http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/30/snowden_asylum_in_germany_support_grows
Showing posts with label NSA spying. Show all posts
Showing posts with label NSA spying. Show all posts
Thursday, July 03, 2014
Dear visitor to my blog, As you may know, most of my recent posts are quasi-replicated re-postings of the work of others. Accordingly, I was getting set to repost the June 30, 2014 lead post of Democracy Now, when I discovered that the embed code would not function ...even though it appeared to be no different in construction from the many Democracy Now embed codes I've used in the past. After many tries with no luck, I finally decided that it must have been censored. Why do I think that? Well, upon watching the video corresponding to the frozen copy below, I've concluded that it is because Edward Snowden comes across in this testimony before the German Parliament as such a sincere individual with true concern for human rights so deep that he regards his having to hide in Russia indefinitely is a small price to pay to get out the story of NSA's spying. Indeed, it is my sense that anyone who has been previously been lied into believing that Snowden is a traitor will immediatly see him as a HERO! So go to the link below the photo, which should take you to the original, and watch at least long enough to take in this close-up segment (about 4 minutes in), and then decide whether or not you agree with my assessment.
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/6/30/snowden_asylum_in_germany_support_grows
Tuesday, June 03, 2014
Those who have grown apathetic about the National Security Agency violating privacy rights, may soon find their interest renewed, as the political is about to get very personal. "One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying is 'Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?'" -- Glenn Greenwald
Glenn Greenwald to Publish Names of Americans NSA Spied On
“This will be the finale, a big missing piece.”
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| Photo Credit AFP |
“One of the big questions when it comes to domestic spying is, ‘Who have been the NSA’s specific targets?’” he told the Times. “Are they political critics and dissidents and activists? Are they genuinely people we’d regard as terrorists? What are the metrics and calculations that go into choosing those targets and what is done with the surveillance that is conducted? Those are the kinds of questions that I want to still answer.”
Greenwald has promised that this will be the “biggest” revelation of the nearly two million classified files he received from Edward Snowden, and that “Snowden’s legacy would be ‘shaped in large part’ by this ‘finishing piece’ still to come.” In a May interview with GQ, Greenwald spoke of this “finale:”
"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."
Greenwald told the Times that the names will be published on The Intercept, the website he established following his departure from The Guardian.
By powerfully simplifying the consequences of government surveillance, this disclosure has the potential of intensely reigniting the debate around privacy rights and the role of the NSA.
Stay tuned, you may find youself on the nation's newest enemies list!
Alyssa Figueroa is an associate editor at AlterNet
Friday, February 14, 2014
Paul Craig Roberts, in what is likely to be his hardest-hitting column ever, excoriates five lying liers who have relentlessly violated the Constitution, making them traitors to the United States. Yet, they have not been arrested and put on trial.
The Five Criminals: In America the Gestapo Has Replaced The Rule Of Law
February 13, 2014 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
The Five Criminals In America, the Gestapo Has Replaced the Rule of Law
Paul Craig Roberts
RT is the best English language news source available to Americans. On January 29, RT published a photo of 5 presidential appointees lying through their teeth to Congress.
http://rt.com/usa/intel-hearing-snowden-threats-369/
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| Picture taken from the PCR-provided link above and pasted in by the blogger. |
All five of these Gestapo wannabes are in violation of their oath of office to protect the Constitution of the United States. They have relentlessly violated the Constitution, which makes these five, who are in charge of US intelligence and black operations, traitors to the United States. Yet, they have not been arrested and put on trial. Congress is content to sit there and listen to their ongoing lies time after time after time, despite the fact that these 5 have committed more and worse crimes against our country than the “terrorists” that serve as an excuse for the crimes committed by the intelligence agencies.
Remember, dear readers, it is a crime for you to lie to any federal agent even if you are not under oath or before Congress. How much more evidence do you need that you are not a citizen of the United States but a mere serf of the federal government? Will you ever wake up?
