War on Independent Journalism

New corporate news protection law seeks to leave bloggers and freelancers dangling in the breeze.  Particularly Wikileaks will remain a target, and so will independent bloggers across the spectrum, such as yours truly.

The Hill:

Media giants put multimillion-dollar lobbying muscle behind shield law

The question of who would receive the additional legal protections as a “covered journalist” has become a contentious point, with bloggers and lawmakers taking umbrage at the idea of the government deciding who is and isn’t a legitimate reporter.

During the markup of the Senate bill, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said the committee had entered “dangerous territory” by drawing lines between who does, or does not, qualify for protection.

“It seems to me the First Amendment protects the activity, not the employment status of the person engaging in it,” Cruz said.

It’s not often I agree with republican congressmen.  But since Obama has openly turned to fascism and the sponsoring of terrorists, you take what you can get.

 

Obama’s Cooked Intelligence

If a fraud works, then it gets repeated.  Thanks, Shrub.

IPS:

Obama’s Case for Syria Didn’t Reflect Intel Consensus

Former intelligence officials told IPS that that the paper does not represent a genuine intelligence community assessment but rather one reflecting a predominantly Obama administration influence.In essence, the White House selected those elements of the intelligence community assessments that supported the administration’s policy of planning a strike against the Syrian government force and omitted those that didn’t.

 

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity:

Obama Warned on Syrian Intel

We regret to inform you that some of our former co-workers are telling us, categorically, that contrary to the claims of your administration, the most reliable intelligence shows that Bashar al-Assad was NOT responsible for the chemical incident that killed and injured Syrian civilians on August 21, and that British intelligence officials also know this.

Our sources confirm that a chemical incident of some sort did cause fatalities and injuries on August 21 in a suburb of Damascus. They insist, however, that the incident was not the result of an attack by the Syrian Army using military-grade chemical weapons from its arsenal. That is the most salient fact, according to CIA officers working on the Syria issue. They tell us that CIA Director John Brennan is perpetrating a pre-Iraq-War-type fraud on members of Congress, the media, the public – and perhaps even you.

The Real “Benghazi-Gate”

CIA supplied arms to terrorists through Benghazi, Libya:

GlobalResearch:

CIA Gun-running, Qatar-Libya-Syria.

A report from CNN’s Jake Tapper has reintroduced “Benghazi-Gate” to the US media spotlight. The report claims that “dozens” of CIA operatives were on the ground in Benghazi on the night of the attack, and the CIA is going to great lengths to suppress details of them and their whereabouts being released. The report alleges that the CIA is engaged in “unprecedented” attempts to stifle employee leaks, and “intimidation” to keep the secrets of Benghazi hidden, allegedly going as far as changing the names of CIA operatives and “dispersing” them around the country.

One suspects this has a single and defined purpose – to hide the CIA’s culpability in supplying arms to known extremists in Libya and Syria. Moreover, the CNN report alludes to the CIA supplying “surface-to-air missiles” from Benghazi to rebels in Syria, but this may only be the tip of the iceberg.

 

Japan Finally Decides to Act on Fukushima!

After only 2 1/2 years of lies and cover-up by TEPCO and the Japanese government itself, we finally may have some serious response to the most catastrophic nuclear meltdown in world history.

As 300 tons of radioactive water leak out per day, and TEPCO has only recently acknowledged that radiation may be leaking at all,  the government of Japan finally felt like such incredibly stupid douche bags that something had to be done.

REUTERS:

TOKYO (Reuters) – Highly radioactive water from Japan’s crippled Fukushima nuclear plant is pouring out at a rate of 300 tonnes a day, officials said on Wednesday, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ordered the government to step in and help in the clean-up.

The revelation amounted to an acknowledgement that plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co (Tepco) has yet to come to grips with the scale of the catastrophe, 2 1/2 years after the plant was hit by a huge earthquake and tsunami. Tepco only recently admitted water had leaked at all.

…”Rather than relying on Tokyo Electric, the government will take measures,” he said after instructing METI Minister Toshimitsu Motegi to ensure Tepco takes appropriate action.

But with our own government and media telling the population that radiation isn’t a problem and there is never anything to worry about, there’s nothing to see here right?  After all, nuclear plant meltdowns are just like eating a banana or flying in a jet plane.

 

Organized Crime Racket TEPCO

Two and a half years after what is arguably the greatest atomic catastrophe in history:

Exclusive: Japan nuclear body says radioactive water at Fukushima an ’emergency’

Really?  How astute.  This move seems to be the only way to gently nudge the crime syndicate TEPCO into acting to stop the flow of radiation into the Pacific.

Reuters:

“Countermeasures planned by Tokyo Electric Power Co are only a temporary solution, he said.

