Privacy, Security and Sanity

By Robert C. Koehler
COTO Report

What I keep longing to hear, in the hemorrhaging national debate about Edward Snowden, whistleblowing and the NSA, is some acknowledgment of what the word “security” actually means, and what role — if any — the government should play in creating it.

“You can’t have 100 percent security and also have 100 percent privacy.”

A moment of silence, please, for the dying patriarchy. That, of course, was how President Obama explained it to the American public shortly after the spy scandal hit the fan. When did we become “the children” in our relationship with the government, irrelevant to its day-to-day operations, utterly powerless as we stand in its massive, protecting shadow?

Al-Qaeda manipulated the US into putting sanctions on Yemen

RT interviews Susan Lindauer (see video here).

The US is moving to place sanctions on anyone who opposes what Washington calls a democratic process in Yemen. Anti-war activist Susan Lindauer says this brings the US right into Al-Qaeda’s trap.

­Yemen is fighting an alleged Al-Qaeda insurgency with military support from the United States. On top of this, the Arab state continues to suffer from months of political unrest, with anti-government protesters demanding more reforms.

Who is Rupert Murdoch?

By Gordon Duff
Veterans Today

Ignorant Certainty

By Robert C. Koehler

Now that the end of the world didn’t happen, I can’t stop thinking about it. What chutzpah, what a diminished worldview, not simply to make such a prediction, but — even more incomprehensible, to my relentlessly self-questioning mind — to know you’ll be among the saved.

In 1011, a guy like Harold Camping would probably have been able to generate more panic than bemusement. A millennium later, with science taught in the public schools and all, we have a little more collective resistance to such thundering certainty leaping from highway billboards. I confess, however, to feeling a deep, reptilian tug last Friday morning, as I saw the sign — SAVE THIS DATE, MAY 21, 2011, CHRIST IS COMING — while driving through eastern Wisconsin. Yikes, that’s tomorrow.

Wikileaks Info Cherry-Picked by Corporate Media to Bolster Case Against Iran

By Ali Gharib
AlterNet

Use caution in reading the Iraq war logs—and news coverage of them.

A source provides details to the American government about the nefarious activities of a Middle Eastern country. That information ends up in scores of secret U.S. government documents. Subsequently, the information winds up on the front pages of major newspapers, and is heralded by war hawks in Washington as a casus belli.

Sound familiar? It should, but perhaps not in the way you’re thinking. Here’s a hint: It’s not 2003, but 2010. This is the story of what happened recently to Iran in the wake of the latest WikiLeaks document release, where U.S military field reports from Iraq made their way into major national newspapers and painted the Islamic Republic as a force out to murder U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

Hidden Intelligence Operation Behind the Wikileaks Release of ‘Secret’ Documents?

The real story of Wikileaks has clearly not yet been told

By F. William Engdahl
Global Research

Since the dramatic release of a US military film of a US airborne shooting of unarmed journalists in Iraq, Wikileaks has gained global notoriety and credibility as a daring website that releases sensitive material to the public from whistleblowers within various governments. Their latest “coup” involved the alleged leak of thousands of pages of supposedly sensitive documents regarding US informers within the Taliban in Afghanistan and their ties to senior people linked to Pakistan’s ISI military intelligence. The evidence suggests, however, that far from an honest leak, it is calculated disinformation to the gain of the US and perhaps Israeli and Indian intelligence and a coverup of the US and Western role in drug trafficking out of Afghanistan.

Militarizing Latin America

bobrow.wordpress.com

By NOAM CHOMSKY
September 9, 2009

In the past ten years, South America has moved toward integration, a prerequisite for independence; has broadened international ties; and has addressed internal disorders—foremost, the traditional rule of a rich Europeanized minority over a sea of misery and suffering. It rejects the US “War on Drugs” and “War on Terror.” 

The US doesn’t like this, and plans to make its new seven military bases in Colombia the center of its Latin American operations.  The Obama administration is also building mega-embassies in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Afghanistan: The Explanations Don’t Stack Up

From the 2008 film, Opium War

By Michael Brull

Our war in Afghanistan is usually justified as an anti-terrorist mission or a nation-building exercise. But neither of these explanations is actually true.

Obama’s plan for underage detainee

By Jason Leopold

Obama cooks up legal excuses for the 12-year-old whom Bush forces kidnapped and imprisoned back in 2002. To avoid an upcoming habeas corpus hearing, Obama’s team will criminally charge Mohammed Jawad. Looks like the Constitution lawyer from Harvard has contempt for the concept of “speedy trial.”