James Clapper, who has the grand title of Director Of National Intelligence, is an admitted liar to the US Congress but nevertheless remains in office. That Clapper is still in office is a good measure of the decline both in the integrity of the US government and in the integrity that Congress, media, and the public expect from the government. President Nixon was driven from office for a very small thing: Nixon lied about when he learned about a burglary with which he had nothing to do. Clapper brazenly lied to the US Congress, denying that he was spying on members of the US Congress.
Clapper is not only in violation of the Constitution, he has committed a felony, especially under the stretched interpretation of laws that is the norm for Department of Justice prosecutions. Huge numbers of Americans are in prison for offenses that are molehills compared to Clapper’s, or for that matter, any of the other five sitting there lying to Congress.
The Five Criminals told Congress that Edward Snowden, who is under the protection of the Russian government, must be made to give back the evidence of NSA spying on the entire world before some US troops or diplomats are killed by terrorists in some future war started by Washington, which routinely dismisses the victims of its war crimes as “collateral damage.”
None of the Five Criminals were able to specify how Congress could make the Russian government hand over Snowden. Rabid Republican warmongers have falsely and propagandistically accused Snowden of being “a Russian spy.” What utter dishonesty! The only reason Snowden is in Russia is that the US, in violation of international law, refuses to allow an airplane to fly from Russia with Snowden to any of the South American countries that have granted Snowden asylum. The fact that Snowden is in Russia is entirely the fault of Washington.
As I have written and said on many occasions, facts mean nothing to Washington, to the presstitute media, and to most of the American population, who prefer comforting lies to reality.
No one in the American media or most Internet sites will dare tell you that the reason the Five Criminals are again lying to Congress is to deflect Congress and an insouciant public and media from the fact that they have violated the law and their oath of office, and that the only purpose of invoking “national security” is to protect the criminal actions of the security agencies from being discovered. “National Security” is the blanket under which the crimes of government are hidden.
All that “national security” means is that “we are not going to let anyone find out that we are nothing but a gang of criminal thugs, and we are going to use the cover of national security to demonize Snowden who told on us.”
The so-called “security agencies” and their media whores have created a wartime atmosphere of fear as if the “world’s only superpower” was about to be destroyed by a handful of lightly armed fighters thousands of miles away who resist Washington’s invasions of their countries in corners of the earth that most Americans cannot find on a map. What kind of superpower is so terrified by peoples that the superpower choses to invade and murder? If the wronged people are so threatening, the superpower should stay at home and leave them alone.
Listen to this bullshit from Clapper: As a consequence of Snowden, “the nation is less safe and its people less secure.” The truth is the opposite of what Clapper states. Snowden alerted us to the fact that Clapper was shredding the US Constitution that is our greatest protection. Clapper, who should be in the dock for treason, has stolen our rights and our shield against harm and abuse from arbitrary government power. Clapper is an enemy of every American.
Listen to this bullshit from Lt. Gen, Michael Flynn, director of the US Defense Intelligence Agency, who stupidly asserts that Snowden’s revelations of illegal mass spying on the US citizens and the world caused “grave damage” to “national security.”
What the general means is that it caused damage to his reputation and brought him some cause for anxiety by revealing that he was engaged in criminal activity. But the general knew how to invoke the sympathy and support of the right-wing superpatriots. He declared that the greatest cost of Snowden’s revelations is “the cost of human lives on tomorrow’s battlefield or in some place where we will put our military forces when we ask them to go into harm’s way.” He is, of course, talking about the next time that Washington criminally attacks another country in total violation of the Nuremberg standard.
Senator Barbara Mikulski listening to this bullshit said that what was needed was a Supreme Court ruling “to determine the constitutionality of these programs.” Was this sincere or a cop-out? Why is Mikulski passing the buck? The current Republican Supreme Court is corrupt and will not defend the Constitution. One of the leading Republican lights, as dimly lit as he is, Justice Antonin Scalia, truthfully said that concentration camps are a likely future reality for Americans and that the Supreme Court would not do anything about the tyranny should the executive branch think it necessary.
