theGovernment: June 2013

Sunday, 30 June 2013

Glenn Greenwald Speaks Out

Ex-official: CIA Helped Jail Mandela

June 29, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "Chicago Tribune" ----- June 10, 1990 - WASHINGTON — For nearly 28 years the U.S. government has harbored an increasingly embarrassing secret: A CIA tip to South African intelligence agents led to the arrest that put black nationalist leader Nelson Mandela in prison for most of his adult life.

Foreign media portrayals of the conflict in Syria are dangerously inaccurate

But at the very time I was in the town, Al Jazeera Arabic was reporting fighting there between the Syrian army and the opposition. Smoke was supposedly rising from Tal Kalakh as the rebels fought to defend their stronghold. Fortunately, this appears to have been fantasy and, during the several hours I was in the town, there was no shooting, no sign that fighting had taken place and no smoke.

Of course, all sides in a war pretend that no position is lost without a heroic defence against overwhelming numbers of the enemy. But obscured in the media's accounts of what happened in Tal Kalakh was an important point: the opposition in Syria is fluid in its allegiances. The US, Britain and the so-called 11-member "Friends of Syria", who met in Doha last weekend, are to arm non-Islamic fundamentalist rebels, but there is no great chasm between them and those not linked to al-Qa'ida. One fighter with the al-Qa'ida-affiliated al-Nusra Front was reported to have defected to a more moderate group because he could not do without cigarettes. The fundamentalists pay more and, given the total impoverishment of so many Syrian families, the rebels will always be able .....

US Ospreys and air tankers put Iran in Israel's reach - Middle East - Stripes

The United States plans to give Israel weapons that would enable it to send ground forces against Iranian nuclear facilities that it can't penetrate from the air.

The deal includes air-refueling aircraft, advanced radars for F-15 fighter jets, and up to eight V-22 Ospreys, an aircraft that can land like a helicopter and carry two dozen special operations forces with their gear over long distances at aircraft speeds.

Syrians behead Christians for helping military, as CIA ships in arms - Washington Times

A priest and another Christian were beheaded before a cheering crowd by Syrian insurgents who say they aided and abetted the enemy, President Bashar Assad’s military, foreign media reported.

An undated video that made the Internet rounds on Wednesday showed two unnamed men with tied hands surrounded by a cheering crowd of dozens, just moments before their heads were cut off with a small knife, Syria Report said. The attackers in the video then lifted the head for show, and placed it back on the body. The incident took place in the countryside of Idlib, the media report said.

Saturday, 29 June 2013

Yahoo Fought PRISM and Lost, FISA Court Confirms -- News from Antiwar.com

The FISA courts have finallydeclassified some minor details of an early 2008 lawsuit brought by Yahoo, which was resisting the demand to join PRISM. A heavily redacted version of the ruling was leaked in 2009, dismissing the complaints as “overblown” and claiming the NSA’s promises not to abuse the system made their opposition moot.

Wednesday, 26 June 2013

Africans denied right to work in Israel

Africans denied right to work in Israel
“Rather than saying, ‘This is what you need to do,’ they destroyed all food in the restaurant, including what was on people’s plates,” said Ilana Pinshaw, project manager at Tel Aviv-based microfinance group Microfy, which monitored the case and provides training, and small loans to asylum-seekers in Israel looking to start businesses.

Bias against Muslims rampant in “liberal” California

The Islamic Human Rights Commission reveals that 29.9 percent of all respondents in the state of California had experienced a hate-motivated physical attack, the highest figure found so far.

Not far behind, however, in the designated seat of liberal America, the San Francisco Bay Area of California, 23 percent of respondents reported being victims of a hate crime.

72% Think NSA May Have Monitored Congress, Military Leaders, Judges - Rasmussen Reportsâ„¢

72% Think NSA May Have Monitored Congress, Military Leaders, Judges - Rasmussen Reportsâ„¢
Most voters think the National Security Agency is likely to have violated one of the country’s most cherished constitutional standards – the checks and balances between the three branches of government – by spying on the private communications of Congress and judges.