“Tepco’s “sense of crisis is weak,” Kinjo said. “This is why you can’t just leave it up to Tepco alone” to grapple with the ongoing disaster.

“Right now, we have an emergency,” he said.

Tepco has been widely castigated for its failure to prepare for the massive 2011 tsunami and earthquake that devastated its Fukushima plant and lambasted for its inept response to the reactor meltdowns. It has also been accused of covering up shortcomings.

It was not immediately clear how much of a threat the contaminated groundwater could pose. In the early weeks of the disaster, the Japanese government allowed Tepco to dump tens of thousands of metric tons of contaminated water into the Pacific in an emergency move.

The toxic water release was however heavily criticized by neighboring countries as well as local fishermen and the utility has since promised it would not dump irradiated water without the consent of local townships.”

Some common sense observations:

1. Tepco’s management should be in prison.

2. All impacted NATIONS (including ours) should have converged on the site en masse to do everything possible to contain the damage.

3. Evacuations should have gotten people out of the contaminated zones instead of criminally leaving them to ingest more radiation year after year.

4. The atomic energy industry should be killed, shut down, mothballed and all those millions of tons of radioactive waste dealt with so that it cannot harm more people.

There is plenty of energy out there that doesn’t involve fucking up people and the environment.  These clean, renewable technologies have not been met with giant government infusions of cash and favorable incentives, only the appearance of such.  The token gestures made are a fraction of what is needed and are designed to mask that the big, centralized highly dangerous technologies (fossil fuels and nuclear) are the ones favored by corrupt lawmakers.  Thus fracking becomes the next big gold rush in America and elsewhere, despite fucking up water supplies, the aquifers we need to survive.  Such criminal malfeasance dooms humanity to more downward spiral and the environment to eventual destruction.

They are also attempting to restart the nuclear power industry here, with $36 Billion offered by Obama’s regime to guarantee new construction.  These assholes do not care, and if they can convince enough gullible, ignorant people that nuclear meltdowns are perfectly okay and nothing to worry about, they will get away with it.  Therefore, we get cover ups and happy spin whenever the issue is raised, and the bullshit American corporate media plays along.

 

Killing Investigative Journalism

With the complete collapse of democracy, justice and rights comes the assault on journalism.  These are inextricably linked.  Democracy and a free press share DNA.  When one is mutated beyond salvaging, they both die.

“Fourth Circuit Endorses WikiLeaks

by Kevin Jon Heller

Well, not really. But that’s the unintended consequence of yesterday’s awful decision in US v. Sterling, in which the Fourth Circuit held that James Risen could not rely on journalist’s privilege to avoid testifying against James Sterling, whom the government believes leaked classified information to Risen. According the court, the government is entitled to Risen’s testimony, because he is the only “eyewitness” (a journalist receiving classified information) to the “crime” (leaking classified information to a journalist):”

more

Cesium levels surge 90-fold in Fukushima Water

‘Safe, Clean Nuclear Power’

 

Organized crime racket TEPCO knows nothing, absolutely nothing, about why levels spike and continue to contaminate the environment two years and four months after their multiple reactors exploded on live television.

Cesium levels surge 90-fold over 3-day period at Fukushima nuke plant

As the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) acts to cover up disasters like these, including Chernobyl and Fukushima, relying on a flimsy “no biomarkers” defense, the world will likely continue to ignore this major environmental calamity.  Still poisoning the Pacific Ocean daily with BILLIONS of becquerels of Cesium released constantly from the melted down reactors, no end is in sight to this crime against humanity.

To put this “becquerel” measurement into perspective, a becquerel is one radioactive discharge per second, which is measurable by sensitive detectors.  A leading doctor, who has treated the children of Chernobyl for decades, in Belarus, has published papers regarding illnesses caused by internal cesium contamination:

“Chronic Cs-137 levels over 30 (becquerels per kilogram) body weight is often associated with serious cardiovascular diseases.”

For children with cesium 137 in excess of 50 Becquerels/kg body weight,

“pathological disorders of the vital organs or systems will occur.”

“children having 5 Bq/kg more than 80% are healthy, while having 11 Bq/kg only 35% of children are healthy.”
-Dr. Yuri Bandashevsky

Now you’re on your own to put that BILLIONS of becquerels per day gushing out of Fukushima into perspective.  Enjoy your Pacific fish.

And more:

Obama’s openly fascist “Environmental Protection Agency” (sic)  just raised the “permissible” levels of radiation that you and your children can suffer under when the next radioactive meltdown happens.

JOHN LaFORGE:

“The late Dr. Rosalie Bertell made clear 36 years ago in Robert Del Tredici’s book At Work In the Fields of the Bomb, ‘The people with the highest vested interest are the ones that are making the nuclear bombs. And it turns out they have complete control over setting the permissible [radiation exposure] levels.’”