Senator Ron Wyden told the Five Criminals, “I don’t think this culture of misinformation [that the Five Criminals represent] is going to be easily fixed.”
Nothing will be fixed until the Five Criminals are arrested and put on trial for treason and until Congress defunds the illegal wars and states firmly, backed up with the threat of impeachment, that there is no such thing as “the unitary executive” who is above law, Constitution, Congress, and the federal courts. The Supreme Court will not protect us. Congress must put the executive branch on notice that it is not above the law and the Constitution.
Americans have lost the rule of law. Unless Congress quickly restores it, the country is lost.
Tuesday, November 05, 2013
Greg Hunter interviews Paul Craig Roberts on the fate of the US dollar, who will ultimately pull the trigger, and when.
Fate of Dollar is the Fate of U.S. Power - Dr. Paul Craig Roberts
4 NOVEMBER 2013
Former Assistant Treasury Secretary Dr. Paul Craig Roberts says, “The fate of the dollar is the fate of United States Power.” Dr. Roberts goes on to say, “The whole question of the dollar’s longevity depends on the willingness of other countries to continue holding dollars and dollar denominated assets while the Federal Reserve prints a trillion dollars a year to prop up the big banks and to finance the federal budget deficit.” There are many ways countries are currently moving away from the dollar. One of the most startling, says Dr. Roberts, “China is accumulating very large quantities of gold. So, this does show that the dollar may have a limited life as the supreme currency.” With global NSA spying scandals, if the dollar starts coming under attack in the currency markets, Dr. Roberts predicts, “All of this makes it very difficult if there is a run on the dollar for the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to call up these foreign governments and say help us stop this run.” Don’t think the Fed is ever going to stop printing money because Dr. Roberts contends, “They’re trapped because you can’t expect them to say let’s blow up the world right now so we don’t have a crisis in the dollar next year.” Join Greg Hunter as he goes One-on-One with economist Dr. Paul Craig Roberts.
http://youtu.be/GIMiKBbdGzo
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Paul Craig Roberts explains that "Americans will soon be locked into an unaccountable police state unless US Representatives and Senators find the courage to ask questions and to sanction the executive branch officials who break the law, violate the Constitution, withhold information from Congress, and give false information about their crimes against law, the Constitution, the American people and those in [a host of other countries]." The only way out is impeachment of "the lawless executive branch." "The US faces no threat that justifies the lawlessness and abuse of police powers that characterize the executive branch in the 21st century."
Humanity Is Drowning In Washington’s Criminality — Paul Craig Roberts
August 13, 2013 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
Humanity Is Drowning In Washington’s Criminality
Paul Craig Roberts
Americans will soon be locked into an unaccountable police state unless US Representatives and Senators find the courage to ask questions and to sanction the executive branch officials who break the law, violate the Constitution, withhold information from Congress, and give false information about their crimes against law, the Constitution, the American people and those in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Guantanamo, and elsewhere. Congress needs to use the impeachment power that the Constitution provides and cease being subservient to the lawless executive branch. The US faces no threat that justifies the lawlessness and abuse of police powers that characterize the executive branch in the 21st century.
Impeachment is the most important power of Congress. Impeachment is what protects the citizens, the Constitution, and the other branches of government from abuse by the executive branch. If the power to remove abusive executive branch officials is not used, the power ceases to exist. An unused power is like a dead letter law. Its authority disappears. By acquiescing to executive branch lawlessness, Congress has allowed the executive branch to place itself above law and to escape accountability for its violations of law and the Constitution.
National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper blatantly lied to Congress and remains in office. Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency, has also misled Congress, and he remains in office. Attorney General Holder avoids telling Congress the truth on just about every subject, and he also remains in office. The same can be said for President Obama, one of the great deceivers of our time, who is so adverse to truth that truth seldom finds its way out of his mouth.