Monday, 24 June 2013

A Giant Blackmail Machine: NSA Spying: So They Are Listening In, After All

A Giant Blackmail Machine

NSA Spying: So They Are Listening In, After All

By Tom Burghardt

June 24, 2013 "Information Clearing House - Despite a stream of mendacious twaddle from President Obama, congressional grifters and spook agency mouthpieces like Office of the Director of National Intelligence head James Clapper, FBI Director Robert Mueller and NSA chief General Keith Alexander, it turns out our guardians are listening in to America's, and most of the world's, telephone conversations after all.

The Pursuit of Edward Snowden: Washington in a Rage, Striving to Run the World

By Norman Solomon

June 24, 2013 "Information Clearing House - Rarely has any American provoked such fury in Washington’s high places. So far, Edward Snowden has outsmarted the smartest guys in the echo chamber -- and he has proceeded with the kind of moral clarity that U.S. officials seem to find unfathomable.

Cheney: I Helped Set Up Secret NSA Spy Program

Sunday, 23 June 2013

Groundhog Day in Afghanistan: US Turns Up 12 Years Late For Talks With The Taliban

Karzai is bitter because, with the US losing in Afghanistan, its withdrawal will probably lead to the demise of any government led by him, and perhaps to a resumption of the civil war, in which it intervened to back one side 12 years ago. He has now suspended talks on a long term security deal with the US for when the troops supposedly quit the country in 2014. This is harmful to the US which is already planning to maintain a considerable military presence with many bases in the country.

Hezbollah’s Palestinian Problem

Hezbollah’s Palestinian Problem

By Franklin Lamb

June 22, 2013 "Information Clearing House - Many Lebanese and Syrian supporters of this regions Resistance culture, increasingly led by Hezbollah, are chastising, for a number of reasons, their former Islamist ally Hamas. Pillorying them with accusations that the latter are ingrates who are creating a host of problems for Hezbollah and its support for the Syrian regime, during the continuing crisis. Unnecessary problems, it is frequently asserted, that inure to the benefit of their mutual arch enemies, the Zionist colonizers of Palestine and their American and Arab enablers.

No Proof Who Used Chemical Weapons In Syria: UN

"We are not able to say who has used chemical agents or chemical weapons and we are very much worried about the chain of custody of the substances," Pinheiro told reporters after an informal meeting with UN Security Council ambassadors.

S Africa migrants battle rising persecution - Features - Al Jazeera English

Suicide Bomb Hits Pakistani Shi’ite Mosque, Killing 15 -- News from Antiwar.com

Friday, 21 June 2013

Pepe Escobar : Brazil burning: The Story of an Illusion Gone Sour

Yet this breakneck capitalist dream masked serious cracks. Locally there may be euphoria for becoming the sixth or seventh world economy, but still social exclusion was far from gone. Brazil remained one the most (deadly) unequal nations in the world, peppered with retrograde landowning oligarchies and some of the most rapacious, arrogant and ignorant elites on the planet – inevitable by-products of ghastly Portuguese colonialism.

Inside Guantánamo’s Force-Feeding Quagmire

Noam Chomsky: Obama Is ‘Running Biggest Terrorist Operation That Exists’

A Tale of Two Presidents: The One We Voted For – and Obama:

The deep-thinking moralist that we were told was in the White House might look at this and worry that in fighting terrorism we have resorted to engaging in terrorism. After all, deliberately killing people without regard for their identity seems like an effort to terrorize a whole population. Indeed, as this week’s stunning new video series by documentarian Robert Greenwald illustrates, such violence seems eerily similar to the kind of terrorism that our government publicly decries.

The Lies of Empire: Don’t Believe a Word They Say

June 21, 2013 "Information Clearing House - The U.S. reprises Iraq, inventing a WMD threat from Syria. The FBI concocts home-grown terror through stings, while the NSA claims it has secretly saved many lives. “Why this steady stream of government-invented terror, if the real thing is so abundant?” And, isn’t the U.S. arming and funding the same jihadists they are supposed to be listening for on our telephones?

Israel refuses to investigate torture of 16-year-old

Israel has refused to investigate the brutal ill-treatment of a Palestinian child, a human rights group has stated.

