world ablaze with war and social unrest - largely due to a deranged US foreign policy - and Obama and Kerry hellbent on starting World War III to avenge personal slights by Putin we very well are nearing that "national emergency" that Lt. Colonel North was setting up a response for. Any "terrorist" attack - either legitimate or that promised Dick Cheney special will firmly lockdown this country forever and all of that data that has been mined will be used to generate the pickup lists. If you are even reading this there is a damned good chance that you will be on one.

NSA Employees Get Off on Nude Pics Per New Snowden Interview

Not that it is any great surprise considering the level of corruption and abuse of power that permeates the entire American system these days but one of the fringe benefits of the NSA snooping programs is the ability to gather and drool over amateur pornography and naked pictures to take the edge off of a boring day at work. In a new exclusive interview conducted by The Guardian with former government contractor turned NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden the perusing of such personal and intimate material for fun is but one of the many bits of information discussed with the American hero. It is good to see Snowden actually getting the opportunity to speak at length in an honest forum unlike that over-hyped and heavily edited sit down with the state lackey Brian Williams of NBC back in May.

The interview, conducted in Moscow by Alan Rusbridger and Ewen MacAskill won't get any coverage in the USA!, USA!, USA! where the narrative has mostly already been set that Snowden is a "traitor" and "Russian spy" which at least among many who I know personally is taken as the immutable truth as if spoken by God himself. The Guardian however for the most part still manages to publish and report the truth (with the exception of how even this venerable institution has now been transmitting unchallenged the lies of the US and Kiev regimes about the downing of MH17) but is largely unknown to the US public who remain safely enclosed within their red, white and blue cocoons of ignorance and exceptionalism, I excerpt the following from the transcript of the Snowden interview but please go and check it out yourself and pass it around to others:

ON NUDE PHOTOS

Many of the people searching through the haystacks were young, enlisted guys and … 18 to 22 years old. They’ve suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work, for example an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising situation but they’re extremely attractive. So what do they do? They turn around in their chair and they show a co-worker. And their co-worker says: “Oh, hey, that’s great. Send that to Bill down the way.” And then Bill sends it to George, George sends it to Tom and sooner or later this person’s whole life has been seen by all of these other people. Anything goes, more or less. You’re in a vaulted space. Everybody has sort of similar clearances, everybody knows everybody. It’s a small world.

It’s never reported, nobody ever knows about it, because the auditing of these systems is incredibly weak. Now while people may say that it’s an innocent harm, this person doesn’t even know that their image was viewed, it represents a fundamental principle, which is that we don’t have to see individual instances of abuse. The mere seizure of that communication by itself was an abuse. The fact that your private images, records of your private lives, records of your intimate moments have been taken from your private communication stream, from the intended recipient, and given to the government without any specific authorisation, without any specific need, is itself a violation of your rights. Why is that in the government database?

I’d say probably every two months you see something like that happen. It’s routine enough, depending on the company you keep, it could be more or less frequent. But these are seen as the fringe benefits of surveillance positions. 

[Kind of like the "fringe benefits" of government TSA goons feeling up little children at airport checkpoints]

ON HIS LEAKING OF THE NSA DOCUMENTS TO JOURNALISTS

Snowden wanted the revelations to be published as fast as possible.] So I was very concerned about all these delays. You’ve got to remember I knew nothing of the press. I’d never talked to a journalist … I was a virgin source basically.

It was a nervous period. You have no idea what the future’s going to hold and I was all right because I knew things would get out but I wanted them to get out in the best way, and that was [why] I didn’t want any mistakes. It was what I called the zero fuck-ups policy…

It’s that concept of herd immunity. They run cover for the others. And particularly once you start splitting them over jurisdictions and things like that it becomes much more difficult to subvert their intentions. Nobody could stop it.

But as an engineer, and particularly as somebody who worked in telecoms and things like that on these systems, the thing that you’re always terrified of when you’re thinking about reliability is SPOFs – Single Point Of Failure, right?