If an American citizen lies to a federal investigator, even if not under oath, the citizen can be arrested, prosecuted, and sent to prison. Yet, these same federal personnel can lie to Congress and to citizens with impunity. Whatever the American political system is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with accountable government. In Amerika no one is accountable but citizens, who are accountable not only to law but also to unaccountable charges for which no evidence is required.
Congress has the power to impeach any presidential appointee as well as the president. In the 1970s Congress was going to impeach President Richard Nixon simply because he lied about when he learned of the Watergate burglary. To avoid impeachment, Nixon resigned. In the 1990s, the House impeached President Bill Clinton for lying about his sexual affair with a White House intern. The Senate failed to convict, no doubt as many had sexual affairs of their own and didn’t want to be held accountable themselves.
In the 1970s when I was on the Senate staff, corporate lobbyists would send attractive women to seduce Senators so that the interest groups could blackmail the Senators to do their bidding. Don’t be surprised if the NSA has adopted this corporate practice.
The improprieties of Nixon and Clinton were minor, indeed of little consequence, when compared to the crimes of George W. Bush and Obama, their vice presidents, and the bulk of their presidential appointees. Yet, impeachment is “off the table,” as Nancy Pelosi infamously declared. http://www.nytimes.com/cq/2006/11/08/cq_1916.html Why do Californian voters send a person to Congress who refuses to protect them from an unaccountable executive branch? Who does Nancy Pelosi serve? Certainly not the people of California. Most certainly not the US Constitution. Pelosi is in total violation of her oath of office. Will Californians re-elect her yet again? Little wonder America is failing.
The question demanding to be asked is: What is the purpose of the domestic surveillance of all Americans? This is surveillance out of all proportion to the alleged terrorist threat. The US Constitution is being ignored and domestic law violated. Why? Does the US government have an undeclared agenda for which the “terrorist threat” is a cover?
What is this agenda? Whose agenda is more important than the US Constitution and the accountability of government to law? No citizen is secure unless government is accountable to the Constitution and to law. It is an absurd idea that any American is more threatened by terrorism than by unaccountable government that can execute them, torture them, and throw them in prison for life without due process or any accountability whatsoever. Under Bush/Obama, the US has returned to the unaccountable power of caesars, czars, and autocrats.
In the famous play, “A Man For All Seasons,” Sir Thomas More, Chancellor of England, asks: So, you would have me to cut down the law in order to chase after devils? And what will we do, with the law cut down, when the devil turns on us?
This is the most important legal question ever asked, and it is seldom asked today, not in our law schools, not by our bar associations, and most certainly not by the Justice (sic) Department or US Attorneys.
American conservatives regard civil liberties as mere excuses for liberal judges to coddle criminals and terrorists. Never expect a conservative Republican, or more than two or three of them, to defend your civil liberty. Republicans simply do not believe in civil liberty. Democrats cannot conceive that Obama–the first black president in office, a member of an oppressed minority–would not defend civil liberty. This combination of disinterest and denial is why the US has become a police state.
Civil liberty has few friends in government, the political parties, law schools, bar associations, or the federal judiciary. Consequently, no citizen is secure. Recently, a housewife researched online for pressure cookers looking for the best deal. Her husband was searching for a backpack. The result was that a fully armed SWAT team appeared at the door demanding to search the premises and to have questions answered. http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/08/government-knocking-doors-because-google-searches/67864/
I am always amazed when someone says: “I haven’t done anything wrong. I have nothing to fear.” If you have nothing to fear from the government, why did the Founding Fathers put the protections in the Constitution that Bush and Obama have stripped out? Unlike the Founding Fathers who designed our government to protect the citizens, the American sheeple trust the government to their own demise.