On 6 February 2010, Mohammad Halabiyeh, then aged 16, broke his leg during his arrest by the Israeli border police. Mohammad — who hails from Abu Dis, near Jerusalem — needed urgent medical treatment. Yet the police interrogated and tortured him for five days by beating him, kicking him on his injured leg and threatening him with sexual abuse.

Thursday, 20 June 2013

US Taxpayers Pay for Apartheid Israel Regime

The US government in 2013 will give Israel over USD 3.15 billion, an increase over the billions it gave Israel last year. Yet the US doesn’t ever seem to have any problem determining where that money comes from: the US taxpayer has for decades been funding the apartheid Israeli regime.

Tuesday, 18 June 2013

Nine Reasons You Should Care About NSA’s PRISM Surveillance

Fighting Terrorism by Arming Terrorists

By one estimate, seven of nine key rebel combatant groups are Islamist. “As the civil war has dragged on, the rebels have become more Islamist and extreme,” the Economist reports. Thus the administration’s decision to arm only the non-Islamist rebels may soon resemble O.J. Simpson’s search for the “real killers.”

Jonathan Manthorpe: Saudi Arabia Funding Fuels Jihadist Terror

It belongs to Saudi Arabia.

Over more than two decades, Saudi Arabia has lavished around $100 billion or more on the worldwide promotion of the violent, intolerant and crudely puritanical Wahhabist sect of Islam that the ruling royal family espouses.

The links of the Boston bombers and the London butchers to organizations following the Saudi royal family’s religious line are clear.

One of the two London butchers, Nigerian-born Michael Adebolajo, was radicalized by the cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri, who headed the outlawed terrorist group Al-Muhajiroun.

The group follows Wahhabist teachings and advocates unifying all Muslims, forcibly if necessary, under a single fundamentalist theocratic government.

The crocodile tears of Samantha Power

Back in 2002, Power apparently upset those sensitive souls in the Zionist lobby when she dared to suggest that the US should impose a “solution” in Palestine. It was an offensive remark as it inferred that America wanted peace, when it had provided Israel with many of the arms being used to butcher Palestinians. But that wasn’t why the lobby got offended: it felt that she had committed the mortal sin of criticizing Israel.

Writing in The Huffington Post, Shmuley Boteach — apparently the “most famous rabbi in America” — recently bragged of how he convinced the Zionist lobby to trust Power. Boteach arranged for Power to meet 40 top lobbyists. During the encounter, “tears streamed down her cheeks,” he wrote, as Power insisted that her comments had been misconstrued.

Monday, 17 June 2013

Article: another terrorism news.

Iraq’s Shi’ite South Targeted: 54 Killed, 174 Wounded -- Antiwar.com

A surge in attacks that began last month resumed after several days of relatively light violence. Shi’ites were targeted in today’s hostilities. Because several of the bombings occurred in southern cities unaccustomed to daily or even weekly attacks, the violence was likely coordinated. Overall, at least 54 Iraqis were killed and 174 more were wounded.

Putin: Lets Not Arm Those Organ-Eating Syrian Rebels -- News from Antiwar.com

Eating the hearts of your enemies isn’t just unsanitary and a gross violation of Muslim dietary laws, but also a pretty clear indication that a person is a little too into the mass murder aspect of the civil war.

Which has President Vladimir Putin openly warning against arming these sorts of rebels in the latest US-led push to start funneling weapons into the country, admonishing EU officials for supporting rebelswho spurn the “humanitarian values” of Europe.

Al-Qaeda-Backed Rebels Blow Up Mosque in Eastern Syria -- News from Antiwar.com

Attacking the Shi’ite neighborhoods in the village of Hatla last week, Syrian rebelskilled at least 60 people, chased a lot of others out of town, and burned a whole neighborhood of homes down for being Shi’ites.

Terrorism. Muslim extremist's vision for the world.

'Dozens dead' in Aleppo car bomb attack - Middle East - Al Jazeera English

Friday, 14 June 2013

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35276.htm

June 14, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "RT" ---- After concluding that the Syrian government has used chemical weapons against the country's insurgency, thus crossing a ‘red line,’ the Obama administration has decided to start sending arms to anti-Assad rebels for the first time since, officials say.