This was the thing I told the journalists: “If the government thinks you’re the single point of failure, they’ll kill you.”

[Think about that statement “If the government thinks you’re the single point of failure, they’ll kill you” and it is as terrifying as anything else and the list of bodies of those who got too close to the truth before they published it is as long as it is evident that there are elements of the US government that engage in maintaining death squads for "wet ops"]

ON THE PROGRAMS THEMSELVES & THE US GOVERNMENT

I began to move from merely overseeing these systems to actively directing their use. Many people don’t understand that I was actually an analyst and I designated individuals and groups for targeting.

I was exposed to information about the previous programs like Stellar Wind [used during the presidency of George W Bush] for example. The warrantless wire-tapping of everyone in the United States, including their internet data – which is a violation of the constitution and law in the United States – did cause a scandal and was ended because of that.

When I saw that, that was really the earthquake moment because it showed that the officials who authorised these programs knew it was a problem, they knew they didn’t have any statutory authorisation for these programs. But instead the government assumed upon itself, in secret, new executive powers without any public awareness or any public consent and used them against the citizenry of its own country to increase its own power, to increase its own awareness.

We constantly hear the phrase “national security” but when the state begins … broadly intercepting the communications, seizing the communications by themselves, without any warrant, without any suspicion, without any judicial involvement, without any demonstration of probable cause, are they really protecting national security or are they protecting state security?

What I came to feel – and what I think more and more people have seen at least the potential for – is that a regime that is described as a national security agency has stopped representing the public interest and has instead begun to protect and promote state security interests. And the idea of western democracy as having state security bureaus, just that term, that phrase itself, “state security bureau”, is kind of chilling.

[The machine is fully out of control and there are no overseers in the government, only enablers and cover-up artists]

ON HIS EXILE TO RUSSIA COURTESY OF JOHN KERRY'S STATE DEPARTMENT

So this is the thing that nobody realises. They think there was some masterplan to get out safely and avoid all consequences. That’s what Hong Kong was all about. But it wasn’t. The purpose of my mission was to get the information to journalists. Once I had, that I was done.

That’s why I was so peaceful afterwards, because it didn’t matter what happened … Going to Ecuador and getting asylum there, that would have been great … And that would have just been a bonus. The fact that I’ve ended up so secure is entirely by accident. And as you said, it probably shouldn’t have happened. If we have anybody to thank, it’s the state department. The whole key is, the state department’s the one who put me in Russia.

And

I’m much happier here in Russia than I would be facing an unfair trial in which I can’t even present a public interest defence to a jury of my peers. We’ve asked [the] government again and again to provide a fair trial and they’ve declined. And I feel very fortunate to have received asylum. Russia’s a modern country and it’s been good to me so, yeah, I have a pretty normal life and I would absolutely like to continue to be able to travel as I have in the past. I’d love to be able to visit western Europe again but that’s not a decision for me to make, that’s for the publics and the governments of each of those independent countries.

ON GEORGE ORWELL

Contrary to popular belief I don’t think we are exactly in the Nineteen Eighty-Four universe. The danger is that we can see how [Orwell’s] technologies that are [in] Nineteen Eighty-Four now seem unimaginative and quaint. They talked about things like microphones implanted in bushes and cameras in TVs that look back at us. Nowadays we’ve got webcams that go with us everywhere. We buy cell phones that are the equivalent of a network microphone that we carry around in our pockets with us voluntarily as we go from place to place and move about our lives.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is an important book but we should not bind ourselves to the limits of the author’s imagination. Time has shown that the world is much more unpredictable and dangerous than that.

[I have often remarked that Orwell was an optimist and as Snowden points out - he was limited by his inability to fully anticipate the huge advances in technology that would make his Oceania a reality]

Edward Snowden is a patriot and a true American hero whose risk of everything has provided an invaluable service in helping to expose the nefarious criminal activities of an unaccountable and unconstitutional Deep State shadow government that operates with full impunity.  This anti-democratic nest of vipers uses the visible components of the US government as an exoskeleton, just a costume to trick the masses that all is still right until the day comes for the changes in policy (say a "terrorist" attack or world war) that will bring about the "turnkey totalitarianism" that will be the final evolution of the warfare state.