…[Daniel] Hirsch says that the National Council on Radiation Protection’s plans for implementing the new PAGs “would allow the public to be exposed to extraordinarily higher levels of radiation than previously permitted” during reactor accident emergencies. The new PAGs also allow extremely high contamination of food, he says.“In essence,” Hirsch reports, the PAGs say “nuclear power accidents could be so widespread and produce such immense radiation levels that the government would abandon cleanup obligations” forcing people to absorb and live with far more cancers.

Still glad you go for that so-called “lesser evil” voting?

How difficult is it to hire two evil guys for you to choose from?

“Big Lies are told by big liars; don’t forget.” -me

Lawlessness Is The New Normal

 

Lawlessness Is The New Normal

Paul Craig Roberts:

“Although the individual countries still retain some sovereignty from the EU government, they are all under Washington’s thumb, as demonstrated by the recent illegal and hostile action taken on Washington’s orders by France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Austria against the airliner carrying Bolivia’s President Evo Morales.

Flying back to Bolivia from Moscow, Morales’ plane was denied overflight and refueling permission by Washington’s French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese puppets and had to land in Austria, where the presidential plane was searched for Edward Snowden. It was a power play by Washington to kidnap Snowden from Bolivia’s presidential airliner in defiance of international law and to teach upstart reformers like Morales that independence from Washington’s orders is not permitted.

The European puppet states went along with this extraordinary breach of diplomacy and international law despite the fact that each of the countries is incensed that Washington is spying on their governments, diplomats, and citizens. Their thanks to Snowden, whose revelations made them aware that Washington was recording their every communication, was to help Washington capture Snowden.”

True CIA Spy: Phillip Agee

CIA Manipulation: The Painful Truths Told by Phil Agee

 

Germany’s Largest Newspaper

Speaks for itself…

Turnkey Tyranny

Joe Giambrone

 

Published at:

OpedNews, June 14 2013

 

 

“I know everything that is said and done.  And thought!”
-Emperor Tiberius, Caligula (1979)

 

“…they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behavior in the world known to them.”
-Edward Snowden (2013)

The genius of the American political system is that each administration is significantly worse than the one that preceded it.  The effect is historical revisionism in the public mind.  Nixon looks downright cuddly next to the abuses of Cheney/Rummy/Bush and company.  Now Bush Jr. is starting to look like a civil libertarian when compared to the current Snoopmeister In Chief.  As we plummet toward official Satanism, with a state unrecognizable and patently evil at its core, we can at least cling to the notion that things weren’t as bad as now in some past golden age.  Then we can look around and fight amongst each other, assigning blame to the nearest uninformed yahoo, rather than to the high priests of human sacrifice and global misery and destruction.

We now have an utterly exposed fraud of a system unrecognizable as a democracy, but clearly within parameters of what George Orwell conjured up and Hitler before him.

A series of disclosures comes regularly from defective cogs, little technocratic machine parts, which no longer spin as directed.  Edward Snowden’s classified leaks are the icing on top of a shit pile so towering as to be visible from orbit.  As Snowden warned, “the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.”

That is the modus operandi.  Secret memos have replaced debate, law and Constitutionality.

“If I wanted to see your e-mails or your wife’s phone, all I have to do is use intercepts. I can get your e-mails, passwords, phone records, credit cards.”
–Whistleblower Edward Snowden

Snowden, a private contractor, a computer systems “analyst” at Booz, Allen and Hamilton, is recently out of a job.  But that doesn’t seem to have stopped his employer from rolling forward with the mission, no matter what that mission actually entails.  Buzzfeed reports that Snowden’s old job is open for candidates to apply.  So if you’re a hacker with questionable morals and scruples, you are encouraged to take the keys to the kingdom.  There you will be able to “wiretap anyone, from YOU or your accountant to a federal judge to even the president…”

Someone, somewhere in a uniform adorned with various gaudy medals, might ask why some off-the-street computer punk could get hired to wiretap his entire life, and with what oversight or legality?  If said punk decides to wiretap high-ranking military officers, what then?  And the President of the United States?  And federal judges?  What sort of Frankenstein’s worst nightmare has the National Security Agency concocted over there, and in what possible ways do such gaping security holes constitute “national security?”  This is quite the opposite, in fact, a national insecurity on a scale unprecedented in all of human history.

Thanks for letting us know, Snowden, but, you’re still enemy number one to be silenced.  Like Manning, and Assange, Kiriakou, Binney and Sibel Edmonds.  You’re not supposed to tell the public.  You see, the US government considers the public a hostile force to be propagandized, controlled, manipulated, kept ignorant, persuaded, sold, taxed, recruited or locked up.  This is the triumph of “western democracy.”