Thursday, 13 June 2013

Ron Paul Warns US Government May Assassinate NSA Leaker Snowden

“I’m worried about somebody in our government might kill him with a cruise missile or a drone missile,” Paul said on the Fox Business Network. “I mean, we live in a bad time where American citizens don’t even have rights, and that they can be killed, but the gentlemen is trying to tell the truth about what’s going on.”

Western Emperors Have No Clothes

June 12, 2013 "Information Clearing House - The military victory for Syria’s government forces in the strategic central town of Qusayr last week was a watershed event for several reasons. But of the crucial turning points heralded by this event, one is inimitably clear - the Western powers, the would-be emperors of Syria, stand naked in their failed criminal conspiracy to destroy that country.

Wednesday, 12 June 2013

Ron Paul: ‘Thankful’ for Edward Snowden - Breanna Edwards - POLITICO.com

America's Outsourced Spy Force, by the Numbers - Philip Bump - The Atlantic Wire

Egypt warns Ethiopia over Nile dam - Africa - Al Jazeera English

"We are not calling for war, but we will not allow, at all, threats against our water security," Morsi said before adding, "all options are open."

The Palestinian struggle is a black struggle

One of the pillars of my trip to Gaza with the Palestine Literature Festival turned out to be an ongoing discussion regarding the essential blackness of the Palestinian struggle and the need to form greater ties with our “natural allies” from Africa and South America in particular.

Friday, 7 June 2013

NSA Taps In To User Data of Facebook, Google and Others, Secret Files Reveal

It boasts of what it calls "strong growth" in its use of the PRISM program to obtain communications. The document highlights the number of obtained communications increased in 2012 by 248% for Skype – leading the notes to remark there was "exponential growth in Skype reporting; looks like the word is getting out about our capability against Skype". There was also a 131% increase in requests for Facebook data, and 63% for Google.

Wednesday, 5 June 2013

NATO Data: Assad Winning the War for Syrians’ Hearts and Minds

The data, relayed to NATO over the last month, asserted that 70 percent of Syrians support the Assad regime. Another 20 percent were deemed neutral and the remaining 10 percent expressed support for the rebels.

Bradley Manning's Legal Duty to Expose War Crimes

A legal duty to report war crimes

Manning is charged with crimes for sending hundreds of thousands of classified files, documents and videos, including the "Collateral Murder" video, the "Iraq War Logs," the "Afghan War Logs" and State Department cables to Wikileaks. Many of the things he transmitted contain evidence of war crimes.

The "Collateral Murder" video depicts a US Apache attack helicopter killing 12 civilians and wounding two children on the ground in Baghdad in 2007. The helicopter then fired on and killed the people trying to rescue the wounded. Finally, a US tank drove over one of the bodies, cutting the man in half. These acts constitute three separate war crimes.

Bradley Manning Trial Day 2 « Antiwar.com Blog

Most interestingly — though not surprising — it appears the government will spend the next 12 weeks trying to convince the jury that not only was Manning fully cognizant that his actions would “aid the enemy” — the “enemy” being al Qaeda — but that he conspired with Julian Assange and WikiLeaks to do it.The leitmotif in this ongoing tragedy is that the government is looking for a way to finally prosecute Assange, who is living under Ecuadoran asylum in that country’s embassy in London. WikiLeaks in currently under investigation by the U.S Justice Department. Many believe the government is trying to prove that Assange helped Manning obtain, store and release the documents, which would make him a co-conspirator rather than merely the recipient of more than 700,000 classified U.S documents. Manning has adamantly denied this co-conspiracy scenario, but has admitted handing the files to WikiLeaks after being turned down by major American newspapers. WikiLeaks has neither confirmed nor denied it got the documents from Manning

Afghan Protesters Demand US Arrest Troops Over Torture, Killings -- News from Antiwar.com

Afghan protesters turned out in force in the Wardak Province today, carrying thefreshly exhumed bodies of three more victims of the special forces torture scandal that has been rocking the Nirkh District, where villages say US troops routinely raided them and disappeared civilians.