LINKS

Edited Transcript of Guardian Exclusive Interview

Video Teaser for Guardian Interview

Glenn Greenwald's Big NSA Story Gets Squashed

On Monday, Pulitzer prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald let the news slip via Twitterthat his long-awaited NSA story was to be published on The Intercept at midnight. By Tuesday morning, much to the dismay of myself and many others it appeared that the site - which since its rollout has been disappointly devoid of new material - has caved to government pressure tactics did not post the story. According to a rather cryptic Tweet by Greenwald later on Monday, "After 3 months working on our story, USG today suddenly began making new last-minute claims which we intend to investigate before publishing". Might any of those claims be based on trumped up charges that publication would play right into the hands of the "terrorists" and could a permanent delay be in the works?

While I have remained a skeptic to the allegations that the new First Look Media venture that lured Greenwald with the siren song of creating a new and uncompromising investigative journalism forum that was an alternative to the entrenched corrupt state-corporate media the pulling of the big story 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, for example journalist Chris Floyd to be suspect with support to both the coup government in Kiev as well as the right-wing regime of the newly elected Narendra Modi of India. The problem is that at the end of the day all of these one-percenter elite pigs stick together and Greenwald should have been far more judicious in his association with one of them.

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.

"I chose a half measure, when I should have gone all the way... I'll never make that mistake again. No more half measures"

- Mike Ehrmantraut

After that cryptic tweet it is time to consider seriously that the "imminent" game-changing story on NSA surveillance targets and other acts of wanton state criminality has been sunk by the US government. Whatever it is that those "new last-minute claims" that preempted the publication by The Intercept at midnight last night consisted of, they must have been of the gravest nature to derail the biggest story of Greenwald's career. As to what exactly they were may never be known, perhaps a sealed indictment against Greenwald, the shutdown of The Intercept or threats to Omidyar's other business interests under some trumped up bullshit interpretation of a terrorist law or even a death threat, all could have done the trick. There may have been a mole inside of Greenwald's operation -- it is no secret that The Intercept was hiring -- providing leaked information to the government or maybe Omidyar just lost his nerve but the fact is that the story has for the moment been effectively killed.

Greenwald's work on the Snowden documents has been extraordinary and has made him many an enemy within both the corrupt state-corporate US media as well as within the US power structure and political class alike which is truly a badge of honor for the man considering the criminality of the scum that he has exposed. The wrath of the United States government and national security state and their relentless drive to keep the big story under wraps and therefore censored could be expected. I have no doubts towards Greenwald's integrity but his one major blind spot over the last year was his decision to cast his lot with moneybags Omidyar. Given his support of of neo-Nazis in Ukraine and murderous fascists in India along with the need to expand his eBay empire globally would seemingly make him a strange bedfellow to a crusading journalist like Greenwald. The halting of the publication of the story will only give the doubters, as well as many fence-sitters more reason to question this relationship and they would be right to do so.

Again, it is easily understood why Greenwald would jump at the opportunity to build a new media platform that would challenge the contaminated electronic and print media in The Homeland but he should have done his homework. When the blog Pando came out with a story breaking Omidyar's dabbling in foreign dictatorships, Greenwald rapidly offered up a lengthy defense of his boss but it now appears that he was hoodwinked and maybe it was a honey trap all along.

Not only was Greenwald lured by Omidyar's money but also Jeremy Scahill (Dirty Wars) and perhaps the greatest of the new generation of muck-raking financial writers Matt Taibbi whose departure from Rolling Stone magazine was as much the end of an era as was the passing of Hunter S. Thompson. Taibbi was brilliant in his scathing attacks on the depravity of Wall Street and crony capitalism and the hijacking of democracy by the greedy gamblers who are able to operate with impunity and his finale at Rolling Stone on Goldman Sachs commodities trading scams along with Greenwald's work on the NSA looked like First Look had an unbeatable pair of cops on the beat.