Glenn Greenwald recently explained how the mass of data that is being accumulated on every American is being mined for any signs of non-terrorist-related criminal behavior. As such warrantless searches are illegal evidence in a criminal trial, the authorities disguise the illegal way in which the evidence is obtained in order to secure conviction based on illegally obtained evidence. http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article35773.htm
In other words, the use of the surveillance justified by the “war on terror” has already spread into prosecutions of ordinary criminals where it has corrupted legal safeguards and the integrity, if any, of the criminal court system, prosecutors and judges.
This is just one of the many ways in which you have much to fear, whether you think you are doing anything wrong or not. You can be framed for crimes based on inferences drawn from your Internet activity and jokes with friends on social media. Jurors made paranoid by the “terrorist threat” will convict you.
We should be very suspicious of the motive behind the universal spying on US citizens. The authorities are aware that the terrorist threat does not justify the unconstitutional and illegal spying. There have been hardly any real terrorist events in the US, which is why the FBI has to find clueless people around whom to organize an FBI orchestrated plot in order to keep the “terrorist threat” alive in the public’s mind. At last count, there have been 150 “sting operations” in which the FBI recruits people, who are out of touch with reality, to engage in a well-paid FBI designed plot. Once the dupes agree, they are arrested as terrorists and the plot revealed, always with the accompanying statement that the public was never in any danger as the FBI was in control.
When 99 percent of all terrorism is organized by the FBI, why do we need NSA spying on every communication of every American and people in the rest of the world?
Terrorism seldom comes from outside. The source almost always is the government in power. The Czarist secret police set off bombs in order to blame and arrest labor agitators. The Nazis burned down the Reichstag in order to decimate the communists and assume unaccountable power in the name of “public safety.” An alleged terrorist threat is a way of using fear to block popular objection to the exercise of arbitrary government power.
In order to be “safe from terrorists,” the US population, with few objections, has accepted the demise of their civil liberties, such as habeas corpus, which reaches back centuries to Magna Carta as a constraint on government power. How, then, are they safe from their government? Americans today are in the same position as the English prior to the Great Charter of 1215. Americans are no longer protected by law and the Constitution from government tyranny.
The reason the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution was to make citizens safe from their government. If citizens allow the government to take away the Constitution, they might be safe from foreign terrorists, but they are no longer safe from their government.
Who do you think has more power over you, foreign terrorists or “your” government?
Washington defines all resistance to its imperialism and tyranny as “terrorism.” Thus, Americans who defend the environment, who defend wildlife, who defend civil liberties and human rights, who protest Washington’s wars and robbery of the people in behalf of special interests, all become “domestic extremists,” the term Homeland Security has substituted for “terrorist.” Those who are out of step with Washington and the powerful private interests that exploit us, other peoples, and the earth for their profits and power fall into the wrong side of Bush’s black and white division of the world: “you are for us or against us.”
In the United States independent thought is on the verge of being criminalized as are constitutionally guaranteed protests and the freedom of the press. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/10/james-risen-prison-journalism-criminalised The constitutional principle of freedom of speech is being redefined as treason, as aiding an undefined enemy, and as seeking to overthrow the government by casting aspersions on its motives and revealing its secret misdeeds. The power-mad inhabitants of Washington have brought the US so close to Gestapo Germany and Stalinist Russia that it is no longer funny. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to see the difference.
The neoconservatives have declared that Americans are the “exceptional” and “indispensable people.” Yet, the civil liberties of Americans have declined the more “exceptional” and “indispensable” that Americans become. We are now so exceptional and indispensable that we no longer have any rights.
And neither does the rest of the world. Neoconservatism has created a new dangerous American nationalism. Neoconservatives have given Washington a monopoly on right and endowed its military aggressions with a morality that supersedes the Geneva Conventions and human rights. Washington, justified by its “exceptionalism,” has the right to attack populations in countries with which Washington is not at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen. Washington is using the cover of its “exceptionalism” to murder people in many countries. http://news.antiwar.com/2013/08/11/us-drones-pound-yemen-but-targets-arent-all-militants/print/ Hitler tried to market the exceptionalism of the German people, but he lacked Washington’s Madison Avenue skills.