Not a lot is new here, but the naked illegitimacy of the office of the president is a welcome development indeed.  As the buck stops in the Oval Office, perhaps we can begin there with handcuffs and actual warrants for arrest that respect the 4^th, 5^th and 6^th Amendment rights of Mr. Obama and company.

“I am not a crook!” said a former crook.  But today, the very notion that the president is a crook has been defined out of existence as a “conspiracy theory” the wild, insane ravings of the lizard cult people awaiting the mother ship.  For it is quite impossible for the president, or anyone else in government, to conspire to break the law.  Such a thing goes against the divine.  A religious aura surrounds the hallowed grounds of the White House, a place so sacred as to be beyond the worldly temptations of normal mortals.

As no US government official is currently capable of breaking the law, the tin foil adorned crowd must simply be shunned and silenced, ridiculed into irrelevance.  Impeachment is another quaint anachronism.  After all, there was no blowjob.  No one lied about semen.  Bodily fluids were not spilled.

This is simply a policy disagreement.  Policy is, in the end, whatever the government decides to have typed up in a memo.  This memo’s relevance to the law and to the rights of the citizens has been engineered completely into irrelevance.  Memo trumps Constitution.  Ask Diane Feinsetin.  They have a “program” and the program is approved by them – so what’s the problem?

The lunatic conspiracist and enemy of the state Edward Snowden claims, “The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to.”

Well what does he know, really?

“…I can’t in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”
-Edward Snowden

Senator Mike Rogers disagrees.  End of story.  End of investigation – of the NSA – not of Snowden of course.

Can some rogue leaker take down the illegitimate surveillance state?  Doubtful.

Have the people awoken?  Remains to be seen.

Can they do anything about it?  Will they?  Will they be asleep again by Sweeps Week?

“A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
– Edward R. Murrow

Let me ask you, couch potato man, how many more Edward Snowdens will throw away their careers, their life savings and flee for the rest of their lives in order to save your sorry freedom that you don’t even value yourself?  Why should they?  Are you worth it?  Are you even on the right side of history?  Ignorance, in the hyper-information age, is rather pathetic, don’t you think?

The world of knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips, often 24/7, and yet they actively choose to know very little.  They wallow in trivialities and banalities choosing ignorance 9 times out of 10.  How long can such a people remain free?

Should they?

“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.”
-Edward Snowden

Beer, Breasts and Cat Videos, that new reality show debuts at 9pm.

#

 

War on Reality

NYTIMES, Peter Ludlow  piece, which was recommended by Dr. Peter Dale Scott (Facebook):

Bank of America approached the Department of Justice over concerns about information that WikiLeaks had about it. The Department of Justice in turn referred Bank of America to the lobbying firm Hunton and Willliams, which in turn connected the bank with a group of information security firms collectively known as Team Themis.

Team Themis (a group that included HBGary and the private intelligence and security firms Palantir Technologies, Berico Technologies and Endgame Systems) was effectively brought in to find a way to undermine the credibility of WikiLeaks and the journalist Glenn Greenwald (who recently broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leak of the N.S.A.’s Prism program), because of Greenwald’s support for WikiLeaks. Specifically, the plan called for actions to “sabotage or discredit the opposing organization” including a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error. As for Greenwald, it was argued that he would cave “if pushed” because he would “choose professional preservation over cause.” That evidently wasn’t the case.

Team Themis also developed a proposal for the Chamber of Commerce to undermine the credibility of one of its critics, a group called Chamber Watch. The proposal called for first creating a “false document, perhaps highlighting periodical financial information,” giving it to a progressive group opposing the Chamber, and then subsequently exposing the document as a fake to “prove that U.S. Chamber Watch cannot be trusted with information and/or tell the truth.”

(A photocopy of the proposal can be found here.)

In addition, the group proposed creating a “fake insider persona” to infiltrate Chamber Watch. They would “create two fake insider personas, using one as leverage to discredit the other while confirming the legitimacy of the second.”
Psyops need not be conducted by nation states; they can be undertaken by anyone with the capabilities and the incentive to conduct them.

The hack also revealed evidence that Team Themis was developing a “persona management” system — a program, developed at the specific request of the United States Air Force, that allowed one user to control multiple online identities (“sock puppets”) for commenting in social media spaces, thus giving the appearance of grass roots support.

The Yes Men also get a mention in private intelligence contractor STRATFOR’s hacked emails.

The Yes Men impersonate DOW CHEMICAL spokesmen
and apologize for Bhopal mass killing on the BBC

Stratfor also had a broad-ranging public relations campaign. The e-mails revealed numerous media companies on its payroll. While one motivation for the partnerships was presumably to have sources of intelligence, Stratfor worked hard to have soap boxes from which to project its interests.