Taibbi really pushed the envelope in "The Vampire Squid Strikes Again", turning up the heat on Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder who has presided over the Justice Department's passing out of 'get out of jail free' cards since Barack the transparent took office. Back during the days when the entire scam was being set up, the infamous global swindler and friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the now deceased Marc Rich was instrumental in establishing the conditions for the ongoing commodities con. I excerpt the following from Taibbi:

Goldman and Chase -- along with Glencore and Trafigura, a pair of giant Swiss-based conglomerates that were offshoots of a firm founded by notorious deceased commodities trader and known market manipulator Marc Rich -- all made notably coincidental purchases of metals-warehousing companies in 2010.

The presence of these Marc Rich entities is particularly noteworthy. According to famed Forbes reporter Paul Klebnikov, who was assassinated in 2004 after years of reports on Russian corruption, Rich made a fortune in the early Nineties striking crooked deals with the Soviet bosses who controlled the U.S.S.R.'s supplies of raw materials -- in particular commodities like zinc and aluminum. These deals helped create a fledgling class of profiteers among the bosses of the crumbling Soviet empire, a class that would go on years later to help push Russia out of its communist past into its kleptocratic present.

"He'd strike a deal with the local party boss, or the director of a state-owned company," Klebnikov said back in 2001. "He'd say, 'OK, you will sell me the [commodity] at five to 10 percent of the world-market price"."."."and in return, I will deposit some of the profit I make by reselling it 10 times higher on the world market, and put the kickback in a Swiss bank account.'"

Rich made these reported deals while in exile from the United States, which he fled in 1983 after the U.S. government charged him with tax evasion, wire fraud, racketeering and trading with the enemy after being caught trading with rogue states like Iran, among other things. The state filed enough counts to put him away for life, and he remained a fugitive until January 2001, when a little-known Clinton administration Justice Department official named Eric Holder recommended Rich be pardoned. A report by the House Committee on Government Reform later concluded that Holder had not provided a credible explanation for supporting Rich's pardon and that he must have had "other motivations" that he didn't share with Congress. Among other things, the committee speculated that Holder had designs on the attorney general's office in a potential Al Gore administration.

In any case, in 2010, a decade after the Rich pardon, Holder was attorney general, but under Barack Obama, and two Rich-created firms, along with two banks that have been major donors to the Democratic Party, all made moves to buy up metals warehouses. In near simultaneous fashion, Goldman, Chase, Glencore and Trafigura bought companies that control warehouses all over the world for the LME, or London Metals Exchange. The LME is a privately owned exchange for world metals trading. It's the world's primary hub for determining metals prices and also for trading metals-based futures, options, swaps and other instruments.

With the NSA abuses including names of those who have been spied on (or blackmailed) as well as Taibbi's foray into the crooked financial aspects (NSA ties as well?) it seemed like an awesome and unprecedented run at the Deep State was nigh with some of the revelations coming very close to the domain of the mysterious and legendary "Octopus"which was the subject of work by investigative reporter Danny Casolaro who was found dead under very mysterious circumstances back in 1991.

Casolaro's research came to reach into the upper echelons of US politics at the time and included the use of the sophisticated, ahead of its time software program PROMIS which according to some accounts - notably Guy Lawson's book "Octopus"and Cheri Seymour's "The Last Circle"- was being used to rig financial markets, launder money and facilitate US and foreign espionage by utilizing "back doors" in host computers for spying. In the case of Seymour's research, elements within the US Department of Justice are implicated, particularly Reagan administration figures such as Edwin Meese in using government actions to quash criminal investigations.

Eric Holder has a long history within the DOJ and was also been appointed as a judge of the DC superior court by Reagan in 1988. Having also served during the Reagan, Clinton and Obama presidencies he has an established continuity and his involvement in the Rich pardon doesn't pass the smell test, even more so given the crime spree on Wall Street that has taken place during his watch. 