Washington is always morally right, whatever it does, and those who report its crimes are traitors who, stripped of their coddling by civil liberties, are locked away and abused until they confess to their crimes against the state. Anyone who tells the truth, such as Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, are branded enemies of the state and are ruthlessly persecuted.
How does the “indispensable, exceptional nation” have a diplomatic policy? How can a neoconized State Department be based on anything except coercion? It can’t. That is why Washington produces nothing but war and threats of war.
Wherever a person looks, whatever a person hears, it is Washington’s threat–“we are going to bomb you into the stone age” if you don’t do what we want and agree to what we require. We are going to impose “sanctions,” Washington’s euphemism for embargoes, and starve your women and children to death, permit no medical supplies, ban you from the international payments system unless you relent and consent to being Washington’s puppet, and ban you from posting your news broadcasts on the Internet.
This is the face that Washington presents to the world: the hard, mean face of a tyrant.
Washington’s power will survive a bit longer, because there are still politicians in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Latin America and in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the NGOs in Russia, who are paid off by the almighty dollar. In exchange for Washington’s money, they endorse Washington’s immorality and murderous destruction of law and life.
But the dollar is being destroyed by Quantitative Easing, and the domestic US economy is being destroyed by jobs offshoring. http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/TAA0731131.html
Rome was powerful until the Germans ceased to believe it. Then the rotten edifice collapsed. Washington faces sooner or later the same fate. An inhumane, illegal, unconstitutional regime based on violence alone, devoid of all morality and all human compassion, is not acceptable to China, Russia, India, Iran, and Brazil, or to readers of this column.
The evil that is Washington cannot last forever. The criminals might destroy the world in nuclear war, but the lawlessness and lack of humanity in Washington, which murders more people as I write, is no longer acceptable to the rest of the world, not even to its European puppet states, despite the leaders being on Washington’s payroll.
Gorbachev is correct. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a debacle for the entire world. It transformed the US from the “city upon the hill,” the “beacon for humanity,” into an aggressive militarist state. Consequently, Amerika has become despised by everyone who has a moral conscience and a sense of justice.
Sunday, August 04, 2013
At last a secret US govenment activity so outrageous that it's deplored by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Reps. Conyers & Massie on Bipartisan Campaign Against NSA Spying; Call for James Clapper to Resign
A bipartisan coalition against domestic surveillance is growing stronger in Washington. Last week, the House nearly passed a measure that would have prevented the National Security Agency from using the USA PATRIOT Act to collect phone records of individuals who are not under investigation. The measure failed by a narrow 217-to-205 margin. We speak to two key backers of the amendment: Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky). "It was a signal that even in the partisanship that goes on too much around here there are people willing to say, 'Enough is enough. The PATRIOT Act isn't being followed,’" Conyers says. Massie also praised NSA leaker Edward Snowden who received temporary asylum in Russia on Thursday. "His disclosures have changed the course of human history," Massie says. "His initial disclosures were a service to our country, because now we’re having this conversation — and we wouldn’t be having this conversation."
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Jimmy Carter gets it right! The mainstream media remains mum.
Thursday, Jul 18, 2013 02:03 PM -0700
Jimmy Carter: US “has no functioning democracy”
The former president weighs in on NSA and the future of Internet platforms like Google and Facebook
By Alberto Riva
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| Jimmy Carter (Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta) |
This article originally appeared on International Business Times.
Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter is so concerned about the NSA spying
scandal that he thinks it has essentially resulted in a suspension of
American democracy.
“America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy,” he said at an event in Atlanta on Tuesday sponsored by the Atlantik Bruecke,
a private nonprofit association working to further the German-U.S.
relationship. The association’s name is German for “Atlantic bridge.”
