America’s new normal: Mass surveillance, secret courts and death to whistleblowers

There is a deep and abiding sense of unease permeating American society. From the IRS targeting politically conservative groups to the Department of Justice targeting journalists for surveillance, from the revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) is tracking the telephone calls of most Americans to the public spectacle of whistleblower Bradley Manning’s trial, in recent weeks there has been no shortage of evidence that the new “normal” in the United States is not friendly to freedom. Continue reading

NSA employees use data mining systems to spy on wives, ex-spouses

(WMR) — WMR has learned from a knowlegable National Security Agency (NSA) source that agency employees are using various NSA data mining and surveillance systems, including PRISM meta-data and phone call transcripts, to snoop on their wives and ex-spouses. In addition, some NSA employees have offered to sell such information to individuals outside of NSA who want the goods on their wives and ex-spouses. Continue reading

What are we going to do about our sociopathic corporations?

Scarcely a day goes by in the United States without a news story about serious ethical/criminal misbehavior by a bank or stock brokerage or credit-rating agency or insurance agency or derivatives firm or some other parasitic financial institution. Most of these firms produce no goods or services useful to human beings, but spend their days engaged in the manipulation of money, credit and markets, employing dozens of kinds of speculation. Continue reading

President Obama’s data harvesting program: NSA as pollster, PRISM as MISO

It is way too soon to bet the house fortune on the reliability of reports by the Washington Post (Washington, DC) and The Guardian (United Kingdom) on President Obama’s data harvesting program, known for the moment as PRISM. Continue reading

Another phony jobs report from a government that lies about everything

The payroll jobs report for May released Friday continues the fantasy. Continue reading

Fracking America’s food supply

Fracking—the process the oil and gas industry uses to extract fossil fuel as much as two miles below the ground—may directly impact the nation’s water supply, reduce water-based recreational and sports activity, and lead to an increase in the cost of food. Continue reading

Pipelineistan

I have written on more than one occasion about the value of preaching and repeating to the choir on a regular basis. One of my readers agreed with this, saying: “How else has Christianity survived 2,000 years except by weekly reinforcement?” Continue reading

Syria—Israel is losing the battle

In the last weeks, we have been following British and French’s desperate attempts to push for a military intervention in Syria. It is far from being a secret that both British and French government are dominated by the Jewish Lobby. In Britain it is the ultra Zionist CFI (Conservative Friends of Israel)—apparently 80% of Britain’s conservative MPs are members of the pro Israeli Lobby. In France the situation is even more devastating, the entire political system is hijacked by the forceful CRIF. Continue reading

The strategy of tension: A tactic to divide, manipulate and control people

The strategy of tension (Italian: strategia della tensione) in any language, even as reported by Wikipedia in an article dotted with claims for documentation that appear to be distractions, is a tactic that aims to divide, manipulate, and control public opinion using fear, propaganda, disinformation, psychological warfare, agents provocateur, and false flag terrorist actions. Sound like today’s news? It’s not. But it does have an inglorious tradition that goes back to the CIA-supported, neofascist movement, Operation Gladio, post World War II. Continue reading

San Onofre is dead and so is nuclear power

From his California beach house at San Clemente, Richard Nixon once watched three reactors rise at nearby San Onofre. As of June 7, 2013, all three are permanently shut. Continue reading

Obama’s “bleeding” press conference

(WMR)—President Obama did not want an encounter with the press in Los Angeles during his brief remarks on June 7 about health care to turn into a press conference. Obama said he didn’t “want the whole day to just be a bleeding press conference.” Continue reading

Murder made sexy

The US Special Forces is a bizarrely gendered world, as I found out when I joined it to write a book about war. This all-male bastion is sexualized in a way that can only be called perverted, particularly in its methods for turning young men into killers on command. Continue reading

Swimming in the jury pool

The ordeal of Juror Number 6,143

“Bet you’re glad you’re in here today instead of court,“ he said, smiling. I braked in front of the Bucheron, not recognizing him immediately. When I’d seen him at the courthouse, he was wearing jeans. At the grocery, he was business attired. Continue reading

The DOJ-FBI have it both ways: “Ain’t nothing here, but the ‘nothing’ is highly classified & sensitive”

Once upon a time there lived a Saudi Clan in a city called Sarasota in the United States. The clan was visited by Mohamed Atta—the government-designated top hijacking terrorist who according to the government led the largest terrorist event in United States’ history—known as 9/11. The clan’s Sarasota house was visited by this lead hijacking terrorist not once, not twice, but many times. The clan also had visits from two other US government-designated 9/11 hijacking terrorists—Marwan Al-Shehhi, who supposedly crashed United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower, and Ziad Jarrah, who was supposedly at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. Continue reading

RT racks up a billion views on YouTube

Laying claim to be the first news channel to hit such a milestone, Russia Today (RT) has revealed that it has notched up one billion views on YouTube. Looking at the world through fresh eyes, as it were, RT.com brings you to history in the making as strikingly as television brought you the Vietnam war on your network news decades ago, and film documentaries captured history during WW II. Continue reading

South Dakota commits shocking genocide against Native Americans

Genocide is not too strong a term for what is now happening in South Dakota. The huge, shocking violation of legal and human rights being carried out by the state is tantamount to genocide against the Native American nations, the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota Sioux, residing within its borders. It is the abduction and kidnapping by state officials, under the cover of law, of American Indian children. Continue reading

Now more than ever, everybody’s a target in the American surveillance state

The recent revelation that the National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers, with the complete blessing of the Obama administration, should come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention over the past decade. Continue reading