While most lack the necessary knowledge to recognize these historical linkages they are such that would make the establishment very nervous of the possibility of Snowden's NSA leaks being used as a point of reference for backtracking in order to reconstruct how exactly we got from Reagan's Executive Order 12333 back in 1981 to the NSA surveillance and data-mining colossus of 2014. Were enough talented investigators able to successfully run the trace it would have the potential to blow the lid off of the entire f*cking sewer which is truly what these bastards are afraid of. There are far too many crimes and crimes to cover up those crimes going back decades to risk exposure.

But I digress..

So as it sits now, with Greenwald's story in limbo - the "imminent" scoop is starting to look like it has been squashed like a pesky insect by the red, white and blue jackboot of Leviathan. There is absolutely no way that the government is going to allow it to be published in a form that will challenge the corruption of the entire system - we are not only talking about the NSA here but everything and that will not happen. Greenwald fucked up by allowing himself to be put under the control of one who benefits from the existence of that corrupt system through what is really starting to look like a legacy killer in The Intercept and First Look Media. Perhaps it is hubris, he has been so busy making appearances in an obviously dishonest domestic media conducting his victory tour after the publication of "No Place to Hide" that he never saw it coming. His delay - there have been many calling for the publication of the entire Snowden trove - has only allowed for the government to regroup, plot and bring pressure to kill the story. If the story is halted, substantially delayed or gutted then it represents a major strategic failure on his part and a successful attempt to dilute or halt the story will do immense damage to those who are desperately fighting for justice and the return to accountability.

Greenwald's failed calculus was in believing that the bastards could actually be beaten - they can't, like that classic Dire Straits song puts it "the man's too strong". This is a guerrilla war in which the only victory is in causing them problems with an ongoing series of non-centralized swarm attacks by dedicated activists, bloggers and writers - this is why the Occupy Movement was such a threat and was crushed.

While Greenwald's delay may only be temporary, the cave in to the government that he himself has now acknowledged will make any future revelations suspect. The affiliation with The Intercept and Omidyar which already has suffered a ding in credibility by not publishing that other country involved in the SOMALGET program. This was a transgression that Wikileaks - an organization that helped to save Mr. Snowden's ass from a US torture chamber - immediately decried and revealed what the bosses at First Look Media would not.

The only solution is to PUT IT ALL OUT THERE and let the bloggers and alternative media have at it and if the establishment successfully suppress Greenwald's big "fireworks" show then there is really no other way. If there exists a complete set of the documents (and I suspect it does) then let one who is not subject to coercion by the rogue elements in Washington set off their own extravaganza and truly light up the sky. It would be delightful were this to happen on the Fourth of July as a symbolic gesture to the principles that this once great country was founded upon.

No more half measures.

[This article is a combination of two prior pieces and is also published at OPED NEWS]

The Innocuous Face of Government Criminality

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, what they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together

-Hannah Arendt

Former NSA and CIA leader Michael Hayden is indicative of the horrors of the coming American authoritarian state. He is a bookish, cherubic, nondescript, avuncular man who nonetheless has contributed greatly to those programs of such a degree of enormous potential for evil are only waiting for the correct political climate and leadership to trigger a reign of darkness and terror unique to this country's history. The "banality of evil" is the term used by political theorist and author Hannah Arendt to describe Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, a nondescript German man in a position of great authority whose work was instrumental in the murder of six million Jews. Hayden has been a regular on the Sunday morning propaganda circuit along with fellow fascists Mike Rogers and Peter King as they frantically work to protect the NSA surveillance machine and smear former government contractor Booz Allen employee turned whistleblower Edward Snowden and others who challenge their tyrannical wet dreams. After the serendipity of a post-Christmas ruling by in the bag federal judge William Pauley in a Manhattan courtroom erecting a firewall around the unconstitutional and Orwellian programs that sent turned the prior week's funk into holiday joy Hayden was a part of a full court press as the new year will feature a counteroffensive as inevitable as it will be furious. 