Tuesday, July 02, 2013
Will our European allies react to the new information released by Edward Snowden that the NSA has been spying on the personal lives of their citizens by banding together and demanding an explanation from Washington? Or will Washington use the results of its spying to blackmail each EU country separately into accepting US spying while publically denying that its spying continues?
Has Washington’s Arrogance Undone Its Empire? — Paul Craig Roberts
July 1, 2013 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
Has Washington’s Arrogance Undone Its Empire?
Paul Craig Roberts
No one likes a bully, and Washington’s NATO puppets have been bullied for six decades. British prime ministers, German chancellors, and French presidents have to salute and say “yes sir.”
They all hate it, but they love Washington’s money; so they prostitute themselves and their countries for Washington’s money. Even a person of Winston Churchill’s stature had to suck up to Washington in order to get his bills and his country’s bills paid.
But what the bought European leaders are finding is that Washington doesn’t pay enough for the prostitution required. One year out of office Tony Blair was worth $35 million dollars. But that’s not enough to get Blair on the waiting list for $50 million 200 foot yachts, to have a chalet in Gstaad, $50 million penthouses in Paris and New York, and a private plane to fly between them, or to wear a $736,000 Franck Muller watch on his wrist, sign his name with a $700,000 Mont Blanc jewel-encrusted pen, and drink $10,000 “martinis on a rock” (gin or vodka poured over a diamond) at New York’s Algonquin Hotel.
In a world in which every member of the Forbes Four Hundred is a billionaire plus or multi-billionaire, $35,000,000 just doesn’t cut it. In 2006 the manager of one hedge fund was paid $1,700,000,000 for one year’s thieving. Another 25 were paid $575,000,000 for their skills in front-running trades. $35 million is probably the annual budget for their household servants.
The British seem content in their role as Washington’s favorite lackey, but France and Germany have not enjoyed that role. France’s last real leader, General DeGaul, would have nothing to do with it and refused to join NATO. Germany, dismembered with East Germany occupied by the Soviets, had no choice. Germans’ gratitude to President Reagan for their unification resulted in re-unified Germany falling under Washington’s hegemony.
However, if news reports from Berlin are true, Germany has had enough. The catalyst was Edward Snowden’s revelations that Washington spies on everyone including its allies, both Germany and the EU in particular. Moreover, Washington uses Britain as the Trojan Horse within the EU as a backup spy in case NSA misses something.
According to news reports, the German, French, and EU governments are upset to find out that their extreme subservience to Washington has not protected them and their citizens from being spied upon. Here they are, fighting Washington’s wars in far distant Afghanistan, the fate of which is completely unrelated to their own, and what does Washington do but embarrass them by spying on the personal lives of their citizens.
Who does the Merkel government represent, Germans are asking, Germans or the NSA? Why does the Merkel government kowtow to Washington? The next question will be: “what does Washington’s spies have on Merkel?”
With the German government put on the spot by Washington’s betrayal, news headlines are: “Germany Ready to Charge UK and US Intelligence Over Bugging Operations.”
Little wonder Washington and its media whores hate Edward Snowden. “A spokesman for the [German] Federal Prosecutor said the office was preparing to bring charges against” the UK and US intelligence services. In light of the Snowden affair, it will be wonderful if Germany issues arrest warrants and Washington and London refuse to extradite its NSA and UK spy operatives who have violated every law and every trust.
The German Justice Minister, Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenburger, demanded an “immediate explanation” why Washington was applying to Germany policies “reminiscent of the actions against enemies during the Cold War.”
The president of France has said that France will not again cooperate with Washington on any issue until France receives “full assurances” that Washington will cease spying on France.
The president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, and the EU Commissioner for Justice, Viviane Reding, demand Washington’s answer to Snowden’s revelations that Washington has betrayed its own allies.
The question that must be asked is: do any of these protests from politicians who are
almost certain to be on Washington’s payroll mean anything, or are they just make-believe protests to quiet the domestic European populations who have been betrayed by their elected leaders? Why would the French president and the German justice minister think any reassurance from Washington meant anything? When in human memory has Washington told the truth about anything? When has Washington’s reassurance meant anything?