Rohingya population control: The onslaught in Burma continues

On April 21, the BBC obtained disturbing video footage shot in Burma. It confirmed extreme reports of what has been taking place in that country, even as it is being touted by the US and European governments as a success story pertaining to political reforms and democracy. Continue reading

Justice American style: The Obama war on dissent

The International Court of Justice in 1996 unanimously interpreted the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as, “There exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.” Continue reading

Think fracking is bad? Wait Until You hear about the gas industry’s ‘acid jobs’

It is a scandal how little the public knows about the 'rock melting' extraction process

Think fracking is bad? You should know about ‘acid jobs,’ environmental groups are warning. Continue reading

The empire’s voters: Kochheads & Obamapologists

No wonder why so many who could vote actually choose not to. In most instances, especially anywhere that political party affiliations are labeled, why bother? As Ralph Nader put it so succinctly, all we choose from are ‘Twiddle Dee and Twiddle Dum’. Continue reading

Bilderberg authoritarianism destroys humanity

Knowing the accuracy of historical reality is difficult, but accepting the truth in that chronicle is almost impossible for most people to accept. This reluctance to deal with the stark and calculated obliteration of societal freedom is the ultimate curse of the human condition. The denial of the authoritarian plan by elites like the Bilderberg cabal is the equivalent of Satan’s greatest lie, convincing us he does not exist. Well, the days of casting the smear of conspiracy over any reporting on the secret and hidden conclave of global manipulators, is officially over. Continue reading

America’s bridges are falling down, falling down . . .

SEATTLE, Washington—An Interstate 5 bridge collapsed into the Skagit River, dumping two vehicles and a trailer in the waters north of Mount Vernon. A law-enforcement source said 150 yards of the interstate dropped into the water. Continue reading

The IRS ‘scandal’ scandal

How does the IRS doing its job become a made-up political outrage?

Almost everything you hear and read in the media about the current IRS “scandal” is based on deliberate falsification of basic facts. Some might call it lying. Continue reading

America’s greatest affliction: The presstitute media

When Gerald Celente branded the American media “presstitutes,” he got it right. The US print and TV media (and NPR) whore for Washington and the corporations. Reporting the real news is their last concern. The presstitutes are a Ministry of Propaganda and Cover-up. This is true of the entire Western media, a collection of bought-and-paid-for whores. Continue reading

Swedish riots: ‘The underclass has reacted’

DALARNA, Sweden—The Swedish riots appear to have ended, but while most of the media fumbles about to understand what happened, the answers arguably seem to have been provided 12 March, over two months before the unrest began. At that time I interviewed Paul Lappalainen, a senior Swedish civil servant who had run the Government’s 2005 inquiry into ‘structural discrimination.’ It was a most prescient moment when he said “I prefer not seeing riots,” but warned it “seems that policymakers are not trying to avoid the conditions within which riots occur.” Continue reading

Maryland v. King and the total loss of our bodily integrity

As I document in my new book, “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State,” our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—are being choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, Taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation. Continue reading

Erdogan should swap threats for diplomacy

There’s no doubt that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan deserves multiple pats on the back. On his watch, Turkey has emerged as one of the most successful global economies putting its struggling European neighbors in the shade. The country’s infrastructure is second to none and its tourist industry attracted 36 million visitors last year. Moreover, he has proved to be an influential regional player and should be commended for his championship of the Palestinian cause and his generous hosting of over 300,000 Syrian refugees. Further, he’s shown the world that an Islamic-oriented government can be effective within a society that is essentially secular and until now Turkey is considered a model for other regional nations to emulate. Until now . . . Continue reading

War crimes as policy

The CIA: Keepers of the hit lists

In February the Guardian and BBC Arabic unveiled a documentary exploring the role of retired Colonel James Steele in the recruitment, training and initial deployments of the CIA advised and funded Special Police Commandos in Iraq. Continue reading

Blowback lessons for Erdogan Pasha

It was understandable, even if unadvisable, for Ankara to put its weight behind the Syrian uprising when largely peaceful Sunni protests first erupted in the countryside. The Arab Spring was in full force; history was turning a new leaf. Tunisia and Egypt had been epic revolutions, at least initially. Libya was more tragic. But even if it diverged from the narrative, it allowed outside powers a manner of relevance and, more importantly, set the NATO precedent for long-time non-conformists. Syria did, for all intents and purposes, seem next. And Erdogan wanted to be on the right side of history. Continue reading

Libyan society held hostage to trauma

Over one hundred years ago, the Syrian thinker and one of the pioneers of the Arab renaissance, Abd al-Raḥman al-Kawakibi, wrote in his treatise The Nature of Despotism: “The end of the tyrannical state does not only affect the tyrants. The destruction engulfs the people, their land and their homes. Because the tyrannical state in its final stages strikes randomly at all and sundry like an ox or an elephant gone berserk in a pottery shop. The tyrannical state will destroy itself, and in the process will destroy its offspring and its entire kin before succumbing to its inevitable demise.” Continue reading

The sky gods of unintended consequences

Of all the delusions we entertain in our lives, both individually and collectively, that we are the ‘masters of our own destiny’ has got to be one of the grandest. It is emboldening to feel we are somehow ‘in control,’ ‘in charge’ of the myriad forces and influences that surround and inhabit us but in reality we seem more like high-stakes gamblers than gods, playing a numbers game not fully aware of the odds that, as often as not, are resolutely stacked against us. Continue reading