While using the CBS forum of Face the Nation to affix the 'traitor' tag to Snowden and perhaps step up behind the scenes efforts to have him added to the extrajudicial kill list Hayden continued the media push. In a USA Today piece (quite possibly the most dumbed-down newspaper on the planet) Hayden blasted Barack Obama for not having the "political courage" to reject any suggestions to establish oversight on the NSA:

"President Obama now has the burden of simply doing the right thing,...and I think some of the right things with regard to the commission's recommendations are not the popular things. They may not poll real well right now. They'll poll damn well after the next attack, all right?"

It must be pretty tough to swallow to be called out by a eunuch for having no balls but Barry has a thin skin, already runs one of the most oppressive administrations of all time and sics his attack dog Eric Holder's Justice Department on whistleblowers, journalists and political foes on a whim. Not that his hand picked NSA review panel was going to push for any serious reforms to begin with but the deep state that Hayden represents has no tolerance for even cosmetic changes that will allow the sheeple to continue their long, slow shuffle towards the steel chutes.  

Very interesting that Hayden would reference the “next attack” because with these programs, that obviously have zilch to do with actually preventing terrorism the aftermath of the “next attack” is exactly what they really are about. When Hayden was over at NSA it would be fair to wonder whether he might have been more than a bit involved in the MAIN CORE project that was revealed in a pair of 2008 articles by Christopher Ketcham entitled The Last Roundup as well as another by Tim Shorrock entitled Exposing Bush's Historic Abuse of Power.  The articles refer to a massive database in which the names and information of millions of Americans are being accumulated for the day that the opportunity presents itself for the pickup and detention (and Christ only knows what else) by government goons. It is to be the ultimate purge of political dissent and opposition to the programs of the surveillance state and will likely include journalists, activists, lawyers, educators, civil libertarians, gun owners and even bloggers who dare to criticize Leviathan. With the expansion of NSA surveillance and data dragnets the possibility that the crackdown could extend to even donors to organizations like the ACLU which has all of the traits of what will be declared an ‘enemy of the state’ and even readers of ‘forbidden’ blogs and articles, probably on this very website. This is the world of Hayden and his criminal compatriots who despise the very notion of freedom, liberty and the limitations on out of control government power imposed by that pesky Constitution.

MAIN CORE would have been under the purview of Hayden during his reign at NSA Stasi Central which was from 1999 to 2005 according to his Wikipedia page, an interesting question would be what did Mr. Hayden know about the September 11, 2001 attacks and when did he know it. If he is going to hang his black beret on the peg of justifying the capture and storage of the communications and financial records of hundreds of millions of law abiding citizens as a necessity to prevent the “next attack” it would be one damned important question to ask why his NSA was unable to prevent the ‘day when everything changed’.  MAIN CORE was illegal to the point as Ketcham’s article points out that former Bush administration Justice Department official James Comey, second in command to Attorney General John Ashcroft and currently Obama’s FBI Director engaged in open conflict with administration figures over the authorization of Bush-Cheney surveillance programs. There is the now legendary race to the hospital that Mr. Comey engaged in to beat White House thugs Andrew Card and Alberto ‘Torquemada’ Gonzales to Ashcroft who was stricken with pancreatitis where they tried to coerce the sick man to sign the papers. Comey beat them there and in a hospital room showdown refulsed to authorize the renewal of obviously unconstitutional programs. This occurred in March of 2004 when General Michael Hayden was running the NSA. Perhaps today's NSA head General Keith Alexander is getting a bit of a bad rap considering the bulk of the unconstitutional programs seemed to be already in place during Hayden’s time. It would seem that his media friendly predecessor would benefit greatly from seeing Alexander thrown under the bus as well as having any further inquiries/lawsuits shut down lest they reveal his own criminality.