The Tonkin Gulf? Iraqi weapons of mass destruction? Iranian nukes? Assad’s sarin gas attack? FBI orchestrated “terror attacks”? It is a proven fact that the US government lies every time it opens its mouth. Compared to Washington, Stalin, Hitler, Tojo, Mao, Castro, Chavez, and Pol Pot were truthful.
Washington’s reply to Europe’s demands for explanation is: “We will discuss these issues bilaterally with EU member states,” but “we are not going to comment publicly on specific alleged intelligence activities.”
You know what that means. Bilateral means that Washington is going to talk with each EU country separately, using the information NSA has obtained to blackmail each complainant into silence. Whereas the EU together could stand up to Washington, separately the countries can be browbeat and offered more money or threats that illicit love affairs will be revealed to shut them up. Washington is betting on its power to intimidate individual countries with the threat of isolation and being cut off from money. If the EU countries agree to the secret bilateral explanations from Washington, the affair will end and the spying on Europe will continue while Washington and the EU politicians deny that the spying continues.
By now the entire world must know that Washington is not merely lawless, but also totally out of control, reveling in arrogance and hubris, driven by desires for hegemony over the entire world. Washington is so paranoid and distrustful that it doesn’t even trust its own citizens or the European puppet governments that it has bought and paid for.
Washington is the only government that has ever used nuclear weapons, and Washington used them against a defeated government that was trying to surrender. Today the craziness in Washington is much worse. Decision-making councils are full of crazed neoconservative war-mongers, such as National Security Advisor Susan Rice, a threat to humanity. Washington think tanks and media are over-represented by neoconservatives such as William Kristol who wants to know “what good are nuclear weapons if you can’t use them?”
The sleazy European politicians and media who took Washington’s money provided for their own economic security, but they betrayed the security of the entire world. By enabling Washington’s hegemony, they unleashed Washington’s arrogance. This arrogance now threatens not merely the independence of every country but life on earth.
Instead of meeting unilaterally alone with Washington, the European countries should
stand together. After all, supposedly there is an EU. If there is an EU, Washington should meet with the EU, not with its constituent parts individually, no one of which can stand up to Washington’s intimidation and bribes.
If thermo-nuclear war is to be avoided and life is to continue on earth, Europe must disband NATO. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was formed in the aftermath of World War II. Its purpose was to prevent the powerful Red Army, which defeated Nazi Germany, from overrunning all of Western Europe.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, 22 years ago. Yet, NATO still exists. Moreover, against President Reagan’s intentions, NATO has grown. NATO now includes former constituent parts of the Soviet Empire, such as Eastern Europe, and former constituent parts of the Soviet Union itself, such as Georgia, the government of which is bought and paid for by Washington. The NGOs that Washington funds might even deliver Ukraine into Washington’s fold.
Egged on by Washington, Georgia initiated a war with present day Russia, which superior Russian forces quickly ended. In the opinion of many, the Russian government showed far too much tolerance for its defeated enemy, which is being rearmed by Washington and encouraged into new military adventures. Washington is working to make Georgia, located in Asia between the Black and Caspian seas, a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO membership would make Georgia a treaty protectorate of Washington and its NATO puppets. Washington thinks that this elevation of Georgia would result in Russia acquiescing to Georgian aggression in order to avoid war with the US and NATO.
China, also, has been amazingly abused by Washington, and instead of replying in kind, has taken it in stride. This magnanimity on the part of the Chinese has been misinterpreted by Washington as fear. The fear that Washington imagines is causing China to quake in its boots has encouraged Washington to surround China with new naval, air, and troop bases. The fact that however numerous are Washington’s bases in the Pacific and South China Sea, Washington itself is an ICBM away has not registered on the ignorant scum that rules Amerika. Overwhelmed by its hubris, Washington threatens all life on earth.
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