General Hayden also headed up the CIA from 2006-2009 replacing Porter Goss who clashed with then Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, a man who ran Latin American death squad operations during the Reagan-Bush regime as well as a member of the Iran-Contra gang.  It should be noted that Hayden was hand-picked by Negroponte who along with other Iran-Contra figures who returned to positions of power under Bush-Cheney had a pedigree that included a serious amount of contempt for the rule of law and the constitution.  When at CIA Hayden presided over the pox on America that is the rendition and torture programs which like the JSOC/CIA assassination programs have philosophical roots in the Iran-Contra era specifically Operation Condor and earlier in Vietnam with the infamous Phoenix Program. These people do not believe in anything even remotely resembling the concept of American values that at one time were at one time at least in theory virtuous and admired throughout most of the world. That is all gone now and Hayden and vermin just like him will not be satisfied until a total fascist dictatorship exists in the United States – we are getting there very, very quickly.  In Hayden’s world not only is Edward Snowden a “traitor” but so are tens of millions of those Americans whose respect for constitutional principles and a longing for the return of law and the two forces are on a collision course.

So of course Michael Hayden is fighting hammer and tong to call for Obama to ignore recommendations as tepid as they may be to shed light and implement control over the NSA surveillance monstrosity and by extension the torture and assassination programs that lie beneath it. Hayden is a fiend of a man who would in a normal society not only be denied the undeserved legitimacy and reverence that he is afforded by the corrupt state-corporate media but would fittingly be rotting in a prison cell for the rest of his life. During a Monday interview on the liberal Democracy Now, a part of a segment on the latest revelations from Der Spiegel on the NSA’s TAO (Tailored Access Operations) program former Guardian journalist pegged it in responding a question on Hayden’s bandying about of the “treason” term:

Here’s Michael Hayden. He oversaw the illegal warrantless eavesdropping program implemented under the Bush administration. He oversaw torture and rendition as the head of the CIA. James Clapper lied to the face of Congress. These are felonies at least as bad, and I would say much worse, than anything Edward Snowden is accused of doing, and yet they’re not prosecuted. They’re free to appear on television programs. The United States government in Washington constantly gives amnesty to its highest officials, even when they commit the most egregious crimes. And yet the idea of amnesty for a whistleblower is considered radical and extreme. And that’s why a hardened felon like Michael Hayden is free to walk around on the street and is treated on American media outlets as though he’s some learned, wisdom-drenched elder statesman, rather than what he is, which is a chronic criminal.

It would be highly advisable for Glenn Greenwald to stay in Brazil because he assuredly occupies a prime spot on the rogue government's target list and would represent a trophy to the surveillance state as it would send a crystal clear message to investigative journalists of what they will be subject to for challenging Hayden and his cabal of fascist thugs. There is however no way turning back at this point because MAIN CORE coupled with the increased technological ability of the NSA and it's arms to spy on and store absolutely everything for the day that the "next attack" makes it acceptable to begin rounding up law abiding American citizens can only be prevented by doing so with a ever increasing drive to expose the criminality of the bastards who have hijacked this country and bring them to justice just as their historical predecessors were at Nuremberg.

Would Obama Authorize Snowden’s Assassination?

“Death solves all problems, no man no problem”

-Joseph Stalin

With the new Oceania’s eternal wars now well into the second decade and the hijacked and subverted government screaming “national security” whenever their illicit programs are threatened by even the most minimal of oversight it is a legitimate question as to how far that they will go. As the concerted pushback against the revelations of former government contractor employee Edward Snowden turned NSA whistleblower roar into the new year, intensifying like a hurricane destined to extract maximum vengeance on landfall could this government now be moving towards escalation? Would President Barack Obama sign off on the targeted assassination of Snowden? Would his administration turn a blind eye while CIA or JSOC hit squads murdered him so as to preserve an aura of plausible deniability? Would any rational person who is aware of just how far down the rabbit hole of an abyss that we have all been dragged into since September 11, 2001 be surprised if this were to occur?

The damage that Snowden has inflicted on the fascist state that rose out of the darkness of that Tuesday morning in late summer of 2001 is immense and as we continually are assured by Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald (who had also best be watching his back) there is more coming on NSA criminality. Just this past weekend, after authoritarians received a late Christmas present with federal Judge William Pauley’s ridiculously anti-American ruling in favor of the American Stasi on Friday there have been stories broken. Germany's Der Spiegel featured a large piece on the NSA's TAO division (Tailored Access Operations) that operates out of a secretive facility in San Antonio and specializes in hacking into computers and networks around the world. The unit offers up an array of sophisticated technical gadgetry, engages in the intercepting of shipped computers in order to implant "back doors" while they are enroute to buyers - yet another revelation that NSA activities are going to do even more costly damage to American businesses and taps into underseas telecommunications cables. If what has been seen to this point and with the escalation of the shadow government's war on journalists (particularly Greenwald) through operatives like Alan Dershowitz, capture of the courts to perform legal gymnastics to find programs to be constitutional on hair-splitting and technicalities and the braying of "treason" charges against Snowden the worst is still yet to be published and the decision has likely already been made to stop it under any and all circumstances.

This would include the removal of Snowden from the mortal coil, not the best option for a desperate rogue state in that it would make him into a martyr but he is even now becoming a powerful symbol that the bastards can be fought. When Snowden came out last weekend and declared victory it crossed a line and it would be so far against the grain of what the post September 11, 2001 junta on the Potomac to think that there is not currently a serious lobbying effort being made to terminate Snowden with extreme prejudice. Hell, it's not like Obama is adverse to ordering the killing of American citizens without due process, he already one-upped George Bush and Dick Cheney with the extrajudicial assassination of radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. Mr. al-Awlaki was born in New Mexico, for a period following the 9/11 attacks was sought out by the establishment as a rational representation of an American Muslim (see WaPo piece from 2001) and was even invited to a dinner at The Pentagon. The iman became increasingly radicalized by the phony war on terror and its underlying war on Muslims and soon ended up as an enemy of the state, affixed with the al Qaeda devil horns by the propagandists and on the JSOC/CIA kill list. In September of 2011 the Obama administration had al-Awalki killed by a drone strike in Yemen therefore setting the precedent on depriving an American born citizen of any form of due process, not long afterwards his 16 year old son was also blown into hamburger by a drone, he was also an American citizen by birth. Obama's Justice Department provided the necessary legal cover of the killings in the manner that the department always does when high crimes need the stamp of official state sanction. This is not to defend al-Alwaki's calls for jihad on America but there are certain rights that Americans used to be entitled to as a matter of birthright, one being an actual trial. Obama has set a very dangerous precedent here and his ultimate legacy will be that he not only refined and cleaned up the programs of Bush-Cheney but codified them and sold them to liberals, an always gullible bunch.

Dick Cheney's lackey Michael Hayden, former NSA and CIA head, a regular on the propaganda circuit continued to nudge the "treason" accusation closer to mass dissemination with his Sunday morning gig on CBS's (the network that was just busted for airing a total fabrication of a propaganda piece on Benghazi) Face the Nation. Hayden, who bears far more responsibility for the unconstitutional NSA programs than current American Stasi Commandant Keith Alexander spoke that Snowden's leaks have left the agency "infinitely weaker" (a damned good thing for America in my opinion) and that "What Snowden is revealing … is the plumbing. He’s revealing how we acquire this information.” The irony of a turd like Hayden speaking of "plumbing" is just priceless and is illustrative of the absolute panic that exists that the Roto Rooter men are slowly unplugging the pipes and that the ensuing torrent that is about to come sluicing out has the capability of drowning the real traitors who have used their wars and fear mongering to disembowel the Constitution and destroy the very concept of a free and open society for their own sordid and nefarious ends. Snowden as it has been made abundantly clear by both the Obama 

administration and the neocon propagandists is already an enemy of the state, just like al-Awlaki was.

So the question remains, will Barry do it if ongoing efforts to drag Snowden back for a show trial and a life in a torture prison do not bear fruit? He has already proved that he is willing to act as judge, jury and executioner out of sheer political expedience and nothing should be ruled out for our constitutional law professor in chief.